There were two million fewer children living in poverty when Gordon Brown left office.
While some measures show an increase in child poverty since 2010, it is not by as many as two million children. At least one measure shows a fall.
A post on Facebook claims that there were two million fewer children living in poverty when Gordon Brown left office in 2010 compared to today.
It says: “On the day Gordon Brown left office we had a functioning NHS, low inflation, 2000,000 less [sic] children living in poverty and a handful of food banks”.
But the two million figure is a lot higher than shown by any of the official measures of child poverty.
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As we’ve written before, there are different ways to measure poverty and, while some do show an increase in child poverty since Mr Brown left office, none of the measures we’ve seen puts it as high as two million. At least one measure actually shows a fall in child poverty numbers over this period.
The main measures of poverty in the UK are published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and they refer to relative low income and absolute low income.
Broadly speaking, relative low income observes inequality: how many people are falling behind compared to everyone else in any given year. Absolute low income essentially tracks whether people’s living standards at the bottom end of the scale are improving or not, using a set year as a benchmark.
These don’t take into account people’s assets or fixed costs like childcare though, and the government is developing new measures to account for this.
All these options mean a wide range of numbers are available, and the main measures can show anything between 2.6 million and 4.9 million children in poverty today.
Despite the variation in estimates, none of the measures we’ve seen show as many as two million more children in poverty, although several show rises in the hundreds of thousands.
Depending on your choice of measure, the DWP’s figures on low income can show anything from a rise of 900,000 to a fall of 100,000 since 2010 and up to 2022/23. As well as that, a lot depends on whether you take the 2009/10 or 2010/11 financial years as your starting point.
If you want to try for yourself, the rise of 900,000 comes from choosing relative low income, before housing costs, since 2010/11. Or you can choose absolute low income, after housing costs, comparing since 2009/10, which shows the fall of 100,000.
Other independently-produced figures which try to include people’s fixed costs suggest rises in the region of 400,000 to 600,000 children, although these aren’t as up-to-date and show the situation in 2021/22.
Poverty means different things to different people, and it’s easy to get lost in all the different numbers available. But the ones in the Facebook post aren’t close to any we’ve seen relating to this topic.
We’ve written about child poverty many times before, including on claims made during this general election campaign. You can find more of our political coverage on our Election Live blog.
It’s important to consider whether information you see on social media comes from credible sources before sharing it online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because we have not seen a measure showing a rise in child poverty by two million, and several measures suggest it has risen by a smaller number.
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