On the face of it, there are few surprises in the UK map of child poverty, published on Wednesday by the campaign group End Child Poverty.
Tower Hamlets, with its deprived inner city neighbourhoods is the country’s poorest area, while leafy Wokingham in affluent Berkshire commuterland, has the lowest rates of child poverty. You could be forgiven for wondering whether it has always been thus.
The political colour of these areas is also largely as you’d expect: the most deprived consituencies and local authority boroughs tend to be Labour-controlled, while those furthest from financial hardship and strife, and the world of Wonga and food banks, tend to vote Conservative.
And yet, according to End Child Poverty, which has published the map, four years of austerity mean that it is not quite business as usual. You can find child poverty concentrated in pockets of the most relatively affluent areas, from Hove to Worcester. In super-rich areas, such as Kensington in central London, rampaging inequality is drastically highlighted over the space of a couple of tube stops.
According to Imran Hussain, director of policy at Child Poverty Action Group:
Poverty is reaching into so many communities, including relatively affluent ones end quote
The prime minister David Cameron’s Witney consituency is a case in point. Overall, the child poverty rate is 13%. Yet drill down to ward level and you will find almost one in three children living in the Witney Central ward are classified as in poverty, defined as below 60% of the UK median income.
This data is calculated in two ways: income before housing costs, and after. The government uses the before housing costs measure. Using this, we see that 87 parliamentary constituencies have a child poverty level below the 2020 target of 10%. Using the after-housing costs measure, which is used in the End Child Poverty research just two constituencies make the cut (Sheffield Hallam, and Aberdeenshire and Kincardine).
Similarly, while nearly one if six children(15.9%) are classified as in poverty before housing costs, that figure rises to 25.1% once rent is deducted from income. As cuts and freezes to housing benefit kick in over the next few years, the impact of housing costs on low income families financial resilience is only likely to become more pronounced.
The figures which can be read at parliamentary constituency, local authority and ward level, are calculated by combining official data on tax credits and out of work benefits dating back to 2011, together with Labour Force survey data from the final quarter of 2013.
The analysis was carried out by Donald Hirsch and Laura Valadez at the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University.
