Three things the government needs to do to make the child poverty strategy work

The child poverty strategy – published last week – sets out the government’s vision for supporting the UK’s lowest-income families over the rest of this parliament. It is a concrete step towards the government’s shift towards prevention. But ministers must take action on three critical fronts if they are to implement this agenda effectively.

DWP needs the right powers and accountability mechanisms to lead meaningful cross-government action on child poverty

The strategy brings together separate policies announced by various departments under the banner of reducing child poverty. For instance, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is lifting the two-child benefit cap; the Department for Education (DfE) is expanding eligibility for free school meals; the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is building out the £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme, and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is delivering mental health support in schools.

This adds up to a selection box of policies that should improve outcomes for children in poverty. But there is a risk the strategy misses opportunities to really leverage the benefits of cross-government working and add up to more than the sum of its parts. There are no joint policy programmes to be delivered across departments, no shared budgets, and it is unclear who is accountable for delivering the strategy as a whole and whether departments will coordinate meaningfully with each other as they deliver their separate programmes.  

The government says a Child Poverty Team in DWP will lead on monitoring the strategy’s progress, “with regular cross-government ministerial oversight” over implementation. But it is not clear what powers these ministers will have to ensure the strategy is on track. For instance, if departments are under-performing, the policy programme is not having the impact expected, or ministers disagree on the best route forward, it is unclear if DWP has the authority to take a decision and direct other departments’ agendas and resource.

Likewise, if all ministers on the board are equally responsible for overseeing delivery, there is a risk that no department has enough skin in the game to ensure the strategy delivers on its overarching objectives. Ministers will feel accountable for delivering on their own departments’ obligations within the strategy, but no-one is accountable for ensuring the strategy as a whole delivers its promised step change in outcomes.

Sufficient prime ministerial engagement would help address this, but Starmer’s attention is necessarily limited.  It would be better to give DWP the authority and accountability to lead this agenda without requiring regular oversight from No. 10.  

Local authorities need the right guidance, resource and powers to deliver on the strategy’s goals

Some of the strategy’s major national measures, such as removing the two-child limit, are relatively simple to implement and will reduce absolute poverty quickly (taking up to 630,000 children out of absolute poverty, according to the IFS). ⁷ Waters T and Wernham T, ‘Options for reforming the two-child limit’, comment, 23 October 2025, Institute for Fiscal Studies, retrieved 9 December 2025, https://ifs.org.uk/articles/options-reforming-two-child-limit  Other announcements rely on driving change through local services, which are already stretched and under-resourced. Local authorities will need the right powers, incentives and support to deliver on the strategy’s objectives, including unblocking critical barriers to delivery.  

For example, the strategy commits the government to ending the use of bed and breakfasts (B&Bs) beyond six weeks to house families. In recognition of the fact that B&Bs provide notoriously poor living conditions, it is already illegal to do this. But our research shows councils turn to B&Bs because they have no other options. Local authorities need support from central government to take better control of the temporary accommodation market. This should include political prioritisation of, and investment in, analytical capacity so councils can use local market data to more strategically shape their temporary accommodation stock.  

Local authorities will also struggle to deliver elements of the strategy without additional powers. For instance, the government has asked local authorities to step in to shape their local childcare market to improve quality and access, but local authorities have no powers over the key levers for improving childcare quality – as standards and inspections are administered by Ofsted. ⁸ Davison N and Metcalfe S, Policymaking blind spot: Why some children are left behind from the start, Institute for Government, forthcoming.

In other cases, the strategy proposes isolated changes that are unlikely to significantly improve local outcomes without wider reforms. Its proposal that councils should be required to notify GPs, teachers and health visitors when a child goes into temporary accommodation indicates an understanding of the need for greater local join-up. But similar initiatives have fallen short in the past; improving information sharing on one data point is insufficient to systematically join up local services around families’ needs. That larger task requires wider reforms to tackle siloed service delivery, such as pooling budgets across local services, the right skills and IT systems to promote more cross-service data sharing, shifting culture, and creating cross-service accountability mechanisms.

The government should monitor the strategy’s early progress and course correct, if needed  

The government expects the strategy to lift 550,000 children out of relative low income by the end of this parliament. It has committed to monitoring and evaluating progress – but this is relative to a baseline assessment not due until summer 2026, at the earliest. This leaves ministers without data to track progress until summer 2027, only two years before the end of this parliament.  

In the meantime, the government should identify some early metrics it can monitor to get a sense of progress, and it should create clear routes for collecting and acting on feedback from policymaking teams and frontline operations. The expectations and culture set by senior ministers – particularly Darren Jones in his new role as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, coordinating public service delivery – will be critical for ensuring this remains a priority as the government implements the child poverty strategy.