90,000 people die in poverty in the UK every year

[JennyJumpup]

Marie Curie have just released a new report that says 10 people die in poverty every hour in the UK. It’s just not right that so many people are spending their final days worrying about money, and the rising cost of living is only going to make things worse.

There needs to be better support in place so people with terminal illnesses can afford to make ends meet. Marie Curie has started a petition calling for government action… please could you sign it? It’s really easy and only takes a minute.

They are calling for things such as giving dying people their state pension no matter what their age, and help with childcare costs for dying parents.

campaigns.mariecurie.org.uk/page/105296/petition/1?ea.tracking.id=eaf

[Admins, I hope it is ok to post this.]

I'm guessing that number is about to significantly go up.

To be clear, it's not dying because of poverty but in poverty. They haven't stated how they define poverty.

I do agree though that people should receive their state pension when diagnosed as terminal.

How does that compare to the proportion of those in poverty in general?

14.5 million are living in poverty @ThreeFeetTall

Absolute poverty or relative poverty? Because the latter will always exist.

Frankly I don't see why it's somehow always the government's fault when people are poor. I've been quite poor myself at times, but I never blamed the government.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

90,000 of 14.5m in poverty die in a year - the mortality rate for those in poverty is thus 6 per 1000. For the whole UK population the mortality rate is 50% higher at 9 per 1000.

In the UK, the most widely used definition of poverty is income less than 60% of the median after housing costs. This means that if everyone's income doubled tomorrow, the number of people living in poverty would remain at 14.5m.

This is from p11 of the report:
Defining poverty
There are several ways of defining poverty and no single definition is universally accepted.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation defines poverty as being:
“When a person’s resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet their minimum needs (including social participation).”9
The Department for Work & Pensions, which publishes ocial poverty estimates for the United Kingdom in its annual Households below average income (HBAI) publication10, uses the following de nitions of ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ poverty:
• A person is in relative poverty, or relative low income, if they live in a household with income below 60% of median household income in that year.
• A person is in absolute poverty, or absolute low income, if they live in a household with income below 60% of the 2010/11 median, uprated
for inflation.
The relative poverty measure is typically used to compare inequality between low and middle- income households. The absolute poverty measure is typically used to consider how the living standards of low-income households change
over time.
For the purposes of the above definitions, income can be measured either before or after housing costs have been deducted (BHC or AHC). As lower- income households spend a larger share of their household income on housing costs, poverty levels are generally higher when incomes are measured after housing costs.
Since 2018, the Social Metrics Commission11 has been publishing estimates of poverty in the UK based upon a new de nition of poverty which considers the extent to which someone’s resources, after housing costs, meet their needs12. This measure considers so-called ‘inescapable costs’ such as childcare and disability, which some households face and that make them more likely to experience poverty. In practice, the definition accounts for the cost of disability by deducting the value of disability bene ts (such as Personal Independence Payments or Disability Living Allowance) from a household’s available resources as a proxy for these costs.
It considers all available
financial resources a household has, such as savings or investments,
in addition to income. It also includes groups previously omitted from poverty statistics, like those living on the streets and those just above the low‐income threshold but in overcrowded housing.
In 2020 the Department for Work & Pensions evaluated the Social Metrics Commission’s work and concluded that it could form the basis of a new measure of poverty for o cial statistics13.
Most of the
findings of the Centre for Research
in Social Policy’s study, and consequently in
this report, therefore use the Social Metrics Commission’s de nition of poverty. While there remain some limitations to this definition – it is likely that simply deducting the value of disability benefits from available resources understates the impact of disability on a household’s
finances – we believe it to be the most comprehensive definition available and the most evidence-based way to account for the additional costs of disability and ill‐health on a person’s
financial situation, and therefore their risk of experiencing poverty.

I think you might be missing the point. The objective is not to apportion blame, but to bring about legal changes so that dying people are (for example) entitled to receive their state pensions.

How would that work in practice? We are all dying…. You have to die within say 12 months or you give the money back? Not trying to be flippant, but who decides if you are dying and how long you have, and how poor your are? Sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare that just wouldn’t work.

If you have less than 6 months to live you should already be able to get PIP quite quickly to help with those extra costs of being ill (not sure how long these claims are actually taking to process at present) www.gov.uk/terminal-illness-benefits

Childcare costs for dying parents- that makes sense.

Excellent—over 8,000 new signatures since yesterday! Please keep it going people… they are almost at their target of 10,000!

who decides if you are dying and how long you have,

When you are dying of something like (for example) cancer, a doctor will tell you an estimated number of months/weeks/days you have to live.

I have a friend with MS. Undoubtedly will die of it. Perhaps 5 - 15 years. For the most part, doctors can’t predict date of death very accurately. Anyway, I don’t dispute the principle just not sure how it works in practice

I'm sorry about your friend. MS isn't classified as a terminal illness.