04/11/26
3 min read
Delivering his first budget last week, John Healey repeated the phrase ‘breathing space’ thirteen times. Promising breathing space today and hope for tomorrow, he argued that the budget signalled a government that knows exactly ‘who we are’ and ‘where we are going’.
However, while there were some bold statements on devolution and harnessing growth for good, this was a budget almost completely void of the substance required to bring even a small inch of breathing space to families on a low-income. The earlier removal of the two-child limit this April was an important step, but at least 4 million children still experience poverty and face another winter shaped by their parents’ struggles to get by and the constant anxiety this brings.
While Andy Burnham is widely lauded for his ability to connect with the public, his government has yet to speak up and out about the scale of hardship caused by the continuing cost-of-living crisis, especially for those most vulnerable to hardship. Since entering Downing Street, Burnham has also been almost completely silent on child poverty. It sometimes appears as if his government believes that last year’s UK Child Poverty Strategy, which heralded the abolition of the two-child limit, means the job is done, when as the parents from Changing Realities who wrote the strategy’s foreword argued, it must be only the beginning.
What the evidence tells us
Since 2020, I’ve worked on two Nuffield Foundation funded projects that have generated fresh understanding of the extent, nature and implications of child poverty.
First, the mixed-methods Benefit Changes and Larger Families Study remains the only independent investigation of the impact of the two-child limit and the benefit cap on families with three or more children.
Over four years, we found that these policies failed when judged against the ambitions declared for them by their architects. More fundamentally, they pushed affected families deeper into poverty and were, in effect, ‘poverty-producing’, by design.
The benefit cap’s flawed rationale
While the team, which included researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the University of York, and policy colleagues at Child Poverty Action Group, cheered the demise of the two-child limit, we remain incredibly concerned that the benefit cap endures. This cap, which restricts the amount of social security support families not in work or in receipt of disability benefits can receive, routinely pushes families deep into destitution. Yet the removal of the cap, or even simply rising the point at which it bites, is not even on the table. This can and must change.
Our new analysis shows that the benefit cap rests on a flawed rationale – that families can escape it by making better choices – when many lack the power to make changes, such as increasing their working hours or moving house. In many cases, they cannot work more because of caring commitments for example, and are unable to move to cheaper accommodation, because it simply does not exist.
Families at breaking point
Since 2020, I’ve also led Covid Realities and its successor Changing Realities, working in partnership with parents and carers in poverty to document their everyday lives and push for change. Such participatory research is vital but also incredibly difficult because parents are motivated to take part in the hope that their lives will be improved, hopes which often remain unrealised.
As our recent briefing shows, families in hardship are at breaking point. Parents have already exhausted all the strategies available to them (shopping around, using food banks, leaving the heating off when the kids are at school), and have nothing left to cut. They simply cannot get through another winter without effective and meaningful support. But they also need to see social security discussed more openly and constructively. As Frances Ryan and Baroness Ruth Lister recently argued, we can and must change the national conversation about ‘welfare’, and fast.
The promise of ‘breathing space’ falls short
Sadly, the budget failed either to provide the urgent help families need, or shift the debate on social security, with only small ‘crumbs of comfort’ for those struggling the most, and a return to tired mantras about the need to drive our ‘welfare bill’ down. A poorly targeted and flat-rate £100 help with energy costs, a small extension to the electricity VAT exemption, and minor adjustments to Carer’s Allowance tapers, are all that was offered of any note.
As Nik from Changing Realities said in The Guardian: “I work multiple jobs just to pay my rent, and nothing in today’s budget will make that situation better. Where is the “breathing space” for families like mine, or hope for the future?“
Ultimately, the ‘breathing space’ pledge is meaningless without real efforts to tackle child poverty. I will continue to focus my work on building the evidence, amplifying families’ experiences, and finding ways to make the government listen and, I hope, act.
Ruth Patrick is a professor in social and public policy at the University of Glasgow and a visiting professor of LSE.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Nuffield Foundation.
