I took this approach because there are now so many tens of thousands of reports on the situation of children in Britain, looking at child poverty, what’s not fair about it and what’s happening to them… and I know that these reports largely wash over people’s heads. We’re so used to them now – even when you see a headline that says 30% of the country’s children live in poverty, or 35% or 40%. All the reports and the non-fiction books are largely read by the same small group of people – as, meanwhile, the great majority of people in the UK remain remarkably unaware of the situation. Whenever we survey people, we discover they have very little awareness of what is normal, what is average, in terms of incomes and family situations. They are unaware of how many people live on much less than what they themselves live on, and they are unaware of where where they themselves sit in terms of poverty and affluence.

So we need a different approach, I thought; one that hopefully works better, because it’s in a format that people who read books are happier to read. Basically, they want to read about real people. They don’t want to read about income decile one, or the average median child in the year 2022 – well, some people do, but they are a minority.

 Stories about humanity are more effective. Particularly stories about individuals, rather than about a group; stories where somebody has a name and you can imagine they actually exist. Simply put, stories are easier to read. You know, I read all these reports on child poverty, and even my eyes glaze over after the first couple of pages. But stories are unpredictable; you don’t know what’s going to happen. They have shocks in them. There are shocks in Seven Children, but the shocks match what actually happens to countless numbers of people. They’re not in there for effect, they’re in there to demonstrate what happens to typical children in the UK.

The aim with Seven Children was to try to bring people, not only children but also their parents and their siblings and their wider families, to life. Because it’s much, much more shocking when you see what impact inequality has. I found it more shocking when I thought about these children as real children, just seven of them, and I’ve been doing this for decades. If it has an effect on me to think through how they are going to get their clothes, how they are going to afford heating, how they are going to afford a bus ticket, then it should have that effect on other people too. What choices are the best-off parents going to make about things like education or health care? How limited are those choices? What are the parents’ hopes and aspirations for these seven children?

There are lots of surveys that ask people about what they hope for, for their children. But it’s important to see how those hopes come up against the reality of people’s lives. Seven Children is written in the context of autumn 2018, when our seven children are born, and 2019, which came a year after almost ten years of austerity. There weren’t many children’s centres left; there weren’t that many community centres still going. In 2020, we had a pandemic. In 2021, 2022, inflation began to rise. In 2023, the average family had 25% to 30% less to spend than it had two years previously. It’s quite a dramatic series of events that have impacted on the lives of children like the ones in Seven Children. The book’s seven children are representative of 14 million children that have lived through this situation, in their formative years. All the information about the children is factual, even though the seven children themselves are constructed. Of course, the problem with constructing families is that you can’t check on them to make sure you’ve got it right – because you’ve made them up. They have to be consistent, and I discovered that is much harder than I thought it would be.

You become dulled to the numbers when you look at them all the time. You have to. Seven Children touches on, although only very briefly, child mortality. And I’ve written lots and lots of papers about children dying. But you can only do that if you don’t actually think about what you’re writing about. You become dulled to all these things by repetition; that’s just what happens. It’s also shocking the first time you realise, for example, that nearly a majority of children in Britain no longer have a summer holiday in any way we’d recognise as the kind of summer holiday that most children had when I was a child. The first time you hear that, it’s a shock, but the 100th time you hear it, it’s well, yes, that’s just how things are now. But you have to make yourself think about it from the point of view of a child turning up at school in September, when some children have been away, and others haven’t.

You have to think about families talking about what they do, and what they want to do, and having to make choices between things many of us would see as essential. Are we going to ensure the contents of our house in case of a fire or flood or theft, or are we going to have a holiday? You can actually see these choices being made in the aggregate, in the data. One thing I should say is just how extensive the data we have is, not just in the main data I use in Seven Children, but there’s lots and lots of other data. The main data I use in Seven Children comes from the Households Below Average Income report, which draws on the annual Family Resources Survey, which we catch glimpses of the parents in Seven Children completing.

Every March, on a particular day, the Secretary of State stands up and says something banal in Parliament, and somebody presses a button, and 29 or 30 Households Below Average Income spreadsheets are released to the public, although hardly anybody looks at them. And in each of those 29 or 30 spreadsheets, which are in the same format, generally the same as the year before, there may be a dozen or two dozen mini-spreadsheets, and in each of those there are tables with hundreds, in some cases thousands, of numbers. So there’s this flood of information every March, that began in the 1990s because social policy professors and sociologists and political scientists campaigned so that we would actually count child poverty in detail, to work out at what rate we were reducing it – and the tragedy decades later is that we are still churning out statistics showing we still haven’t done so. It is a statutory duty that has to be done by the Department of Work and Pensions, but when these data now reveal things that are the most shocking since 1994, there is hardly any coverage of it at all.

It almost seems like it’s a way of covering up a terrible story by releasing a flood of factual information about it. That’s why I thought it had to be turned back into human stories of young lives, of reminding us that we will never get to be age three or four or five or six again. That was the driving force of writing Seven Children, to try to find a way to talk about something that we have become dulled to listening about despite the fact we know so much about it.

In the UK we have endless figures on the situation of children and child poverty, the average children, the slightly more affluent children. We have more statistics in the UK, I’m absolutely sure, than anywhere else in Europe, possibly anywhere in the world, and yet we may care the least of anywhere in Europe about the situation of children.  

I haven’t done a book on children before. I wrote a book on the Central Line of the London Underground, which looked at people by age, and they went up every three years for every stop at the line. So there were a few children at the beginning, but only for a few stops on the Central Line.

I picked children for this book partly because it’s the starkest story, although the situation of the UK’s older people and pensioners is pretty bad as well – they’re not protected by the “triple lock” at all. The triple lock is simply a lock on the minimal state pension, and it isn’t enough to get by. But the situation of children is the starkest picture; the fact that families with children have done the worst. There are 14 million children in the UK. Most of them have got two parents and most of them have got at least one sibling. And that’s an enormous proportion of the population.

I also think that when you are looking at injustice, there’s more clarity in focusing on children. People are not as likely to think, Why didn’t that two-year-old try harder? Why didn’t the two-year-old just, you know, knuckle down and get a job? So I look at children rather than having to explain once again how life works, and that you can’t always simply pull yourself up by the bootstraps, as some people argue – and some of the people who are most ignorant about this, in fact, are working in universities. It’s much more effective to focus on children if you want to describe the state of a country. In fact, this has been done for centuries in social science; political campaigners in the 1870s and 1880s focused on children – the street urchins, the waifs and strays, the sad little faces. So I’m following rather than inventing a method – even though you have to remember, I don’t write fiction.

As I saw when writing Seven Children, one of the hardest things to do is to write conversations; what people say. The great thing about very young children is they don’t say anything. It’s a lot easier to make up a story where your central characters don’t have an obvious view and they’re not making arguments or discussing things with other people. You could say it was a cop-out, in that way, although, of course, I have the parents talking to each other. I’m much nearer in age to the parents of the children in Seven Children, so it’s easier for me to do that, but it was also a deliberate choice.

Children are the future. And the damage from growing inequality has been done, and the effects of the damage will carry on. Lucinda Hiam and I recently published a paper (“Why has mortality in England and Wales been increasing? An iterative demographic analysis”) on the golden cohort, people born between 1925 and 1935, and they’re mostly dead. They were the people most affected by austerity, but they’re dead now, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Whereas the children like the ones in Seven Children could easily have incredibly good lives. The reason I say this isn’t some trite observation; the fact is that almost exactly 100 years ago, children were also in an awful situation in Britain. It got worse in the 1920s and 1930s, but then those those children ended up having some of the best lives that people in Britain have ever experienced, because they got a welfare state, and because they got free education. Some of them got into universities. They had full employment, they got housed. And it could happen to this generation of children as well.

Books from Dickens’ era and later often included sums of money, and because inflation was very low then, five years later, it would still make sense to somebody reading the book. This is trickier to do today, because we have had a period of incredible inflation. But I include the sums, and the pence as well as the pounds, because quite clearly the pence actually matter. The size of the amounts of money described in Seven Children are certainly likely to shock people. Some will say, Oh, this just simply isn’t possible. How can the family of the poorest child actually live on on this? They see that it’s a very big drop from what the family of second-poorest child to the poorest child has to get by on.

I concentrate on the choices that are made between items, partly because we’ve asked about that for over 25 years in the Family Resources Survey. So we can actually look back at 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, at what families could and could not afford, and see if it’s getting better or worse. And the kinds of items covered by this survey are all necessities. These are all things that the great majority of people agree you should be able to have: that a parent should be able to have a mobile phone, because you need one to be able to work and and live. Should you be able to repair it or buy a new one? What if it breaks? Should you be able to have a kettle? Should you be able to heat your house?

I could have put in a lot more numbers about prices. I tried to concentrate instead on the actual things and what they meant to families, because that avoids the issue of the amounts of money changing. And there’s a lot about housing in Seven Children, and just how much it costs, and what proportion of people’s income it takes up – the families that spend less on housing as compared to the families that spend more.

But one of the biggest shocks to readers will be that the families with the most money in Seven Children – Freddie’s and Gemma’s – are simply not that affluent. When we talk about affluent families, we are playing a game when we are just thinking about children in the top 1% or 2%. In fact, none of the families of 98% of children in the UK would look that affluent to upper-middle-class Londoners or people in Morningside in Edinburgh.  

Yes. And you have to even when you’re on the average income for parents with young children, which is well below the medium income in the UK, because parents of young children don’t tend to be the higher paid individuals. People in good jobs, but of the ages where they have children, are, on average, worse off than the average person in full employment. And there’s a kind of stiff upper lip thing that goes on among older people, of, We got through it; why can’t they? They just need to budget. Why have the children got these games?

But criticising families for letting children have computer games is like criticising somebody in 1900 for having a stamp album. Of course there are things that people partake in that aren’t absolutely necessary, but that mean that they can be part of normal society.

In Seven Children, I’m trying to get across the idea of just how much drudgery and fear there is, and hard choices being made every day, for millions of families in the UK. Seeing it this way is almost unknown in current thinking, because there is almost nobody alive today who lived through the previous period in the 1920s of real falling incomes. There are still a few people left who were children then, but they were so young, they were sheltered from it.  

But this is what we’ve been living through for the past few years in the UK. It is nothing like the 1970s; in the 1970s we had high inflation, but wages went up even faster. People got better off. You know, apart from the rich who moan about the 1970s, most people became better off. But in the past few years, we’ve seen the tightening of belts, or what the BBC calls the cost of living crisis. It’s on their website banner, along with climate change and the war on Gaza or whatever, but the BBC are running out of space for crises on their banner. The cost of living crisis is the most acute crisis since the 1920s and 1930s, certainly in terms of hunger rising amongst children and their parents. And we need to recognise this, and realise it is actually harder to bring up young children now than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago and 70 years ago.

I’m partly at fault, I suppose, although I haven’t done that much about the very bottom end. There are 6% of children in the UK who are worse off than this book’s poorest child, Anna. And that 6% include the children who are holding the hands of their mother, almost always their mother, when they go to the foodbank. The mother of the poorest child in this book will not go to a foodbank. Instead, it’s the 1-2%, the poorest ones, who are are sleeping on the floor, or if they’re lucky, on a mattress, but they don’t have a bed. Or they are sofa-surfing. They don’t have a home. They’re the children most likely to go into care or to have come out of care, to be in the criminal justice system, to be in alternative provision in education or a Pupil Referral Unit. Louise Casey, a policymaker under New Labour and again under the Conservatives, used to call these “troubled families”. This framing wants you to believe that there is a permanent small number of people for whom life is is truly awful – whereas the reality is that huge numbers of families can drop into this situation. All it requires is illness or the death of a parent, or just severe illness, being unable to work. Parents splitting up, losing a job for a reason that’s nothing to do with them through no fault of their own, but the company their working for, say a clothing retailer on the high street, goes bust because people now buy their clothes online. That’s all it takes to suddenly find yourself in this situation.

There is enormous churn at the very bottom, and concentrating on the very bottom, as if it’s a permanent state, is just misrepresentative. when we look at the poorest child in this book, the poorest 6% of children are poorer than she is. Anna’s mum is extremely good at budgeting. Anna doesn’t go cold; her mum manages to heat the home. This isn’t me making this up; this is me looking at the figures in the Households Below Average Income report on the bottom quintile, and in the majority of cases for children in that situation, their parents do say they’re managing – just – to heat their home.  p>

Of course, you can, and I can, go endlessly into the numbers about people who didn’t manage to heat their home in the last two winters. And the child at the top in Seven Children, Gemma, has 6% of children above her. Her life will look pretty typical to most readers. Her family are not jetting around. They won’t have a really expensive car. They could just about pay for her to go to private school, but she’d be the poorest child in a private school if they did, and they’d be giving up everything else to do that. Some families do do that. Her mum and dad run a corner shop, and they run it well. They’re careful. There’s a story about thrift that runs throughout this book. The poorest child and the best-off child have parents who are thrifty, and the other five in between are too, because you cannot bring up young children in Britain on the incomes that the great majority of people have, unless you’re very careful with money.

No, I don’t. But my seven families really are representative. I do mention the chance that one of these children may well have a parent in prison by time they’re 18, and you know, our prisons are full and it’s quite hard to get into them at the moment, even though we have more places in prisons for parents than anywhere else in Europe. In this book, one of the fathers is absent and finds life difficult. And there are little things that might well annoy some readers about how some of the parents behave. But if you want to get really annoyed about how parents behave, you should look at parents who take their children onto super-yachts in the Mediterranean – the kinds of things that are expensive and profligate. None of the parents in Seven Children are doing anything like that. They’re not buying cups of coffee for four pounds on the high street. They’re not going out on binges.

In fact, I use data from from the Minimum Income Standards project at Loughborough University on how many times a year people might have a babysitter, which is three. We have all this ridiculously detailed information. So rather than base things on your supposition about people you never meet, if you actually want to know about them, you can look at what I’ve tried to do in this book by going through these tables. I’ve worked out who can afford an Xbox, and where the money comes from, and how much grandparents chip in. Because that’s all in there. But you have to take all these tables and numbers and then you’ve got to turn them into something that adds up to your national totals, and correctly represents each of your quintiles as they are, and is plausible and truthful and representative. And that’s all I tried to do in Seven Children, while trying to tell a story so that you will find it interesting at the same time.

Likely the biggest misconception is that the experience of most children in Britain will be quite similar to readers’ own children. Being able to afford a book, being able to have time to read a book, is a privilege. We have some information about who buys books, although not a lot because it’s kept secret. There are marketing companies that look at book sales, and they know how many people are in social class A and B who buy books, but they don’t actually put that data on the web. Books like mine are purchased by people in the wealthiest segment of society, the best-off 20% to 25%. People who’ve got more time. More women than men (and incidentally, we do have that data).

Seven Children tries to show readers that their lives – the lives of the kind of people who buy books, who go to book festivals, who go to worthy talks – really is very different from what is typical. It’s not just that if you’re a reader you’re very likely to be better-off than the average. You’re also very likely to be better-off than the parents of the best-off child out of seven of a typical set of seven children in Britain, spread out by income.

Oh yes, they will have a huge amount of empathy. It’s only a small proportion of people who completely lack empathy, and they’re very dangerous. I suspect that the people who buy books may be more empathetic than the people who do other things with their time, because they like to think about other people’s lives. I’m partly hopeful that this can contribute to a general shift in mood, and to do what we did a century ago, which was when upper-middle-class people like me, very posh people, wrote about the rest of society and how shocked they were when they found out what those lives were like.

In a way, there’s nothing new in what I am doing with Seven Children. I’m simply doing what was done in the precursor to all the social changes made in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the welfare state, which was the creation of all three main political parties; William Beveridge [author of the Beveridge Report that informed the formation of the UK’s welfare state] was a Liberal. The continuation of these developments into the 1950s and 1960s, all of that relied on the thinking done around time of the First World War, and shortly after in the 1920s and 30s. You can absolutely trace the change in the attitudes of the elite, of the best-off in the country, to greater awareness of the situation of other people.

They were slowly realising what that situation really was, and deciding, or at least the youngsters at the time of the First World War decided, that they weren’t going to put up with it. And they didn’t. They changed things. They changed things in an incredible way in Britain, far faster and far better than many other countries, to result in the UK becoming one of the most equal countries in Europe by the 1960s and 1970s; as equal, almost, as Sweden.

Well, my favorite quote about that comes from Oswald Falk, who was a particularly nasty banker. But he was also a friend of John Maynard Keynes. And Falk’s comment was that, you know, Keynes might have this general theory of of equilibrium that was very clever, but what he’d really done was to help change the moral sentiment of the country. That was an observation by a very selfish banker, recognising what was changing in the 1930s thanks to people like the Bloomsbury set. And you know, they were hardly the most moral, caring people, but if even the Bloomsbury set could contribute towards things getting better, that was significant.

Of course, there were other factors and other actors: trade union movements, huge numbers of strikes, lots of agitation. It wasn’t just because of the elite. But if you don’t have at least some of the elite working with you – if the elite, the best-off, are absolutely determined to keep things very, very unequal, keeping almost everything for themselves and quietly harbouring views that they are special and most people are scum – then change for the better is much, much harder, if not almost impossible.

It is changing a bit. Actually, I was very sceptical when I heard that they were changing it because it was under the last government and certainly those ministers showed a remarkable lack of degree of empathy over children. You don’t preside over children becoming stunted and actually dying in greater numbers, if you actually care about children.

But the changes that are being made on the whole seem sensible. It’s modernising it a bit. I think it makes sense for it to be the large number of people involved. I would do some very basic things. I would get government to release the data on the heights of children. We have lots of surveys of heights and weights of children, and they release the the body mass index, and say, our kids are getting fatter, but they don’t release the height data, so we have to use other sources for that. So I would want to focus on really simple, brutal things, like, how many centimetres on average is an 11-year-old this year compared to last year? Are we seeing stunting?

And then at the other end of the scale, I would like to see a bit more about parents’ and children’s hopes and aspirations and dreams and looking forward to the future, and their feelings of feeling safe or settled or not. Asking, do you think you’ll be able to go to the same school that you were at last year, in two years’ time?

This may seem like a trite question, but we have a quarter of children in private rented accommodation, which means they’re often being pushed out of home because the rents are being increased, particularly in the South East of England, and so they have to move school. Questions about about friends, a lot more about life, and seeing the people being surveyed as as more like the people making the decisions about the survey. Because one thing that goes badly wrong in a society that becomes more unequal like ours, is that the people in charge of the surveys and the professors in charge of analysing poverty, well, the simple fact is that they’re paid as university professors. They might have once been poor, although the great majority of them never have, but they live lives like me, so they are so divorced from the concerns of most people that they can make very simple mistakes. I’ve had professors of poverty telling me, oh, we haven’t seen any evidence that children are getting shorter. And I think, but you are a professor of poverty!

I’m not too worried about data. We have lots and lots of data. It can always be improved. I’m much more worried that we have just got used to this, and also that we tend to pretend that we’re an island in the middle of an ocean – and we don’t look at the situation for children in the rest of the continent we’re on and ask why our children don’t have the same opportunities, the chances and the lives that those children have. That’s a really simple way the survey could be improved. And one reason we don’t do that is if you were to go back 100 years, even though we were very unequal, our children, on average, lived better lives than in most of Europe, because we were richer and all of Europe was unequal. So we don’t have a tradition of comparing ourselves with other countries.

If you go back to the time of Maud Pember-Reeves’s 1913 book Round About a Pound a Week, a study of working-class life in Lambeth, which in Seven Children, Anna’s mum read in school, that book and other books that came out at that time, don’t say, “Oh, and let’s look at France – are they doing well?” Which of course, you could easily do now. I would like to see more comparative work, which really helps deal with the argument, Oh, we can’t afford it. It’s not possible. You know, if it’s plainly happening just a few hundred miles away, or in Scotland, where children, by the way, are getting taller – I mean, how obvious do we have to make it for people? Children in Scotland are getting taller. Children in England are getting shorter. In Scotland, they worry much more and give money to parents who are poorer.

I tried hard to imagine this. In Seven Children, Brandon’s parents are listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme with a professor talking about quintiles. But it’s very hard to put yourself in other people’s shoes whose lives are very different to yours. I can probably put myself in the shoes of a well-paid Guardian columnist, and I can certainly put myself in the shoes of university academics, almost all of whom, compared to the families that this book is about, are well paid, although they very often tell me that they’re not. But I find it hard to put myself in the shoes of somebody who is struggling as much as Brandon’s parents.  My only experience, mainly with people a bit younger than me who did grow up in poverty, is hearing about their anger. They are angry when they know that none of what has happened is inevitable, and once they learn that this was a choice that other people made. They are angry about what has happened to them and to their family. And that anger is absolutely understandable. Particularly when you look at the fact that a third of all our income every year goes to the families of the 6% of children better off than the best-off child in Seven Children, a third! It’s an enormous amount of money, and that’s the result of a choice being made. That amount of money, that proportion, a third of the national income going on 6% of children and their families doesn’t happen anywhere else in Europe. In Europe, you don’t have people going to schools with fees of £30,000 or £40,000 or £50,000 a year. You know, that’s exactly the same kind of money that could be used to buy a sausage roll so someone isn’t hungry at lunchtime. It’s not some special £50,000 a year that is a different kind of money that can’t buy food for somebody else. I would hope that if people like Anna’s and Brandon’s parents read this book, it might add to their realisation that there absolutely nothing inevitable about the situation we are in, in the UK. There are 11 charts in the book that show this, and also that we haven’t always been like this. It’s not our history. It’s not what the UK has always been like and it’s not what parts of the UK are like now. In fact, child poverty is lower in Scotland than in the South East of England, excluding London – in that’s right; in leafy Surrey and other bits of the South East, child poverty is higher than in Scotland.  I hope people reading Seven Children will ask, okay, so who’s in charge of the government now? What’s the name of the political party? Where did it come from? What is that political party supposed to stand for, and who built it up? Does it have a backbone, a soul?  And to what degree is it simply stupidity and ignorance amongst those members of that political party who are forming the new government that they tolerate this kind of inequality, as they have done so far in 2024, or much more worryingly, to what extent is that party now run by people whose beliefs have very little to do with what that party was formed to achieve? I want people to think about that and ask, and ask, and ask again, why the UK is the way it is. And when they are told it is not appropriate to ask, or told, don’t worry your little head, or we can’t afford this, to just keep asking. And say, what’s wrong with the party in government? Why don’t they get it? Are they stupid, or are they callous?