Britain faces a “colossal bill” for child poverty with the cost of increasing rates of destitution calculated to reach £35bn a year by 2020, according to a report.

Donald Hirsch, an academic at Loughborough University, says that one-in-four children in Britain – 3.4 million – is forecast to be in relative poverty by the end of the decade.

At those levels about 3% of the country’s GDP would be consumed, as well as the longer term losses to the economy that result from lower educational attainment and poorer physical and mental health in later life.

The result is a bill in 2020 of £35bn – an amount that exceeds the cost of HS2, the proposed high-speed rail network. Hirsch first calculated the cost to the country of “very high levels” of child poverty in 2008 and warned then that the economy was losing £25bn a year because of impoverished childhoods.

Today child poverty rates are back up to 2008 levels. With cuts to public services balanced by increases in spending via the pupil premium and new nursery places for poor families, there has been a rise in the cost of child poverty to the country – taking the bill to £29bn.

In his report Hirsch says that £15bn of this is for spending on services to deal with the consequences of child poverty while £8.5bn is the loss in private post-tax earnings by adults who having grown up in poverty.

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