to be utterly shocked to learn that 1/4 of Brits live in poverty?

[latenightworker]

I was just reading about this new book The Return of Mass Poverty and that particular stat is quoted.

How can a country have so many people working hard (which they are, despite what the Daily Mail would have us believe) and yet barely scraping by?

(BTW I have no connection whatsoever with this book or agency or anyone involved, I just happen to receive the agent's newsletter and thought it was a very interesting, and shocking, book).

I find it very believable especially when many of us are earning less than the living wage

I could well believe it, but I'd want to know how they're defining poverty first.

It's relative, of course (the numbers in absolute poverty will be much smaller) but shocking nonetheless. What really bothers me is that people even slightly younger than me (I'm 50) have never had and will never have the same opportunities as my generation, and neither, most likely, will my kids. Almost all my educated 30 and early 40 something friends are struggling with the exception of the few (mainly people I know via work) who are in city jobs.

Absolute or relative poverty? It should be obvious that relative poverty can never go away, unless you find a way of forcing everyone to have the same.

The perverse thing about relative poverty is that the average living standard of half the population could be cut in half and it would show that poverty had fallen - because the gap between richest and poorest was smaller even though overall people's living standards were far worse. For example according to that measure, poverty fell during the financial crisis, because well-paid people were losing their jobs and as such reducing the gap between the top and bottom quartile.

It's a shit measure of poverty in any globally meaningful sense.

When we lived in the UK, my DH was working and yet friends on the dole were better off than we were. We claimed anything we were entitled to, but our monthly takeaway was a bag of chips from the chippy each. My DS wanted to know how come they had a takeaway night every week and ate pizzas etc. The only difference between us was that one family worked and one didn't. The 'living wage' is a 'just scraping by wage'. Bloody depressing.

There doesn't seem to be any financial reward FOR working. You can argue the moral, social etc rewards til the cows come home, but when your dc feel 'poorer' than their mates on benefits, it's tough. Even if the Gov tried to change that, some campaign group would put a stop to it.

If your measure of poverty is the bottom 25% of the population, then it's trivial to get there - with slightly more complicated measures it's still easy with any relative measure.

Relative measures of poverty are entirely pointless other than in "class war" style stuff. What matters is do you have enough to eat / live and access to anything you need to improve your own situation.

A lot of charities make a lot of money out of classifying poverty in this way, and it also guarantees that they will be able to assess high numbers of the population as living in poverty. Is "just scraping by" poverty? Would everyone who is just scraping by be happy to be labelled as living in poverty? I've never considered myself to be living in poverty, yet at times have been sleeping on friend's floors and with no money in the bank. Sometimes everything in your life doesn't go perfectly, but I don't find sticking pointless labels on it helpful, in fact it can makes things worse as people get stereotyped.

I think standard of living is a better way of looking at it.

OTheHugeManatee has explained this perfectly.

There are people in need but defining this as 'poverty' is neither helpful nor accurate.

OTHM is spot on.

This link gives more info on the book, including the definition of 'poverty' used :

breadline britain

Quote :

Those in poverty are then identified as people whose lack of necessities– and the extent of their deprivation– together has a pervasive and multiple impact on their lives.

We’ve referred to this group as being in ‘deprivation poverty’ and it is used as our measure of poverty throughout. It is a measure based on people’s actual living standards, rather than on an indirect measure, such as income.

The extract is worth reading.

Millionsmom -when my dh got made redundant and we had to rely on benefits we certainly weren't munching on pizza takeaway every night or any night. Perhaps being an x pat you seem to have a clouded memory of how things really are on benefits.

What is the definition of poverty?

Fuel Poverty is a big issue the governments figures have 1 Million working households unable to afford to heat themselves. About 45% of that figure is family households.
Many of those are reliant on pay as you use meters which are the most expensive way to pay for fuel.
People over committed on credit can be left in poverty either by off setting where banks remove money to pay credit bills without telling them until afterwards or where simply paying all of their credit payments leaves them with little else and no option but to use credit to buy food and pay bills.
Again these people are employed usually.

Poverty isn't just about having enough money for a standard of living, it is also about using the money to access that level of living-and lots of people can't manage that because of different sets of circumstances.
So working families can be in poverty-and less able to access help and support from agencies and charities because they are working households and may even appear to have a reasonable income BUT that income is used on debt, heating travel childcare and other costs.