Which children experience severe and acute poverty?

The Government’s forthcoming child poverty strategy is a crucial moment where it can set out how it will make progress against manifesto commitments to lower child poverty and end the ‘moral scar’ of people needing emergency food parcels.

When the Government set out its approach to developing its child poverty strategy, it said it would be a strategy that responds to the ‘urgent need to focus on those children experiencing the most severe and acute forms of poverty’. This is vital at a time when 2.8 million low-income families with children went without essentials and 2.0 million were behind with household bills in the 6 months to May 2025. Worse still, large numbers of families are turning to foodbanks for support, with 1 million Trussell emergency food parcels provided for children in 2024/5. 

In this explainer we identify 3.6 million children experiencing severe and acute poverty. Children living in lone-parent families, large families and families in receipt of disability benefits are particularly likely to have this experience. A child poverty strategy that targets severe and acute poverty must remove the 2-child limit, introduce a protected minimum floor in Universal Credit to limit the impact of the benefit cap, support parents to work and earn more where possible, and support family incomes where it is not possible , so everyone can at least afford life’s essentials.

How to measure severe and acute experiences of poverty

Commonly used poverty metrics, such as relative and absolute income poverty, offer good indications for which families are struggling financially, and are therefore at higher risk of going without essentials. However, to identify the children facing the most severe and acute experiences, we can look directly at which children are going without essentials, we refer to this as children experiencing hardship.

To do this we analyse the Family Resources Survey to identify families with a below average (median) income who also have at least 1 of the following 3 experiences of hardship:

1. being unable to afford enough food (measured by having low or very low food security)
2. being unable to afford to heat your home
3. being unable to afford to keep up with household bills.

We included an income threshold to focus the analysis on the most severe and acute hardship, as higher-income households have more options and coping mechanisms available to them (such as drawing down savings). We do not set the threshold at the poverty line as almost half (47%) of children with at least 1 of the 3 experiences of hardship do not live in relative poverty (accounting for income from disability benefits), indicating this threshold would be too low. Not being in poverty right now is not enough to guarantee families can afford enough food, to stay warm, or keep on top of bills. This is partly because incomes are not static, with 1 in 10 children (10%) not living in poverty in 2021/22 moving into poverty by 2022/23, and those on middle incomes were more likely to move into low income compared to those on higher incomes.

To identify where to set the threshold for the income filter, we have looked at how the risk of going without at least 1 of the 3 basic essentials compares across the income distribution. We used equivalised income (household income that has been adjusted to reflect the size of a family), without income from extra-costs disability benefits such as Personal Independence Payments (as these are designed to compensate people for the additional costs of their disability), and after housing costs.

Figure 1 shows that at and just below the relative poverty line (40% - 60% of median income), children are 1.5 times (53%) more likely to go without at least 1 of the 3 basic essentials, compared to children who are not in relative poverty. This risk rises further as poverty deepens, with children around 1.7 times (between 69% and 74%) more likely to go without essentials when a family has equivalised income below 40% of the median.

The analysis also shows the relative risk of hardship remains elevated until around the median income level (shown as 100% on the x-axis), after which children have a lower relative risk of going without essentials. This finding is consistent across several years of the FRS. For this reason we place the upper threshold of our hardship measure at the median. Setting it at this level includes 9 in 10 children (90) going without at least 1 of the 3 basic essentials, but focuses the measure on families where the risk of going without is much greater, and the availability of coping mechanisms more limited.

3.6 million children in families that can't afford food, heat or bills

Using this measure of hardship, we find 3.6 million children in the UK are growing up without at least 1 of the 3 basic essentials. What is more, children in poverty are more likely to experience these hardships than working-age adults or pensioners in poverty.

Looking at which children are most at risk of hardship, at a glance, the list looks the same as those experiencing poverty. Over half of children growing up in families where no one is in paid work (60%) and half (50%) of large families in receipt of social security experience hardship. Social renters, lone-parent families, families in receipt of health or disability-related benefits, or any means-tested benefits  also have very high risks of hardship (50%, 45%, 43%, and 48% respectively).

However, turning to look at what proportion of children experiencing hardship belong to different groups, compared to the share of children in poverty belonging to the same groups, shows some compositional differences between the 2 measures. Children in families in receipt of UC, health or disability-related benefits, lone-parent families, large families, families where no one is in paid work, social renters or carers, all makeup a larger share of children experiencing hardship than they do of children in poverty. Conversely, children in working families and those in families that own their home or have a mortgage, make up a smaller share of children experiencing hardship than they do of children in poverty.

From this analysis we conclude that a strategy that prioritises severe and acute experiences of poverty must prioritise children in lone-parent families, large families and families with a disabled family member. We do not include families where no one is in paid work, or social renters in this list of discreet groups to be targeted, as deeper analysis reveals they are almost entirely comprised of other groups highlighted in the analysis. Some 98% of children in hardship in families where no one does paid work also have at least 1 of the following characteristics: lone parent family (70%), social renter (67%), large family (52%), family in receipt of a health or disability-related benefit (49%). Similarly, if we breakdown the social renters group, we again find the same groups, with 83% of children in households experiencing hardship in the social rented sector comprising lone parents (55%), large families (48%) or families in receipt of a health or disability-related benefit (33%).

It is important to note that this analysis still misses some key groups due to shortcomings of the data. For example, children growing up in some forms of temporary accommodation or asylum accommodation will be missing from the analysis as these forms of accommodation are not included in household surveys. In addition, there are some groups that we know to have a high risk of hardship, but for whom relevant data is not collected to enable them to be identified in the analysis, such as families whose migration status leaves them with no recourse to public funds, leaving them unable to access Universal Credit, social housing and some local authority crisis support schemes.

3 key groups for the child poverty strategy

It is right that the Government’s child poverty strategy is concerned with addressing severe and acute experiences of poverty. This means it must target support to:

• large families
• lone parents
• families in receipt of disability benefits.

These are all families that have an elevated risk of poverty as well as hardship, so rather than pointing to special or different policy responses, this analysis underscores the need for some well-established policy recommendations. These include: removing the 2-child limit, introducing a protected minimum floor in Universal Credit to limit the impact of the benefit cap, supporting parents to work and earn more where possible, and supporting family incomes when work is not possible, so everyone can at least afford life’s essentials.