Breadline Kids | Speech

Indledning
Hello everybody. My name is Emma Sussemiehl, and I teach social studies here at the University of East London.

I am very thankful for getting this opportunity to stand here in front of you all and address the rising problem of Child poverty in the UK.

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Uddrag
Although Britain is the sixth richest country on earth with a welfare system in place, children are still being plunged into poverty at an alarming rate.

The area Snowhill that receives more than one billion pounds worth of investments, shows a lot of inequality between citizens.

Whilst the banking industry are moving forward and facing great success in the future, a whole other case stands for the children in Birmingham.

On the other side of Snowhill more than half of the children are growing up in poverty, where families live in overcrowded housing.

Another sign of inequality is the difference between white household and households with other ethnic background.

Children from either Black, Asian or ethnic minority households are facing a 17,4% higher risk of poverty than children from white households.

Furthermore, all over the country schools have set up food banks and provide their students with basic supplies such as food, tampons, and clothes for them to survive, which has been highly demanded.

Some schools even offer counseling for families living on the breadline. In other schools teachers take money out of their own pockets to pay for the children’s lunch.

Therefore, schools are on the frontline and are doing their best to help the families, yet funding to schools are being cut.

According to the UN the levels of hunger and deprivation in the UK are among the highest within high-income countries in the world. In 2018-19, 4,2 million children were living in poverty and this number is expected to increase with more than 100.000 every year.

A reason behind this issue, has been the Conservative’s Party’s policy of austerity better known as cutting on public services in response to the financial global crisis has affected people with low income the hardest, which have resulted in 1,5 million extra children plunged into poverty.

The problem is also due to decreasing wages within the poorest fifth of people, that has been falling since 2016-2017.