As the Labour Party Conference approaches, Trustees of Academics Stand Against Poverty UK examine Labour’s record on poverty and set out the priorities they believe should be at the heart of Andy Burnham’s programme of renewal.
When Academics Stand Against Poverty UK (ASAP UK) audited the 2024 General Election manifestos, Labour’s package of policies scored 2.1 out of 5.
That is a poor result. It sits below the threshold of 3 that we have consistently used across three audits to indicate whether our reviewers had any real confidence that a party’s platform would address poverty and enable people to flourish.
Labour scored respectably on disability, sustainability and the environment. But on social security, the domain that speaks most directly to the everyday experience of poverty, our reviewers gave the manifesto just 1 out of 5. As Michael Orton and Richard Machin put it in their review, the manifesto was ‘notable for its lack of consideration of social security’, with no pledges to raise benefit rates beyond retaining the pensions triple lock, and no commitment to reverse any of the cuts to the social security system made since 2010.
Work, not adequacy, was presented as the foundation of Labour’s approach to poverty and inequality. Two years on, that ambition gap has not closed. If anything, the last two years of turbulence have demonstrated exactly what our reviewers warned about: a poverty strategy built on vague ambition and a reluctance to fund it will not survive contact with a difficult economy or a restless electorate.
Keir Starmer’s government left office having made welcome noises about child poverty, but without pushing through the structural reform to social security that would make any real dent in the numbers.
Unfortunately telling is the history of the Starmer government’s approach to the two-child limit. Starmer withdrew the whip from seven backbench MPs in July 2024 for backing the SNP amendment to axe the cap, then later claimed to be ‘proudest’ of axing the cap himself once it was announced in the Budget (a result of backbench pressure and the concluding comments of the child poverty taskforce).
That is the inheritance Andy Burnham now carries into Downing Street. As the new Prime Minister, Burnham has an opportunity that his predecessor did not fully grasp: to treat tackling poverty not as a residual concern to be managed around fiscal rules, but as the foundation of the renewal he has promised.
He has spoken of building council homes, ending long-term rough sleeping and reindustrialising the country. Those are welcome ambitions. But they will only deliver for the people who need them most if they are matched by an equally serious commitment to income adequacy, to the social security system, and to the structural drivers of poverty that our audit found so conspicuously missing from Labour’s prospectus in 2024.
ASAP UK’s Trustees have therefore set out some of the policy priorities we believe should sit at the heart of Burnham’s approach to poverty.
Deliver intergenerational fairness
The UK faces systemic pressures at both ends of the demographic spectrum. Austerity, combined with population ageing, has pushed adult social care close to breaking point, with particularly severe consequences for low-income families.
At the same time, child poverty and youth unemployment have reached their highest levels in a decade. Achieving intergenerational fairness requires addressing these challenges simultaneously. We leave policy recommendations on social care to Trustees with relevant expertise and instead propose two urgent reforms focused on younger generations.
Eradicate child poverty: The government must ensure that its Our Children, Our Future strategy is implemented effectively. Implementation must go beyond adjustments to the benefit cap and deliver structural, comprehensive solutions to child poverty, rather than the piecemeal approach our manifesto audit found across the political spectrum in 2024.
Support indispensable occupations: Roles that serve the common good, in both the public and private sectors, should be formally recognised as essential, regardless of whether they require a university degree.
We have been here before. During the pandemic, the government itself designated a list of ‘key workers’ whose labour was deemed indispensable to keeping the country running. These included care workers, delivery drivers, supermarket staff, cleaners and transport workers, alongside the more obviously recognised nurses and teachers.
Many of these occupations were and remain among the lowest paid in the economy, with the least job security and the weakest employment protections. The pandemic exposed just how dependent society is on this workforce, and just how little that dependence has translated into decent pay or conditions.
That contradiction cannot be allowed to persist. Government should revalue this work through measures that strengthen pay, working conditions and social security protections, including pensions. It should also encourage young people into these occupations by removing tuition and training fees and subsidising accommodation and maintenance costs.
Defend the minimum wage
In the last 12 months we have seen increasing pressure placed on the existence of the minimum wage, with some opposition parties now appearing to be converging on the view that statutory pay floors are the problem rather than part of the solution, and that they should be loosened, particularly for young workers.
Reform’s Nigel Farage has argued that the minimum wage is ‘too high for younger workers’, explicitly floating a cut to the youth rate as a trade-off against employer National Insurance costs.
Kemi Badenoch has been vaguer, describing the minimum wage as ‘over-burdening’ businesses without committing to any specific change, but the direction of travel is the same: pay floors framed as a cost to be trimmed rather than a foundation to be defended.
This is precisely the age group ASAP UK believes government should be actively drawing into essential occupations, not pricing further into precarity.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s data should give the government pause before it lets this framing go unanswered. Being in work is not the protection from poverty it is often assumed to be: two-thirds of working-age adults in poverty live in a household where at least one adult is in work, and poverty risk varies markedly by sector and job quality. Work alone does not lift people out of poverty; the type and quality of that work matters. In this context, a minimum wage that is deliberately eroded for the young, framed as a burden on business rather than a floor beneath working life, would not shrink in-work poverty. It would deepen it.
The Burnham government needs to articulate a clearer, more confident defence and justification of the minimum wage, rather than leaving it to be quietly contested by opposition parties while ministers focus elsewhere.
Successive governments have treated the minimum wage as a settled, technical matter for the Low Pay Commission to manage, uprated each April and rarely discussed in principle. That approach is no longer sufficient when senior politicians are openly questioning whether some workers are paid too much for doing essential jobs. The government should make the positive case for the minimum wage as a foundation of in-work poverty reduction and of the dignity of low-paid work, not merely defend its current level by default.
Target deep poverty, not just headline poverty rates
Across the UK, 3.8 million people (1 million of them children) experienced destitution, the most severe form of hardship, at some point in 2022. The government must address the very high debt levels experienced by many in deep poverty, which means that any increase in benefits received will often go towards paying off debt rather than actually meeting need.
We also need a redoubling of efforts to increase the supply of social housing. For example, the local authority in Newport, Wales has the fastest growing population and also has an especially precarious social housing sector, with the council having transferred its entire stock to housing associations some years ago. A report published this Spring by the Bevan Foundation recommends introducing a Welsh Child Payment, along the lines of the Scottish Child Payment. The value of such a measure is equally clear across the rest of the UK.
Treat poverty as a health issue
Decades of research also demonstrates that poverty is not experienced in isolation. It has impacts across health, housing and education. As such, it is time to start treating poverty as a health issue, and to recognise that anti-poverty policies are integral to health prevention and promotion.
Consistent findings across decades of studies show that poverty is a driving force behind the widespread and longstanding health inequalities in the United Kingdom. Poverty has a profound effect on individual health: it reduces life expectancy and healthy life expectancy and triggers multiple chronic and lethal health conditions.
It also has a heavy and lasting toll on struggling NHS services. In 2016, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that poverty cost the NHS £29 billion a year, equivalent to £34 billion today, and around a sixth of the entire NHS England budget. People living in the most deprived areas attend A&E departments almost twice as often as those in the least deprived areas, with significantly higher emergency admission rates.
We need an urgent, comprehensive and targeted national strategy to address poverty’s impact on health.
An opportunity Burnham should not waste
Our 2024 audit was blunt about what a score of 2.1 meant: a lack of ambition to address poverty, shared to varying degrees by every party we reviewed.
Andy Burnham now has the chance to change that verdict. He inherits a country in which deep poverty is rising, where children and young people are bearing a disproportionate share of the cost, and where the NHS is quietly absorbing billions of pounds of poverty’s consequences every year.
None of the priorities set out above require reinventing the wheel; they require the political will that has, for too long, been in short supply.
This blog is written by Trustees of ASAP UK:
Lee Gregory is Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.
Natalija Atas is Senior Lecturer in Social Science at Liverpool Hope University.
Sebnem Eroglu-Hawksworth is Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of Bristol.
Gideon Calder is Associate Professor of Social Philosophy and Policy at Swansea University.
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