Is the UK’s child poverty rate 10 times that of the Nordic countries?

A social media post with almost 200,000 views claims that more than 30% of children in the UK live in poverty.

It compares that figure to Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which supposedly have child poverty rates between 2% and 4%.

However, the post is misleading: while there are more children in poverty in the UK than in the Nordics, the numbers have been inflated.

This is because the post uses data from about 20 years ago for the Nordic countries and seemingly invented figures for the UK.

Most of the Nordic numbers are from a 2005 OECD report and are calculated based on the percentage of children under 18 who lived in households with a disposable income less than 50% of the median.

This differs from what the social media post says — that it’s based on the percentage of children living in households below the minimum wage.

The same dataset put the UK’s child poverty rate at about 16% back in the year 2000, not 32%.

What do the real, more recent numbers say?

The OECD last published data for all five of the countries together in 2019.

Back then, the UK still had the worst rates of child poverty, but they weren’t as damning as the post on X suggests.

The UK stood at 14.1%, followed by Sweden at 9.3%, Norway at 7.9%, Denmark at 4.8% and Finland at 3.7%.

More recent children-at-risk-of-poverty data from Eurostat and the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is based on households below 60% of a country’s median income and therefore shows higher numbers than the 50% metric.

In 2023, Eurostat put Sweden at 19.8%, Norway at 12.3% and both Denmark and Finland at 9.7%.

The UK’s DWP meanwhile put the country at 22.4% that year.

How does the rest of Europe compare?

While it’s true that the UK is lagging behind the Nordic countries when it comes to child poverty, the difference isn’t as stark as the social media post claims.

When looking at Europe as a whole, the UK sits near the top of the table of the highest child poverty rates using the 2023 Eurostat and DWP data.

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However, when compared to the rest of the “Big Five” European economies, the UK isn’t the worst; in fact, it performs better than Italy and Spain.

France also has a higher rate than the EU average, while Germany stands at the lower end of the table.

Outside of the Nordic countries, Slovenia, Czechia, and Belgium have the lowest child poverty rates in Europe, at 10.2%, 12.4%, and 13.2% respectively, according to Eurostat.