The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest report on poverty in the UK, published this week, should be read first and foremost as an indictment of all Conservative governments between 2010 and 2024. During almost a decade and a half of Tory rule, the JRF estimates that no progress at all was made in reducing overall levels of relative hardship. No surprise perhaps. Through wide-ranging, ideologically driven welfare cuts, ministers actively sought to make life harder, not easier, for many of the least well-off.
The grim legacy of that approach is that in 2023-24 – the last dataset available – about one in five people were in relative poverty, defined as less than 60% of median income. But it also turns out that 6.8 million people were struggling to survive on far, far less than that, having effectively been economically cut adrift. Some 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022. As the JRF’s chief analyst, Peter Matejic, puts it: “Poverty in the UK is still not just widespread, it is deeper and more damaging than at any point in the last 30 years.”
Tory austerian-in-chief George Osborne and his imitators have a lot to answer for. But Mr Matejic’s chastening observation is also directly relevant to today’s political debates. Much of the Westminster bubble appears to be in thrall to the notion that Britain’s welfare budget must be cut substantially in the age of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, in order that the nation’s resources can be diverted towards security spending. As this report starkly underlines, millions of the poorest people in the country – many of them in work – would not be in any position to weather such a storm. They are already being forced to go without food, deep in debt and unable to pay their bills.
The moral bankruptcy of “guns versus butter” arguments will not stop the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage making them, supplemented by bogus talk of fostering “personal responsibility”. But having belatedly scrapped the two-child benefit cap, it ought to become the Labour government’s vocation to make a different socioeconomic case between now and the next election.
After being plunged into penury by spiralling food, energy and housing costs, a substantial section of the population is unable to do more than live from day to day. Subsistence-level basic benefits and prolonged wage stagnation have compounded the crisis. A shaming number of families are routinely hungry, tired, stressed and isolated, and in no position to make a bigger contribution to the rest of society.
This is a scandal, of course. But in solely economic terms, the doom loop of despair is also a colossal waste of available human capital. Such squandered potential will not be accessed through welfare cuts that circumscribe impoverished lives even further. Nor will rearming at the expense of the least well-off do anything for social cohesion at a time when far-right forces are successfully exploiting a crisis of faith in politics.
From the great crash of 2008 to the cost of living crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s economy stagnated and its poorest citizens got even poorer. As the JRF points out, a more adequately resourced welfare state would act as a catalyst for growth by restoring economic agency to those who need it most. A reframing of the welfare debate is overdue. When will the penny drop at Westminster?
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