Is the UK’s child poverty rate 10 times that of the Nordic countries?
A widely-seen social media post claims that child poverty in the UK is significantly higher than in the Nordic countries. However, the numbers don't appear to tell the truth.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Is the UK's child poverty rate 10 times that of the Nordic countries?
00:08A social media post with almost 200,000 views claims that more than 30% of children in the UK
00:14live in poverty. It compares that figure to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden,
00:20which supposedly have between 2 and 4% child poverty rates. However, the post is misleading.
00:27Yes, there are more children in poverty in the UK than in the Nordics, but the numbers have been inflated.
00:35This is because the post uses data from about 20 years ago for the Nordic countries
00:39and seemingly invented figures for the UK. Most of the Nordic numbers are from a 2005 OECD report
00:46and are calculated based on the percentage of children under 18 who lived in households with
00:51a disposable income less than 50% of the median. This differs from what the social media post says,
00:57that it's based on the percentage of children living in households below the minimum wage.
01:01The same data set put the UK's child poverty rate at about 16% back in the year 2000.
01:10The OECD last published data for all five of the countries together in 2019.
01:15Back then, the UK still had the worst rates of child poverty,
01:18but they weren't as damning as the post on X suggests.
01:21The UK stood at 14.1%, followed by Sweden at 9.3%, Norway at 7.9%, Denmark at 4.8%
01:29and Finland at 3.7%. More recent data from Eurostat and the UK's Department for Work and Pensions
01:35is based on households below 60% of a country's median income and therefore shows higher numbers
01:41than the 50% metric. In 2023, Eurostat put Sweden at 19.8%, Norway at 12.3% and both Denmark and
01:50Finland at 9.7%. The UK's DWP meanwhile put the country at 22.4% that year.