Nursery World - Three in every ten children in the UK live in poverty as ‘scale of destitution’ rises fast

Six million of the poorest people in the UK would need to double their income to escape poverty, a major report has warned.

Three in every ten children - 4.2 million children - live in poverty, reveals the JRF report, PHOTO: Adobe Stock

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) sets out the scale and nature of hardship across the UK in its final report before the next general election.

It reveals that three in every ten children - 4.2million children - live in poverty, and the number of people in extreme poverty, or destitute, where they cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed, is rising.

Around four million people experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children, and these figures have more than doubled since 2017, the report says.

The deepening levels of hardship for millions of people across the country since the mid-1990s are described as ‘social failure at scale’.

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