Video: UK recession actually started in 2004

This story from ITN summarizes the recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report. The Rowntree Foundation said that the recession in the UK actually began in 2004.

Poverty levels rise again in the UK

The annual report from the UK's Joseph Rowntree foundation has just been released. This year, the Foundation says that poverty in the UK continues to rise.

Poverty levels in the UK are now at the same level as back in 2000. The report says that after a few years trending down, poverty has increased every year since 2004. The Rowntree Foundation points to 2004 as the year that unemployment and property repossessions began to rise in the UK.

From the BBC, we read this further breakdown of the new report.

The report - which is the Foundation's annual assessment of poverty in the UK - said that 2004-05 was a key turning point as that was when poverty, unemployment and property repossessions all started to rise.

"The report highlights the scale of the challenge the government faces if it is to reduce poverty significantly in the UK," said Julia Unwin, chief executive of the Foundation.

"Although there was success in reversing long-term adverse trends in the first half of the last decade, the re-emergence of these problems indicates that poverty cannot be solved with short-term, reactive solutions."

The report, produced by the New Policy Institute, found that two million children lived in low-income, working households. This was the highest figure since the Foundation started collecting records.

Peter Kenway, co-author of the report, said that the tax credits system was tackling the symptoms, not the root cause, of the issue that many people were not getting enough income despite doing many hours of work each week.

He said that the solutions were "not obvious" but required a debate over subjects that some politicians considered taboo.

They included the fact that some people had been "taxed into poverty", as well as the effect of more women in the workforce and the impact of migration levels into the UK.

One in five of Scotland's children in poverty

A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals that 1 in 5 of Scotland's children live in poverty. The report says that translates to 210,000 children or 21% percent. The number has actually increased from years before.

From the East Lothian News, we learn more of the reports conclusions.

Levels of child deprivation have fallen faster in Scotland than other parts of the UK in the last decade but have stalled since 2004/05, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report.

And it suggests that the UK Government's target of eradicating child poverty by 2020 will not be met if progress continues at the current rate.

Measures to reduce deprivation in Scotland are now fairly similar to the rest of the UK, according to the report.

It called on the Scottish and UK governments to do more to reduce child poverty north of the border and suggested a wide range of policy measures.

UK needs to spend billions to halve child poverty

A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says the UK government needs to spend billions of dollars to halve child poverty by it's target of 2010. A new report from the foundation says that 4.2 billion dollars in tax credits is needed per year. With current funding levels the UK will miss their target by 600,000 children.

The Guardian newspaper details the report in this Press Association story.

The research predicts that the number of children in poverty will fall to 2.3 million by 2010, missing the target of 1.7 million set by former prime minister Tony Blair in 1999.

The recession may not increase the number of children living in poverty, the report suggests, but many will find themselves further below the poverty line as a result of increased unemployment.

The report said: "Overall, it is possible that recession will bring a net increase in children's hardship even though it does not raise the child poverty total. This is likely to raise the cost of tackling child poverty, since it is more difficult to lift children out of severe poverty."

Research carried out for the report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it would cost £4.2 billion a year to tackle the problem by raising the child element of child tax credit by £12.50 a week more than currently planned.

Failing to meet the 2010 target will make it more difficult to reach the 2020 goal of eradicating child poverty.

Report author Donald Hirsch said: "The challenge in a recession will be to build on the progress already made in reducing child poverty.

Recession in Britain putting anti poverty work at risk

A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that the recession is putting anti-poverty efforts at risk. In fact, the foundations latest report says that UK poverty indicators have faltered in the last five years.

Larry Elliot of the Guardian filed a story on the report.

The study found that the Labour government had been far more successful in its first five years in office after 1997 than it had been since. Until 2002, 30 of the 56 poverty indicators - including housing, education, health and crime - chosen by the charity showed improvement and only a few worsened. Since then, only 14 of the indicators have improved and 15 have worsened.

Successes of the past decade, the JRF study said, were an increase in the number of homes meeting the government's decency standard, a halving in the number of 11-year-olds failing to achieve level 4 at key stage 2 tests, a reduction in the pay gap between low-paid women and male median earnings, and a steep reduction in the number of poor households with access to a bank account.

But it said too many pensioners still did not claim the benefits they were entitled to, the value of in-work benefits for adults without children had fallen by 20% in the past decade, there had been no progress in reducing under-16 pregnancies and no increase in the proportion of disabled working-age adults in employment.

Peter Kenway, the report's co-author, said: "The successes from the past 10 years need to be acknowledged but the failures also need to be understood if they are to be properly addressed. The concern now is how well an anti-poverty strategy that has been centred on getting people into work is going to fare in recession.

"With the adult social security net worth no more in real terms than 10 years ago, lots of people who lose their jobs have a long way to fall. Those out of work are going to find it harder to get a job."

The prime minister used last week's Queen's speech to put on a statutory footing the government's pledge to eradicate child poverty, but the JRF report said the emphasis on children had narrowed the government's approach.

Jobless adults falling behind in the UK

A new study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation focuses on unemployed adults in the UK. The study says that jobless benefits for adults without children have not increased in 20 years.

Meanwhile, the study also had good news for Scotland, the foundation says that part of the UK is doing better.

According the BBC the number of jobless adults now is greater than the number of poor seniors.

The research, carried out by the New Policy Institute, suggested the number of working age adults without children in low-income households had risen in recent years, to about 220,000.

"As the rest of society has got better off, so this group has sunk ever further behind," the study said.

The study also suggested that Scotland's child poverty rate was one of the lowest in the UK.

The proportion of children living in poverty has remained at 25% for the last three years, with about 250,000 in low-income families, according to the report.

Child poverty in Scotland has fallen by a fifth since the late 1990s - similar to the reduction in Wales and some parts of the north east and south west of England.

The report said: "The reason why Scotland's performance exceeds that of great Britain as a whole is that the fall in other English regions has been negligible.

"As a result, the Scottish child poverty rate is now among the lowest of any part of Great Britain."

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.'

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Low wages undermine work route out of poverty

from The Guardian

Lucy Ward, social affairs correspondent

Labour's drive to tackle poverty is being undermined because persistent low pay means work is no longer a reliable route out of poverty in Britain, according to a report published today.

A study for the Rowntree Foundation examining the record of Tony Blair's government finds that, though many children and pensioners have been successfully lifted out of poverty since 1997, the root causes of the problem have not been addressed.

The ninth annual Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report argues that the large numbers of people on low pay and the "seeming acceptance of gross inequalities of rates of pay" mean future poverty is as inevitable as ever.

Though the government has achieved "limited success" in cutting poverty, it has done so through the use of targeted benefits rather than resolving underlying issues such as workplace inequality and high numbers of jobless and unqualified young adults, the authors say.

The central premise of the government's anti-poverty strategy, that work is the best route out of poverty, is questionable given that half of the 3.4 million children living in poverty have a parent already in paid work, the same proportion as in the late 1990s, the study concludes. A low-paid couple, it says, can only avoid poverty if both are working.

The report is being published to coincide with the national poverty hearing on Wednesday, when faith leaders, politicians and others will gather in Westminster to hear from those living in poverty and debate solutions.

The study, conducted by the New Policy Institute, points to government successes in putting both child and pensioner poverty "firmly on a downward course".

Child poverty has been cut by 700,000, reversing an entrenched trend but falling short of the government's target of taking a million children out of poverty by March 2006, on the way to ending child poverty completely by 2020.

The big fall in poverty among pensioners, especially single pensioners, has been a major success of the anti-poverty policy, the researchers say. The poverty rate for pensioners overall has fallen from 27% in the late 1990s to 17% in 2004-05, and among single pensioners the rate has halved from 33% to 17%. But for working adults, the poverty rate remains unchanged since Labour took office at 19%, reflecting Britain's low wages.

The government's failure to bring down this figure is "a major weakness", the report concludes.

The report highlights other persistent problems, including the continuing unemployment rate of at least 10% among adults under 25, and the lack of progress since the late 1990s in the numbers of school leavers failing to achieve basic qualifications.

Such issues need to be addressed directly by the government, say the researchers, who point out that on issues where the government has taken a stand - such as bank accounts and central heating - exclusion through poverty has fallen substantially.

But the overall picture, says co-author Guy Palmer, is "not so much a mixture of success and failure of policy as one of success and neglect. Where the government has acted, change has happened. Where it has not, previous trends have continued."

Colette Marshall, UK director of Save the Children, said the government's strategy of getting low-income families into work was "clearly failing". "The government needs to address the issue of low pay but also acknowledge that work is not possible for all."

The charity is calling for two seasonal grants to support families during the run-up to Christmas and the summer holidays, when they face acute financial pressure.

Million Scots in poverty, claims report

from The Scotsman

EBEN HARRELL

ALMOST 20 per cent of all Scots - nearly one million people - are living in poverty, according to a report to be published today.

More than 200,000 of these impoverished Scots are "working poor" - employed, but unable to make a living wage, the report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds.

The report uses an EU-endorsed definition of relative poverty - an income less than 60 per cent of the national average - different from the type of absolute poverty found in the third world.

Even so, the report paints a bleak picture of the estimated 900,000 children, adults and pensioners struggling to make ends meet; the annual income after tax for an impoverished single adult, according to the report's definition of poverty, is £5,000 a year.

The report, titled Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Scotland, highlights several successes in Scotland, which last year met the UK government's target set in 1998 to reduce child poverty by a quarter. Across the UK as a whole, the target was missed. Since the mid-1990s, the poverty rate for pensioners has also come down in Scotland from about 28 per cent to 18 per cent.

On the whole, Scotland, with its population of just over five million, slightly exceeds all UK-wide averages for poverty indicators. The report credits government initiatives such as reduced tax credits and out-of-work benefits for the successes. But its authors also criticise the Executive and Westminster for ignoring the 216,000 Scots who remain poor despite having jobs. Most of these "working poor" are women who take low-paying part-time jobs.

Guy Palmer, a director of the New Policy Institute think tank and one of the authors, said: "What this report shows is that where the government wants something to happen, it can make a difference. That's why I get a bit worked up over the working poor. Westminster should be looking at raising the minimum wage and the Executive should be leading the way by ensuring all of its employees make living wages."

A Scottish Executive spokesman said: "This report highlights some clear successes in the work of the Executive and statistics across the board speak for themselves.

"However, there is still work to be done. We are tackling poverty in Scotland through our Closing the Opportunity Gap approach, and working with the UK government on our target to eliminate child poverty by 2020. We want to prevent individuals and families from falling into poverty; provide routes out of poverty; and sustain individuals and families in a lifestyle free from poverty."

Tam Baillie, of Barnardo's Scotland, said: "The government should be given credit for moving significant numbers of children out of poverty. But it's a disgrace that one of the richest countries in the world still has families living in poverty. The government has to redouble its efforts to assist those families who are in deepest poverty."