Labour clueless on how many children it will plunge into poverty

As part of Labour’s nakedly discriminatory immigration ‘reforms’, the government is planning to expand ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) to settled migrants. Worse still, they have no real idea of how many children this ruinous policy will plunge into poverty.

In November 2025, the UK government published “A Fairer Pathway to Settlement: A statement on earned settlement”. It lays out changes that will make the UK immigration system yet-more hostile, with proposals including:

• Making permanent residency less available to people.
• Increasing the amount of time most people spend in the immigration system before they may apply for permanent residence.
• Reducing that wait if they have a higher level of English proficiency, if they are high earners, if they hold senior positions in a public service, or if they have undertaken ‘extensive’ volunteering.
• Increasing that time for people who arrive on a visitor visa, breach immigration rules, or have ever received public funds.
• Completely removing the option of permanent residency for anyone who has ever received a criminal conviction, has outstanding litigation, or has NHS, tax, or other government debts.

It’s currently the case that most migrants who are in the UK on a limited visa are subject to a ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition. However, as the government revealed in the ‘Fairer Pathway’ document, it’s now looking to expand NRPF to settled migrants, too:

The government believes that the development of an earned settlement system should include a reassessment of the benefits accruing to settlement and where the accrual of those benefits might in future sit in the journey to settlement and citizenship respectively. Under this option, new migrants granted settlement would continue to be unable to access specified benefits in line with existing visa conditions. This would have the effect of shifting the default position on access to benefits to citizenship rather than settlement.

‘Earned Settlement’ consultation

On 13 March, the Home Affairs committee published a report on its ludicrously short stitch-up of a consultation into the immigration reform proposals.

The inquiry highlighted that migrants can apply for fee waivers under certain conditions, including:

• being destitute, or at imminent risk thereof,

• reasons relating to a child’s welfare, or

• if they’re facing exceptional circumstances affecting their income.

It also included summaries of some relevant responses, including Anna Skehan, a solicitor at Islington Law Centre, who:

told [the government] that circumstances that might lead to an application to access public funds might include an injury or illness, a mental health crisis, or a relationship breaking down due to domestic abuse.

That is to say, the Home Office plans to penalise migrants for needing state support for disability, poverty, domestic abuse.

Likewise, the NRPF Network — an organisation that provides advice to local authorities on NRPF – highlighted to the committee that:

applying for access to benefits through a change of conditions is typically “a last resort”. The NRPF Network argued that penalising people for accessing public funds would increase risks of poverty, abuse and exploitation.

Labour — no idea of the impact

Now, a DWP minister has essentially admitted that the government has no real clue about the number/proportion of children in poverty living in households subject to NRPF.

Crossbench peer John Bird wrote in asking the government:

what estimate they have made of the number and proportion of children in (1) poverty, and (2) deep poverty, living in households subject to no recourse to public funds; and what assessment they have made of the impact of the Child Poverty Strategy on those numbers.

In response, DWP Minister of State Maeve Sherlock listed resources available for children from NRPF families. However, she notably failed to give any figures at all. Rather, she stated that:

We are continuing our work to develop our understanding of NRPF and its impacts. This includes work with the Home Office to develop questions on NRPF for inclusion in the Family Resources survey 2026/2027, a household survey undertaken annually to explore living standards in the UK. This will provide greater insight into how families with the NRPF condition are living in the UK and will help to inform future policy-making.

Sherlock’s statement here almost directly echoed Labour’s recent policy paper ‘Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty’, published 13 March. It stated that NRPF families could access free school meals, and some free childcare schemes. Likewise, it also mentioned developing questions — and gave no figures whatsoever.

So, not only is the government planning to expand NRPF, it made its proposals and ran the consultation before gathering any formal data to understand the impact of NRPF on child poverty. Worse still, it hasn’t yet worked out how to even assess this consequence of NRPF.

Immigrant kids don’t count

In the foreword to the ‘Our Children’ policy paper, Keir Starmer boasts that:

The recent story of child poverty in Britain is simple. The last Labour Government reduced it by around 600,000 children. Yet since 2010 it has risen by 900,000 and now around 4.5 million children are in poverty. That is a staggering indictment of the previous Government’s policies. The statistics alone are shocking enough but think about the individual human cost. […]

The answer, in both first principles and evidence, is a resounding no. And so this child poverty strategy sets out a different path for Britain.

Starmer and his Labour Party talk a big game about tackling child poverty. However, they’re currently barreling towards an expansion of NRPF which will inevitably entrench poverty for the children of marginalised migrant and refugee families.

They haven’t studied the impact this will have, because they simply don’t care. Starmer’s Labour considers immigrants as collateral damage in their doomed bid to appeal to the far right. All child poverty is abhorrent, but for Labour, immigrant children clearly don’t count.

Featured image via World Vision UK