The tragic relationship between child poverty and homelessness in London
Photo by Pedro Ramos on Unsplash
The threat of homelessness is an extremely visceral fear. The lack of a safe place to sleep, eat, shelter from poor weather and gather with those closest to us should be a basic right that every individual sees realised. However, for thousands of children their home is just a hope. In the meantime, they might sleep in mouldy, cold rooms, while sometimes sharing a hotel bed with several siblings with nowhere to play or do homework.
At the end of February this year, the government released new statistics for July to September 2024 showing that 70,450 households in London are in Temporary Accommodation. Focusing exclusively on all households with children across the country in TA, 58% are in London alone. As Shelter, recently highlighted, 164,040 children are currently in TA and 92,850 or nearly 3 in 5 children in TA are in London. These children are not well captured in HBAI data, which is used to create child poverty statistics for the country. That could mean that nearly tens of thousands of children are missing from the estimated 700,000 children believed to be in poverty across the capital. We also know that children are being moved outside of their local borough or even outside of the city entirely, but we don’t know how many.
With the equivalent of one child in every classroom in London currently living in temporary accommodation, and 14,885 young people presenting as homeless to their local council across the city in 2023-24 figures, it is clear that all levels of government across London must take the intersection of the housing crisis and child poverty very seriously.
Gathered evidence shows that child poverty can be a predictor for adult homelessness and is almost always a co-existing reality for families facing the threat of homelessness.
Trust for London’s 2022/23 data on child poverty rates after housing costs show significant jumps when housing costs are accounted for as the chart below shows. The affordable housing crisis in London and the hundreds of thousands of children experiencing poverty must be viewed in tandem. If we want to seriously prevent child poverty from causing long-term harm to children, we need to build appropriate, truly affordable homes fit for families who live in our community urgently.
The challenge though to quickly improve the lives of families is to provide the services they need when the threat of homelessness first looms. There are particular groups who face specific barriers when navigating personal crisis. For a parent who is threatened with domestic violence or a single parent with threats from debt collectors or joblessness due to unpaid caring responsibilities, holistic support is needed to help prevent and reduce the likelihood that they are unable to stay or move into a permanent home quickly. Other families are essentially forced into homelessness after their application for asylum is approved and they’re granted refugee status. These families often have little to no social and financial capital. Those still in a visa application process also face costly fees and limited social security support should they need it. And if a person has grown up in poverty and either loses their home or must leave their current place as a young person, their age may limit both their eligibility for support and prioritisation for what little help they can request.
Effective interventions must tackle both the broad supply challenges as well as the specific individual circumstances of Londoners. If change isn’t built on understanding of individual needs, it will fail to create systemic change.
Certainly, the evidence is clear that building more truly affordable social housing is the cure. At the same time, we also need to inoculate ourselves against the disease of child homelessness in London urgently. This is a public health crisis and a moral indictment.
We are currently leading a project focusing on the key moments when homelessness should and could be prevented. We believe that some crucial conversations need to be had about protecting families from homelessness and providing appropriate support to shorten or prevent experiences of homelessness. The issues are complex, but inaction is costly. Children have significant health, academic and social risks if we do not act quickly. We’re privileged to be working with Cardinal Hume Centre and New Horizon Youth on this project. Together we’re gaining insight from three particular groups to understand what policies need to be put in place while the houses are still being built.
We’re currently interviewing young people with experience of homelessness as a minor or young adult, migrant families and single parent, women led families. We are holding these interviews across March and April. If you know of someone who might like to take part, please do get in touch.
We aim to share our findings in summer 2025 and invite political leaders and civil servants to engage in important conversations about how we can support families to reduce the backlog of cases where families are living in unacceptable circumstances and children are growing up without a home.
Visit to Restorative Justice for All
One of the best parts of the role of community outreach officer for 4in10 is the privilege of being able to visit our extraordinary members and this has led to some truly fantastic experiences.
Whether it is being part of the series of campaign events put together by Southall Community Alliance, watching the presentation of new bleed control kits, donated by anti-knife crime charity Bin Knives, Save Lives or being part of community information events run by Poplar Harca housing association, this job continues to give me the chance to really experience the hard work of our incredible membership and has given me a real sense of hope.
Given this I thought it would be good to write about one of these events to give you a flavour of the experience.
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to visit Restorative Justice for All (RJ4All)’s Rotherhithe Community Centre whilst they were doing their Wellbeing Circle.
RJ4All is a charitable international institute with a mission to address power abuse, conflict, and poverty through the use of restorative justice values and practices. The RJ4All Rotherhithe Community Centre serves as a vital hub for community empowerment and social connection at the local level.
As RJ4All’s Community Centre is always doing events, so for me it was originally more the date I was available to go than what activity I was going to be part of, but I was so glad I chose that day!
When I arrived, I was instantly made to feel completely welcome and shown around their centre. This was a very friendly building made up of a few side rooms, an office, a small kitchen and a small meeting room with sofas, tables, chairs and toys for children.
I was the first visitor to join but the session quickly filled up and by the time we were ready to go there were maybe 10 of us (all women). It was only at this point that I was grew to understand the nature of the event.
Our team leader explained to us that the idea was that each week the wellbeing circle explored a thought-provoking topic with the leader posing questions within it. She then apologised as it was her first week – not that you would have known she was brilliant.
I would not say I was cynical about the model – group therapy has been shown to do some amazing things but I was unsure how I would find it with not knowing anyone or indeed anything about the event but any anxieties I had were soon to be proved wrong.
The topic under discussion was ‘forgiveness’. First we were asked to explain in turn what we understood forgiveness to mean and then went on to explore times where we had each grappled with forgiveness.
As we went round the circle the comments of my fellow participants began to really touch something in me and as the evening went on I found myself talking about things and feeling emotions that I would never have thought about. And this, plus being with others while they explored sometimes very personal things profoundly touched me.
I came away from that extraordinary event feeling incredible, refreshed and if possible lighter; like I had been on a big therapy session. I would recommend this experience to anyone!
RJ4All’s Wellbeing Circles promote its overall vision of building the world’s first restorative justice postcode by providing a first line of mental wellness support to the community, strengthening relationships within the area, and fostering community cohesion in SE16.If anyone else would like to learn more about RJ4All you can go to their website here [I’ll include a link when it goes live].
'Make Childcare Make Sense' conference at City Hall (21 January 2025)
Last week, we were thrilled to host our ‘Make Childcare Make Sense’ conference at City Hall, generously hosted by London Assembly Member Marina Ahmad. This event marked the culmination of two years of dedicated work, focused on the challenges families on low incomes in London face when trying to access affordable childcare.
Our work was driven by an urgent and growing concern—raised both within and beyond our network—that the soaring cost of childcare is a key driver of child poverty in London, rivalled only by housing costs. In response, we partnered with our network members to investigate these experiences in depth. The findings are detailed in our report, Make Childcare Make Sense for Families on Low Incomes in London, published in March 2024.
The report revealed that the current childcare system is failing families. Many funding entitlements are inaccessible due to required ‘top-ups,’ inflexible policies that don’t accommodate diverse circumstances, and a lack of inclusivity for all children. Parents deeply value childcare, but they find the system frustratingly complex and overwhelmingly expensive.
These findings align closely with other key reports published around the same time, including the London Assembly Economy Committee’s Early Years Childcare in London and Business LDN’s No Kidding: How Transforming Childcare Can Boost the Economy. 
Our event last week, which was attended by a wide range of stakeholders, took stock of the situation nearly a year on. We heard powerful contributions from members of the Childcare for All campaign group about their lived experiences of childcare when you have no recourse to public funds, from Single Parents Rights Network and KIDS, who support families with disabled children to access childcare. All had clear and very pragmatic suggestions about how the system could do much better to support the groups they represent.
Rosa Schling from On the Record delivered a fascinating presentation on historical childcare campaigns, including the National Child Care Campaign of 1985, which called for “comprehensive, flexible, free, and democratically controlled childcare facilities funded by the state.” It’s striking how closely this aligns with what the parents we spoke to today still need and want.
We also heard from Sarah Ronan of the Early Education and Childcare Coalition and June O’Sullivan from LEYF, both of whom made a compelling case for an urgent policy shift. They emphasized that while the Government is making significant investments in early years education, these investments are failing to reach the most disadvantaged children. Failing to address this is an untenable position for a government that is committed to both reducing child poverty and improving early childhood development.
Finally, we were delighted that Joanne McCartney, Deputy Mayor for Children and Families was able to attend and address the conference; to hear directly from families, practitioners and researchers about the current challenges and we look forward to continued dialogue with her and the Mayor about what the GLA can be doing to both support the childcare sector and families and children to benefit from it.
If you couldn’t join us last week, we truly missed you—and we can confidently say you missed out too! But don’t worry—you can still be part of the conversation. Watch our campaign film, where parents dare to dream of a future where childcare is accessible to all children, free and on an equal basis: https://4in10.org.uk/make-childcare-make-sense-a-4in10-film/.
London Elections 2022. Influence your candidates NOW!
London Elections 2022.
Influence your candidates to take action on child poverty.
On 5 May 2022 in all 32 London boroughs apart from The City of London, every council seat is up for election.
This presents a once-in-four-year opportunity to grab the attention of those who would represent us, tell them about the impact of poverty on the city’s children and what they must do to tackle it. With child poverty rates in London among the highest in the country and many families are now facing severe hardship in the face of the cost-of-living crisis, it is a matter of urgency that those seeking election to their local council prioritise tackling child poverty in their communities.
4in10, alongside other organisations in the London Child Poverty Alliance, is asking its members to engage with candidates in these elections to encourage them to sign our pledge to work towards a child poverty free London.
We hope that as a result, on 5 May there will be hundreds of local government elected officials who are better informed about how they can tackle child poverty in the local communities and are ready to take action to do so.
Manifesto for a child poverty free London
The London Child Poverty Alliance’s Manifesto for a Child Poverty Free London sets out twelve key ‘asks’ that it believes if put into action, would make a significant contribution towards creating a child poverty free London. The asks are focused on four key areas:
- Action on income
- Action on housing
- Action on childcare
- Action on hunger
The manifesto website provides prospective councillors with good practice examples, local data and further information about how these can be put into practice in their communities. It also contains a signup page where they can publicly commit to work towards a child poverty free London.
Take part in the campaign
First and foremost, we are asking you to share the manifesto with your staff, volunteers and those you work with and ask them to ask candidates they meet to sign up to the pledge via the manifesto website.
If you have the capacity, you could also send manifesto to the candidates in your ward, or across the area where you are based, asking them to sign the pledge.
The easiest way to find out who your local candidates are is to visit the Who Can I Vote For? website and enter your postcode. Alternatively, you could contact the local offices of the main political parties to ask them for their contact details.
Also look out for local hustings events going on in your community and if possible attend one. These will provide an opportunity for you to ask the candidates what they plan to do to tackle child poverty, you can use the manifesto to help you decide what to ask.
If you need any support or have any questions, please contact us and we’ll be very happy to assist.
Register to vote
And finally, don’t forget to register to vote! It is possible to register to vote even without a permanent address. The deadline to apply is 14th April and the deadline for applying for a postal vote is 19th April. Contact your council’s electoral services team for more information.
Useful resources
London Councils Guide to How elections work
Guidance from the Charity Commission on campaigning during election periods
Interesting Blog from New Philanthropy Capital
What Will Spring Statement the Spring Statement Mean for Charities.
Thank you to NPC for allowing us to share this. For more information click here:
Spring is upon us. Flowers are blooming, birds are finally singing—and the sound of tweeting will reach deafening levels this week as the change of seasons also brings a new Spring Statement from the Chancellor. But as new beginnings go, the outlook has looked brighter.
A lot has happened since the somewhat optimistic-feeling autumn budget, and not much of it has been good for the charity sector: a war in Europe, the subsequent economic and social fallout, and spiralling living costs across the country. With this backdrop, ‘levelling up’ has dropped down the agenda, but it cannot be forgotten. More than ever, we need to see the budget deliver for marginalised groups who are most vulnerable to these social and economic shocks.
What will be the big themes of the budget?
In the short term, the overall economic outlook is pretty bleak. Inflation is rising to 30-year highs and may hit double digits, with another spike likely in the autumn. Disposable income is set to see the largest annual fall in 50 years. The government already announced a rise in the National Insurance rate—and although they may be scrapping this for the lowest paid workers, it will provide little salvation to those most affected by rising costs. The Chancellor has teased that rising food and fuel prices are likely to be confronted with a package of support, in addition to the £350 package announced in February—which now seems like a drop in the ocean. However, rumoured defence spending rises and support for Ukraine may limit the Treasury’s ability to ease people’s concerns.
We also have huge labour market vacancies, with around 1.2 million fewer people in the labour market compared to pre-pandemic trends. This is driven both by the young, but also by over 50s who have left the labour market completely. The Treasury will likely be thinking closely about this and an update to the plan for jobs is expected on Wednesday.
What should charities be expecting?
There may be tough times ahead for the charity sector. The combination of rising costs, rising demand and inflation, leading to a decline in value of grants and donations, could be a serious one for charities. What is certain is that as an abstract ‘cost of living crisis’ moves into a desperate ‘can’t heat my home’ crisis, charities will be ever more in need.
Along with the support for household bills already mentioned, there have been some rumoured benefit changes which the Chancellor may employ to try and soften the blow. For example, lowering the taper rate of Universal Credit again, or raising child benefit or pensions, but in the short term this is unlikely to seriously alter the circumstances of many people that charities support.
Charities whose work concerns Ukraine should also expect specific announcements around the crisis—both in terms of more support for resettling people in communities here, and also in terms of increased aid for organisations working closer to Kyiv.
What about levelling up?
With everything else that’s in the news, the mission to ‘level up’ the country has fallen down the agenda. However, the pain people will be feeling over the coming months means that this support is needed more than ever.
The largest levelling up fund yet to be allocated is the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). This is meant to replace EU funding for business support, community infrastructure, and employment and social exclusion support. The prospectus for the UKSPF is due soon, and allocations to lead authorities may be made as early as the Spring Statement. Given the labour market vacancies, this would be welcome.
What may be missing, however, is support for tackling social needs. In the pre-launch guidance for the UKSPF, the government quietly revealed that new funding for people and skills may not be available until 2024 / 25. As we outlined in our recent briefing, this could leave a three-year gap in new funding which will affect the most marginalised in the country the most, and will risk progress on the levelling up agenda.
At NPC, we’re worried this is going to blunt charities’ ability to deliver for communities around the country at a time when they are needed most. Following on from our briefing, we will be running an event on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund next month, focused on how charities and local government need to work together to ensure people don’t lose out on support. This will be vital viewing for anyone trying to tackle social exclusion or improve employment in communities around the country. Further details announced soon.
Longer-term, we are focused on ensuring that the lessons from projects working on social issues around the country are kept at the heart of future levelling up plans. Later this year, the government will be launching its Strategy for Community Spaces and Relationships. We know how much there is to learn from work that’s already happened, and we will be pulling together best practice from community initiatives across the country, along with fresh thinking, to design plans that can genuinely tackle the social needs that people see as key to the success of levelling up.
The Spring Statement is unlikely to bring a new start for the charity sector, but we know many charities have already planted seeds which address the issues communities care about. We want to help them grow and thrive elsewhere.
Get in touch with Theo.Clay@thinkNPC.org if you want to learn more.
Spotlight on 4in10 Member Praxis and the NRPF Action Group
How are you helping to tackle child poverty in London?
Praxis is a charity for migrants and refugees. We provide immigration advice, housing and peer support and through all of these ways our work helps to protect children from poverty. We have become a leading expert in finding pathways out of destitution and supporting migrants facing homelessness, and our training and campaign work has national and international impact. Our core purpose is to help migrants in crisis or at risk, ensuring they can live in safety, overcome the barriers they face, and take control of their own destinies. You can read more about our strategy here, find us on Facebook, Twitter and our website here.
As part of this work, we facilitate the No Recourse to Public Funds Action Group, which is made up of campaigners with lived experience of the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) policy, to build campaigns to end this policy. You can find out more about our campaign, and read the NRPF Action Group’s manifesto calling for the end of NRPF here.
Tell us something you are excited about?
We are really excited that the group has decided to focus on campaigning for free school meals. The overarching goal of our campaign is to ensure free school meals for all children living in poverty, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. We’re launching with a specific call to the Government to make permanent the temporary extension of free school meals to some groups of children living in poverty affected by No Recourse to Public Funds, which was brought in during the pandemic.
We are also calling for free school meals for all children in poverty, regardless of immigration status, to take into account the fact that children with insecure immigration status are not covered by the extension of eligibility.
Our policy briefing sets out our campaign asks in more detail – you can find that here;
Additionally, here are some posts you can share if possible:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PraxisCommunityProjects/posts/325409016299148
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Praxis_Projects/status/1500765019050500096
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CazDWYtoCQa/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6906533946969186304
If you can support our campaign on social media, in your email networks and newsletters, this would be hugely appreciated! Please do reach out if you would like to collaborate in any way!. Any support you can offer to our campaign is hugely welcomed and thank you for all you do – Pascale.robinson@praxis.org.uk
Share with our members something positive about your organisation’s achievement or service?
We were one of the organisations that helped to uncover the Windrush Scandal originally and we’re proud to have been part of the work to campaign to change the system.
What can other network members learn from you or find out more about through you?
- We can offer advice for those who need help navigating the migration system: Get Help — Praxis for Migrants and Refugees.
- We are experts in finding pathways out of destitution and supporting migrants facing homelessness. Please reach out to collaborate on this!
- We can offer training on the immigration system for a variety of organisations (depending on our capacity).
What would most help you achieve your goals?
We want to make sure that migrants can live in safety, overcome the barriers they face, and take control of their own destinies. To do this, we campaign for systemic change. We’re building alliances and working in partnership with experts by experience to create positive, long-term changes to the policies and practices that create exclusion and destitution. We’d love to collaborate on work to achieve these goals!
Why did you join 4in10? What do you enjoy about being part of the 4in10 network?
Though we have only been in contact with the 4in10 team for a short while, 4in10 has already provided a brilliant chance to forge connections and collaborate with other amazing organisations working in the capital!
We are so looking forward to working together more, especially on our campaign to make sure all who need them have access to free school meals regardless of their immigration status.
Fantastic 4in10 Coffee Morning on Child Care
4in10 Coffee Mornings are always full of great people and good things. Just to wet your appetite for future ones and to give you some insight into why we chose child care as the issue for today you can find the slides below.
Thanks to Steve Triner from Sutton CAB and Samantha Creme from the London Early Years Foundation.
Proposals for a new Bill of Rights: what would it mean for children living in poverty in London?
Katherine Hill, 4in10’s Strategic Manager, takes us through the issues:
The story of Human Rights Act (HRA) reform has been a long and somewhat torturous one. Governments of various guises have been consulting on what changes might be needed since the mid-2000s, only a few years after the Act came into force. While the content of these proposals has changed over time the one constant has been that those who have made the effort to respond diligently to each round of consultation have almost unanimously concluded that there is no solid case for reform; the Act is doing the job it was intended to do, effectively defending ordinary citizens against the exercise of excess power or neglect by the state.
Most recently the Independent Human Rights Act Review (IHRAR) set up by the Government to take (yet) another look at the Human Rights Act reported that, “[t]he vast majority of submissions received by IHRAR spoke strongly in support of the HRA.” And the separate but concurrently running inquiry carried out by the cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights concluded: “[t]o amend the Human Rights Act would be a huge risk to our constitutional settlement and to the enforcement of our rights”. Why, then, has the Government now published proposals for wide-ranging and significant changes to the way the Act works? We all know that evidence-based policy is out of fashion, but this seems to have gone one step further. It is embracing policy in that is in direct contradiction with the evidence. This is policy driven by ideology pure and simple.
At this, the temptation may be to throw up our hands and leave the beleaguered Human Rights Act to the hands of fate. What is the point of repeatedly making the case for it, only to be ignored? There are two reasons. Firstly, we must recognise that the case for effective human rights is one that needs to be constantly remade, it will never be a case of job done. Human rights, if they are to mean anything, must be a statement of collective values, an expression of our shared commitment to freedom, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy for all humans. For these to be transmitted from generation to generation there needs to be ongoing dialogue about them and what they mean in our modern world. Shying away from that conversation leaves the legal mechanisms we have for defending our rights vulnerable to attack.
Secondly, and more pragmatically, if we do not argue and win the case for the Human Rights Act, and these current proposals for reform come into force, ordinary citizens may lose the means to enforce their rights effectively. For those 4in10 exists to advocate with and for, families and children experiencing living in poverty in London, the consequences are potentially very serious indeed.
The proposed reforms aim in multiple ways to make it harder for people to enforce their rights. These include a proposal to introduce of a new step in the legal process requiring individuals to demonstrate that they had experienced “a significant disadvantage” before their case can go to court. Legal action can already only be taken if the individual is the “victim” of a human rights breach, so it is hard to view this as anything other than an attempt to deter people from enforcing their rights by adding a further legal hurdle to the process. This will disproportionately affect those experiencing poverty who are more likely to have their rights breached in the first place. To give just one example, children in the lowest income quintile are 4.5 times more likely to experience severe mental health problems than those in the highest.[1] It follows that some of those are more likely to experience mental health detention too, where their human rights – including the right to respect for private and family life (article 8) and right to liberty and security (article 5) – will be engaged. If children in these circumstances, who already find it very difficult to access justice, have to jump through additional hoops it will further diminish their ability to challenge their detention where they believe it is an unlawful breach of their human rights.
The Government’s proposals would introduce a two-tier system for enforcing human rights by restricting their use in the domestic courts by certain groups, including “foreign criminals” and those accused of illegal migration. This makes a mockery of the values underlying the whole notion of human rights. These are rights that everyone is entitled to enjoy regardless of economic or immigration status, gender, sexuality, disability or anything else. It follows that all should have equal access to the law to enforce them. If they don’t, the impact will be felt most by those on the margins, and especially the poorest children in our society. If the Government is more easily able to deport people without them being able to challenge this on the grounds of right to respect for private and family life (article 8), families may face the sudden loss of their main breadwinner, and children living in already financially precarious situations will be plunged into deeper poverty.
A key issue the Government seeks to address through its plans is that it wants to stop what is termed ‘judicial overreach’, that is the courts getting involved in decisions that are more properly the role of Government and Parliament, accountable as they are to the people. High on the list of things the Government believes it is best placed to make decisions about is the allocation of social and economic resources and it is particularly aggrieved when it thinks the courts seek to interfere in these issues.
The reality is however, that there is little evidence that this is what the courts in the UK are routinely doing. Recent cases that have examined welfare policy have often been unsuccessful, for example a challenge to the two-child limit (which does not allow welfare payments to be made to third and subsequent children) on the grounds that it discriminates against lone parents. The courts found these to be matters on which Parliament has deliberated and struck an appropriate balance. This may be very disappointing for those of us who believe that there should be a wider role for human rights in these matters, and that the right to an adequate income, a safe and warm home and access to healthy food meet basic human needs that should be enforceable whatever the colour of government in town. But it certainly does not support the Government’s argument for the need to curtail the powers of the courts, and the rights of individuals, as is proposed.
Over the longer-term we need to build the case and argue robustly for more comprehensive protection of these important economic, social and cultural in our domestic legal framework, as an essential element of any strategy to eradicate poverty. But first, and most urgently, we need to protect what we already have in the form of the Human Rights Act, as failing to do so will have the greatest impact on those who most need to rely on it.
To find out more about the Government’s plans to reform the Human Rights Act and to find out how you can respond to the consultation visit the British Institute of Human Rights dedicated web pages where you can find lots of easily digestible information and advice.
[1] Gutman, L., Joshi, H., Parsonage, M., & Schoon, I. (2015). Children of the new century: Mental health findings from the Millennium Cohort Study. London: Centre for Mental Health.
Timewise Video on Flexible Working
Timewise Webinar
Can flexible working help towards supporting low paid workers to progress and move out of poverty? Presenting the flexible working index and a discussion about flexible working as a real alternative.
https://timewise.co.uk/article/flexible-job-index-2021-a-timewise-roundtable/
Putting the onus on employers to enable all jobs to be flexible and for flexibility not to be a barrier to progression or keep people (mostly women) trapped in low paid work.