Long-term childhood poverty in Britain: Trends and drivers across the 1991-2017 birth cohorts

While any experience of child poverty can affect life chances, longer exposure is particularly concerning due to its lasting effects on education, health and earnings. This study adopts a life-course perspective, tracking poverty from birth to age 10 for cohorts born in Britain between 1991 and 2017. On average, 17% of children spent at least half of their childhood in poverty. Long-term poverty affected 25% of those born in the early 1990s, markedly declined to 13-14% for cohorts born after the 1997 welfare reforms, and substantially increased again to 23% for children born following the 2013 austerity reforms. Decomposition analysis shows that cross-cohort changes are driven more by shifts in the penalties associated with work and family risk factors than by changes in their prevalence. These shifts in penalties reflect broader changes in redistribution and predistribution. The early decline in long-term poverty was largely due to rising employment and earnings in low-income households, while the post-austerity increase stems mainly from reduced redistribution. For cohorts born in the 2000s, social transfers played a substantial role in containing long-term poverty despite worsening predistribution. Overall, the findings show that long-term childhood poverty remains a significant challenge in Britain and highlight the need for both stronger redistribution and improved predistribution to address it.