Finances | Support working parents with childcare & commuting, thinktank urges

Extra support for working parents, including aid with childcare and commuting, must be introduced if the Government is to reduce child poverty levels, a thinktank has said.

Rising parental employment over the past two decades has switched the focus of Britain’s child poverty challenge from tackling workless households to supporting working families, with many kinds of working families now facing a greater risk of poverty than at the turn of the millennium, according to research published this week by the Resolution Foundation.

Working poverty out notes that the last Labour government reduced relative child poverty significantly – down by the equivalent of 600,000 children between 1998-99 and 2008-09 – with rising parental employment playing a key role. Critically, single parent employment rates increased from 52 per cent in the mid-2000s to 66 per cent by 2022.

However, as the current Labour Government prepares a new child poverty strategy for the decade ahead, the authors note that Britain’s employment and poverty landscape have changed drastically, necessitating a different approach.