We cannot reduce child poverty without tackling the housing emergency

Housing costs are pushing families with young children into poverty

The housing emergency is one of the biggest drivers of child poverty. Shelter’s 2025 analysis found that a quarter of children living in relative poverty are pushed below the poverty line specifically because of housing costs alone. For many families with babies and young children, rent or mortgage payments are their single biggest outgoing, shaping what’s left for food, heating, and other essentials during those crucial early years. We welcome the government’s acknowledgment of this in its recent Child Poverty Strategy.

A record number of children are in damaging temporary accommodation

Shockingly, there are now over  176,000 children in England living in temporary accommodation — the highest number since records began. Around one in three of these children is aged five or under, meaning tens of thousands of babies and toddlers are spending their earliest years without a stable or suitable home.

Temporary accommodation is particularly damaging during the early years. Poor conditions, lack of space and constant uncertainty can affect children’s safety, health, and development at a stage when building strong foundations is critical. Between April 2019 and March 2024, 104 children died with temporary accommodation recorded as a contributing factor to their vulnerability, ill health, or death—most of them babies under the age of one.

Shelter’s own research - the largest ever survey of households in temporary accommodation - highlights what daily life in temporary accommodation looks like for families. Three-quarters of families are living in poor conditions with many living in overcrowded rooms, limited access to basic facilities, and hazards like faulty wiring or unsafe cooking spaces. More than a third of parents told Shelter their children don’t have their own bed, often because families are confined to a single room with no safe place for a cot away from radiators or draughts.

Lack of space also affects how children play and develop. Parents spoke about babies having nowhere safe to crawl and toddlers having no room to learn to walk. In some cases, children’s play or sleep spaces are unavoidably close to hazards such as cookers or kettles. As one parent shared: ‘There’s hardly any space for my kids to just play and feel free. The sink, cooker/oven is next to where my toddler plays every day and having to watch him religiously so he doesn’t touch the oven door while it’s on is really big challenge’

Research from University College London’s CHAMPIONS project backs this up, showing that homelessness during the early years can be harmful to children’s play and development, both physically and psychologically.

Temporary accommodation deepens poverty for families

Shelter’s research shows that temporary accommodation does not just reflect poverty — it exacerbates it. Almost nine in ten families (87%) reported to Shelter that they struggle to keep up with the costs associated with their temporary accommodation. For some parents, the impact on housing stability also affects their ability to work, with families reporting reduced hours or having to stop work altogether.

What needs to change

The evidence is clear that tackling early years poverty requires urgent action to fix our broken housing system, which looks like:

Increasing the supply of genuinely affordable social rent homes

First, we need a significant increase in genuinely affordable social rent homes. For decades, investment has fallen short, leaving families stuck on long-waiting lists; there are currently 1.3 million households in England on waiting lists for a social home.

Helping families afford the private rented sector

While new social homes are built, many families will continue to rely on the private rented sector to avoid homelessness or move on from temporary accommodation. Over time, this sector has become increasingly unaffordable, particularly for lone parents competing for larger homes on a single income. Shelter’s  found just over half of the additional children living in poverty since 2010/11 are in private renting households.

Shelter analysis also shows that over half of families with children who rent privately claim housing benefit or Universal Credit housing element.  If this support doesn’t cover the cost of rents, it’s very difficult for families to leave damaging temporary accommodation or avoid homelessness in the first place. Yet, repeated freezes to Local Housing Allowance (LHA) have broken the link between this support and rents, leaving families unable to find homes they can afford or move on from temporary accommodation.

If the record number of children in poverty are to be helped quickly out of damaging temporary accommodation, it’s now vital local housing allowance is unfrozen and permanently uprated in line with the real cost of renting.

Ending the household benefit cap

Alongside this, the household benefit cap, which affects 264,000 children, continues to prevent families, particularly those with children under five, from affording a suitable home. Although the recent removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit was welcome, the benefit cap still limits support regardless of housing costs or family circumstances. The cap makes families too poor to afford most private tenancies leaving them stuck in damaging temporary accommodation. As members of the End Child Poverty Coalition (alongside Barnardo’s), we’re calling on the government to scrap the cruel cap. This will help parents with pre-school children to avoid both homelessness and deep poverty.

We need an end to all one-room accommodation for families

Despite the government’s welcome child poverty strategy commitment to end the practice of discharging newborn babies into B&B or other unsuitable shared accommodation, recent government statistics show there were still 2,880 families with children in B&B accommodation, 1,670 of whom had been there beyond the legal six-week limit. While B&B use for families reduced by 47% in the past year, we agree with the government that it still remains far too high and we must see faster progress to ending this practice.

The government has made a good start in addressing the housing emergency by investing in the social rent homes needed for the new generation of young children. We now need the government to take further urgent action to make sure families can get into a suitable private rented home, so they can speedily move on from damaging temporary accommodation while waiting for social rent homes to built.