An extra 260,000 children are on the breadline since before the Covid pandemic. Photograph: Orlando Britain/Alamy
Exclusive: Study finds almost quarter of UK population living in poverty, reaching the highest level this century
More than one in three children and a quarter of adults are living in poverty in the UK as deprivation levels rise to the highest in the 21st century, according to a landmark report.
The study by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC), which uses measures recently adopted by the UK government, found the cost of living crisis had plunged 2 million more people into severe hardship since 2019.
In total, more than 16 million people are defined as living in poverty, or 24% of the UK population – the highest since comparable records began in 2000.
Children accounted for the biggest rise of any social group falling into poverty, the report found, with an extra 260,000 on the breadline since before the Covid pandemic, meaning a record 36%, or 5.2 million children, were in deprivation.
It is likely to reignite calls for Labour to scrap the two-child benefit cap as, of those 5.2 million children, more than half (55%) lived in families with three or more children. About one in four of the children in poverty lived in a single-child household, with the same proportion in a two-child family.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
Protestors hold a banner outside Canterbury Crown Court to demonstrate against the conviction and sentencing of teenager Ibrahim Bah in February 2024 | Andrew Aitchison/In pictures/Getty Images. All rights reserved
Governments are locking teenagers up in a bid to catch smugglers – and failing vulnerable kids in the process
In December 2022, an inflatable dingy carrying dozens of people across the English Channel capsized. At least four people died. Ibrahima Bah, a teenager from Senegal, was identified by authorities as steering the dinghy and was arrested.
One of the people who died was Ibrahima’s friend. Neither of the friends had money, so Ibrahima initially agreed to steer the boat in exchange for their passage. He tried to back out when he saw the condition of the boat, but the adults organising the passage forced him to continue.
In February 2024, Bah was sentenced to almost ten years in prison for manslaughter by four counts of gross negligence, and for violating immigration rules. Despite Bah saving other passengers’ lives on the journey, mainstream headlines slammed him as a guilty ‘boat pilot’ and described him, wrongly, as an adult man.
Bah is one of dozens of children who have been charged for immigration offences across the UK and Europe. Most of those children are Black teenage boys travelling alone. Most of them were seeking safety and protection.
Accused children and their lawyers have spoken to openDemocracy from Greece, Italy and the UK about these huge miscarriages of justice.
They tell a story of racist and outdated age assessments, a lack of access to legal support and translators, bureaucratic mistakes, biased prosecutors and a fundamental lack of support.
“A dark place”
When he arrived in the UK, Bah didn’t know exactly how old he was. He was given an age assessment and declared to be over 18. Only later did a birth certificate emerge, showing that he was a minor. The courts rejected it and relied on the age assessment instead.
“I think Ibrahima struggles to understand, as do we, how he can possibly be held accountable for those people’s deaths,” says Maddie Harris of Humans for Rights Network, an organisation supporting people subjected to hostile border regimes.
Since June 2022, Humans for Rights Network has identified at least 23 minors prosecuted as adults for immigration offences. All of them are Black Africans, the majority Sudanese or South Sudanese.
“The reality of the child’s experience versus what they are accused of – they’re just not the same thing at all,” said Harris.
Most if not all children travelling irregularly go through a lot on their way to the UK. For more and more children, part of their transit now also includes getting coerced into steering the boats by those arranging the passage, often through violence, threats, or because they cannot afford the fare. Once they’re in the UK, they struggle to understand how the legal system can then paint them as criminals.
“They told me, ‘you are under arrest because you arrived in the UK without a visa,’” said Ameen (a pseudonym), one of those prosecuted children. “A couple of minutes later, they said, ‘you have to go to prison for a couple of days, and then you will go to court.’”
The next three days in the police station were the “darkest days” of his life, Ameen said. “One room, with nothing. A dark place. Nobody talks to you, nobody answers you. Stress. Words are not enough to explain those days. They were bad days, the worst that I have ever had in my life.”
Ameen went on to spend six months in an adult prison.
UK age assessments are “highly subjective”
Child asylum seekers get caught up in this system because of the way authorities determine their ages.
“When people arrive, they have the opportunity to state their age, usually by putting their finger on a number on a piece of paper,” said Vicky Taylor, a researcher at Oxford University and lead author of the 2024 report No Such Thing as Justice Here.
If a child is recognised as under 18, they are put in the care of the local authority. If they say they are a minor but are suspected of being older, they are subjected to further assessment.
“These initial inquiries have been shown to be unreliable,” said Taylor. “People are often in a confused state, having just landed in the UK after a long, dangerous and traumatic journey. They are not offered legal advice, interpreting or support.”
Age assessments tend to have three stages, according to Taylor. First, the young person is asked to recount their own personal timeline – when they left their home country, for instance, or the last birthday they can remember.
“Obviously it can be difficult [to assess] when people are from cultures in which birthdays are not celebrated or marked in the same way,” said Taylor. “Trauma also greatly affects young people’s ability to tell their story in a way that is legible to authorities.”
The second check is physical appearance. Assessors look at the potential child to see if they have beard lines, or to check how hairy their hands are, or how far back their hair line is. These are racialised markers, said Taylor.
Third, a person’s demeanour is assessed – how they engage with officials, react to questioning, and how they carry themselves.
All these checks “are highly subjective,” said Taylor, “and very difficult to ascertain within a ten-to-40-minute assessment.” Children travelling alone, as well as those who have been through difficult and traumatic experiences, are also less likely to present in ways that are obviously child-like.
It’s estimated that over 1,300 children were wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office from January 2022 to June 2023
Many children who went through this process say they did not understand what they were asked. And for those who came away with a new age assigned to them, the number was often arbitrary.
Age assessments have been widely criticised by rights groups and researchers. An inquiry by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration between 2021 and 2022 described age assessments as “perfunctory” and noted that concerns had been raised at various times about the process.
“[Children’s] experiences include not being provided with the correct interpreter, being called liars and facing inappropriate comments about their physical appearance,” said Labour MP Andrew Western in the House of Commons. “This is unacceptable, and the reason it is so worrying is that the stakes are so high.”
Earlier this year, Refugee Council, Humans for Rights Network and the Helen Bamber Foundation reported that over 1,300 children had been wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office from January 2022 to June 2023. The charities reported that children as young as 14 were forced to share rooms with unrelated adults, with no safeguards in place, and that children felt “unsafe, scared, and traumatised” by their experiences.
According to Harris, these figures are likely to be an undercount, since not all local authorities responded to requests for information, and some children continue to be prosecuted as adults.
“It’s a sort of conveyor belt,” said Harris. “They continue to prosecute children without adequately resolving their ages.”
Children branded as ‘traffickers’ in Italy
This is not just a problem in the UK. Italy is also taking child migrants to court, said Cinzia Pecoraro, a lawyer in Sicily. Similarly to Britain, outdated and racialised age markers are partly to blame.
Some of the methods Italian authorities use to measure people’s ages date back to the 1950s. One method uses X-rays to examine bone structure, based on samples of an Anglo-Saxon population. Its margin of error is between six months and two years, according to Pecoraro.
The moment I was arrested as a trafficker I was worried, because they accused me of something I didn’t do
Pecoraro represented one child from West Africa who was identified as steering the dinghy he arrived in.
“The moment I was arrested as a trafficker I was worried, because they accused me of something I didn’t do,” said Ola (a pseudonym) over text message.
Ola was originally identified as underage, but the Italian authorities intervened and subjected him to a flawed age assessment. He was moved to adult prison as a result.
“I felt sick, because they gave me an age that is not my age,” Ola said. “I felt it was racism.”
Ola spent a year in adult prison until Pecoraro was assigned to his case. “I realised that this was a child,” she said. “It was obvious.” She eventually got hold of a birth certificate, and after multiple delays his case was sent back to a minors’ court.
Ola is an adult now and the case is still pending. Despite being tried as a minor, he still faces serious consequences for allegedly steering the dinghy. “It’s been nine years,” Ola said. “Let’s hope to finish it soon so I can feel calm, because every moment I think about it.”
Pecoraro is confident Ola will be acquitted, but said he is lucky she was assigned to his case. She has a lot of experience defending minors in his position. “You need a proper defence,” she said. “Without it, they get convicted.”
These convictions are not happening in a political vacuum. The government of Georgia Meloni – who rose to power on the back of anti-immigrant rhetoric – has aggressively sought to reduce numbers of people arriving in Italy.
More and more people have been criminalised for the crime of ‘facilitation’ across the EU, allowed under the soon-to-be-expanded Facilitation Directive. And in Italy, Pecoraro says prosecutors seemed determined to continue.
“It’s common knowledge these journeys do not have a formal crew or driver. They are only passengers, forced to steer the boat,” she said. “This is [well] known, but prosecutors don’t want to surrender.”
Kids caught up in Greece’s hostile system
Thousands of people are likewise in prison in Greece for the crime of ‘facilitation’, with at least one or two people arrested per dinghy arriving. As a result, racialised people serving time for ‘smuggling’ related offences comprise the second largest prison population in the whole of Greece.
Sometimes just being seen by authorities at the rear of a boat is enough for a person to be identified as ‘driving’. Kani (a pseudonym), a young person from an African country, was 19 when he arrived in Greece. He was arrested after being falsely identified for driving the dinghy.
M. E., now 16, is awaiting trial and faces a possible 4,670-year sentence for ‘smuggling’
“I didn’t touch the steering wheel, and I have no idea about driving or anything else,” wrote Kani in a text message. “They took me to prison after that. I had no idea why they took me in the first place. I didn’t even realise that the matter was this serious. I didn’t understand anything. I said to myself, ‘what is happening’? I was literally terrified.”
In 2023, H. E.*, an Egyptian fisherman, was sentenced to 280 years in prison for piloting a dinghy from Libya to Crete. Unable to pay for himself and his teenage son, he had agreed to steer. His son, M. E.*, now 16, is awaiting his own trial and faces a possible 4,670-year sentence for ‘smuggling’.
In reality, M. E. won’t serve a sentence of this length – even if he could live that long. Maria Flouraki, the teenager’s lawyer, said he’ll likely be released before a decade is up. While Greek courts regularly hand out decades or even centuries-long sentences for smuggling cases, sentences are generally capped at 20-25 years, with options for early release.
The crime of ‘facilitation’ – legalese for smuggling – comes from the 2002 EU Facilitation Directive, and is interpreted very widely by Greek authorities. In this case, the child providing his father support while he steered the boat – helping pass out food and water, for instance – was enough to make him legally complicit.
Flouraki said M. E. could not understand why he was accused of being a smuggler. “He was just a kid following his father. He had no other option.”
She is hopeful he will be acquitted once in front of a judge, as is generally the case for minors. Flouraki’s client is not being prosecuted as an adult, but children are sometimes identified and charged as adults.
Dimitris Choulis is a lawyer on the Greek island of Samos. Many of the minors he works with have spent months in adult prison before being released. “To be honest, it’s always been like this,” said Choulis.
One of Choulis’s clients is a child currently locked up in an adult prison. Choulis says he has the birth certificate, and hopes it will help him to get his client out of adult prison and into the minors’ system soon.
Choulis does not believe Greece is deliberately trying to criminalise children. Rather, he thinks that children are getting caught up in a system beset with structural failures. But, he said, such problems could be avoided if the system gave children more time and support.
“They don’t give them the opportunity, and these [children] don’t know what they have to say,” said Choulis. “They are [hearing] a strange language, in a strange country, and they’re in handcuffs. They don’t know what to say, and they haven’t seen a lawyer.”
Whether children are locked up because of embedded racism in age assessments, overzealous prosecutors or bureaucratic errors, the result is the same.
Children are paying the price because the UK and EU governments are more intent on securing their borders than safeguarding the rights of people seeking asylum, said Vicky Taylor. “States are willing to override their obligations to children because they’re preoccupied with the performance of security.”
*Full names have been withheld to protect their identities
In Brazil’s Amazon region, more than 1,700 schools and 760 health centers have been shuttered or become inaccessible due to drought. A scene from Tabatinga, Amazonan State, Brazil in October 2024. UNICEF / UNI671256 / Diogenes
A drought in much of South America impacts more than 420,000 children living in the Amazon basin, according to new estimates from UNICEF.
The record-breaking drought — ongoing since last year — has left rivers in the region at an all-time low, a press release from UNICEF said.
The lack of rain has affected river transportation and water supplies for Indigenous children and their communities in Colombia, Brazil and Peru. Families use the rivers to access and transport water, food, fuel and medical supplies. The children also use them to travel to school.
“For centuries the Amazon has been home to precious natural resources. We are witnessing the devastation of an essential ecosystem that families rely on, leaving many children without access to adequate food, water, health care and schools,” said Executive Director of UNICEF Catherine Russell in the press release.
Food insecurity caused by the drought has increased malnutrition risk in the region’s children, while restricted access to drinking water could lead to an increase in infectious diseases, UNICEF said, as AFP reported.
“Food insecurity caused by drought increases the risk of malnutrition, stunting and wasting, and death in children,” the press release said. “Research has also found that pregnant women who experience droughts are likely to have children with lower birth weights.”
In the Brazilian Amazon, more than 760 medical clinics and over 1,700 schools have become inaccessible or were forced to close due to low river levels.
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee northern Gaza under Israeli attack on October 12, 2024. (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)
“Such dehumanization cannot help but trigger our associations with scenes depicting the Nazis loading Jews into cattle cars.”
Much alarm has been raised over the so-called “Generals’ Plan,” an ethnic cleansing proposal for northern Gaza that has reportedly garnered attention in the highest reaches of the Israeli government.
But Israeli scholar Idan Landau argued in a column published in English by +972 Magazine on Friday that what the Israeli military is actually doing in northern Gaza “is even more appalling” than the plan outlined by a group of retired generals. Landau argued that focus on the details of the Generals’ Plan has served to obscure the “true brutality” of Israel’s deadly operations in northern Gaza, which has been rendered a hellscape of death and destruction by the military assault and siege.
Landau, a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, opened his column—first published in Hebrew on his blog—by pointing to two photos: one showing a celebratory event at a camp built by an Israeli settler organization just outside of the Gaza Strip, and the other showing displaced Palestinians lined up at gunpoint amid the ruins of northern Gaza.
“These photos tell a story that is unfolding so rapidly that its harrowing details are already on the brink of being forgotten,” wrote Landau. “Yet this story could start from any point during the past 76 years: the Nakba of 1948, the ‘Siyag Plan‘ that followed it, the Naksa of 1967. On one side, displaced Palestinians with all the belongings they can carry, hungry, wounded, and exhausted; on the other, joyful Jewish settlers, sanctifying the new land that the army has cleared for them.”
The Israeli military’s dehumanization of the people of Gaza, Landau wrote, “cannot help but trigger our associations with scenes depicting the Nazis loading Jews into cattle cars.”
On the left, Israeli settlers gather at an event celebrating Sukkot near the Gaza Strip. On the right, displaced Palestinians line up at gunpoint in the ruins of Jabalia refugee camp. (Photos via +972 Magazine)
Landau wrote that what the Israeli army has been implementing in northern Gaza in recent weeks is “not quite” the Generals’ Plan, which entails giving Palestinians still in the region a week to leave before declaring the area a closed military zone—and designating everyone who remains a militant who can be denied humanitarian assistance and killed.
The actual strategy Israeli soldiers have been deploying in northern Gaza is “an even more sinister and brutal version” of the Generals’ Plan “within a more concentrated area.”
“The first, most immediate distinction is the abandoning of provisions for reducing harm to civilians, i.e. giving residents of northern Gaza a week to evacuate southward,” Landau wrote. “The second departure concerns the real purpose of emptying the area: while portraying the military operation as a security necessity, it was, in fact, an embodiment of the spirit of ethnic cleansing and resettlement from day one.”
“As opposed to the picture painted by the army, implying that residents in the northern areas were free to move south and get out of the danger zone, local testimonies presented a frightening reality: Anyone who so much as stepped out of their home risked being shot by Israeli snipers or drones, including young children and those holding white flags,” Landau noted. “Rescue crews trying to help the wounded also came under attack, as well as journalists trying to document the events.”
The scholar cites one “particularly harrowing video” in which a Palestinian child is seen “on the ground pleading for help after being wounded by an airstrike; when a crowd gathers to help him, they are suddenly hit by another airstrike, killing one and wounding more than 20 others.”
“This is the reality amid which the people of northern Gaza were supposed to walk, starved and exhausted, into the ‘humanitarian zone,” Landau wrote. “Since the Israeli army began its operation in northern Gaza, it has killed over 1,000 Palestinians. The Israeli Air Force usually bombs at night while the victims are sleeping, slaughtering entire families in their homes and making it more difficult to evacuate the wounded. And on October 24, rescue services announced that the intensity of the bombardment left them with no choice but to cease all operations in the besieged areas.”
The deadly military assault, Landau stressed, has been accompanied by a “starvation policy” that has severely hindered the flow of humanitarian assistance to northern Gaza.
The heads of prominent United Nations agencies and human rights organizations warned Friday that conditions on the ground in the region are “apocalyptic” and that “the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence.”
Landau noted that on October 16, following pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government reportedly allowed 100 aid trucks to enter northern Gaza.
“But journalists in the north were quick to correct the record: Nothing at all had entered the besieged areas,” Landau wrote. “On October 20, Israeldenied a further request by U.N. agencies to bring in food, fuel, blood, [and] medicines. Three days later, in response to a request for an interim order by the Israeli human rights group Gisha, the state admitted to the High Court that no humanitarian aid had been allowed into northern Gaza up to that point. By this time, we are already talking about a three-week-long food siege.”
Addressing the question of “what is left for us to do” in the face of such a catastrophe, Landau wrote that “the consensus concerning the war of extermination poisons Israeli society and blackens its future so profoundly that even small pockets of resistance can proliferate stamina and hope to those who have not yet been carried away by the currents of madness.”
“We can also look for partners in this fight abroad, where the critical lever of pressure is the pipeline of American weapons,” he added. “The struggle to end this intensifying war of extermination and transfer in Gaza, particularly in the north, is first and foremost a human fight. It is a fight for life, both in Gaza and Israel: for the very chance that life can continue to exist in this blood-soaked land. Nothing could be more patriotic.”
+972 Magazine published Landau’s column a day after Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, warned in a statement that “time is running out” to stop the far-right Israeli government’s attempt to “erase the Palestinians from their own land and allow Israel to fully annex Palestinian territory.”
“Genocide and a man-made humanitarian catastrophe are unfolding in front of us and in Gaza,” said Albanese. “I regret to see so many member states are avoiding acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people and instead look away.”
Jeremy Corbyn, MPs and politicians from the Green party, Plaid Cymru and others respond to the budget.
Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name.
While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table.
Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on.
Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy.
We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to:1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal.
We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed.
The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.
Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent,Carla Denyer MPGreen partyco-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green party, Ben Lake MPPlaid Cymru,Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru,Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member , Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayor, Andrew Feinstein Former ANC MPand Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne WoodFormer leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MPfor Cynon Valley, Hilary SchanChair, We Deserve Betterand Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony SlaughterWales Green partyleader
This blog has previously experienced copyright take down notices. I am republishing this letter in full on the basis that the original authors have and retain rights of copyright and that they have indicated that they wanted it published by submitting it to the Guardian newspaper.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
