More than a quarter of Reading children in poverty, according to study

Researchers Dr Juliet Stone and Professor Donald Hirsch found that, during the 2018/19 financial year, 9,213 children in Reading Borough lived in poverty.

This equates to 27.1per cent of children in Reading and is an increase of more than 700 children or around one per cent compared to in 2014/15.

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Children under 16 are defined as living in poverty if their household earns less than 60 per cent of the median income, which during that year was £17,640 or less.

What about the wider Reading area?

The study looked at poverty levels both in the Reading borough and in the two parliamentary constituency areas.

Reading West had child poverty levels of 27.6 per cent or 6,293 children in 2018/19, while Reading East had 21.8 per cent or 4,893 children.

The figures show the poverty divide between Reading West and East has increased in the last five years, with levels of poverty in the east remaining largely the same and poverty in the west increasing by almost three per cent.

Slough is the only area in Berkshire which has higher levels of child poverty than Reading – with more than 32 per cent and 12,000+ in both the borough and parliamentary areas.

The researchers used the Government’s own poverty figures, which do not consider the median cost of housing in each area, and then factored this in.

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This means the income available to a household once things like rent, water rates, mortgage interest payments, buildings insurance payments, and ground rent and service charges are paid.

Given the range of rents in different parts of the UK, this enables a more accurate comparison than just looking at income to work out what households across the UK have available to spend on food, utilities, clothing, and leisure.

According to the original figures from the Department of Work and Pension, only around 15 per cent of Reading Borough children lived in poverty or 5,003 – more than 4,000 less than when housing costs are taken into account.

The number of children living in poverty is likely to have worsened since the coronavirus pandemic, with The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) saying recently the coronavirus pandemic risks worsening child poverty.

Charity Reading Family Aid said in the first three weeks of the UK's first ‘lockdown’ it is estimated a quarter of all households in the UK had lost either a substantial part, or all of their earned income as a result of Covid-19, plunging many more Reading families into poverty.