UNIONS and politicians offered a cautious welcome today as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer launched a multibillion-pound strategy to tackle child poverty.

The issue has worsened considerably in recent years, with as many as 4.5 million children now thought to be growing up in deprivation. 

The publication of Labour’s Child Poverty Strategy follows Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s scrapping of the two child benefit cap from April, at a cost of £3 billion, which could lift as many over 450,000 out of poverty.

It outlines measures such as the extension of free school meals, extending eligibility for up-front childcare costs and ending the unlawful placement of homeless families with children in B&Bs, which ministers hope will help lift a total of 550,000 children out of poverty by the end of the parliament.

Launching the 116-page plan, the PM said: “If you are arriving in your classroom hungry or tired from sleeping in a cold bed, then you are simply not in the best position to learn. 

“We should not stand for that.”

National Education Union (NEU) general secretary Daniel Kebede called on the government to go further by scrapping the benefit cap and rolling out free school meals to all primary-aged children “so no child is left behind.”

He said: “Educators see every day how poverty damages children’s ability to learn, coming to school hungry, cold, or without the basics they need. 

“If implemented with urgency and backed by proper investment, this strategy could begin to turn the tide.”

Echoing calls for spending to match the pledges, the Local Government Association’s (LGA) health and wellbeing committee chair Dr Wendy Taylor warned without new cash “it is hard to see how we will be able to achieve the step change that is needed to reverse current trends successfully.”

Welcoming the strategy’s existence, if not its ambition, Scottish social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville told BBC Radio Scotland: “For the first time we may be able to work with the UK government to tackle child poverty.

“There are good policies in there that the UK government are announcing. But what I would go back to is the lack of ambition. 

“The First Minister wants to eradicate child poverty. We have statutory targets to drive down child poverty in Scotland.”