Over a third of Crawley’s children now living in poverty

Over the summer, Loughborough University, in partnership with the End Child Poverty Coalition, released their latest annual report looking at child poverty in the UK at the constituency level. As ever, the delay in national statistics being made publicly available means that the report focuses on the year ending March 2022, prior to the start of the current cost of living crisis.

Their data reveals that before rapid inflation took hold, 9,667 children were living in poverty in Crawley, representing over a third (33.9%) of all the town’s children. Merging this with data releases from previous years, we see a definite trend emerging.

The longer the Conservatives are in office the more children in the town fall into poverty. This isn’t a co-incidence, even if we were to assume that UK’s economy could not have grown any faster and that public sector pay freezes and weakening workers rights had no impact whatsoever upon people’s takehome pay, reports have repetedly shown that changes made to tax credits and other forms of social security have directly led to an increase in poverty in the UK.

While the idea of a ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’ belongs in the Victorian age, anyone who believes that this situation is self-inflicted by parents needs to bear in mind that the vast majority of those now living in poverty are actually in working households. That is just how badly 13 years of Conservative Government has broken our economy and society, an incredible contrast to 13 years of Labour Government during which the party left office with child poverty over a third lower than it had inherited from the Conservatives.