The Circumstances of Persistently Poor Families with Children

About this study

The Government has made a commitment to end child poverty by 2020 and also to focus effort on improving the lives of the most disadvantaged members of society. However, while both research and policy on poverty has focused on people who are currently experiencing low income, those who have a history of low-income have received less attention.

The Department for Work and Pensions commissioned NatCen to explore the circumstances of persistently poor families with children.

Our findings suggest that significant numbers of families with children live in persistent poverty and that persistently poor children are at increased risk of a range of other disadvantages, including living in bad housing and being expelled from school.

You can read a summary of the findings on this site. You can also download a PDF summary of the research findings, or a PDF of the full report.

Potential policy impact

The evidence from FACS points to particularly adverse outcomes for persistently poor families. Despite this evidence, there are no concerted policy measures to tackle persistent poverty apart from those designed to tackle poverty in general.

Being without regular work dramatically increases the risk of persistent poverty and is also associated with a range of other disadvantages, such as having no qualifications.

Employment policy therefore needs to work alongside policies designed to contend with these other disadvantages, and to ensure that when work is found it is secured and sustained. Policy must also recognise that work is not always possible for all parents at all times, particularly during periods of ill health and concentrated times of childcare.

Method

The Government states that a household with children is income poor if its weekly net income, before housing costs, falls below 60% of the average (median) income (taking into account the size and composition of the household).

Our research involved a secondary analysis of a large-scale longitudinal study of families with children - the Families and Children Study (FACS). This a large-scale government sponsored survey of families with dependent children in Britain. As FACS tracks and collects information on the same families at annual intervals, we could explore families' experiences of living in persistent poverty.