Expand the benefit system to support more working households, allow benefit claimants to keep their money for the first few months of returning to employment so they can build their own safety net. Pay workers a wage they can actually live on. Reward those who stay in work with things like free child care & discounts at the supermarket. There’s so much this government could be doing to tackle this, but they wont because they don’t care.
Not suprising or necessarily a problem.
The definition of poverty is “60% below the median household income after housing costs for that year” so there will always be the same percentage of people in poverty, it’ll be quite a lot of people and probably a lot of them will work. it gives zero indication of standard of living.
Hmm crazy idea, don’t live in the most expensive place in the UK if you can’t afford to?
Private rents must be a huge factor in this, shows the desperate need for much more good quality social housing, that stays as social housing
Statistically poverty is a completely useless metric and doesn’t indicate standard of life at all.
Everyone should realise this when they see the absurdity of the ‘75%’ figure
This is absolutely crazy and the government loves it.
Unemployment numbers in the UK are worth fuck all. We really need a new measure.
Frankly this group is of no interest to the political parties who have no interest in their votes, while some of those in work also have a very negative view of them and blame them for their situation.
Doesn’t the poverty metric work in a way of house hold income vs a certain metric ? So isn’t it unhelpful in the sense of seeing the true scale of the problem ?
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So for example, if everyone was on £1,000,000 salary average in London, people on £400,000 a year would be classed as poverty ? So there will always be a poverty class no matter how high wages go.
It should be noted that this is as high as 47.5% in Tower Hamlets, 46.4% in Birmingham and 43.5% in Stoke-on-Trent. The East Midlands has the fastest increase in children from low-income families (31.3% change, 7.9 percentage points), although all subregions they looked at experienced growth except London (as a whole), Wales and Northern Ireland.
When the there are two parents, the rate of poverty (as defined above) was 25%. When neither parent worked, this rises to 60% (or 63% when one one or more in part-time work). But 44% of children from a lone parent families were in poverty. When the parent didn’t work, it was 61%, but even when they did, 26% of children in this situation were in poverty. The headline is from London in particular and is sort of ‘the other way around’.
The number of children the family had was a huge indicator for poverty (spending more on housing? Don’t know. It doesn’t really explore it. Or anything.)
Here is the report: [https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Local-indicators-of-child-poverty-after-housing-costs_Final-Report-3.pdf](https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Local-indicators-of-child-poverty-after-housing-costs_Final-Report-3.pdf) … To be honest I think it is pretty rubbish. It doesn’t seem very interested in what these things mean, what the effects of it are, or anything like that. They’ve just taken the Excel spreadsheet linked above and generated some graphs for it.
*Edit*: On reflection, doesn’t it feel a bit low that 44% of children in lone parent families earn less than 60% the median wage? They have half the earning potential, so you’d imagine they’d, approximately, have about 50% of the median wage. That said, a single parent is hard pressed to be in full-time work – but the child poverty rate for part-time work is 37%. Intuitively I’d expect this to be more up at 70% or so, given the definition. The only thing accounted for is area and housing costs, so it’d be interesting to see how housing costs are broken down according to number of children and parents.
I’m not surprised the cost of everything has gone up over the last 15 years (some things like mortgages and renting exceedingly so) while wages are stagnant.
If people can’t afford to get on the property ladder Its no surprise children are unaffordable.
Yay Britain! Are we not amazing??? (Do I need to do the sarcasm thing)?
Hmmmm I wonder which parts of London this is and why….
No supprise here. Tories have deliberately suppressed wages. But, are happy to give in work benefits to boost profits of companies who won’t pay a reasonable wage! Don’t call the claimant a scrounger that’s the person employing her/him!
15 comments
Expand the benefit system to support more working households, allow benefit claimants to keep their money for the first few months of returning to employment so they can build their own safety net. Pay workers a wage they can actually live on. Reward those who stay in work with things like free child care & discounts at the supermarket. There’s so much this government could be doing to tackle this, but they wont because they don’t care.
Not suprising or necessarily a problem.
The definition of poverty is “60% below the median household income after housing costs for that year” so there will always be the same percentage of people in poverty, it’ll be quite a lot of people and probably a lot of them will work. it gives zero indication of standard of living.
Hmm crazy idea, don’t live in the most expensive place in the UK if you can’t afford to?
Private rents must be a huge factor in this, shows the desperate need for much more good quality social housing, that stays as social housing
Statistically poverty is a completely useless metric and doesn’t indicate standard of life at all.
Everyone should realise this when they see the absurdity of the ‘75%’ figure
This is absolutely crazy and the government loves it.
Unemployment numbers in the UK are worth fuck all. We really need a new measure.
Frankly this group is of no interest to the political parties who have no interest in their votes, while some of those in work also have a very negative view of them and blame them for their situation.
Doesn’t the poverty metric work in a way of house hold income vs a certain metric ? So isn’t it unhelpful in the sense of seeing the true scale of the problem ?
​
So for example, if everyone was on £1,000,000 salary average in London, people on £400,000 a year would be classed as poverty ? So there will always be a poverty class no matter how high wages go.
It’s headline figure is that 29.2% of children are in poverty, whereby poverty is their term for what the DWP call ‘Children in low-income families’. The data is from here: [https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/children-in-low-income-families-local-area-statistics](https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/children-in-low-income-families-local-area-statistics)
It should be noted that this is as high as 47.5% in Tower Hamlets, 46.4% in Birmingham and 43.5% in Stoke-on-Trent. The East Midlands has the fastest increase in children from low-income families (31.3% change, 7.9 percentage points), although all subregions they looked at experienced growth except London (as a whole), Wales and Northern Ireland.
When the there are two parents, the rate of poverty (as defined above) was 25%. When neither parent worked, this rises to 60% (or 63% when one one or more in part-time work). But 44% of children from a lone parent families were in poverty. When the parent didn’t work, it was 61%, but even when they did, 26% of children in this situation were in poverty. The headline is from London in particular and is sort of ‘the other way around’.
The number of children the family had was a huge indicator for poverty (spending more on housing? Don’t know. It doesn’t really explore it. Or anything.)
Here is the report: [https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Local-indicators-of-child-poverty-after-housing-costs_Final-Report-3.pdf](https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Local-indicators-of-child-poverty-after-housing-costs_Final-Report-3.pdf) … To be honest I think it is pretty rubbish. It doesn’t seem very interested in what these things mean, what the effects of it are, or anything like that. They’ve just taken the Excel spreadsheet linked above and generated some graphs for it.
*Edit*: On reflection, doesn’t it feel a bit low that 44% of children in lone parent families earn less than 60% the median wage? They have half the earning potential, so you’d imagine they’d, approximately, have about 50% of the median wage. That said, a single parent is hard pressed to be in full-time work – but the child poverty rate for part-time work is 37%. Intuitively I’d expect this to be more up at 70% or so, given the definition. The only thing accounted for is area and housing costs, so it’d be interesting to see how housing costs are broken down according to number of children and parents.
I’m not surprised the cost of everything has gone up over the last 15 years (some things like mortgages and renting exceedingly so) while wages are stagnant.
If people can’t afford to get on the property ladder Its no surprise children are unaffordable.
Yay Britain! Are we not amazing??? (Do I need to do the sarcasm thing)?
Hmmmm I wonder which parts of London this is and why….
No supprise here. Tories have deliberately suppressed wages. But, are happy to give in work benefits to boost profits of companies who won’t pay a reasonable wage! Don’t call the claimant a scrounger that’s the person employing her/him!
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