Challenging Poverty
The story of the past decade has been of steadily increasing poverty alongside rapid deepening of poverty. As we enter Challenge Poverty Week it is important to understand what we mean by poverty and destitution, what its consequences are and why it can change.
Rising Poverty.
The numbers experiencing poverty moved from 13.1m to 14.4m between 2010 and 2024. This measure captures, those who don’t have enough to live and participate in society. Those with resources below this line must make hard choices about the very basics of life. It means trading off being able to heat your home, pay your rent, or buy the essentials for your children.
Because poverty is about material resources its consequences are often described in terms of what can be afforded – but that misses its most insidious consequences. Living with the knowledge that tomorrow your kids may go hungry, tomorrow the brown envelope with “urgent” in red letters will come, or even the bailiff (with the physical threat and huge new fees that this brings) takes an enormous toll. Knowing that your kid is being bullied for not having the right stuff or can’t go on a school trip with their mates, feeling like you are failing those you love is heartbreaking and in the long run more damaging than skipping meals.
I often sit listening to people tortured by their “bad decisions”, where they prioritised the “wrong” bill, bought the wrong thing, or spent a few pounds on something they now look back on as frivolous. Sitting on the outside what I see is impossible decisions where every choice had bad consequences and “mistakes” a higher earner would laugh off or possibly not even notice. Mostly however I am astonished that people are still carrying on trying to find a way through.
We know that this constant pressure affects both mind and body. For example, poverty induces long-term and measurable increases in inflammatory mediators in the blood. Essentially the body puts itself into a state of preparing for damage – useful when temporary but when this state is prolonged it is linked with heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
Taken together this is why the 14.4 million people experiencing poverty have hugely diminished life chances over the medium and long term. Poverty is linked with a shorter life, with a greater proportion of that life in poor health. It is also linked with poorer educational and health outcomes for their children.
Poverty in the UK matters. It eats away at people’s dignity, health and opportunities today and into the future.
Rising Destitution
Destitution is about not having the very basics of life – food, shelter and hygiene. In 2012 there were 3.8 million people including 1 million children experiencing destitution in the UK.
Twenty years ago, this form of deep poverty had largely been eliminated in the UK. When people were able to engage with statutory services there was sufficient support available to ensure they did not experience destitution. While mass destitution was gone, we knew that some people here not accessing support, and that complete eradication lay in addressing the barriers some faced in accessing the help they needed.
Just over a decade ago it became clear that there were some people who after diligently seeking all the support available, remained destitute. A totemic example of this was local government “Welfare Assistance Schemes” offering tents and sleeping bags to people seeking help after a Section 21 no fault eviction. It was an eye-catching example of a more complex truth that the web of local, national and charitable schemes that caught people heading towards destitution was no longer functional.
In response Joseph Rowntree Foundation designed a “consensual” measure of destitution – asking the UK public what it thinks destitution is and then assessing the number of people who met that definition. By 2015 that number was 1.25 million, before the pandemic it grew to 2.4million and today it stands at 3.8 million.
While the consequences of poverty build up over time – destitution is destructive from day one. It hurts today and even a short spell of destitution has a huge scarring effect. One million children in the UK experience this and in any reasonable country it would be on the front page of every newspaper until it was stopped.
Rising affluence
It is important to recognise that while the 15 years of these increases in poverty could not be called “boom” years – even taking into account inflation average incomes went up, average wealth per household increased markedly and business wealth increased by even more.
The way this increased income and wealth was distributed however ensured that the bottom of the income spectrum saw their standard of living drop and for many the basics of life were moved out of reach.
It is important to note that this poverty creating distribution is not due to iron laws or invisible hands, it is caused by human choices taken in boardrooms, businesses and government offices. That comes with it the joyful knowledge that we can take different choices.
Challenging Poverty together
The most important task in challenging poverty is to care. To recognise it is an awful injustice visited upon real people, whose lives, stories and opinions matter. Let’s End Poverty is releasing “Dear PM” a booklet containing letters to the Prime Minister written by people who experience poverty, telling their stories, giving their view of what has gone wrong and what could be better. It’s a rich collection which will leave you, and hopefully the PM, in doubt that poverty is an injustice that can and must be addressed.
Perhaps the biggest cause of increasing poverty is that the benefit system no longer offers the protection it once did. Half of people receiving the main low-income benefit, Universal Credit, skip meals each month. Research from JRF and the foodbank charity Trussell indicates that 5 out of 6 families receiving UC must miss out on essentials. An important step in reducing poverty is an Essentials Guarantee where benefits levels meet families’ basic needs.
Similarly, Church Action on Poverty has set up a petition calling for an end to the 2-child rule. This rule is directly responsible for 500,000 (or 4% of the UK’s children) experiencing poverty, by deliberately ignoring the needs of the third and later children when calculating the level of support offered to families.
