Rachel Reeves MP Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to DWP Households Below Average Income statistics, said:

“These figures show the Government’s child poverty strategy is failing abysmally with no progress for the millions of children still living in poverty. They also include extremely worrying signs that rising housing costs are set to push more children into poverty and that severe poverty is on the rise. 

“The last Labour Government lifted over 1 million children out of poverty, helped thousands of families into work,  built children’s centres and introduced child and working tax credit to make work pay. But under David Cameron child poverty is forecast to rise, not fall. And even the Government’s own adviser on child poverty warned last month that 3.5 million children will be in absolute poverty in 2020 and that the ‘Government lacks any credible plan’.”