'It can't stay like this': Meet the North East families fighting child poverty by themselves

Mwenza Blell is a mum of two on maternity leave, but she still finds time to petition the local government over staggering rates of child poverty in the North East. Alongside fellow parents, she was recently out protesting in Newcastle’s west end to demand action to ensure that no child grows up poor.

Here’s the situation: two in five children in Newcastle are living in poverty (38%). That is around 12 in every classroom. More widely across the North East, nearly 190,000 babies, children and young people are growing up in poverty (35%).

“People are willing to walk long distances for small amounts of food,” says Blell, who is a founding member of grassroots organisation Food & Solidarity, which fights hunger and housing injustice in Newcastle.

“They are willing to work. They are willing to make lots of effort for very small amounts of money. Things are rough, not just for the people that you know are struggling and the people who tell us they are struggling, but for all kinds of people.”

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Mayor of the North East Kim McGuinness has made ending child poverty central to her agenda, and the Labour government has promised to tackle it too, but parents, charities and campaigners have told the Big Issue that more needs to be done to make real change.

Beth Farhat, chair of the North East Child Poverty Commission, says: “One in three babies, children and young people here in the North East are having their life chances and opportunities limited by all the barriers that growing up in poverty brings. 

“This is not only hugely damaging to tens of thousands of children and families, we also know growing levels of hardship are putting unsustainable pressure on public services like schools, colleges, councils and the NHS throughout the region, whilst stretching our voluntary and community organisations to breaking point.”

Food & Solidarity is one of those organisations. It started during the pandemic, delivering food to vulnerable neighbours, and became a lifeline as prices surged in the cost of living crisis. Although inflation has reached near normal levels, prices are still rising and people have nothing left to sacrifice.

Blell has felt this on a personal level. “It’s been really challenging. Being lower down the income scale, you feel like you are constantly at risk of being hit by things you can’t plan for. That loomed over me. You don’t know how bad things are going to get. You can feel yourself being squeezed and trying to come up with strategies to cope with it.”

A quarter of parents in the North East with children aged 18 and under struggled to provide enough food for their children in the year to August, according to Barnardo’s.

“Thousands of parents in this region are struggling to feed their children – with even more families struggling now than two years ago,” says Lynn Perry, chief executive of Barnardo’s. “The cost of living crisis continues to bite, with families facing a desperate struggle to keep the power on and the fridge stocked this winter.”

Food & Solidarity recently delivered a photo petition to McGuinness and councillor Lesley Storey of Newcastle City Council featuring hundreds of photographs of local families who called on the council and mayor to prioritise tackling child poverty in the region and advocate for policies which would end child poverty nationally.

As far as McGuinness is concerned, she is already doing this. “I’ve seen first hand how low pay, insecure work and an inadequate and uncaring benefits system can trap families. It’s a situation that’s all too familiar for families across our region and has worsened over the last 14 years,” the mayor recently said as she set out her plans to reduce child poverty.

Councillor Karen Kilgour, leader of Newcastle City Council, also said that “tackling child poverty is one of our overarching priorities and is something we are working tirelessly to address as a city and a region”.

The council is working closely with McGuinness, and they claim they want to ensure “no child in our region is left behind, and to make sure that Newcastle can use every power available to help and support people to improve their circumstances”.

Kilgour said the council has a number of interventions designed to support people out of poverty – a welfare rights service, free activities and food for children during the holidays when they cannot access free school meals, supporting residents into employment and pushing to make Newcastle a Real Living Wage City so families receive an income which matches the cost of living.

Beyond this, McGuinness’ plan includes a commitment to help parents with the cost of childcare, as the region has especially high rates of poverty among people who are in work. More than one in four (26.7%) children in working households in the North East are growing up in poverty, research from the TUC found.

Blell works and has a partner who works, but still finds it difficult to cover the costs of childcare. “It feels so ugly how challenging it is,” she says. “You want to be in work and you want to have the best chance. You’re trying to think about not being destitute to the point where you can’t even work down the line. 

“But the cost of childcare makes it impossible to be working full time, because you don’t set your own salary. It’s not cost-effective to be working full time because you are haemorrhaging money on childcare.”

McGuinness has proposed a new childcare grant to support parents getting back into work, as well as the reintroduction of Sure Start-style services and funding for after-school clubs. Nationally, Labour has established a ministerial taskforce which will look at ways to bring down poverty across the country.

But is it enough after 14 years of austerity? Farhat said: “Both the North East mayor and the new government’s commitment to put tackling child poverty front and centre of their plans is very welcome and desperately-needed – but this must result in measures that will urgently improve the living standards of families in the North East.”

Labour has particularly come under fire for its refusal to end the two-child limit on benefits, which is trapping hundreds of thousands of children in poverty.

The North East Child Poverty Commission estimates that one in every eight children across the region are growing up in a household affected by the two-child limit on benefits, which denies financial support to families with three or more children.

Speaking to the Big Issue, McGuinness admitted: “I don’t think that the two-child benefit cap is fair. I would add to that that I don’t think the prime minister or chancellor think it’s fair either. I don’t think anyone wants to be in a situation where these are the choices that the government is having to make. And that makes me very angry.”

She echoed the words of Keir Starmer as she added: “Government is about difficult choices, and there’s been a series of difficult decisions already made. I’m frustrated that the benefit cap is still in place. I know others are, but I don’t think it’s something that the government wants. I think it’s a choice that they feel they’re being forced to make because of the inheritance.”

Labour has repeatedly spoken about the £20bn black hole left behind by the Tories, but while it deliberates over the “difficult decisions” it has to make, people in poverty in the North East and millions more across the country continue to face their own difficult choices.

In Newcastle, which is a city of sanctuary, that includes thousands of asylum seekers who have no recourse to public funds. Asylum seekers also cannot work, and Food & Solidarity is seeing the devastating consequences of this among local families.

“It is so difficult for people who have no recourse to public funds,” Blell says. “If people have a situation where housing is extortionate or their landlord is mistreating them, they can’t move into social housing and pay cheaper rent or have a more secure tenancy. Sometimes even schools say they can’t have food vouchers if they have no recourse to public funds. That really worries me, and it’s often ignored in the child poverty conversation.”

The group has called on local leaders, including McGuinness, to advocate abolishing no recourse to public funds as well as the two-child limit on benefits. They argue that with her leadership as a Labour mayor and her influence at national level, McGuinness is in a key position to champion real change. 

“Kim has been appointed or perhaps anointed by the prime minister and holds significant influence. She has the power to push for change and stand up for Newcastle’s children. She has the prime minister’s ear” says Elgan John, another parent from the west end of the city.

Blell feels like “sometimes the onus” is on parents like her to come up with a “fully-costed manifesto for these people that they find acceptable”. “But I guess I don’t feel like I should have to come up with all the ways they could be lifting us out of poverty,” she adds.

“It’s been a really rough 15 years,” Blell says. “The council told us that all the problems were the Tories fault, and they just had to do everything they said. They kept threatening to slash things that were keeping people going because they were in this crisis. Based on what they said, that was supposed to change.

“We’ve been squeezed, and we thought there were going to be policies that made life less like living on a knife edge. I don’t see any sign that we’re going to have more security. It just feels like the same. And that is why we are trying to do something about it. It can’t stay like this.”

Councillor Kilgour adds: “The fact that poverty levels have risen to the extent that they have is a damning indictment of the years of Tory-led austerity that people throughout the country have had to endure. It is only a matter of months since voters made their feelings clear and called for change, but the circumstances that have allowed poverty levels to increase are deep-rooted and will take time to correct.

“But as our nation’s finances have suffered over the past 14 years, so too has local government funding. More than £350m has been stripped away from our budgets under previous Conservative governments. That is not sustainable and limits the impact we can make.

“Undoing the damage that has caused today’s levels of child poverty will require national intervention. It’s not something councils can solve alone. I look forward to working with the new government and the combined authority to bring about the meaningful and lasting changes that we all want to see.”

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