A report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the New Policy Institute says that this highlights how work alone is not the answer to ending poverty.
The Annual Report on the State of Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK uses official Government data and focuses on the 18-month recession of 2008 and 2009.
While the number of children in workless households living in poverty fell to 1.6 million, the number of poor children living in working households rose, accounting for 58 per cent of children in poverty. Overall, the number of children living in poverty fell to 3.7 million.
Report co-author Tom MacInnes said the fall in child poverty in jobless households came about despite an increase of around 60,000 in the number of children living in these households.
'So, we can almost certainly say it is related to the rise in both child benefit and child tax credit in 2008,' he said. 'Without the substantial increase in these benefits, the numbers of children in poverty would be around half a million higher.
'With more than half of all children in poverty belonging to working families, it is simply not possible to have anti-poverty policies on the idea that work alone is a route out of poverty. Child poverty in working households must be given the same focus.'
The findings chime with that of a report by Unicef which compared children's well-being in 24 developed nations and concluded that 'full-time employment no longer guarantees a life above the poverty line'. Report Card 9, Children Left Behind found that income poverty had the greatest impact on child inequality in the UK. It ranked the health, educational and material well-being of children in the UK alongside Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, in the bottom two-fifths of the table.
