Submission to the consultation on better measurements of child poverty

UNICEF UK welcomes the government’s reaffirmed commitment to ending child poverty. We agree that child poverty is multidimensional in nature and that improvements could be made to better monitor it. We agree that income is a key part of understanding child poverty. However, in our view, the way forward is to retain the relative income poverty measure (looking at income and poverty gap) as central and to balance it by better directly measuring material deprivation.

Overall, we recommend that the government continues to improve the child poverty measures but not radically change them. Income poverty and deprivation should remain the main measures.