Demand for Hartlepool Baby Bank continues to rise month-on-month
Hartlepool is the fifth in a list of worst-affected areas by the two-child limit in Universal Credit.
Last updated 25th Apr 2025
Hartlepool Baby Bank says demand for its services is continuing to rise month-on-month as many families are still in poverty.
It comes as the End Child Poverty coalition revealed the town's the fifth-worst affected by the two-child limit in Universal Credit.
Middlesbrough came first in that list though.
Emilie De Brujin, chair of Hartlepool Baby Bank, said: "Local families are struggling, local working families, local families looking for work and local families on benefits. All are struggling. Family locally are struggling. It's incredibly hard no matter what your circumstances are; the rising cost of fuel, the rising cost of food. Everything's going up. Even school dinners.
"It's hard here. We've got a shortage of jobs, we don't have public transport to even get to jobs. We've got lots and lots of families with young children struggling here, and year-on-year this is going to grow as more and more families find themselves affected by the two-child limit.
"Here at the Baby Bank, February is normally a really quiet month for us. This February was horrendous. It was just as busy as December and January which are our two busiest periods of the year traditionally and month-on-month, the numbers getting referred or self-referring to the Baby Bank continues to rise.
"We definitely would see a decrease in the work that we need to do if the two-child limit was scrapped. If they immediately scrapped it they would lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty immediately.
"I'd like to see better transport, I'd like to see better investment in infrastructure, better invenstment into the family hubs. Make it make sense. Make them have longevity. Don't throw all of this money and make them on short-term contracts. Make them stay. We know that Sure Start worked. Give families back a place to take their children, for these children to learn.
"Everyone knows that children are our future and not in a glib sense but they're our future generation. We need to value them now. We need real investment into childcare so that parents can afford to work. Grandparents are still working. It's naive of the Government to think there are generations that can just help us look after our children because they're long gone.
"Scrapping the two-child limit would make such a huge difference to impoverished areas like my own where there just isn't the support and there just isn't the infrastructure. We really need support in the North East. We're a great area to live in and we're a great area to work in, but we need that bit more support that other bigger areas are getting.
"I'd really like to see a firm commitment that in the next statement we are going to see real changes for families. These families are working incredibly hard to bring up their children, to juggle their jobs and to make a difference to society. We see a lot of volunteering mums and dad who can't get jobs yet because they don't have the skills but they're trying to upskill."
The Government says its taskforce is exploring how to give every child the best start in life and no kid should be in poverty.