LONDON — Thea Jaffe pushes a stroller up a steep hill on the morning school run in north London.
“It’s like Sisyphus,” she laughs, breathless. Two toddlers jostle in the buggy; her 10-year-old trails beside with his red Michael Jordan backpack. She glances at a mirror and suitcases left on the curb — free for anyone to take — but keeps walking. Her one-bedroom flat above a grocery store is full of such finds.
Jaffe, a single mother, laughs softly — somewhere between amusement and strain. Every day is some version of this climb: child care, rent, groceries, the quiet math of survival. She earns 45,000 pounds (about $59,000) in a job she loves, yet her take-home pay doesn’t even cover day care for her three children.
Her daily struggle mirrors a national one. Across Britain, families who once felt solidly middle class are losing their footing as rents, child care costs and food prices outpace wages. Child poverty is at its highest level since comparable records began in 2002 — and among the highest in Europe — even though most poor households have at least one working parent.
For decades, policymakers assumed that employment was the surest defense against poverty. That no longer holds. Real wages have stagnated. Child care costs have soared with full-time coverage in some cases exceeding 1,000 pounds (about $1,315) per month while years of austerity measures have resulted in the closure of many care centers. There is a shortage of affordable housing. And Britain’s main welfare payment, Universal Credit, has lost value during years of inflation because benefits were not always indexed to keep pace with rising costs.
“The last five to 10 years have brought levels of really abject poverty,” said Kitty Stewart, an expert on social policy at the London School of Economics. She said that child poverty has been climbing since around 2012, when austerity measures began to bite. Families with three or more children have been hit especially hard.
One of the most controversial policies impacting families is the so-called “two-child limit,” which prevents families already receiving benefits from claiming payments for a third or subsequent children. Analysts estimate it has pushed hundreds of thousands of children below the poverty line.
“It’s explicitly creating poverty,” Stewart said.
In Britain, about 31 percent of children, some 4.5 million, live in poverty, according to the government’s definition, which counts children in households earning less than 60 percent of the national median income after housing costs. About 70 percent live in households with at least one working parent.
Child poverty rates vary significantly — the highest levels are found in regions including the West Midlands, London and the North West of England, once housing costs are taken into consideration.
Labour Party crossroads
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he wants to reduce child poverty by the next election, fueling speculation that his government could propose changes, perhaps even scrapping the two-child cap, when it unveils its budget on Nov. 26. How the government will pay for any increased subsidies remains unclear.
The debate around child poverty is emblematic of a deeper fault line within the Labour Party — whether it should, first and foremost, protect the vulnerable, as those on the left insist, or should balance the books and impose fiscal disciple as centrists say. That tension was already on display last year when backlash over Labour’s plans to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners ultimately led the government to soften the policy.
The two-child limit cap was created in 2017 by a Conservative government that said that those receiving welfare payments should face the “same financial choices” as those who don’t rely on benefits when deciding on whether to have more children.
Critics say it punishes children because of the circumstances of their birth. In most of Europe — as well as in the United States, which has a far less generous social safety net — families receive equal support for each child or, in some cases, more per child in larger families.
Supporters argue British taxpayers should not subsidize larger families and polling shows that argument resonates. A YouGov poll in July 2025 found that 59 percent of Brits favored keeping the limit.
“Lifting the two-child benefit cap would be a reckless act that will cost 3.5 billion pounds a year, meaning more taxes and more borrowing, when we are already living beyond our means,” Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, said in September. “We believe in fairness and that people on benefits should make the same responsible decisions about having children as everyone else,” she added.
Critics insist the benefits are not enough to persuade people to have more children. “It’s madness to think anyone has a baby for an extra 300 pounds a month — that’s not what motivates people,” said Ruth Talbot, 46, a Londoner raising three kids on her own and campaigning for single parents.
Debating a benefits cap
Talbot said she knows of women who want to leave abusive or unhappy relationships but are held back by fear of financial hardship. “It becomes another barrier at a time when that’s already traumatic and uncertain,” she said. “If anything, that’s when you need more support, not less.”
Nicola Killean, Scotland’s children and young people’s commissioner, has called the cap a “clear violation of children’s human rights,” arguing it undermines children’s right to an adequate standard of living and disproportionately affects communities where larger families are common.
Researchers say that the social and financial consequences are already visible.
Stewart, the LSE academic, notes that decades of research shows that children who grow up in poverty have worse health and education outcomes, lower earnings in adulthood and are a heavier burden on the public purse. During a parliamentary hearing last month, she cited studies showing child poverty costs the state around 20 billion pounds ($26 billion) a year.
The Resolution Foundation, a think tank, estimates that ending the cap would lift 470,000 children out of poverty. But the move would cost billions, testing Labour’s pledge of fiscal discipline.
Sophie Livingstone, the CEO of Little Village, a charity, said that child poverty is driven by multiple interconnected factors and that scrapping the two-child limit “might stop things from getting worse,” but that deeper reforms are needed — with affordable child care, housing and a welfare system that reflects real costs.
“We want the numbers to go down, not just to stop rising,” she said.
Her organization in London provides families with clothing and other essentials. Last year, it began supplying maternity wards across the city with baby essentials so new mothers wouldn’t leave the hospital empty-handed. Livingstone said that the families referred to the charity include those living in damp, airless rooms, rationing diapers and thinning formula to make it last.
One mom who relies on the charity is Marisha Simpson, 33, a preschool aide in east London earning about 1,200 pounds ($1,579) a month. Even with Universal Credit, she struggles to cover child care and rent. When a delay in her benefit payments left her short, she contacted her local member of Parliament to secure the 600 pounds that was held up.
“Sometimes it just never arrives,” Simpson said. “People think if you’re on benefits you don’t work hard. But I’d much rather not need them at all.”
Climbing the hill
By most measures, Jaffe has built the kind of life that should have offered security. She moved to London from New York two decades ago, earned a master’s degree from University College London and works full-time as a client-solutions manager. Her salary should put her comfortably in Britain’s middle class.
Separated from her children’s father, she says she is solely responsible for supporting their children. To bridge the gap, she receives Universal Credit, visits food banks and charity shops and occasionally joins university study surveys for grocery vouchers. She jokes she’s “like a ninja” on the Lidl supermarket app, tracking discounts. In one recent grocery run, she bought 16 pounds of potatoes on special and stretched them across a month of meals. She acknowledges her kids have toys and books and there is no mold in their apartment — “we are lucky, but it shouldn’t be this hard.”
She laid out her finances. On a recent payday, she received 2,800 pounds ($3,684) in take-home pay and welfare payments of 3,342 pounds ($4,398), a total of 6,142 pounds ($8,082). Her outgoing costs were 5,950 pounds ($7829), including 2,000 pounds ($2,632) in rent; 3,000 pounds ($3,947) in nursery and after-school care; and the rest for food, utilities, transport and other costs.
All told, she was up 192 pounds ($253), making it a good month — the surplus can easily disappear with a school trip, needed clothing, or an unexpected expense. This means she’s constantly calculating — like whether they can afford the 1.75 pounds ($2.30) bus to school, or should walk instead.
Moses, her outgoing 10-year-old, talks often about his plan to become a millionaire. He’s written a business plan to become a YouTube star. “He’s like, ‘When I get my millions, I’m going to change our life,’ Jaffe said. “It’s great, it gives him ambition. I’m just sorry he has to learn so much the hard way.”
For now she just keeps on climbing — one hill, one bill, one morning at a time.
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