Low Wage Growth Has Pushed 900,000 Children Into Poverty'

Average weekly wages now just 16 higher in real terms than in 2010

- Hazel Sheffield , Larry Elliott

The crisis of poverty that has taken root in the UK over the past 14 years has been laid bare in two new reports that reveal the devastating effects that low wages and price increases have had on the lives of 900,000 children.

With both main parties proposing tough welfare spending plans, the reports have highlighted the link between rising child poverty and slow wage growth under five Tory governments since 2010 - the slowest wage growth since the second world war.

Research by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that over the past 14 years, an additional 1,350 children a week in households with at least one working parent had been dragged into poverty.

Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, said: "No child in Britain should be growing up below the breadline. But under the Conservatives we have seen a huge rise in working households being pushed into poverty. We urgently need an economic reset and a government that will make work pay."

Wage stagnation was part of a "toxic combination" of insecure work and cuts to social security that had had a devastating impact on household budgets, the TUC report found, increasing the number of children in poverty with at least one parent in work by 900,000 between 2010 and 2023.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank said yesterday that 30% of children now lived in households below the official poverty line-up from 27% in 2010. Over the course of the next parliament an additional 670,000 children would be affected by the two-child limit, which restricts eligibility to benefits, it said.