In my travels across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland I met with people living in poverty, whether old, young, disabled, in work or not. ![]() ![]() The good news is that many of the problems could readily be solved if the Government were to acknowledge the problems and consider some of the recommendations below. Some tweaks to basic policy have reluctantly been made, but there has been a determined resistance to change in response to the many problems which so many people at all levels have brought to my attention. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan. The Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. But through it all, one actor has stubbornly resisted seeing the situation for what it is. The country’s most respected charitable groups, its leading think tanks, its parliamentary committees, independent authorities like the National Audit Office, and many others, have all drawn attention to the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the least well off in this country. Its manifestations are clear for all to see. The widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 20, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%.3 For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.īut the full picture of low-income well-being in the UK cannot be captured by statistics alone. The results? 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty.įour million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. While the labour and housing markets provide the crucial backdrop, the focus of this report is on the contribution made by social security and related policies. Libraries have closed in record numbers, community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off. And local authorities, especially in England, which perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a series of government policies. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation. It thus seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. ![]() The UK is the world’s fifth largest economy, it contains many areas of immense wealth, its capital is a leading centre of global finance, its entrepreneurs are innovative and agile, and despite the current political turmoil, it has a system of government that rightly remains the envy of much of the world.
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