Poverty is a clever sort of evil. It manages not only to exist in a country as wealthy as ours, but to thrive: 13 million people in the UK live in poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a figure so huge it is hard to comprehend. And it does it all behind a mask of inevitability, an ingrained – sometimes sneering, sometimes weary – acceptance that this is unavoidable.
It is said that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. The second is acknowledging it is a problem that can be fixed. How many of us believe poverty is something that we can get rid of? That we can actually have a country where no one has to spend their life struggling to buy their next meal, keep the electricity on or pay the rent? It’s utopian, it’s said, or classic “lefty” unrealistic thinking. The sort of hope that works in theory, perhaps, but will fail to add up in the real world.
Today the foundation releases a plan to solve poverty in the UK in a generation: a comprehensive strategy that would mean, by 2030, that no one would be destitute, and no one would be in poverty for more than two years. The first of its kind, it examines the causes of poverty around the country and points to practical measures to fix them: from more affordable housing to a more highly skilled workforce and an adequate benefit system.
More than a million people in the UK are so poor they can’t afford to eat properly, keep clean or stay warm and dry. Newborn babies sleep on the floors of B&Bs. Grown men are crushed to death after scavenging for food in skips. Disabled children sit in their own urine because parents can’t pay the utility bills that would enable them to wash their clothes. We are a nation playing at civilisation.
Progress, by definition, supposedly comes with time, but so-called modern Britain appears to be going backwards. Child poverty is predicted to rise sharply over the next four years. In-work poverty – that deceptively bland description for capitalism at its worst – has risen sharply over the past decade, as it has become normal for a worker to spend eight hours stacking shelves in a supermarket and then have to go to a food bank to be able to eat.
Yet poverty myths – including the belief that there is a rung on the social ladder on which perch people who have asked for their own destitution and do not merit anything better – have returned with a vengeance, and remain a comforting way to rationalise such a system. They conveniently enable those with power to wash their hands of their responsibility not to harm families on low incomes, let alone do anything to help them.
Poverty is not a stalking shadow. It doesn’t happen to lurk in some children’s classrooms and beds, separate from the decisions of government, businesses and voters. It is constructed. And because it is caused by the ways in which we choose to arrange how we exist as a society, it can be ended if we choose to arrange ourselves differently. There have previously been moves in that direction by politicians – between 1997 and 2010 Labour reduced the numbers of children living in poverty by 800,000 – but it is time the ending of poverty for every citizen was seen as a serious political objective.
This is not impractical dreaming, but rational thinking. Rather than spending money on the NHS, schools and other public services where an increasing share of resources is devoted to picking up the pieces of the impact of poverty – £78bn a year, according to one recent report – we need the government to fund policies that would address the causes: soaring rents, high living costs, poor health, low wages and low skills.
Some measures can be tiny – for instance, helping low-income families avoid the “poverty premium” by moving away from a system that forces them to use pre-payment meters for gas and electricity. Other measures are bigger, from building more affordable housing to investing in education and training (an estimated five million adults in the UK don’t even have core literacy or numeracy skills). All are within our grasp if politicians, business leaders, and the public work together.
Theresa May went into office lamenting the struggles of families “just managing to get by”. It is not a time for lip service, or sticking plasters around the edges. This country is sick to its bones with poverty. It is time to demand its eradication and accept nothing less.
