Poverty in the UK

As benefits are cut and taxes are raised it is obvious that people around the country will not be making enough money to properly support themselves or their poverty in the UKfamilies. This worrying information released by TUC shows that a significant number of people across the country will soon be living below the minimum recommended household income.

Whilst this isn’t good in its own right, the report also states that more than 50% of the country’s children will be living beneath the recommended income level. In the next 2 years, 7.1 million of the 13 million children in Britain will be living beneath this threshold.

By 2015 the level of income considered acceptable for a single parent single child family will have risen to £19,226 while for a 2 parent 2 child family will have to earn £29,093 to be at the acceptable earning standard.

Most single parents will not be able to work a job which allows them to earn over £19,000 which will still give them enough time to care for their children. This is disgusting when we consider the UK to be a developed nation at the forefront of living standards and human rights.

Many people believe that the Government don’t have a real idea what life is like in middle to lower Classes. Research from Ipsos MORI showing that 69% of people from all classes believed the government don’t understand the financial pressures of the life in the UK.

As inflation is on the increase and wages are not increasing in line with the cost of living it is easy to see why so many people in the near future will be living below the breadline. With a large number of people currently living in poverty below these new standards in our local area what can be done to alleviate these issues?


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Chris Brown
Christopher Brown is Consett Magazine's lead journalist. Chris enjoys meeting with a whole host of different people to report on what's happening in Consett, Co.Durham.

1 COMMENT

  1. One of the most important ways forward for UK society is to stop vilification of our poor and/or dependent citizens and build a civilised consensus that such people are as equally entitled to rights and are the same as ‘us’.

    An especially worrying feature of contemporary UK society is the UK Coalition Govt’s revisiting of ‘class war’. This is most obvious in the language and rhetoric used by the Govt – evidence-absent rhetoric and slurs about benefit claimants as ‘scroungers’ who lie in bed while hard-working neighbours go to work.

    It’s striking that when it comes to the better-off people, the (mostly right wing) media uses very different language. For example, it speaks of banks and energy companies ‘misselling’ instead of them being found guilty of conning, fraud and theft. Incidentally, the SSE energy company this week after at least 3 investigations over 10 years has finally been fined for massive ‘misselling of energy deals – yet not one senior staff member has been removed or even demoted.

    Just about the most disgusting example of this class war propaganda was this week when the Daily Mail ran a front page article declaring that the henious crimes of Mick Philpott were a ‘product of the welfare state’. Meantime, and to their eventual shame and cost, the Liberal Democrats have supported this trend – this week Lib Dem politician Danny Alexander was involved in the language of calling poor tenants in council houses suffering benefit cuts as ‘bedroom blockers’.

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