Britain’s renewed focus on child poverty is crucial – and long overdue. But some of the measures that dominate the debate around poverty do not fully explain why our country has felt so profoundly broken in recent years.

The Relative Poverty statistic used by our own Labour Government in its promise to lift 550,000 children out of poverty is a clear example. It is a valid and internationally comparable statistic. But it is, above all else, a measure of inequality. If the highest earners lost a hundred pounds each, relative poverty would fall overnight – even if the living standards of struggling households did not improve by a single penny. That does not make the measure wrong. It does make it incomplete. Tackling inequality is, of course, central to Labour’s purpose. Fourteen years of rising relative poverty alongside anaemic growth cannot be brushed aside. But to understand what really went wrong for the way we feel about Britain, we have to look beyond these headline rates.

For most working people, real incomes barely moved between 2010 and the pandemic. The Resolution Foundation estimates that typical earnings grew by less than five per cent in real terms over the entire decade – before being hammered by inflation spikes in energy, food and housing.

Where the picture darkens further is extreme poverty. By 2024, the failure was clearest at the bottom of the distribution, with destitution – an inability to afford basic essentials – affecting nearly four million people, including a million children. This is where the erosion of our faith that we live in a “great” Britain truly comes from – not necessarily because of what’s happening to those treading water, but to those pushed beyond the margins altogether. It’s also why, although cuts to welfare cuts foster a ‘sense of scarcity’ responsible for far-right discourse, some commentators have highlighted a lack of correlation between country-level economic trajectory and populist success, meaning that whilst overall economic insecurity might provide a backdrop for rising populist sentiment, we should ask ourselves again whether it is truly the causal factor.

This social damage unfolded alongside the visible decay of the public realm. Local services hollowed out. Social care strained. Public spaces deteriorated. Each fracture compounding the other, deepening both hardship and alienation from the Britain we thought we knew. As J S Mill argued, the true test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable. By that test, Britain failed for too long.

This might be one reason why, to the more compassionate cynics out there, the debate around lifting the two-child benefit cap can feel slightly hollow: When policy on poverty is judged by movement near the centre of the distribution, the depth of hardship at the bottom remains largely invisible. Now, I will be the first to admit favouring a “whatever genuinely works” approach to the emotive debate around the two-child benefit cap. But the evidence is clear: Cash support remains the most direct and effective way of reducing poverty, not just because of its tautological impact on those aggregate income figures but because it reduces scarcity stress. Well-designed services – from breakfast clubs and holiday provision, to childcare and early-years support – are essential in preventing hardship becoming entrenched and long-lasting. The real test, however, is not whether policies move a headline metric, but whether they reach those at the sharpest edge of insecurity – not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is destitution, above all else, which has impacted our sense of pride in our country.

In 2026, our task is to show, by a wide range of measures, that we’re turning the tide on poverty. It is to show that Britain once again protects people from falling out of sight – and from the damage this causes. But beyond this, it is also to ensure that living in Britain feels, once more, like belonging to a society that works.