Why does the UK have so many poor people?

[KenDodd]

Just that really.
Why do you think?

Yes, perhaps they will all be moved to some sort of hostel. It is a grim thought.

Renters are less likely to vote though and homeowners outnumber them anyway and I can't see home owners (who may also be their landlords) voting for change.

Theres another thread on the go at the moment about the term 'snowflake'.

My personal experience of the boomers (and yes I know they won't all be like this, but there seems to be a common thread) is that they've lived the high life in very fortunate times, which has given them an inflated sense of arrogance and entitlement. As I said before they feel all their luck is down to them and therefore they know best about everything. Hence they vote for the Conservatives and Brexit despite the fact it is trashing the country, whilst blaming younger people for struggling in the country they've trashed.

They're too proud to admit Brexit was a shit idea, and defend Boris Johnson using the worst double standards imaginable. Imagine if Corbyn or Starmer had children via affairs that they've never even met, yet banged on about how single mothers are the root of all evil? Or if they defended their top aide breaking the lockdown to drive 300 miles across the country to coincide with family birthdays and trips to beauty spots? We would never hear the end of it. They're just trying to squeeze out one last nostalgia trip at the expense of the rest of us.

Yes, my MIL annoys me

So a full time job and 6 part time jobs, a at the same time? How did you find time to sleep? Did you ever have a day off

No. We didn’t have a day off for a year.

We were knackered at the end but had managed to save enough money to make up the shortfall between the mortgage and the property price.

Dd did something similar to get her first place. Ds was doing something similar before lockdown.

What year did you buy in and where?
My first flat I bought in London, early 90s. I didn't have to work that hard. I had one shit, low paid job in a bar and got a mortgage on that. Hardly any deposit either. Flat was in the Elephant.

Somebody having to work six jobs without a single day off to have somewhere to live isn't a world I want to pass on to our children. I want a better life for them. I certainly didn't have to do that.

Also, I don't accept that it was just luck that I had the life I did. The shape of the country isn't beyond our control. We live in a democracy and shape the country how we want it. This is the future, we as voters, have delivered to our children.

I am a baby boomer. You know one of the lucky ones who supposedly got things handed to them on a plate.

This was in 1982-1983 and we might have been unusual in the amount of jobs we had but everyone of the people we knew or worked with around our age had at least 1/2 and a couple of people had 3 jobs on top of their f/T jobs and their f/t jobs were things like solicitor or accountant.

I don't know that it's helpful to pit the generations against each other as it tends to lead to discussions of individual circumstances which soon becomes meaningless. But it is useful I think to identify broad trends. And the broad trends over the past 30 years have been : 248% increase in house prices and 27% rise in incomes, a move from 33% of households in price regulated social rented housing to 28% of households in price unregulated private sector rented housing. These I think are significant in terms of fixed living costs vs income.

I don't doubt your personal experience oliversmum. However the data shows that overall in the UK the number of people working secondary jobs has increased massively from the 1980s . See for example theconversation.com/the-rise-of-the-low-pay-workforce-when-seven-jobs-just-isnt-enough-106979

'The TUC, which comprises the majority of the UK’s major trade unions, has also reported that only one in 40 jobscreated since the recession is full-time.'

Even back in 2002 the labour force survey showed a 68% increase since 1984 in the number of people doing two jobs and the situation has worsened since then
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1977131.stm

Because people who are either utterly self serving or totally stupid continue to vote in successive Tory governments.

When I was young, had there been a GE, without my socialist parents, heading off to a Russell group uni, with my £50,000 from granny, a three year old paid for, insured car from mum and dad, and a full compliment of designer clothes, off to read law, I probably would’ve felt a bit “I’m alright jack”
Thank god I grew up.

when you don’t have enough, vote for a better life for yourself when you do, use your vote for a better life for others

It actually hurts my heart that people continue to vote in ways that make life harder for other people.
Like do you know what your doing? Do you know that girl in the co op is having an abortion next week, because she is was told she was infertile so didn’t use contraception and now she can’t afford a child she’s missing out on her one chance to follow her dream.
Do you care that the state pension isn’t enough to live on
Or that Under labour there was one fucking Foodbank in the U.K. now there’s thousands

WHY DONT YOU WANT TO BE KIND TO PEOPLE. Why do you vote to make peoples lives worse?

Or that under labour there was one fucking foodbank in the UK
Do you think people didn't need foodbanks then or something? No, we just went hungry instead.

private renting and away from social housing is also a housing benefit time bomb
@kendodd

YES!!

I’ve raised this time and time again, even with my MP.
It’s going to be a huge issue, the housing benefit bill when generation rent “retire”

(Well it won’t be retire, it will be stop working through illness)
Will be huge, it really will. There’s also the lack of houses to sell to pay for care homes, a loss in inheritance tax.

Welfare 'reform' act 2012, mostly.

Universal Credit 5 week wait for payment, in which you need to loan money off the government to simply survive , and this is clawed back from you by reduced payments afterwards. A particular kicker for those needing help who have paid into the system for years.

2 child policy and rape clause. Introduced within said welfare reform, only damages Children and expects to 'correct' millions of years of human biology, but popular with the 'don't have Children if you are poor' brigade (reminder my rent for v modest flat is nearly half my full time income!!)

Huge increase in sanctions, which is often 100% of your income gone. For some perceived transgression or another. Cruel beyond belief. Actually proven in court to have caused death by starvation of numerous disabled people.

High costs of private rent. I've been lining the pockets of private landlords for the privilege of living in shabby damp flats for 16 years and I'm only 32. I work full time and my rent alone is nearly half my wages.

Inadequate childcare provision to enable Parents to work. Most low paid jobs are NOT 9-5 Mon to Fri.

Changes to single parents being financially able to access education.

Benefit freeze for many years as the cost of living goes up and up. Also no provision for the fact that internet is now a necessary utility to manage claim, and have you tried to apply for any jobs in recent years that didn't require internet access to apply??

Maybe controversial, but less and less poor people voting or taking part in politics, many (not all, but many), seeing it as not for them.

Maybe controversial, but less and less poor people voting or taking part in politics, many (not all, but many), seeing it as not for them.

I agree and actually this is the main reason, voting, we get what we vote for and as voters we've voted for more child poverty. Terrible of us really.

I think the 'luck' of the baby boomers could well be attributed to the second world war and ordinary people demanding better for themselves and their children after the great sacrifices that they'd made. They demanded better, voted for better and got better. The amongst other things NHS was born and housing improved, baby boomers inherited this better world. I feel quite ashamed that we've created a harder country for our own children.

@Oliversmumsarmy
We sound about the same age, maybe you're a couple of years older and yet we seem to see things so differently. I see that life is more difficult for young people today, the numbers do seem to back me up on this. I acknowledge young people have benefited from social changes though, gay rights etc. You seem to think they have it no harder than you did. Even if this was true (I don't believe it is) I would see that as a failing because I think we should be striving to leave the world a better place for future generations.

everyone of the people we knew or worked with around our age had at least 1/2 and a couple of people had 3 jobs on top of their f/T jobs and their f/t jobs were things like solicitor or accountant.

As I said I seem to be about your age. I know (and knew) a lot of solicitors and accountants, never met a single one of them with a evening or weekend job as well as their full time job, not one ever! These were all my friends, I knew them very well, I would know if they had extra jobs. They had part time jobs as students if that's what you mean?

Most young people weren’t on an average salary and the cheapest places in some areas were many times their salary.
I would say it isn’t about not being able to afford to buy a place but not being able to buy a particular type of place in a particular area

FFS. You're exactly the sort of baby boomer we're complaining about.
Do you think most people are on an average salary today?? Averages are known to be problematic. In fact the range of salaries today is much larger than the range of salaries that used to exist through the 60s-80s, income inequality has grown. That's simple mathematics, in large part due to the dependence on percentages for calculating wage increases. Have a look at the wages today: the average EvilPea quoted is not what most people are on. I would guess the mode is about £20k, from what I'm seeing, and you need qualifications to get that; EvilPea quoted what is supposed to be the median salary, 8-9k more than the mode. Jobs that don't require qualifications, I might remind you, are rare as hen's teeth now.

I would say it isn’t about not being able to afford to buy a place but not being able to buy a particular type of place in a particular area
That's because you are not listening to a single word anyone says, reading a single word anyone tells you. Except for anything you want to hear confirming stereotypes and your own experience of 'oh how I struggled'. You're certainly not looking at the reality of modern house prices to wages ratios.

I know all about how 'baby boomers worked multiple jobs to struggle to afford house prices'. I was out working those jobs with my parents as a child, from the age of 7 or 8, delivering pamphlets, knocking on doors asking for money for various schemes, folding up pamphlets at night to deliver, so that my parents could continue to afford their mortgage. I had to look after their other kids for the same reason, and then had them kick me out as soon as they could with the constant expectation that I would earn more to keep them. If I was on that same level of wages now I would have to be doing that same number of extra jobs to be able to afford to rent. I am so tired of telling baby boomers this. Go and look at reality, not the clickbait headlines on the BBC - it is true there are occasional headlines about posh entitled middle class youngsters who expect the world given to them on a plate - and do the maths for yourself.

I will admit that I'm not working like that again to live in the shithole drug and crime ridden estate that my parents brought me up in, or worse. Fortunately I was intelligent enough to get higher levels of work and not have kids I couldn't afford, but I would still have had to do that same level of work again to buy in those same estates as someone with no child commitments now, whereas my parents could afford it, with the struggles you outline.

We cannot afford the same standards of living on the same status levels of pay.

Wolfgirrl, yes my parents annoy me .

Tb perfectly honest, @Oliversmumsarmy, this is not the same country I grew up in (80s, I'm 40s). The economy is fundamentally different, the social relationships with the state are fundamentally different. The state has more or less abrogated responsibility for its citizens, and rich individuals have made a power grab and taken back control. Any pretensions Britain might have had towards becoming a democracy have gone. It's not as simple, btw, as poor people not voting - poor people know damn well their voices are ignored, that's why they don't bother. I doubt I'll bother next time. Baby boomers are being allowed to continue their gilded twilight years, sheltered in the presumptions that nothing drastic has changed. It has. Things are hard enough for my generation, those of us who were brought up in the old assumption of looking after our parents and discovering that we actually have to provide a living for our children as well; for the generation behind mine and entering the workforce now, it is ludicrous. Work doesn't pay.