Even before the energy crunch, statistical warning lights were signalling a return to levels of penury we once thought had been consigned to history: in the 2010s, diagnoses of malnutrition in hospital and the official count of rough sleepers both doubled, while the number of food banks skyrocketed.
According to Matthew Desmond – the American sociologist who moved to a Milwaukee trailer park to witness privation close up – “poverty isn’t a line” but “a tight knot of social maladies”, “a relentless piling on” of difficulties. This comes through vividly in the stories uncovered across the UK by reporters I have been working with to illuminate the causes of the poverty crisis and possible remedies. Stories like that of Sandra, a disabled Buckinghamshire woman whose lack of a decent bed aggravated her asthma to the point where her heart briefly stopped; or of Lindsay – 600 miles north in the Orkneys – who lies under sheets damp with condensation feeling not only cold, but also “mad”; or of Sophie in Manchester, Lowri in Blackpool and Yvonne in Tottenham, north London, whose reluctance to tell family and friends about the hunger they face distances them from the very people who could offer support through hard times. Or indeed, tales of the empty days of Francis in Glasgow, which led him to seek comfort in drink, which in turn left him with too little money for the right food, too little iron in his body, and therefore too few healthy red blood cells.
Every deprivation twists into another form, which makes poverty a complex phenomenon. At the same time, it’s an extremely simple problem: very many in Britain don’t have enough money. Not all the troubles listed in the previous paragraph would disappear with extra resources, but a lot would. All would be soothed.
We know it can be done, because we did it during the pandemic – with remarkable results. Thanks to emergency interventions, above all a temporary £20 a week increase in Universal Credit, poverty actually fell. So did extreme manifestations like rough sleeping. But emergency relief is one thing. What about a durable answer? Here, too, we have positive experience to draw on, with the so-called “pensions triple lock”.
From the Elizabethan period with its poor laws through to the poor houses of Victorian times, and on to the era of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, poverty used to be overwhelmingly a problem of old age. No longer. Pick an older person at random today and they’re less likely to be living below the breadline than someone plucked from the population as a whole. Why? Because of a decent safety net. In the financial year 2022-23, the minimum weekly income guaranteed for a single pensioner was £185.15, three times the woeful £61.05 a week the young unemployed were expected to scrape by on.
How did this difference get so big? Around the turn of the century New Labour increased that guaranteed floor for poorer pensioners, then linked it to earnings. A few years later, the (near-universal) basic pension was also pegged to earnings, before the coalition added the “triple lock” twist, meaning it would always rise to keep pace with earnings, prices or 2.5% – whichever was highest.
By contrast, thanks to a series of austerity squeezes and freezes, basic support for unemployed people has been allowed to lag behind prices for eight of the last 10 years, and indeed to drift behind wages ever since the 1970s. Each annual difference is small, but the cumulative effect is enormous. Whereas in postwar Britain, the value of the basic benefit safety net bobbed between a quarter and a third of the typical weekly wage, since the early 1980s it has sunk from about 25% to a mere 13%. Many years ago, I analysed decades of data and established that fully half of the great inequality surge of the 1980s was accounted for by the accretion of modest annual adjustments to benefits and tax thresholds.
A “triple lock against poverty” could, incrementally but remorselessly, exert an equally profound reverse effect. The government would tie its own hands by committing to annual rises, most importantly in the main Universal Credit allowances, so it could only be stopped by fresh legislation – a political headache that would give ministers pause. The first two criteria of the lock – prices and earnings – are familiar. But whereas Liz Truss toyed with tying benefits to lagging wages, the highest of the two would now automatically prevail. Given that benefits have fallen so far, and with pay so often stagnant, a third element is needed to secure decent progress. Rather than the 2.5% minimum rise of the pension lock, which only kicks in when inflation is low, I’d suggest an extra 1% rule – so that benefits would rise by “the best of prices and wages – plus another one percentage point”, at least until basic benefits are back up to a half-tolerable wage replacement rate of 20%-25%, which might take a decade. After that, a double lock might suffice.
But will Keir “sound money” Starmer judge it affordable? There are three reasons he should. First, in any given year, the bill is modest – perhaps £1bn-£2bn extra on a £100bn working age benefit bill, about the same as Truss’s stamp duty tweaks, which Rishi Sunak decided weren’t worth the bother of reversing. Second, although the cost will steadily rise, if Starmer can secure the highest growth in the G7 – something he has already staked his reputation on – revenue will flow in. There is nothing unaffordable about poorer people sharing in general prosperity. Indeed, when they don’t and poverty mounts, ill health, mental fragility and crime all hit the public purse.
Finally, as per Harold Wilson, the leader who won more elections than any other, Labour “is a moral crusade or it is nothing”. An anti-poverty lock avoids saddling safety-first Starmer with a sudden bill, but also allows him to demonstrate that going for evolution over revolution doesn’t mean giving up on meaningful change.
• Tom Clark is a fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and editor of Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis (Biteback).
Further reading
The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey (Ebury Press, £20)
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond (Penguin, £25)
The Forgotten Girls: An American Story by Monica Potts (Allen Lane, £20)
