Mrs Jones has something to say

Britain is the most unequal country in the West, yet the voices of its poor mostly go unheard. Paul Vallely meets one remarkable woman who is determined to speak out

Suspend your judgement, for a moment. When you walk up the path to Maria Jones's house you see broken furniture in an unkempt garden and a front door with its window panels missing or covered in polythene. Inside, there are holes in doors made by her two half-Rottweiler mongrels. Plaster walls are adorned by an ancient coat of green paint, a hologram picture of a lion and an old Timothy Whites-style painting of a white stallion. The room is largely empty except for a massive fish tank, a TV and video and a battered three-piece suite.

On one of the chairs sat Maria, a plastic briefcase on her knee. She was sorting through her papers, preparing for a trip to the House of Commons next day. "I'll wear my long, cool skirt," she said thoughtfully, as though her wardrobe afforded many options.

"Most of the social workers are disgusted by the way I live," she said, matter-of-factly. "They have different standards." Indeed they do. But to adopt them misses something very important in the transformation of an amazing woman.

The poor are so often seen as the passive objects of history rather than its active subjects. This week members of the public are being invited by the Social Security Secretary, Peter Lilley, to phone his benefits Beat-a-Cheat Hotline to shop those who are poor enough to be on benefits yet enterprising/dishonest enough to be trying to earn a bit of money on the side.

Last month saw the publication of three macro-reports on poverty. The United Nations Development Programme revealed that the gap between rich and poor in the UK is now as great as it is in Nigeria; Britain is the most unequal country in the West. And reports by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank - which have peddled the Thatcherite orthodoxy that rising inequality was good for economic growth - have done an about turn: reducing inequality benefits the poor immediately, they say, and will also eventually benefit everyone through higher economic growth.

But in all this debate one set of voices has still gone unheard - those of women such as Maria Jones, the voices of the poor themselves.

Life did not deal Maria Jones a good hand. She was born in South Wales and was placed, with her two brothers, in a children's home at an age so young that she cannot remember much before it. "My mother was an alcoholic. My father was a long-distance lorry driver and was away a lot. He didn't want us in a home but they made us go." As a child she had polio. When she was 18 she developed ME.

"You have the look of the children's home on you for life," she reflected, announcing that she is 38 going on 50. She is gaunt and drawn, though her face is lively and her sense of humour aggressive. "I was 18 when I had my first child. But I wasn't a mum. I was a children's home child still, and I didn't know what to do." She had a series of men and had three daughters. She developed a relationship with the social services which was by turns sullen, unco-operative and belligerent. Her children were placed on the "at risk" register. Her eldest child was taken into care.

The cycle of extreme poverty and chronic disadvantage seemed set to continue. But something changed when Maria became involved with a French-based charity called ATD Fourth World. It runs a centre in Surrey to provide breaks for families living in extreme poverty. After living there Maria began to take an interest in the running of the organisation, which bases its work on the notion of a partnership between voluntary staff and the families they seek to help.

The next day Maria set out for Westminster, clutching her plastic briefcase. She walked to the station at Sunbury-on-Thames, a leafy dormitory whose residents like to call a village; they prefer not to see the tiny council estate on its edge where Maria lives.

At the station she struck up a conversation with one of the local worthies. In response to Maria's question the other woman said, in precise Home Counties tones, that she was going to Westminster Abbey where she does voluntary work embroidering vestments. "I'm off to the House of Commons, to meet some MPs," countered Maria with an artless equivalence.

Settling in her seat she announced at volume, apparently unconcerned as to its impact on the rest of the carriage, that a few years ago she couldn't have done this. Until the train arrived at Waterloo she held forth on a variety of subjects. How her increased confidence had empowered her to go into the TV rental shop and ask why they had been giving her crappy tellies for years. How advertising pressurises low-income mums to buy stuff they can't afford. How previously she bought whatever she wanted until she ran out of money, but now she understood about budgeting. How she wouldn't now pay more than pounds 12 for trainers for the kids and would only buy herself a new top from an Oxfam shop - and wouldn't pay more than pounds 3 for it.

Maria's involvement with ATD Fourth World extends beyond tokenism. "I go to meetings on management and fund-raising. And we have a lot of senimars, even one senimar with the Pope in Rome - I went to that one," she said, repeating her neologism with such confidence and fluency that it seems to become a word in its own right. "It's taught me that I have choices, but I didn't begin to see how to make them until about five years ago."

Choices are at the heart of ATD's approach. At the Commons the seminar was chaired by the Labour MP Frank Field who began by telling the 200 MPs, social workers and low-income families that as new Labour seeks to align itself with the top 80 per cent of the population it was important for it not to forget the poor. Maria was unimpressed by this and, as he spoke, leafed through an ATD brochure until she found photographs of Claire Rayner, Phil Collins, Ben Elton and other celebrity supporters. But she was fully attentive when Terry Friend, from one of the group's ordinary families, took the platform to launch ATD's new book Talk With Us Not At Us. Poor people want to be included and not just judged and "rescued" at times of crisis, he said.

It was a faltering delivery from a prepared text with which Terry seemed ill at ease. "I know people will say: 'Oh my God, he can't even read'," Maria said as the audience enthusiastically applauded. "But Terry has taken a huge step just by trying."

Building self-confidence, rather than offering the poor physical or financial assistance, is at the core of ATD's approach. Disempowerment is of the essence of poverty. "In part, it is about having no money - going out shopping at the end of the day to get the reduced stuff," said a member of one of the other poor families, Moraene Roberts. But there is more to poverty than that. It is about being isolated, unsupported, uneducated and unwanted. And it has knock-on effects.

"Poverty is humiliating," Moraene said. "It is about living with other people's wallpaper. It is about not being able to afford three for price of two supermarket offers. It is about borrowing pounds 80 from a loan shark and having to repay pounds 300. It is having to send your son to school in a yellow coat because that was all you could find that fitted him and was under pounds 5 - all you can afford when you live off pounds 73 a week. It is about being refused a bank account, so that if you are disabled like me you still have to go and collect your benefits from the post office knowing that you are an easy target for a mugger.

"But it is more than economic. Low-income families, children in care, the elderly in homes are all treated by the state as if we're not quite fully human." Have you any idea, she asked, what it is like to have a social worker go through your cupboard to see what you've bought and whether it meets their standards of priorities? "Yes, you may meet their standards but people often get destroyed by the process of doing it."

And the poverty of this generation hurts the next. "How can you teach table manners to children who live in a house so small that there is no room for a dining table?" said Moraene. "How can children learn the importance of reading when there are no books in the house and they never see their mother read?"

Poverty socialises in other ways. "At school, children polarise into groups that have and groups that don't. It becomes too embarrassing for a child to remain in a social group where he doesn't have the money to go ice-skating or to the cinema. So he loses such friends and begins to congregate with other disadvantaged children. Then if one of them gets into crime, the others are drawn in, too. It is one of the nightmares of every low-income mother."

After the session, at a reception in south London, Maria continued with her life story. How social workers persuaded her to get sterilised against her wishes. How a lot of social workers were useless - "though not my new one, Shirley, who's an ordinary woman, a divorcee, with three kids" How working with ATD had given her a confidence she had never dreamt of. And how, last Thursday, "my kids came off the 'at risk' list".

Back in Sunbury, smoking yet another cigarette as the children tucked into fried eggs and tinned potatoes, she considered the day. Outside, her neighbour had given her a look of studied disdain as she returned. Maria Jones did not even notice. She now has other yardsticks by which to measure her progress.