Read our open letter here
Dear Bridget Phillipson and Liz Kendall,
We know how it feels to grow up in poverty. We’ve felt the anxiety, shame, and loneliness that poverty causes. We felt it as children, and as adults we still feel it. We worry that we won’t be able to keep our own children from it.
No child should have to pay the price of poverty.
Your government has said that ‘no child should be left hungry, cold or have their future held back’ by poverty. You’ve promised a Child Poverty Strategy to ensure that ‘every child has the best start in life’.
Hearing these promises, we feel hopeful - but we’re also worried. We need this plan to work, but the two-child limit remains in place, and other benefits are being cut. This is after years of cuts and rising costs have left a record 4.5 million children in poverty.
Action for Children’s latest report ‘Paying the Price’ shows that it is possible to deliver transformational change on child poverty. To deliver on what it has promised, your Child Poverty Strategy must include significant investment in social security, beginning with the removal of the two-child limit and the benefit cap.
Your government can lift over a million children out of poverty by 2030, and halve child poverty within 20 years. But without enough ambition, this opportunity will be missed.
We urge you to remember that poverty is about a lack of money, and it will take money to solve it. But investing in children will always pay for itself, and more besides.
Please make the right choices. Please step up to invest in real change - or children will continue to pay the price.
Yours faithfully,
Young campaigners - Georgia, Freya, Aaron, Louise, Holly