How the term 'poverty' has changed

[Deeperthantheocean]

Just this really.

Poverty in my grandparents' age was 'be rich, a gangster, work hard or you die'.

This was so true, whole different era and real poverty from their times being born in the 1910s and the aftermath. Sadly my GF died so GM was alone bringing up 2 children and then adopting another as that's what what you did when members of the family were being abused. No benefits, only a council where you to practically beg for help and it was so looked down upon and gossip then was brutal.

So, a little 2 bedroom house, outhouse toilet, coal fire, no electricity. My GM worked all day and night... cleaning, making clothes and took in 2 male lodgers in the downstairs 'parlour', made breakfast and evening meals for them.

The 3 girls shared a double bed, GM got up at 4am every morning to bring in coal and make the fire before everyone else got up to go to work/ school. Then she went to work, physical cleaning work to the rich and snooty. The sad thing is she was she was so intelligent, gifted at creativity and music (she played the church organ with music she learnt from heart voluntarily) and sowed the most beautiful dresses. Also cakes.

Having rambled on a bit because this is deep to my heart hearing the stories, poverty was a case of just being able to survive, eat and have a roof. The DC were incredibly intelligent but had to to go to work aged 15 cand over all their wages for the family fund.

Poverty now has a different criteria, which of course it should as society has progressed. However aibu to compare the claim to poverty now to then? There is help, UC, recognition of SEN with DLa etc.

Sorry, but now those claiming poverty now wouldn't consider letting out a room, working all day and night, making clothes and baking just to survive.

Am I right? I wouldn't either as there has been so much to eradicate these hard times but I truly respect the hardship and feel so grateful for what we have now. Xx

i think bed-sharing in the past is possibly a red herring - if you have lots of kids and no central heating, it’s unsurprising same-sex kids bunk in together even in relatively wealthy households, because you can’t leave a fire burning in the night and it’s freezing to sleep alone. It has fallen out of fashion, like wearing hats in bed or having drapes on the bed, partly because most houses have windows that no longer accumulate ice on the inside. But also because of our better grip on how family groups operate: The original Booth report was horrified by the amount of sexual abuse revealed in working class households where whole families shared beds and adults had no privacy, and that was a huge and horrific downside which was another driver for change.

Now, if kids are bed-sharing, it is sign that something is badly wrong in a household and a true indicator of poverty.

Interesting aside, I was reading about the medieval practice of “second sleep” recently - we have forgotten about it nowadays, but in the past it was common to wake in the night and check the embers of your fire were still alight, ready to be stoked and coaxed back into a fire in the morning.

Collectively we forget and distort a lot about the ordinary lived experiences of the past. Changing language is part of this - the true meaning of poverty now isn’t quite the same as what is was. But it’s still poverty.

It’s why the study of history remains so fascinating and important.

id love to rent a room out

but I don’t have one to spare

Maybe not a smart phone but Internet access is certainly essential as the pandemic proved
Those children who couldn't access the Internet couldn't access on line lessons etc
Practically everything is done onnline these days maybe things have gone to far but that's not the fault of people in poverty who can't afford Internet access.

I don't recognise your description of 'old fashioned' poverty. I'm in my 50s and grew up on benefits, my parents had a council house, my mum had enough money to regularly went to the bingo and my dad the pub and betting shop (a few times a week each). My mum also smoked heavily. A lot of my wider family were also on benefits and had a similar lifestyle. My nan also lived in a council house and didn't work (she and my mum both had a couple of hours a week 'cash in hand' cleaning job) she lived on benefits and my two cousins lived with her after there parents both left. They all had enough money to live on and more importantly, secure housing. Our council houses only had a gas fire in the livingroom for heating though.

If we compare to people on benefits now, one big difference I see is insecure, massively expensive, private housing. This must add enormous stress to people's lives.

This was 1970s and 80s

Of course that's true, although people still die due to dangerous living conditions and yes, they do sublet or live in overcrowded conditions.

The poverty still exists, but we've ensured the people we're living off are overseas, where we can avoid seeing them, then complain if they're forced to.migrate here due to the poverty we keep them in.

Then people refuse to cut down a little on the exrraordinary luxuries they take for granted, in order to lessen climate change or in order to redistribute some of the wealth they've taken.

This is such an interesting thread. So many posters have reflected on this complex issue and added such thoughtful comments. Economics is so complicated and so important.
And still so many voters in the UK, England in particular grasp for easy solutions from political parties.
No set of policies to address poverty are simple or easy or cheap to implement. It would be great to see our present government have a national discussion about this issue and open up what is currently as so many posters have mentioned a hidden but huge problem.
In Ireland they created a citizens council who looked at the issue of abortion being illegal. They investigated it all in the public view, called witnesses and so on. Then there was a referendum in which the decriminalise abortion side won easily. I was there the day the vote happened . It was amazing. Older Irish people said they never thought it could even be discussed let allowed resolved!
So it can happen there are other ways to deal with these highly emotive issues of great complexity.

100%. People I work with can’t afford smartphones. If they manage to buy a second hand one for a kid, it gets robbed. Lots of temporary accommodation has no Wi-Fi anyway. Data’s too pricey. UC is online. Homelessness appointments have to be made online. Where I work we often have to give people burner phones so we can get hold of them. But they can’t afford to top up the credit.

You’re not wrong but it’s a good thing that times have moved on and expectations are higher now.

My take on this is that the U.K. is a wealthy country so we can’t in good conscience have people living destitute when the people get to live lives of extraordinary privilege. Where you set that minimum level of living standards is subject to debate and available resources but we should have a minimum standard of living in my opinion and that should evolve over time.

So you've just dismissed the entire study of history?
FYI people usually find it worthwhile to learn from history eg age of death in the past/ age of death today & the impact of various improvements. Then we can lern what to do in the future.
That's just the general idea.

The new government has set up a Child Poverty Taskforce. I was sceptical but I met someone from a local community group recently who’d bern invited to share her views with them and it sounded very positive.

Part of the challenge is the emotive nature of the word poverty and the technical definition of poverty as defined by 60% median income.

The welfare state is amazing and means that no should be homeless or starving. Life might be incredibly tough and living in bad housing with very little food but there is a safety net which means no children sleeping on the street.

However, the official measure has over 3 million children poverty which seems hard to reconcile.

Then if the national median income changes, increases or decreases, thousands of people are technically moved in or out of poverty because of a definition but their actual circumstances haven't changed.

I was brought up in the 60s/70s and we were quite poor but we never went hungry. The bills were paid in the following order, rent because that ensured a roof over our heads, then food, then fuel (coal) and anything else left was for clothes etc.

People back then spent more of their wages on food than we do today. We didn't have a phone, we didn't have a car until I was about 9 years old. Neither me nor my friends did after school activities only brownies. Days out were a rare treat. I can't ever remember going out for a family meal.

People now seem to want to prioritise luxuries over essentials.

What are you going on about? How am I dismissing anything? I’m talking about how we everything is relative and the fact poverty ‘looks’ better now isn’t relevant to how we address the problem

I do think the nature of poverty has changed. My grandparents also lived in real poverty. But ...

Poor people now don't have rooms to rent out, it's more expensive to make clothes than buy pre made, fuel costs for baking make baking a cake v buying one mean its not always cost effective and a lot of people do have more than one job. Although childcare standards are higher so I don't think you could leave kids alone to work.

i agree re far less, and much of it is hidden now.

I was a teenager in the 1960s when a lot of the old barriers in society were breaking down. Not so much for us, but certainly by the time our 1970s born DC were growing up. They can’t remember the pretty awful house we lived in with only one coal fire and a lavatory in the yard, when I’d go to the laundrette because we couldn’t afford a washing machine.

Poverty (mainly relative) now must be so hard, because it affects far fewer, and the comparisons are everywhere in the media. Back in my childhood, and early adulthood, lots of us were ‘poor’ by today’s standards, and ‘the rich’ were a different species. Children like ours, who became adults in the late 80s/90s weren’t limited nearly so much by the ‘know your place’ attitude that was rife in the past, they were the first to go to university, to enter the professions, rather than simply have a job.

I worked for a while in local government, and some of the households who would be classed as poor managed very well. Kids were clean, fed, parent(s) trying to improve their circumstances, with some positive outcomes. Others? Sadly the poverty pattern continued. Poor life choices, poor money management, lack of good role models, dysfunctional relationships. And of course Illness and disability, which are not choices, will usually have a negative impact on household incomes.

Lastly, where we live also makes a difference. There are plenty of places where a decent house can still cost a fraction of those in London and other expensive areas, and where rents are also more affordable.

Why’s it hard to reconcile? Perhaps you don’t know how children are existing?Some are sleeping in cars, disused buildings or on the floors of relatives or friends. 160,000 kids in England alone are homeless with their families. At least 74 kids have died in temporary accommodation since 2019.

The welfare state is by no means amazing. It’s been dismantled.

No, I don't think you are right. My definition of poverty is similar to yours but you need to acknowledge that expectations and legal changes mean some of the options available to earlier generations aren't available now. People live in one bedroom flats (or temporary housing or on the street) with multiple children. There is no space for a lodger. Logers nowadays wouldn't be happy paying rent to sleep in the living room and use an outhouse. You would also be judged mercilessly and probably reported to social services for putting your children at risk by inviting strangers to live in your home in such cramped quarters.

The ability for single parents to hold down multiple minimum wage jobs is more limited than it was then. It wasn't that long ago (Gen X and before them) that being seen as a latchkey kid was normal. Now, primary school age children aren't allowed to walk home from school by themselves and someone would report you to social services for leaving your primary-school aged child at home alone while you were at work. There were also multiple black markets for food and cloth. Whilst I'm sure there are still people who sell goods off the back of a truck, I don't think food black markets are so readily available.

Whilst there is a recognition of SEN, there is no funding for it and it is a constant battle for parents to get just a scrap of what their children need. Yes, there is UC and DLA, but it is not enough to survive on, there are long waits for payments (made even longer by beaurocratic incompetence), which are then often messed up etc.

So, poverty today is the same as it ever was - the inability to feed, clothe and house yourself and your family on whatever wages you have. It just feels like there are fewer options for escaping it.

The thing about just renting out the spare room shows the op must of never met someone who's actually broke. The broke people I know all live in just one room together mum dad and all the kids. Even having one extra room would be a dream for them.

I think the feeling behind this thread may have been caused by reading too many Mumsnet threads where people moan they're broke because they can't afford four holidays a year 😂

Children may not live in absolute poverty and thank goodness that's the case. Do you realise that there are lots of childless adults living in absolute poverty? There is a huge homelessness problem and there are people actually living on the streets. Housing authorities only have to accommodate vulnerable people who are assessed as unintentionally homeless and they will look for any reason to say the person is intentionally homeless as there just aren't enough spaces for them to be accommodated.
The benefits for a single adult without a disability are very low and some on that low amount actually are unable to work but don't pass the assessments for PIP to prove that.

Interesting point re housing in the middle of nowhere. The government went through a post war phase of demolishing what they called slums and moving people out into new housing. But the new housing had poor transport links, no theatres etc where people used to go and the sense of community was lost. It caused a huge number of social problems that I think we’re still seeing to this day.

They gave them new houses but took so much away from them at the same time. It was the same people with the same problems just in a new house.

And nothing has changed in decades
I was watching a documentary on you tube about homeless families it was 2007,one family were in a B&B just two beds and a kettle no cooking facilities, the teenage girl was describing how if they wanted something warm to eat in the evening, they would put a tin in the radiator in the morning and it the contents would be warm by evening
Another family were waiting hours in the cold with four kids to see if the council would pay for a B&B for the night.

I think very very few people live in true poverty these days. Benefits are freely given, there are several food banks in every town, and many people don’t feel the need to do anything much to better themselves, they’re just content to live on hand outs.

This was life in Australia in the 1940s and beyond. It was still life there in the 1980s (and so, presumably, it was similar for poor people in the UK).