Our Children, Our Future: ICF Response to the Government’s Child Poverty Strategy
The Institute for Children’s Futures (ICF) welcomes Friday’s publication of the Government’s new Child Poverty Strategy, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty. We strongly endorse the commitment to abolish the long-standing two-child limit, a policy that has caused profound and lasting harm by accelerating and deepening child poverty across the country. As the Strategy itself acknowledges, abolishing the policy is projected to “lift 450,000 children out of poverty” (p.6), marking one of the most significant anti-poverty measures in over a decade.
The ICF also welcomes the Strategy’s wider ambition to lift more than half a million children out of poverty by 2030. Key measures, including improved access to childcare for parents on Universal Credit, strengthened support for homeless families, and new legal duties to improve standards in temporary accommodation, represent meaningful steps towards creating a fairer future for all children. The introduction of a new statutory duty on local authorities to notify schools, GPs and health visitors when a child is placed in temporary accommodation signals an overdue recognition of the instability, disrupted schooling, and wellbeing risks experienced by children living in temporary accommodation.
However, as the Strategy notes, this measure is intended to “enable health and education providers to respond appropriately” (p.65) and help schools offer pastoral or practical support. While this ambition is welcome, the operationalisation of such a duty requires far greater clarity. Decades of Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews show that system failures rarely result from a lack of information, but from disconnected systems, unclear responsibilities, and inconsistent multi-agency responses. The Strategy does not yet set out who will lead the triage and coordination of support, how data will flow between housing, education and health systems, or how schools and health services will be resourced to act on these notifications. Without this, there is a risk that the new duty replicates existing challenges rather than resolving them.
Despite its positive direction, the ICF remains concerned that the Strategy does not include legally binding targets or clear benchmarks against which progress can be measured. The Strategy commits to publishing a monitoring and evaluation baseline in Summer 2026 and reporting annually thereafter, but this delayed timeline risks missing early implementation lessons. Moreover, the Strategy does not establish an independent oversight mechanism, nor does it provide detail on how local performance, multi-agency integration, or safeguarding implications will be assessed. For a national strategy of this scale, robust and transparent accountability is vital.
While the Strategy is framed within a five-year period, the scale and complexity of child poverty demand a much longer-term vision. Tackling deep-rooted and intersecting drivers, including inadequate incomes, unstable housing, unequal access to childcare, structural discrimination and widening regional inequalities, requires sustained investment, policy continuity and a commitment that spans successive governments. The Strategy highlights strong place-based innovations, such as Greater Manchester’s Live Well model and Salford’s Poverty Truth Commission, demonstrating how local leadership, integration across services, and co-production with communities can rewire systems to reduce inequalities. As a research institute rooted in Greater Manchester, ICF sees first-hand the impact of such approaches and the conditions required for them to succeed.
The ICF further notes that the Strategy could have gone further in embedding children’s rights principles, particularly the best-interests-of-the-child standard, as a foundation for policy design, budgeting, and evaluation. The ICF is also concerned that the Strategy is currently presented solely as a lengthy and highly technical 116-page document. While an accessible format is available on request, this does not constitute meaningful communication for the children, parents and communities the Strategy is designed to support. If this is truly a strategy for them, the government must commit to producing plain-language guides, youth-friendly summaries, multilingual materials and community-facing information. Without clear, accessible communication, families may remain unaware of the supports available or unable to navigate them, limiting the Strategy’s impact from the outset.
As the Strategy moves into its implementation phase, the ICF will draw on its extensive local, regional and national research expertise to monitor progress, evaluate impact and support the development of the long-term, cross-government approach needed to end child poverty for good. We stand ready to work with partners to ensure that every child has the opportunity not only to grow up free from hardship, but to thrive.
