The Government has set a target to lift 15,000 children out of persistent child poverty by 2035, Child Poverty Reduction Minister Louise Upston has announced.

“We are committed to making New Zealand the best place in the world for children and addressing persistent poverty is an important step in realising that vision," Upston said.

“This is the first time a New Zealand government has set a target to reduce persistent poverty, which Stats NZ defined last month as children living in low-income households before housing costs are applied in the current year and at least two out of the three previous years.

“It estimated that for the year to June 2023 about 98,900 children in New Zealand, or 9.4 per cent, lived in households experiencing persistent poverty."

Upston said it is the Government's ambition is to get that down to eight per cent in ten years’ time, which she said would lift around 15,000 kids out of persistent poverty.

“This will require interventions that create meaningful change for children and their families over the long term. Our efforts to ease the cost of living in our first year through tax relief and FamilyBoost childcare payments are a good start, but we must also address the long-term drivers of child poverty," Upston said.

“That is why our focus will be on supporting parents into paid work, raising educational achievement, improving health outcomes and breaking the cycles of benefit dependency that are trapping families and their kids in hardship.

“We will take a social investment approach, focusing our spending on interventions that data tells us will make the biggest difference both now and in the future.

“The nature of persistent poverty means it’s likely to take longer to see measurable reductions over time, which is why we have also set a target to ensure it does not materially worsen over the short-term.

“Our work to address persistent poverty will form part of our wider strategy to improve the lives of children and young people, which includes a target to lift around 17,000 more children out of material hardship by 2027.”

Key points:

• The Government Statistician is responsible for defining and preparing estimates of the rates of persistent poverty.
• Its baseline estimate of the number of children experiencing persistent poverty in 2023 was intended as a guide for target setting and should not be treated as an official statistic.
• ‘Low income’ is defined as having less than 60 per cent of the median household income in a given year before paying for housing costs.
• Persistent income poverty is different from intergenerational poverty, or poverty severity, or wider socio-economic disadvantage.