Singles need £13,400 to lead a 'decent' life, claims report

from the Daily Mail, UK

By Steve Doughty

A single man or woman needs to earn more than £13,400 a year to live decently, a research report found yesterday.

It said that anyone making that money can achieve a living standard that most people in the country would consider acceptable.

The £13,400 level means someone can pay rent on a council flat and afford food, heating and occasional treats like a cinema ticket or a simple meal out, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.

Rowntree, a research group widely respected on the political left, said an individual could expect to reach the benchmark by earning just over £1 an hour more than the minimum wage for 37 1/2 hours a week.

Its report warned that getting to a socially acceptable standard of living is much harder for a traditional family with a working husband and a stay-at-home wife who looks after two children.

The family would need twice as much - £26,832 a year - before it climbed to Rowntree's 'minimum income standard.'

The findings bear out recent reports from the Department of Work and Pensions which found that traditional families and full-time mothers are now at greater risk of poverty than single parents.

Earnings needed for the one-earner, two children family to meet the Rowntree minimum income standard are higher than the average earnings for a man, which last year were £25,912.

By contrast, single parent families have the easiest route out of poverty, yesterday's report said. A lone mother with one child needs to earn just £11,960 a year - £230 a week - to reach the basic standard, thanks to help from tax credits, it found.

Study authors said that its minimum income standards were higher in most cases than the poverty line used by the Government, which says that those on less than 60 per cent of median income are poor.

They said the income measures set out in the report were 'not perfect' but 'set a level that members of the public believe it is socially unacceptable for anyone to live below.'

They added that the minimum income standards should act as a benchmark to help understand Govenment poverty measures.

The income levels were calculated in discussions with 39 focus groups of people from different kinds of homes - both poor and wealthy - with advice from experts in housing, fuel and consumer prices.

Julia Unwin, Rowntree's director and an adviser to Gordon Brown, said: 'This research is designed to encourage debate, and to start building a public consensus about what level of income no-one should have to live below.

'Of course, everyone has their own views about what items in a family budget are "essential". But this is the best effort to date to enable ordinary people to discuss and agree what all households should be able to afford.'

She added: 'Naturally, people’s circumstances and preferences vary, and this research does not dictate how people should spend their money. But it does start to pin down how much people think is needed to be able to afford basic opportunities and choices that allow proper participation in society.'

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