Eve Little, Research Impact and Engagement Manager at the UK Data Service, explores how data and research have informed understanding of child poverty and contributed to recent policy change, including the removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit.
Child poverty in the UK remains a significant and persistent challenge, shaped by a complex interplay of financial pressures, structural inequalities and wider social conditions. It is not a static experience but one that evolves over time, influencing children’s health, development and life chances that can extend well into adulthood.
Understanding the scale and nature of child poverty therefore requires more than headline figures alone – it requires insight into how disadvantage unfolds across families, communities and the life course.
The UK’s national data infrastructure, and the work of the UK Data Service, plays an important role in enabling access to the data and evidence needed to understand and address these challenges.
In this blog post, we examine the connection from data through research into the UK Government’s policy change to remove the two-child limit on Universal Credit.
What the data tells us about child poverty in the UK?
The UK Data Service’s poverty in data and children and young people in data themes bring together evidence from longitudinal studies, large-scale surveys and administrative data to build a more comprehensive and connected understanding of child poverty in the UK.
By drawing together insights from datasets such as Understanding Society, the Family Resources Survey, the Households Below Average Income Series and the UK Census, these themes reveal not only how many children experience poverty, but also how and why these experiences develop and persist over time.
A whole family view of poverty and children’s wellbeing
One case study within these themes, by Morag Treanor and Patricio Troncoso, uses Growing Up in Scotland data to examine how poverty shapes children’s social, emotional and behavioural development. Their research provides strong evidence that child poverty exists within a wider, complex family economic context.
Their research had substantial policy impact, strengthening the Child Poverty Act (Scotland) 2017 by ensuring the inclusion of priority groups and areas such as lone parents, education and income maximisation.
This research also contributed to wider policy discussions around income maximisation and child poverty, helping to shape the context in which a £10 per week supplement for low-income families was introduced. This approach has since been developed through the Scottish Child Payment, which increased to £27.15 in April 2025.
Improving how the UK measures poverty
Another case study highlights the work of the Social Metrics Commission (SMC), established to address a major gap in UK policy making: the absence of an official poverty measure.
Using datasets from the Family Resources Survey, the Households Below Average Income series and Understanding Society, the SMC developed a multidimensional poverty framework that captures not only who is in poverty, but also the depth, persistence and lived experience of poverty.
The SMC’s work has had substantial national impact, helping to shift the UK policy landscape towards a more robust poverty measurement.
In 2019, the UK Government announced that it would develop experimental statistics based on the Commission’s framework. This has now taken shape in the Department for Work and Pensions’ Below Average Resources measure, introduced in 2024 as ‘Official Statistics in Development’. These measures have informed research and reporting by organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Trussel Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Full Fact.
By improving how poverty is measured, the SMC’s work ensures that anti-poverty strategies are grounded in accurate, transparent and meaningful evidence.
A collection of the different measures of poverty and deprivation, including the work of the Social Metrics Commission, are collated and compared in Finn Dymond-Green’s, the UK Data Service Director of Impact, Data Impact blog post series. These posts highlight that effective anti-poverty strategies require multiple perspectives, rather than relying on any single measure to tell the whole story.
Informing the children in poverty inquiry
The UK Parliament Work and Pensions Committee has, since 2021, been conducting a multi-part inquiry into children in poverty. Finn Dymond-Green explored how data in the UK Data Service collection supported evidence submitted and recommendations made by the committee in a Data Impact blog.
The inquiry examined how child poverty should be defined and measured, its impacts and how government departments should work together to reduce it. Around a third of all written submissions, including from the Trussel Trust, the Children’s Society and the Social Metrics Commission, drew on data accessed through the UK Data Service.
These datasets included the Annual Population Survey, the Food and You Survey, the Scottish Health Survey, the Millennium Cohort Study, the Family Resources Survey, the Households Below Average Income series and Understanding Society.
From evidence to action: ending the two child limit
Within this wider evidence base, the removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit from April 2026 marks a significant policy shift. Introduced in 2017, the policy became a key focus of researchers and policymakers examining how income constraints affect families over time.
Under the policy, families claiming Universal Credit received the Child Element for only their first two children. Any third or subsequent child did not qualify.
As the policy rolled out, its impact has deepened and by 2025, almost 1.7 million children – around 1 in 9 in the UK – were living in affected households, with families missing out on around £3500 per year for each additional child.
According to the government’s own impact assessment, this policy change will result in the following estimated changes:
- Around 480,000 households will see increased support
- Around 450,000 children are projected to be lifted out of poverty by 2030
What does the evidence tell us about this change?
The removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit represents not only a change in policy, but an example of how sustained and connected evidence can contribute to decisions that aim to reduce child poverty.
In 2024, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a report looking at the trends and policy options for child poverty in the UK. Drawing on the Family Resources Survey, accessed through the UK Data Service, one of the key findings in this report was that removing the two-child limit would be one of the single most cost-effective policies for reducing the number of children living below the poverty line.
This work fed into the broader evidence base informing policy discussions and was directly referenced in the legislation to remove the limit.
Similarly, the Resolution Foundation, also drawing on the Family Resources Survey, published a report in 2025 looking at the Child Poverty Strategy. They recommended that ‘repealing the two-child limit at the Budget would be an unequivocal step in the right direction by the Government‘.
This assessment also formed part of the wider evidence base informing policy discussions around the removal of the limit and was referenced in the UK Government’s Our Children: Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty strategy.
Alongside this, research has compared the wider societal and economic costs of child poverty against the cost of removing the two-child limit.
Work led by Professor Donald Hirsch in The Cost of Child Poverty 2023 report estimates that child poverty costs the UK economy £39 billion each year – through its impacts on health, education and future employment. He notes that this far exceeds the estimated £3 billion annual cost of removing the two-child limit, reinforcing the economic as well as social case for intervention.
Professor Donald Hirsch also contributed to the wider conversation through a keynote at the UK Data Service Data Impact 2024 event: Poverty in Data, an event which explored the role of data in understanding and tackling poverty.
The removal of the two-child limit marks a significant shift. It will increase incomes for many families and is expected to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. This is not the end of child poverty in the UK, but it is a meaningful step.
It demonstrates that when evidence is sustained, connected and understood within the context of people’s lived realities, it can inform decisions that have the potential to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
Meet the team
(Left) Finn Dymond-Green (They/Them) is the Director of Impact at the UK Data Service.
(Middle) Eve Little (She/Her) is one of the Impact and Engagement Managers at the UK Data Service.
(Right) Sophie Gawryla (She/Her) is one of the Impact and Engagement Managers at the UK Data Service.
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