The 2021 census results have revealed that London’s Tower Hamlets has experienced the biggest population growth in the UK; it is also the local authority with the highest level of child poverty, 25 percentage points above the national rate. In the East London borough, 56% of children live in poverty, more than double the rate seen in Kensington and Chelsea.
It is the poorest borough in London with the highest levels of deprivation and overcrowding. A situation that is undoubtedly made worse by the £200m cuts the council budget has faced in the past decade.
Currently more than one in five of the UK population are in poverty (defined as income below 60% of the national median after housing costs), and 4.3 million of those are children.
Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, which represents a constituency of Tower Hamlets, explained to City Monitor that the “biggest contributor to poverty in London is high housing costs”. “Unless you tackle high housing costs, and that means making sure people have more support around these costs, then we won’t be able to address or reduce the poverty rates for families around London.”
There is an urgent demand for social and affordable housing in Tower Hamlets, but “what’s actually being built is driving up the costs”, Councillor Mufeedah Bustin, chair of the previous Labour Council’s Poverty Review, explains. “In the Isle of Dogs, we’re seeing a lot of high-rise luxury flats, foreign investment and empty homes.” Although Tower Hamlets has already built more affordable homes in the past five years than any other borough, there are still 21,480 households on the waiting list.
In the past decade, Tower Hamlets has seen the biggest population growth in the country, with its resident numbers up by 22.1% since 2011, compared with the 6.3% population growth seen in the whole of England and Wales. To put the current overcrowding into perspective, in England there are on average three people per one football pitch-sized area of land, in Tower Hamlets this goes up to 112 people per the same area. At the other end of the scale, the more affluent London borough of Kensington and Chelsea has seen a 9.6% fall in population size since 2011.
And while the latter is known for housing the super-rich, residents in the more deprived area of Tower Hamlets are bearing the brunt of extortionate living costs and developments that do not always benefit the community. As a result, the life expectancy of someone living in Tower Hamlets is four years less than someone living in Kensington and Chelsea.
In addition to the rising cost of housing, a series of cuts and policy changes have made it tougher for families in Tower Hamlets to escape poverty. The benefit cap limits the amount of social security received by families in London to £23,000 a year, which, according to The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), directly impacts 2,600 children in Tower Hamlets who live in households that receive on average £320 less in benefits each month than their assessed need.
The removal of the Universal Credit uplift, which many families in Tower Hamlets depend on, saw them £20 a week worse off, and the two-child benefit limit has an obvious but disproportionate impact on larger families – many of whom live in Tower Hamlets.
While child poverty among one or two-children families in the UK has stayed roughly level since 2009, child poverty among those in larger families has soared. Some 47% of children in families with three or more children are in poverty, compared with 35% a decade ago.