Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty, the Government’s new 10-year strategy emerging from the recent Child Poverty Taskforce, aims to lift 450,000 children out of relative poverty within this parliament.
The flagship policy announcement within the strategy is the removal of the two-child benefit limit resulting in two million children living in households with increased income. For Barking and Dagenham, where 42% of children live in poverty (after housing costs), that means more than 3,300 households are materially better off through that single policy lever being pulled, notwithstanding impacts of the uplift to the basic rate of Universal Credit and increases to the National Living Wage.
Fair Funding 2.0 is long awaited recognition of demographics, deprivation and needs in local government funding formula. In the latest Local Government Finance Settlement Barking and Dagenham received a 11.5% increase in core spending power alleviating some financial pressure, in the short term at least.
Finally, it feels like the wind is changing and child poverty is a true focus of Government, as it is locally. We welcome the Crisis Resilience Fund (CRF), successor to the Household Support Fund, which gives us c.£11m over the three years to support low-income households facing financial shocks and to invest in strengthening the financial resilience of our community.
Herein lies a major opportunity to channel the CRF into new services, programmes and activities, and to co-ordinate a local system response to poverty with the VCFSE shaping and developing that provision of support and designing the local system to work more upstream and not always at the acute end of crisis. Using the CRF strategically we can increase the capacity of the VCFSE and fund them to deliver anti-poverty work.
We can also use the CRF to combine with Public Health Grant to address health and poverty together and think creatively – including about how we can support people in need of housing support to avoid temporary accommodation placements. The CRF can also be used to fund targeted employment support and advice to building skills and open new pathways into work or in-work progression.
Through Foundations for Change: Tackling Poverty 2025/26, using the CRF as additional resources behind that agenda, we will establish a multi-agency anti-poverty partnership group to co-ordinate a place-based approach and drive delivery of our strategy. In the short term the Group will oversee delivery of the first wave of interventions set out in the Strategy. These interventions aim to more fully understand and address the barriers that our most vulnerable cohorts experience. Cohorts that include lone parents, care leavers, NEETs and people with disabilities whom we know face barriers and disproportionate disadvantage.
Longer term, the anti-poverty partnership group will be given the mandate and scope to collaboratively develop the next iteration of the strategy and future approaches to budget maximisation, income maximisation, hardship and crisis support, and advice services. Through partnership collaboration and better co-ordination we can integrate this support into neighbourhood working approaches and embed anti-poverty work in everything we do.
We can build financial resilience at community-level, therefore reducing dependence and repeat need and averting periods of crisis when people face financial shocks. This requires a place-based approach where the material and financial barriers are tackled strategically, systematically, and one person/household at a time.
| Measure | LBBD | London | England |
|---|---|---|---|
| Child poverty rate (after housing costs) | 42% | 34.7% | 28.4% |
Please note: This is the latest available data as at 1st February 2026.
Foundations for Change: Tackling Poverty 2025 to 26
Fair Futures Board