“We want to help people see things our way”: A rights-based analysis of disabled children’s experience living with low income

That some children and young people in England live in poverty is, I hope, not disputed. What we are prepared to do about it, how badly it affects the rights of the children concerned, and whether anybody is listening to them, are subjects on which we agree rather less. But we should be under no illusion: children affected by the challenges of their families living with poverty are acutely aware what that poverty means for them. They have experiences to share, and opinions to express. And they have a right to be heard. It is from that right that our research, and this report, now spring.

The children whose research and recommendations are presented here are particularly affected by the impact of living in low income families and communities. Their families’ struggles to make ends meet and yet still live, and provide their children with, a dignified life are compounded by the fact that some children also have a range of disabilities. These can limit what they can do in their lives generally, and basic things such as where they can go to school. Such challenges are considerable, even in families living in comfortable financial and social circumstances. For those living in poverty, they are profound, and can become insurmountable.

Our researchers worked innovatively to make the children working with them into co‑researchers of what you will read in this important report. This publication is enhanced by the children whose lives feature in it, who were centrally involved in the research and the production of this report. The university academics who led this work on my behalf, bringing their evidence-based research skills and their background in the wealth of existing literature on poverty and childhood, have ensured the voices of the children sit at the core of the report. Their lives, and their words, ring out from this work, and rightly so.

What you will discover in the following pages is not an easy read. I make no excuses for that fact. I do not accept that for all our claims of civilised sophistication as a country, we still have families who, like that of one mum featured, will be in debt until 2022 or later because they are, quite simply, poor. This is a scandal.

As a nation, we continue to be either unwilling or unable to intervene in this issue in ways that bring such poverty to an end. It is not – it has never been – right that this continues.

This report continues to add my voice, and that of my office, to the urgings of so many organisations that policymakers do not just talk about poor families and wonder how to help them. We need action to end the national shame that is the continued existence of child poverty.

I am proud that the voices of children whose lives are directly and negatively affected by the issues you will find in this report speak so loudly to us all. With me, they present their obvious need, and their equally obvious call: that we act now to make it better and secure both their present, and their future.