Agenda and minutes

Preamble

a)      Research carried out by Loughborough University for the End Child Poverty coalition indicates that two in five babies, children and young people across the North East (38 per cent) were living below the poverty line in 2020/21, after housing costs were taken into account.

b)      The North East has also continued to experience by far the steepest increase in child poverty across the UK in recent years, moving from being just below the national average in 2014/15 to having the highest rate of any nation or region of the country by 2020/21. Overall child poverty rates in the North East have risen by almost half – from 26 per cent to 38 per cent – in the space of those six years; during a time when child poverty fell slightly, by two percentage points, across the country.

c)      Within Darlington it has risen from 25.9 per cent to 39.5 per cent, and increase of 13.6 per cent; and in Sedgefield 23.7 per cent to 39 per cent an increase of 15.3 per cent.

This Council notes with grave concern that Government policy has failed to address the issue of child poverty across the UK, and in particular that child poverty in the North East has risen sharply.

Resolution

Council resolves to write to our two Members for Parliament, Peter Gibson MP and Paul Howell MP:

a)      To highlight and express our concern of the continued and steep rise in child poverty within the Borough of Darlington, and the wider North East,

b)      To request that they call upon the Government to acknowledge that Government policy is failing our children, and

c)      To urge Government to review and amend policy such that the levels of child poverty are reduced.