West Berkshire’s Director of Public Health Dr Matt Pearce has recently published his 2025 report, which you can read here. This has concentrated “on the first 1001 days of a child’s life which are critical to a child’s development and set the foundations for lifelong emotional and physical wellbeing.” The report highlights, he adds, that “a failure to act early comes at great cost, not only to individuals but to society as a whole.”
The report considers a number of factors including obesity, immunisation uptake, communication skills, housing quality and pollution. One of the more eye-catching inclusions is the map on P13. This covers West Berkshire’s wards, each one colour-coded to reflect the percentage of poverty in children under 16 in 2023-24.
By this measure, Lambourn – along with Tilehurst Birch Copse and Tilehurst South and Holybrook – has the highest level of poverty, all three being in the 15.1 to 17.4% bracket. West Berkshire overall has 11% of its children living in this condition.
As all these wards are on the edge of the district, it seemed worth looking at figures for the authorities that bordered them (respectively Swindon and Reading). This map from The Health Foundation shows Swindon’s rate of child poverty is 18% and Reading’s as 17%. To the south, Basingstoke & Deane’s 11.7% is slightly higher than West Berkshire’s and, to the north, the Vale and South Oxfordshire (9.7 and 8.9%) are slightly lower.
With the exception of some local anomalies in West Berkshire (such as Tilehurst and Purley’s lower than average figure) we therefore seem to be dealing with a picture that is not solely defined by the local authority area in which you live. The policies of an individual council or health authority, important though they are, are clearly only part of the solution. National action is needed as well.
Different sources provide slightly different data, but these figures from End Child Poverty suggest that the South East (in which West Berkshire, just, sits) is 25%. Nationally, the situation is getting worse. “Child poverty has increased by 700,000 since 2010,” this October 2024 report from the Cabinet Office states, “with over four million children now living in poverty in the UK and 800,000 children using foodbanks to eat.” Action for Children puts the increase higher (a rise of 800,000 since 2013-14) claims that “child poverty fell significantly during the 1990s and early 2000s but has been rising since 2013/14.”
The WBC report seems at first glance to be a thorough and comprehensive survey of the issue in the district, as I would expect from this author (whom I’ve spoken to several times in the past, particularly during the pandemic). It also contains a large number of statistics and I have a similarly high confidence in their accuracy.
However, many statistics can most usefully be expressed in more than one way. On p12, for example, he says that “since 2014/15, levels of child poverty in West Berkshire have increased (in relative terms) by 52.8% compared with an increase of 37.3% in England.”
This is correct: however, another way of expressing this (looking at figure 8 on the following page) is that West Berkshire’s figures have gone up from 7% to 11% while those for England have increased from 16% to 22% – West Berkshire’s figures have therefore risen (as they have almost everywhere else) though are still lower than nationally and, indeed, for the South East as a whole.
Data for areas as small as wards can also be distorted by very small pockets that vary from the median figure. Lambourn has only about 1,700 households, which means that fewer than a hundred of these can effect a shift one way or another of nearly 6%.
Even so, these are clearly harrowing figures. West Berkshire, even the poorest pockets of it, seems to be doing better than the average. However the general upward trend, and the local variations with some parts of the distrist having more than three times as much poverty as others, will be giving local decision-makers food for throught.
One of the factors that must surely have an effect on child poverty, here and elsewhere, is the cost of housing. Getting more social/affordable homes built (a lot easier said than done) will improve a number of societal problems – including this one. Other poverty traps, in the opinion of WBC’s Deputy Leader and Children and Families portfolio holder Heather Codling, include the two-child benefit cap and the recent general under-investment in children and family services in recent years.
Aside from the above-mentioned map, the WBC report stops short of highlighting the issues in any one part of the district or in suggesting how these can ward-specifically be overcome, in Lambourn or elsewhere. However, the report does end with twelve recommendations (PP43 and 44) which includes investing in a range of initiatives including parental support, family hubs and school readiness and ensuring that West Berkshire become a “child-friendly district” as specified by UNICEF, which Heather Codling described as “an interesting suggestion.”
Doubtless WBC will be responding to this report in the near future. We await an announcement on what action it plans to take and how it proposes to reverse this trend, in so far as its powers permit, and address the worrying divergences of child poverty particularly in parts of the east and the west of the district.
Brian Quinn
brian@pennypost.org.uk
