How do we know there are Children in Need?

Throughout the day, people across the country and here at JRF are raising money for the BBC's Children in Need appeal. But how much do people know about the number of children in need in the UK?

We have a few stats that might help to illustrate the scale of child poverty in the UK:

• 2.6 million children live below the poverty line in the UK. This number has been reducing for the past two years, but our forecasts predict it will rise to 3.3 million by 2020/21.
• More than half (57 per cent) of all children in poverty now live in families where at least one of the adults is in paid work.
• Inner London has a much higher proportion of children in low-income households than any other region: at 44 per cent, thirteen percentage points higher than the average for the United Kingdom as a whole.

And if you are not persuaded by the the human cost to families and children of allowing high levels of poverty to continue, it is worthwhile knowing that child poverty costs an estimated £25 billion each year in costs to the Exchequer and reduced GDP.

Here at JRF we have helped provide the facts for lots for programmes on poverty – from tonight's Children in Need to documentaries such as Brian Wood's and Jezza Neuman's Poor Kids, news programmes and TV soaps. We have even produced a guide for journalists to help them to report poverty fairly and authoritatively.

The need for this information is vital if the public are to understand the scale and the scope of poverty in the UK. Without unbiased evidence about the number of children in need, and what will lift children out of poverty, it would be impossible to know why all these fundraising efforts are so important.