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Monday, 13 April 2026
United Kingdom·Human Rights·Trade & Economy

More than a fifth of UK's 'austerity children' scarred by long-term poverty, study finds

Monday, 13 April 2026 · 1 min read

A University of Oxford study has found that more than 23% of British children born after 2013 spent at least six of their first eleven years in poverty, a sustained hardship the researchers attribute directly to welfare cuts introduced by Conservative governments from around 2013 onward. Policies including benefit freezes, the two-child limit (which capped universal credit support to a family's first two children), and the so-called bedroom tax stripped an estimated £37 billion a year from welfare spending by 2021, pushing hundreds of thousands of children into prolonged deprivation. Researchers warn the damage to health, education, and life chances will be long-lasting, though the current Labour government's recent abolition of the two-child limit is expected to lift around 450,000 children out of poverty by the end of the decade.

Sources
The GuardianMore than a fifth of UK’s ‘austerity children’ scarred by poverty, study says
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