The new Labour Government has pledged to ‘develop an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty’ as a key step towards supporting families in the UK. Nearly one in three children now live in relative poverty in the UK, and one in four children live in absolute poverty, according to UNICEF data from the end of 2023, with the country seeing the fastest rise in child poverty for almost 30 years. Almost half of children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds live in poverty, and 44% of children in lone parent families. The child poverty rate in the UK rose the fastest in between 2012 and 2021 out of 39 OECD and EU countries, many of which were able to reduce child poverty over this period. Furthermore, more than a million people in England are living in pockets of hidden hardship, meaning that they could be missing out on vital help because their poverty is masked by neighbours who are better off, according to analysis from the University of Belfast published in December 2023.

Originally launched in 2012 as the Troubled Families Programme, the Supporting Families programme was refreshed and relaunched in its new guise in 2021. The programme helps thousands of families across England to get the help they need to address multiple disadvantages through a whole family approach, delivered by keyworkers, working for local authorities and their partners. The UK government’s ‘Ten years of Supporting Families: Supporting Families programme Annual Report 2022-23’, published in March 2023, reported that since April 2015 to December 2023 a total of 534,961 successful family outcomes were achieved. It found that the proportion of children on the programme going into care reduced by a third; the proportion of adults receiving custodial sentences decreased by a quarter; juveniles receiving custodial sentences decreased by almost 40%; and the proportion of adults on the programme claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance decreased by 11%.

The Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021 announced an increase in funding for the programme so that by 2024-25 total planned investment across the following three years would be “nearly £700 million.” This funding is aimed at helping 300,000 families “facing multiple interconnected issues access effective whole-family support and improve their life outcome.” In 2024, meanwhile, the government decided to move the government’s Supporting Families programme from the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities to the Department for Education in order to integrate the programme into other linked policies and initiatives, including the roll out of family support hubs.

Meanwhile, however, local support for families in crisis has failed to keep up with an explosion in “bed poverty” in England caused by rising destitution and the cost-of-living crisis, according to research by Barnardo’s, with applications to council-run schemes for replacement children’s beds or bedding quadrupling over the past five years and a greater proportion of applications rejected, likely due to the schemes struggling to meet demand. Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a rescue plan for “austerity’s children” – the generation of over 3 million UK young people born after 2010 from low-income families who “have never known what it is like to be free of poverty”. As part of his proposed programme of support for children is a relaunch of the Sure Start early-years scheme, in part funded by a £1bn social impact fund.

This timely symposium will provide practitioners across local authorities, the police, social services, education, welfare and the housing sector with an invaluable opportunity to examine the scale of poverty in the UK and the impact of the Supporting Families Programme, evaluate the plans that the new government has in place and discuss avenues for significantlyimproving access to local services and the support provided to struggling families.

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