To think that this is unacceptable in this day and age

[nighttrains]

• An estimated 14.3 million people are in poverty in the UK
• 8.3 million are working-age adults, 4.6 million are children, and 1.3 million are of pension age
• Around 22% of people are in poverty, and 34% of children are
• Just under half (49%) of those in poverty are in “persistent povertyy_” (people who would also have fallen below the poverty line in at least two of the last three years). This is as of 2016/17

This is from fullfact.org/economy/poverty-uk-guide-facts-and-figures/

It's appalling for a so called civilised country

@Thisisworsethananticpated

London doesn’t have the poverty in quite the same way as outside of the capital

Whenever I leave the capital it’s a bloody eye opener

But why should we be suprised ? Or shocked ? Surely the fact that humans are on the whole making things worse not better is no suprise

Yes the poverty is very extreme in London. It was hit first and perhaps hardest by the right to buy.

Covid brought the plight of London's deprivation into sharp focus.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-hit-hardest-coronavirus-deprivation-ons-a4467196.html%3famp

www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-deaths-uk-housing-overcrowding-newham-london-a9646301.html%3famp

@IceCreamAndCandyfloss

We live in a country with free education, free healthcare and a benefit system.

We are responsible for our own choices in life. Some will make choices they can’t afford but personal responsibility has to come into the equation.

That's all lovely. But pretty pointless when people don't have a secure roof over their heads.

Blair's war on the disabled has also had consequences. He set in motion the process of slowly dismantling the safety net for the sick and disabled.

As for smoking. People need some form of comfort to cope with a shitty life. We no longer let people cope via sedatives like valium.

In any event seeing as they're apparently such a 'burden' they're doing a good thing by smoking. Contributing loads to the tax coffers - and saving us a fortune on pension and social care costs.

We're in the Brave New World - but without the soma.

@DustyMaiden

If poverty is defined as a comparative to the mean then there will always be poverty.

Maybe so but that doesn't mean we should not seek to reduce it as much as we can by striving for a more equal society

@Chevron123

Nandocushion. Having access to grants to go to university (and meaning that I could apply to universities in more expensive areas), certainly helped. Taking the 11+ and going to a grammar school - in the days when there was no tutoring and you simply passed or failed on the day. Having at least a handful of friends with aspirations beyond getting married and working in a local business. I think that last point is key. The area is one of the few, possibly the only area in the country that didn't have a single young person go to Oxbridge from a state school last year. By no means a perfect measure but it certainly makes you think. As levels of inequality increase, I think people tend to accept their situation and focus on survival.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here with this post. At least social mobility was possible years ago when the 11+ was something you passed or failed purely based on innate intelligence- no private tutoring etc....

Not now though, mammy and daddy from the middle classes pay for young Charles to have a private tutor (often for years) to lass the admission test. All great eh? No - because it takes away places from those who haven’t been tutored today within an inch of their life.

Low and behold - social mobility becomes increasingly difficult for the working classes.

At my first job in 1984 I was paid £74 a week which then was a good wage, it is a joke that someone who is unemployed now only gets that to live on, I know they get their rent & council tax paid but a single person living alone cannot pay their utility bills, feed & clothe themselves on £74 a week. My £74 wage would now be well over £350 a week, that is around 5 times more than it was in 1984, the dole then was £25 a week, so if it had followed wages would be around £125 a week for a single person. We are entering in to a recession that could be worse than the one in the eighties. There are going to be hundreds of thousands losing their jobs because this government now refuses to support viable businesses during the worst pandemic in the last hundred years, but chooses to line the pockets of their cronies & supporters.

@Nat6999

At my first job in 1984 I was paid £74 a week which then was a good wage, it is a joke that someone who is unemployed now only gets that to live on, I know they get their rent & council tax paid but a single person living alone cannot pay their utility bills, feed & clothe themselves on £74 a week. My £74 wage would now be well over £350 a week, that is around 5 times more than it was in 1984, the dole then was £25 a week, so if it had followed wages would be around £125 a week for a single person. We are entering in to a recession that could be worse than the one in the eighties. There are going to be hundreds of thousands losing their jobs because this government now refuses to support viable businesses during the worst pandemic in the last hundred years, but chooses to line the pockets of their cronies & supporters.

The difference is though, you worked full time to get that wage. If someone doesn’t work then they can’t expect to get the same wage as someone that does, otherwise where’s the incentive to work?

Why would anyone bother working in a shit job no doubt shit hours if they can get the same amount by not working? No one could blame them for not wanting to do it.

I agree it’s not much to live off if you’re on benefits but it’s not supposed to be. It’s the bare minimum that someone can survive on. If they’ve got debts etc on top of that then they’ll have next to nothing left. It’s a viscous circle

When I became a single parent in 2010, I worked part time to fit in with school hours, I got £550 after tax a month & got £60 child tax credit & £20 a week child benefit, I had to pay £250 towards my rent, I got some housing benefit, £45 a month on council tax, £50 on gas, £50 on electric, £60 on debts my exh had saddled me with, that was before I had fed & clothed me & ds, put petrol in the car & paid tax & insurance, paid things that cropped up at school. Most weeks I was lucky if I had £5 at the end of the week, I was scrounging money from wherever I could, I dreaded winter because the heating would need to be on, forever panicking in case the washer broke or ds needed new clothes or shoes. At that time there weren't any foodbanks, I used to shop at Farmfoods & used to hold my breath as everything went through the till, praying I had enough money to pay for a week's shopping & dreading that I would have to put something back as I had only bought the bare minimum. We never ate a really balanced diet, we ate what I could afford.

@AbsentmindedWoman
I'll try again, bit differently.

Original
B. £619 --- 144 a week for a single person with no children
Rent: 300
Leaves £319 or £74 pw
OR
room for £100, leaves: 519 pm or 120pw

So, we have a single person -joe, 24- living alone in a studio flat. He pays £300pm rent. Which leaves him £319 for the month.
Which is not so good. But upside is that according to gov his universal credit actually is more around £700. Technically he can't get any less from the gov today.
Meaning that he has paid £300 for rent and has £400 in his pocket.
He pays about £50 for transport (remember, not london). He has £350 in his pocket. Then he pays council tax and bills. Let's say £100, leaving £250 in his pocket for food. That 8 pounds per day to eat.*

So, he move into a flatshare where he pays £100 per month, so he has a leftover of £600 in his pocket (remember gov 700 pounds minimum in universal credit). Take away the tfl, council tax, utility £150: he is left with £450 to spend on himself.
Still not great, but I still say that neither is poverty. Joe always has the option to go on a training, find a vocational training (there is a lot of help options in that direction, or at least pre-covid. Now joe is pretty much sitting in his room gaming... )
He also has the ability to move upwards in jobs in a few years. From this point where he has food, clothes, has the bills covered and roof it is really up to him where he takes his life. Not saying he has a plethora of choices.

*not great, but I can attest that a family of 3 can be fed healthily from £15 a day and still have enough for presents, treats. Not fun.

It is going to get a LOT worse. Within 15 years there will be no benefits, no UC, no NHS. People will look back at these times and wonder what went wrong.

With luck I will not be there..........

I was born in the 80s. My brothers early 90s. Unsurprisingly, we didnt choose to be born into a family where DM was so emotionally abused she wasn't allowed to go to the shop alone. She wasn't 'allowed' to work, and he chose not to. We ended up - all 3 of us under 11, seeing a house repossessed, a car reposessessed, living 5 of us in a bedsit flat in the vilest part of town for around a year until offered a council house far from our friends and schools. Going to a new school in unwashed hand me down uniforms. All 3 of us left school, and home, as soon as we were able and have been lucky to work our way up in mainly hospitality jobs to make them into management careers. It exists, and its bloody awful - even more so when people are so privileged that they're able to deny it happens.

@CountreeGurl

And yet people still vote Tory

This.

@Pumpkinetchocolate There’s socialism. Everyone doesn’t need to be equal. A basic income would help the poorest and people who earn more will still earn more on top of their BI and pay tax, as they do now. If everyone has enough to live on, they will spend more, contributing to the economy. Austerity is a farce, it doesn’t save money and is actually damaging to the economy in the long term.

@Fimofriend

If UK was actually a civilized country you wouldn't get all those British people talking so much, sometimes downright monologuing, about what a civilized country it is. People don't go on and on about something that is self-evident.

Spot on

Out of genuine interest I'm an curious as to suggestions on how to stop the poverty and what solutions there are to end this? I donate to the food back frequently and is close to my heart but I genuinely don't know how it can ever be made better

Thanks for the Twitter stats, depressing stuff! But finally I see the point of Brexit! If only we "leave Europe" as they say, we can start claiming we are part of Africa and then we'll be one of the best countries to live in when doing all these relative comparisons to different countries in our continent!

@TheSunIsStillShining

Your calculations are a load of shite. You need to factor other issues like the fact that the fictional mum with two kids can’t move to the cheap one bed in your example with her kids because the relationship breaking down left her renting a two bed flat which she can’t afford to move out of. She can’t scrape together a deposit or moving costs or even get past the landlord who won’t rent to people on benefits even if they don’t admit it. The rent takes up several hundred more than your guestimate of £500 so she has far less each week for bills and food. Oh, and her ex left her with the debts too so she’s got to cover that each month.

And that’s just one imaginary scenario.

I wonder why so many people want to live here if a large portion of the population live in poverty.
Poverty is relative.
Many on benefits of one sort or another (and as we know, there are MANY types and levels of benefits - far too many IMO) still have 55"+ TVs Sky, Netflix, iPhones tablets the latest trainers, lounge-wear and live on fast food. Many don't cook from scratch with an arsenal of herbs and spices to make cheap ingredients interesting.
The TV is on practically 24/7 and their kids have free school breakfasts and lunches. Why can't any decent mother give her children a good breakfast?
Pancakes with fruit and a scoop of yogurt is cheap. Beans or egg on toast is cheap. Eggy bread with half a tin of beans is really good and a large tin of beans can be bought for 35p or less.
It's laziness, nothing more.

Yet still they vote Tory.

But where are Labour going to magic the money from to get everyone out of poverty.

Everyone in the UK gets 13 years of free education. I mean - that's pretty generous. But it's still not enough.

@ILoveAllRainbowsx

If people don't want to be in poverty then they shouldn't have children until they can earn enough to support them out of poverty.

How is it the government's fault that people decide to have children and are then in poverty?

If people didn't have children in poverty then we could afford to look after the people in genuine need.

Also, we have 2 trillion pounds worth of debt and that doesn't even include state and public sector pensions. So we are not a wealthy country.

Some people don’t decide to have children in poverty. Some mothers are just very unlucky and end up with ssshole husbands who turn jealous and abusive once the child is born and then they end up alone and single and in poverty. This happens more than you know.... And they can’t go back to work until the child goes to full time school.

It makes me annoyed that someone said parents were queuing up in the lockdown to get free school lunches because they wanted a freebie and could obviously afford to make their own. Would you really go all the way to school, risk your health during the height of the pandemic, wait in a long queue to get some sandwiches if you didn’t need to? I doubt many people would go to that length to feed their kids if they weren’t desperate.

When you vote for a Tory government this is what you vote for and I'm not interested in excuses.

@LuluJakey1 and in some areas this is 3rd generation that people are in this situation. It is obvious that some people have never seen this or have thought about how living like this impacts your ability to change your life especially when most people you socialise with live like this so it's normal. It is rare for anyone living like this to have aspirations of achieving a job that would actually lift them out it as you only imagine what you see. I'm struggling to articulate what i mean but I was brought up in a low income single parent family and didn't have anyone around me that was a professional or high earner. I didn't have any aspirations as I only knew people who worked in minimum wage jobs that they didn't particularly like and life was a struggle. I moved to another area at 16 for work and had my eyes opened to a different way when visiting new friends homes and seeing their lives.

"If poverty is defined as a comparative to the mean then there will always be poverty."

"Maybe so but that doesn't mean we should not seek to reduce it as much as we can by striving for a more equal society"

Er, no? Short of ensuring everyone is on the mean (i.e. the same, so it isn't really a mean), defining poverty by reference to the mean means there will always be poverty. What we can do as a society (and for the most part do, although not with 100% success) is try to ensure no-one goes without the basics in life - food and shelter.
It may be nice if everyone could afford more, without difficulty, but you run into problems over how much 'more' is fundable, and the sad fact that for some folk 'more' is never enough.

No system is perfect, and except in a completely communist society (in theory at least) there will always be folks who are unacceptably poor for one reason or another, and the best that can be done is to assist them through what may be a particularly difficult time. And I'm not sure the agency of the state is terribly good at that, whatever the hue of the party in power. Support appropriate charities as well as pay taxes.

I still think that most people in the UK are a few steps away from true poverty.

To me poverty is people who have no home, no sufficient income and no prospects for a better life. That includes access to health care and education for DC.
Thanks to the welfare system most people have a roof over their head, there is food available as well as health care and education. Yes, the benefits are not enough to live on permanently, there are gaps between what you get and what you actually need. But at the same time, the state does step in and help people out. Unlike in many other countries.

@ILoveAllRainbowsx your ignorance is shocking.
Many people choose to have kids and then their circumstances change.

For instance: I had a kid. A very much wanted and able to afford kid. 5 years later my husband became ill and killed himself. We now technically live in poverty.

Shall I send the kid back until I'm more able to afford the privilege?