The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy includes a new legal duty on councils to ensure they notify schools, GPs and health visitors when a child’s family is made homeless and placed in temporary accommodation.

The aim is to ensure ‘no child is left without support’ and that health, education and councils deliver ‘a more joined up approach to support children experiencing homelessness’, says the Government.

This legal duty on local authorities will be delivered through an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill at the House of Lords report stage.

Stephen Elder, national prevention manager at homelessness charity Centrepoint, said the duty on councils ‘will help to ensure agencies can work together to get the right support to these children and their families’.

But he warned that more needs to be done to support families at risk of homelessness at an earlier stage.

The strategy aims to lift 550,000 out of poverty by 2030 and has been published after the Government announced it is to axe the two-child benefits limit from next April.

Measures in the strategy include improved childcare and benefits support for parents wanting to return to work.

It will also make it unlawful to place families in bed and breakfast accommodation for more than six weeks.

Additionally, the Government is investing £8m to continue funding the Emergency Accommodation Reduction Pilot scheme over the next three years. This was introduced last year under the previous Conservative Government.

Local Government Association health and wellbeing committee chair, Wendy Taylor, backed the strategy’s focus on integrating housing, health and family support services to tackle child poverty.

However, she added that ‘without additional investment in these services – and a recognition that councils still face high levels of immediate demand in many acute services – it is hard to see how we will be able to achieve the step change that is needed to reverse current trends successfully’.

In announcing the strategy, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that child poverty ‘is a stain on our country’.

‘This strategy, lifting over half a million children out of poverty, represents an historic moment for generations of families now and into the future,’ she added.