Over 70,000 children are not eligible for free school meals, mainly because their parents are in low-paid jobs which take them over the eligibility threshold, says Child Poverty Action Group.
The Government has been urged to put £2 billion back into Universal Credit to boost the living standards of almost 10 million parents and children in working families in the Budget.
Families trapped in poverty will see no Brexit dividend unless the Government changes course on domestic policies, says the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Over the last 20 years, growth in the earnings of working fathers has been extremely slow, at 0.3 per cent a year on average, while mothers’ earnings have grown by more than two per cent a year. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for families where only the father is working to keep up with other families.
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” wrote Charles Darwin. (Journal of Researches, 1836.)
An annual state of the nation report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion, written for the independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation by the New Policy Institute, has found that 13.5 million people, 21 per cent of the 2016, UK’s population, are living in poverty.