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The number of poor people has now doubled: boy in a British school

Photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

They sell it as a plan for a better future, because that's what you do when you demand something from politicians.

But at its core it is a reckoning, written tightly together on 17 pages.

The heads of youth welfare offices across Great Britain are defending themselves against the British government's austerity measures.

They are demanding millions of dollars in investments, not to make everything better, but only to slow down the worst developments.

You can find out why this is necessary on the second page of the report.

Instead of a foreword, there are figures that make the whole misery clear: 4.2 million children in Great Britain are growing up in poverty.

43 percent of all children with two or more siblings live in poverty.

A quarter of all young people had psychological problems last year - in 2017 it was only one in ten.

The number of truants has increased by 60 percent since the pandemic.

In the poorest neighborhoods, 30 percent of children are already overweight by the end of primary school.

And so forth.

“Childhood matters” is the name of the paper, i.e. “Childhood is crucial”.

The fact that this obviously needs to be remembered perhaps reveals the current state of social services in the kingdom.

John Pearce is head of the youth welfare office in Durham, northern England, and chairman of the British Association of Directors of Children's Services.

Pearce is a brawny, bald guy who you automatically listen to when he raises his gravelly voice.

Even if it's just a short video call.

The paper is of course a warning call, he says straight away.

The city of Durham itself is a vivid example of the misery: one in five people now lives in poverty, and the number of food vouchers issued has doubled within a year.

Thousands of families are so poor that they were immediately tax exempt.

The problem, says Pearce and takes a deep breath, is a nationwide one: “We see school-age children who cannot eat with a knife and fork and are therefore not yet ready for school.

We see young people who were unable to go to school for months during the pandemic and were not visible to professionals, which means that even more children now need to be taken into our care.

We are now talking about so-called “covid kids” who were practically forgotten during the years of the corona pandemic.

It's no longer just about material hardship, but also about physical consequences.

Poor children become overweight earlier and more often, some are severely underdeveloped in language and many also in motor skills.

Poverty, it seems, is really eating into their little bodies – and into their souls.

The number of mental illnesses among British children and young people is at an all-time high and is rising even faster since the pandemic.

The problems did not arise by fate, but were the result of many years of politics.

"Since the economic crisis in 2010, our financial resources in the municipalities have almost halved."

There are now so many cuts being made in the youth welfare offices that the blatant grievances are leading to new problems.

Children who do not learn to eat with cutlery are rarely the taxpayers of tomorrow.

But instead of investing, people continue to save.

"Although the opposite would be necessary," says Pearce in his calm, dry voice.

"We're standing on the edge and don't know what will happen tomorrow."

Of course, it is no coincidence that the position paper is published now.

It's about influencing the upcoming election campaign.

In current polls, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Tory government has a historically poor rating of under 25 percent, while the opposition Labor Party has been at over 40 percent for months.

The change seems inevitable, the only question is how much will really change.

The soon-to-be-departing Bishop of Durham recently spoke critically in the House of Lords, sounding almost disillusioned.

The current government party has decided on an upper limit for social benefits that penalizes families with more than two children.

But Labor is already saying that it doesn't want to change anything given the tight budget.

It was “cruel” politics, said the clergyman.

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