There never was an official description of dereliction and destitution. The social security “safety net” is whatever sum the government of the day pays, with no definition of what it’s supposed to cover. Even though Labour’s tax credits greatly raised the level, no minister ever got trapped into defining the details of what a baseline might look like.
After massive benefit cuts and freezes, despite rising rents and living costs, how could this government explain how someone is supposed to live on the current £85 a week for an adult, or £67 for under-25s? Lee Anderson’s claim that 30p is ample for a day’s food only megaphoned how out of touch a Tory deputy chair can be, as he rubbished “do-gooders” running food banks he said no one needs. Most ministers these days make sure they know the price of a pint of milk and loaf of bread, but as for that miserable £85 a week, how to spend it is a matter for individual choice, they say.
Today, the full array of medical royal colleges, as well as healthcare and children’s organisations, join the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Trussell Trust in writing to the prime minister calling for an “essentials guarantee” so universal credit covers basic survival.
Their letter says: “Every day, we see people unable to afford enough food because their incomes are simply too low. We hear heartbreaking stories from people who are forced to miss hospital appointments because they can’t afford the bus fare, from people who are missing or reducing their medication because they can’t afford the prescription, or from people with diabetes who risk serious complications from going without food.”
They tell him nine out of 10 people on universal credit go without at least one essential. The NHS can’t cure the ailments of poverty, as all the research by Prof Michael Marmot has shown over many years. The NHS Confederation says “80% of what effects health is what happens outside the NHS”. Andy Bell, head of the Centre for Mental Health, says: “Poverty is toxic to our mental health.” Forget the guff about executive stress: it is hardship and debt that causes mental health deterioration.
Here are the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s “essentials”, calculating £120 a week as the barest minimum for one adult: £37 for food, £35 for energy, £6 for clothes and shoes, £8 communications (phone/internet), £16 travel, £13 everything else – toiletries, bank charges, cleaning materials. That’s still hardship: a life of no pleasure, no respite from counting each penny, but not utter destitution, which the foundation defines as the lot of those on incomes below £95 a week.
What would an essentials guarantee of £120 cost? The foundation says the price is £22bn a year more on universal credit. That’s quite a hefty sum, but even in these straitened times there are always choices. A new Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)report lays out damaging effects of the tax system. The report shows how income from capital being taxed less than income from hard work “distorts the labour market”. Equalising these would bring in £8bn in revenue.
Wealth taxes could yield much: a report for the IFS Deaton review of inequality finds: “At a threshold of £2m, it would cover just the top 1% of adults, but at the same rate (1% for a limit of five years) would still raise more than £80bn after non-compliance and administration costs”.
The report also shows VAT zero rates and exemptions cost £100bn in forgone revenue. “They place a large compliance burden on firms and are a very poorly targeted way to redistribute income to lower-income households.” Gingerbread men pay VAT if they have chocolate buttons, but not with dots of sugar.
Other tax perversities abound: why is flying taxed less than driving? Or look at the latest public accounts committee report on the disaster caused by cutbacks in HMRC staff: “eye-watering” losses mean £42bn is now uncollected due to “failure to better resource compliance”. (If you do want to pay, the HMRC helpline has shut down for the summer.)
These are just a few examples: there is money, there are choices. How will the prime minister, back from his California holiday, respond (if at all) to the letter? He will be far more concerned by this week’s backbench rumblings demanding tax cuts than with considering an essentials guarantee.
Labour will not be promising more benefits, after Keir Starmer’s refusal to abolish the two-child limit. Nor is Rachel Reeves offering tax rises. (That doesn’t tell us what they will do in office: past Labour governments are a better guide.) Caution to the point of strangulation is their pre-election policy, wary of public opinion: that £2m mansion tax – utterly reasonable – was a lead-balloon Labour policy in 2015.
In Ipsos’s long-running issues index, “poverty/inequality” ranks only eighth in people’s concerns. The English (more than British) problem has always been meanness of spirit over benefits. But in upcoming research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, focus groups with swing voters in “red wall” seats overflowed with passion and anger over hardship, and not just for themselves but those all around them. That suggests “cost of living” at the top of the issues index reflects concern for others: that the “poverty/inequality” category may not reflect how people actually think.
The question is whether we are now at one of those pivotal moments of change in the political psyche where the scale of debt, struggle, hunger and children going without is finally cutting through the carapace of traditional English thinking that has delivered Tory governments most of my lifetime.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
