Researchers say hardship is a direct legacy of welfare benefit cuts imposed by Tory governments in recent years
More than a fifth of all “austerity generation” British children have been scarred by poverty for at least half their childhood, a direct legacy of the welfare benefit cuts imposed by Conservative governments in recent years, research reveals.
The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years of life in hardship surged after ministers froze working age benefits levels and imposed policies such as the two-child limit, it found.
Austerity policies, which drastically shrank annual welfare spending by tens of billions a year and took thousands of pounds a year out of low-income family budgets, effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty.
The University of Oxford study said the austerity-era growth in children exposed to poverty for most of their formative years was a “significant social problem” that would cause long-term harms to their health, education and life chances.
The study’s co-author, Selçuk Bedük, said the post-2013 austerity cuts to welfare increased both the numbers of children experiencing poverty and the time they spent in it. As a consequence, long-term poverty was now a defining factor in the childhood of about 23% of British youngsters.
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Austerity cuts masterminded by the former Tory chancellor George Osborne and the ex-welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith included the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the two-child benefit limit, cuts to the generosity of universal credit, and years of benefit rate freezes. By 2021, they had stripped about £37bn a year from welfare spending.
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Original article at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/13/uk-austerity-children-scarred-poverty-study-conservatives
