Can we solve UK poverty?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation believes that if the political will was there, poverty could be a thing of the past

According to Government figures, a quarter of all children in the UK live in poverty (Getty)

“The poor are always with us,” goes the Victorian maxim, but not everyone believes that has to be the case. Some organisations have begun to make the bold suggestion that we could do far more than simply alleviating poverty in the UK and actually set out to end it.

In fact, that’s the premise of a new strategic report from social change think-tank the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). Solving poverty will not be quick or easy, the organisation warns, but it’s time to start discussing how it could be achieved.

But could it really be possible to bring to an end a social ill that has existed for longer than the United Kingdom? And what is it we know that the Victorians didn’t?

What is poverty?

Defining poverty is the first hurdle to overcome. After all, not everyone agrees on where the poverty threshold should be set. No one in the UK needs to exist on the "less than a dollar a day" that is a global measure of extreme poverty but that does not mean no one is poor.

The Government typically uses median income as its definition of poverty; a household with an income below 60 per cent of the median income is considered to be in poverty. Under this measure, there are 13 million people in the UK living in poverty, of which 3.7 million are children. That’s a quarter of all the children in the country.

The European Commission has taken a wider definition, reporting: “People are said to be living in poverty if their income and resources are so inadequate as to preclude them from having a standard of living considered acceptable in the society in which they live.” That could include being unable to afford seemingly non-essentials like the internet or a phone contract.

Interestingly, recent years have changed the face of poverty quite literally. Pensioner incomes have increased so greatly that they are now the least likely demographic to be in income poverty. Not only that, but a greater proportion of those in poverty are the working poor – only a third of children who live below the Government’s absolute poverty line are in a workless household, the majority live in a home where at least one adult works but they still bring home an insufficient amount.

The JRF annually calculates the Minimum Income Standard, the amount the public believes is essential for an adequate standard of living, including essentials but also transport, cultural and social costs. It measures poverty as having 75 per cent or less than that standard. In 2016, a couple with two children (one pre-school and one primary school age) would need £422 per week to achieve the Minimum Income Standard, while a single working-age person would need £178 per week.

That means it considers a family to be living in poverty if they are surviving on £317 or less a week and £134 or less a week for an individual.

How do you solve a problem like poverty?

However you define it, solving poverty is hardly an easy task and successive UK governments have failed to make much headway on Tony Blair’s commitment to ending child poverty by 2020. Earlier this year the Government replaced the Child Poverty Act with the Welfare Reform and Work Act, meaning the target was scrapped.

Yet poverty campaigners think there are actions that would allow the state not just to achieve its child poverty targets but to wipe out persistent poverty for by the year 2030, ensuring that no one becomes destitute and that no one lives in poverty for more than 24 months.

The JRF consulted charities, think-tanks, academics, officials and the public, and has drawn up an extensive list of recommendations ranging from changes to consumer law to protect poorer households from premium pricing to serious investment in affordable homes.

It suggests five key ways the UK could tackle poverty. The first is to boost incomes and reduce costs by ending the poverty premium and investing an extra £1bn each year to build 80,000 genuinely affordable homes.

Second, it calls for Universal Credit to be rebooted to ensure work pays and provide a stronger safety net, as well as reforming job centres to ensure they help people into secure work and not just any job.

Third, the organisation argues that educational attainment among children in poverty needs to be improved, as well as a doubling of investment in basic skills training to ensure 5 million more adults are literate and have basic maths skills.

Childcare is a key part of the fourth recommendation, with the JRF suggesting a radical overhaul of the system would give children a better start in life and make work pay for adults. Local "family hubs" could also support households and help create stronger family units and relationships.

Finally, the JRF calls for a focus on promoting long-term economic growth that benefits everyone, with employers encouraged to support and train their lowest paid staff to allow them a chance at moving into better-paid jobs, and giving mayors greater powers to create more opportunities locally. None of that is easy or cheap, but there’s evidence it could transform not just the lives of those affected, but the entire nation.

The cost of poverty

Perhaps one of the most powerful messages of the JRF campaign is that ending poverty is about more than increasing the life chances of those affected. It’s about national prosperity.

It has published a report into the cost of poverty to the UK purse and shown that the public service costs of poverty amount to around £69bn a year. Identifiable effects of child poverty add £6bn to the bill and the knock-on effects of adult poverty cost at least £2.7bn. That means the total cost of poverty in the UK is around £78bn, or around £1 in every £5 spent on public services.

That cost comes on top of the societal costs, which the JRF warns cannot be expressed in financial terms but causes “widespread damage to society” and are a source of “collective shame, social tension and anxiety”.

Solving poverty might cost the country initially but the payback in terms of wellbeing, life chances and even economic development would be considerable.

It would be an ambitious, maybe even audacious target for any government to set but the transformation of people’s lives could be as considerable as when Beveridge first proposed the Welfare State.