Child poverty continues to rise in mid Wales with nearly one in three children living in poverty in Powys.

Low incomes and increasing costs of living has left some families with no option but to turn to crisis help like food banks, and are increasingly reliant on free school meals.

The End Child Poverty campaign, who commissioned the research, is calling for the UK and Welsh governments to recognise the scale of the problem and its impact on children's lives.

While many areas of Wales saw a fall in child poverty, after housing costs are taken into account, between 2014/2015 and 2018/2019, in some rural and coastal regions, child poverty rates continued to grow over the five years.

Powys has the eighth highest child poverty rate (29.3 per cent) out of Wales' 22 local authorities.

Of the six local authorities seeing a growth in child poverty rates, five are in rural or coastal areas. Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Gwynedd, Pembrokeshire, Powys (0.7 per cent) and Blaenau Gwent have all seen rises in the proportion of children living in poverty since 2015.

Pembrokeshire is now the county with the highest child poverty rate in Wales (31 per cent). The greatest number of children living in poverty continues to be in Cardiff, where nearly 20,000 children are growing up below the poverty line

Ellie Harwood, from the Child Poverty Action Group, said Wales' child poverty rates is "unacceptably high".

She said: "Whichever way you look at these figures, they show that child poverty exists in every corner of Wales, from the valleys to the coast, in our rural heartlands and our inner cities.

"With the pandemic threatening to push many more families into hardship, we need the Welsh Government to commit to a new child poverty strategy that sets out ambitious and measurable targets for eliminating child poverty altogether.”