New figures have revealed that some 8,379 children on the Isle of Wight are living in poverty, with things set to only get worse.
Latest ‘End Child Poverty’ coalition figures for 2021/22 show there are still 4.2million children living in poverty in the UK – 29.2%. Locally, the percentage is a lot higher at 34.2%.
Calculations before housing costs show that of those Island children living in poverty, 89% live in a household where at least 1 adult is in work – working families. This equates to 5,708 Isle of Wight children.
Every year the End Child Poverty Coalition, together with the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, publishes data on the number of children living in poverty across the UK.
This 2021/22 report does not yet cover the recent cost of living crisis and persistently high inflation. Therefore, it is expected that next year’s report will almost certainly show a worsening rather than improving picture.
Peter Shreeve, Assistant District Secretary of the National Education Union, has said:
“Child poverty figures remain stubbornly high and much more needs to be done to help. We need to act before the numbers increase even further.
“This is why, we want our MP to support the Free School Meals for All Bill, when it is read for the second time in Parliament on 30 June”.
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“The Isle of Wight National Education Union is asking those living on the Isle of Wight to support a petition to provide free school meals for all primary pupils. See https://www.megaphone.org.uk/p/IoW-FreeSchoolMeals.
No free school meals! Send them to Rwanda!
Not with my tax! These kids should go hungry or get better parents. They’ll drag us all down.
Aaaaand, cue the old mouthbreathers with their “kids these days” and “breeders” comments, liberally seasoned with tired old tropes about “top of the range phones” and “Sky TV”.
Who are “the old mouth breathers”? Please clarify who exactly you mean?
So HOUSING costs are not ‘included’
MOST working people have to pay rent or mortgage, which eats up in many cases much of the second earners wage.
These breeders who have children for a ‘lifestyle’ instead of working full time, only ‘do’ 16 hours work, then have so much free time, YET they pay no or very little rent or council tax.
They also get free school meals, extra hand outs for food and energy cost, FREE dental and prescriptions,
Free school transport and uniforms.
SEE why so many have children and THEN choose to work less hours, not more.
So don’t feel sorry, they KNOW they are onto a good thing and the “Squeaky wheel gets the most oil”
And you asdume an awful lot!!! But assuming seems to be your best friend in particular and I bet your a, Daily fail reader!… I know many many single parents male and female “WORKING” Paying rent or mortgage and just existing because of Mr Sunak and his “ideals” get off your pedestal and take a walk in the real world but that may mean cutting the umbilical cord to your keyboard and embracing the day! “silly mothy maggot”!
And so you condemn someone for assumption then go on to assume things yourself
I am more than happy to pay for children whose families are struggling.
I certainly will NOT be paying for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s hoard of sprogs.
Perhaps they should follow the money trail and find out where it’s being spent?
their parents are surrounded by free housing, free healthcare, free money and anything else that they can get at taxpayers expense.
the only reason these so called charities keep shouting about so called poverty, is to justify their own existence, justify their continued demands for donations, which also pay the staff salaries – meaning they are really only thinking of their own jobs, not the so called poverty stricken kids.
if their parents didn’t have booze, baccy, mobile phones and sky tv – then they wouldn’t be hungry.
real poverty is – homeless, no money, no food and nothing else, no handouts – try looking to 3rd world countries for the real examples of poverty- not the 1st world definition, that being, no play station.
They raise the bar of what constitutes “poverty” all the time, both globally and nationally. No bad thing in itself but when it’s reported that poverty figures are increasing, it isn’t really the case. Apart from the occasional blip caused by war, disease, political upheaval, natural disaster etc, people globally and nationally are generally better off from one decade to the next. If you want to see poverty just look back in time. My grandparents certainly suffered it, in England and Ireland.
Maybe local employers could start paying a wage that doesn’t belong in the 1990s.
Maybe the government should stop paying benefits to those that will not work extra hours
to avoid losing benefits.
That will be down to parents not knowing when to stop having kids to get a little more in their benefit packages!
Free school meals for all is hugely expensive. For schools it means longer days, more staff. Then you have to cater for the allergies, vegetarians the vegans. Don’t laugh they all have rights these days. You need the facilities to cook it all and serve it. Then of course there is the money. How much is enough for one meal? Your better off giving the parents the money. Yes some will squander it, most won’t. This is a socialist idea and they are always funded by capitalism.
You seem to misunderstand how school meals work.
Children can either have school meals or bring in a packed lunch. Most have school meals. Whether they are free or not, the preparation, serving and supervision of those meals requires the same number of staff.
Yes, free school meals is, just like the NHS, a socialist scheme. We all pay in to the pot for those that need to use it. If you are so against this kind of socialism then I assume you also want the NHS scrapped and are happy to pay for your own healthcare at the point of use?
Maybe you should have paid more attention in school yourself?
I must admit I struggle to feed my kids after I’ve bought my cigarettes, designer handbags and got my hair and nails done. Have you seen the price of a fake tan these days?
I feel very sad for you, but i believe they are thinking of offering cigarettes as a benefit payment.
Poverty across the world is classified by not having enough money to meet basic needs including food, clothing and shelter.
Poverty in the uk is classified by households considered to be below the UK poverty line if their income is 60% below the median household income after housing costs for that year which is not the same.
When taking into account the available benefits & work opportunities in the uk, there are no excuses for not having enough money to meet basic needs including food, clothing & shelter.
But why is IOW council allowed to pay £250,000 upwards of council tax money per child in care in residential on mainland,that’s £5,000 per week. That could benefit alot of these children in poverty. £5,000+ per child, 4 x that of adult care which at least is 24hrs and personal care. £5,000 could help prevent need in first place as well. How many children in children’s homes on mainland I wonder?. Every child deserves same,not discriminated just because IOW council as parent.
£250,000 per child sounds like total poppycock. Where did you get that stupid figure from?
“The cost for a child’s place in an independent private care home was roughly £4000 per week in 2018/19 ” so considerably more now. Why don’t you check out yourself. Some homes charge £7/8,000 per week. Anyone can ask Council and probably public accounts will show too.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/28/councils-england-wales-pay-1m-pounds-a-year-to-house-child-in-private-care-home
We’ve lived through 12 years of the Tories pushing more people into poverty. The “Cost of Living” crisis, or Cost of Capitalism crisis is throttling families.
Some of the comments on here are truly abhorrent. It’s not the people on benefits you should be mad at (the majority of whom are in work or pensioners), it’s the tax-dodging billionaires, the MPs giving lucrative contracts to their cronies, the PM donating millions to a US university while a school in his constituency tries to raise money for essential kit.
What happened to all you snowflake-gammon’s usual rhetoric of “look after our own first” ?!
Put The Sun down, stop reading the Mail, chuck your Express in the bin. Look at who owns them and what they want you to think.
Gammons are gullible idiots. Look at how they were suckered into “taking back control” with Brexit by wealthy spivs like Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Farage.
Just like they are now being suckered by those self-same spivs into believing that immigrants and benefit claimants are the biggest issues in the country.
The issue is that most of them are failures in their own lives and need people to blame and look down upon. The Tories are happy to give them scapegoats, safe in the knowledge that stupid people will believe any lie if it avoids the truth of their own lack of intelligence, education and effort.
get a job then jamin – instead of begging off the rest of us
leeches.
and stop demanding that successful people be discriminated against by having more of the money they have made for themselves taken from them, against their will, just to hand it to feckless, layabouts that don’t deserve a thing.
But the jobs don’t pay enough! My wife and I work full time in good jobs (NHS and Council) and still struggle to pay rent, food and utilities.
People don’t become billionaires by hard work. They become billionaires by inheritance, tax avoidance and greed.
You are getting mad at the wrong people. Just like they want you to.
clearly living beyond your means then jamin
you don’t know anything about billionaires obviously
why don’t you spend some time researching how some of todays successful people achieved the results they did – you will not see any inheritance there.
and stop thinking that tax is fine – it isn’t – people are having money stolen from their pay and investment returns by the state under the threat of jail, when the state didnt do any of the work. If you threaten someone with imprisonment in their home if they don’t give you money, it is called demanding money with menaces and illegal.
all direct taxation should be stopped as the state didn’t do the work, so they don’t deserve any of the spoils.
Cause all the Torys have worked their way up the ladder. Just like meeeeee
Working hard with my rich chums,.dodgy contracts and tax avoidance.
Dunno why everyone doesn’t just do it?
You’re just a radical leftist! Boris worked really hard for his money, he works all the time, you never see him at parties because he’s too hard. If you think billionaires are the problem then you are delusional, it’s the poors that make the world this way.
Sorry, but this is simply nonsensical.
True poverty, as most people would define it, is fortunately extremely rare in the UK these days. Just look at photos of people living in slums in just about every major city from a century or so ago and you’ll see what actual poverty looks like.
Our benefit system is extremely generous which is one of the reasons why tens of thousands of people risk their lives to get here every year. Yes, there a few who fall through the cracks but trying to claim that 34 per cent of children on the Island are living in poverty is clearly nonsense.
The charity would have perhaps got a better response if they’d come up with a figure that was in some way believable.
Why free meals for all ? Rich folk can afford it.
Strange that certain sections of society know how to use smartphones, computer games,the benefit system etc but can’t fathom contraception or not getting tattoos and vapes.
I don’t see why every child should get free school meals. I get upset at lotto heritage give a fat cheque to lgbgt history BS when there are children living in poverty. Poverty IS relative. OK, so kids don’t go barefoot anymore, doesn’t mean they are not poor. Of course you’ll always get the lazy, good for nothings, but there are a lot of people that work very hard and really struggle. Myself included. A single, working mother since divorcing yrs ago, I’ve brought up my son, worked, kept our own home and run a car; but, you never feel ‘safe’. There’s always the fear of desperate poverty round the corner….
I see a lot of the usual ignorant scum bag comments on here. Not every family that is struggling is a dole bludger or getting free housing or free council tax. With the average rent on a two bed property around £800 to £900 a Month now and food inflation gas and electric going through the roof and as has already pointed out wages that belong in the 1990s its no wonder people are struggling.
Can’t believe so many here are so quick to knock the poor. Wages have stagnated, NHS is on the floor, more foodbanks than mcdonalds, immigration is high, interest rates high and child povity is high. Tory led brexit is a disaster. The conservatives have utterly ruined this country. I’d be interested if anyone could name 1 thing the tories have done well ,nationally, in 13 years! People who still vote tory after all this are either very, very stupid or very, very deluded.
I agree with every point you’ve made all true. But that doesn’t fit with a lot of these peoples ignorant hate filled narrative.
Absolutely unacceptable that just over a third of our children are living in poverty.
yet -everyone has a mobile phone, mcdonalds is packed, airlines are reporting more people booking holidays, roads are jam packed with people in their cars, unemployment is at 3.9%, pubs reported solid drinks sales at easter, more than 40000 tickets sold for isle of wight festival,, so many vaping/smoking around the streets – doesn’t look like a recession and struggling to me.
the nhs has had more money put into it than ever, yet it is so inefficient and incompetent, they just waste so much – and perhaps if they focused on fixing the broken bones and healing the sick and turned away the timewasters, cosmetic health tourists and hypochondriacs then they wouldn’t be so overburdened.
I thought you British people voted for Brexit not Tories but I do agree those who voted yes were stupid and delusional. Unfortunately that means 52% of Brits are stupid and delusional which sounds about right when you look around and think about it. It’s scary
Blame the scum in county hall
Don’t get me started on this!! I have family that abuse the system and friends of there’s. They get around £2,800 per month or more they have a bigger tv than me designer clothing umpteen kids and get everything given to them on a plate!! I have worked for 36 years and I get nothing!! Everything I have I own because I have worked bloody hard for. I was brought up in a council house I know how hard it is for families, but come on it’s getting ridiculous now, you get money for this money for that, I have a mortgage if I lost my job what do I get? I tell you, I get nothing because I’m penalised for owning my own home, the mortgage protection doesn’t mean jack, you can’t pay we’ll take it away!! So how do you think I feel when spongers get it
So, your parent’s sponged? In their council house. Did they buy it for next to nowt leaving the next generation with no housing?!! My parent’s couldn’t get a council house, as they saved for a house BEFORE producing offspring. What goes round
As long as the illegal immigrants are OK what does it matter about our children.
This! As long as there are brown children around ours will almost be victims! Second class citizens on our own Island!
More children per head of population are in poverty now than at any time in the last 30 years. This is conservatism at it best. It good to see Mickey G with his leveling down agenda having a real impact on people’s lives outside of London.
There are elections next year. For more of the same, use your vote wisely and vote Tory.