As the government publishes its long awaited child poverty strategy, children’s organisations that work with families in the immigration system are pleased that it mentions no recourse to public funds (NRPF) but concerned that soon more children will have no recourse.
It is very important that the Child Poverty Taskforce has recognised that hundreds of thousands of children in poverty are outside mainstream systems of support. Too little is known about how NRPF drives child poverty and the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium welcomes the plans for inclusion of NRPF questions in the Family Resources survey.
The consortium also welcomes the publication of new guidance for local authorities when they support children in families with NRPF under section 17 of the Children Act 1989. However, RMCC strongly believes this guidance must come from the Department for Education, the department best placed to interpret section 17. It must have the welfare of children at its heart.
Whilst recognising the experiences of children with NRPF in the strategy is important, it comes in the context of wide-ranging asylum and immigration plans announced two weeks ago by the Home Office. The government is proposing changes that could keep children across the immigration system on short-term visas with NRPF for decades, with penalties of 15 and 20-year routes for families who access the support they need for their children. The asylum plans include a consultation in 2026 on reduced rights to public funds for recognised refugees.
Most unfairly, the government is looking to move the goalposts for people already in the UK, who have been told they are on a particular route and are now told their pathway to permanent status may be much longer and they could be penalised for perfectly lawful actions.
The child poverty strategy is also silent on babies, infants and children growing up on asylum support, which is set at a level substantially below the poverty threshold.
Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz, Head of Advocacy at Praxis, said:
“This strategy offered an important chance to address child poverty and we are disappointed that for many children in our communities it will make very little difference. All children deserve a life free from poverty, no matter where they were born.”
Anita Hurrell, Head of Policy and Practice Change at Coram Children’s Legal Centre, said:
“All of this country’s children need support to thrive. The government will not meet its ambitions for the next generation if a large number of children, whose futures lie in the UK, spend their childhoods outside mainstream systems of support.”
Notes
1. NRPF is the default condition on visas, which bars access to support including Universal Credit, housing benefit and child benefit. LSE and University of Oxford analysis found that at the end of 2024, an estimated half a million (578,954) children living in the UK had NRPF as a condition of their visa. Not all will face financial hardship but when they do, their families have no access to the social security safety net. This includes child dependants of skilled workers and children in families granted visas on private and family life grounds. Most of these are children on routes to settlement, whose future lies in the UK but whose access to mainstream systems of support is delayed for long periods of their childhoods – cutting them off from vital services when they need them and worsening their outcomes. As the strategy makes clear, child poverty does real long-term harm.
2. The Institute for Public Policy Research has estimated that in 2023 to 2024, 4.45 million children were living in poverty, of whom almost 40 per cent, or 1.75 million, were in families where both parents were born abroad.
