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How
poor is poor in modern Britain?
Child
poverty: Highest in London
By Dominic
Casciani
BBC News Online community affairs reporter
12 December,
2002
What do the latest statistics on poverty really tell us about
the poor in modern Britain?
When Prime
Minister Tony Blair pledged in March 1999 to end child poverty,
it sent a ripple of optimism through those who had campaigned
on this issue for years. Three years on, there are some 500,000
fewer children in poverty as officially defined by the government.
There's still more than three million out there. But for most
people, the problem with the debate is that numbers alone
provide little understanding of how poverty manifests itself.
What does
it mean to be a household living on 60% of median earnings
after housing costs, the government's own preferred poverty
threshold? How poor is poor in modern Britain?
The children
we see today do not look as visibly impoverished as the street
urchins of the 19th century. But does it mean they are any
better off?
Labour
fails to help the poorest
"Our idea of poverty is dated," says Martin Barnes
of the Child Poverty Action Group. "What our parents
or grandparents saw as poverty is simply not the same issue
that we have today.
THE
RISK OF BURGLARY
Single
parent families are much more likely to be burgled than the
average household
Source: British Crime Survey 2002
We don't have the same children on street corners without
shoes."
What we
do have, says Mr Barnes, are parents who keep their children
at home rather than sending them to school until they have
begged or borrowed - usually at high rates - the money for
new shoes.
The child
begins to miss out on education and the cycle of low achievement,
expectations and esteem threatens to continue.
Then there's
the estimated 300,000 children who don't get the free school
meals they are entitled to because either they are afraid
of being bullied or their parents are too embarrassed to claim
them.
And in
some cases that might be the only hot meal they would get
in a day.
Poverty manifests itself in different ways and the latest
report Joseph Rowntree Foundation report tries to draw out
all these factors. Take central heating for instance.
There
has been a dramatic rise in the number of homes with central
heating. In 1994/5, a quarter of poor families did not have
central heating. Today that's been cut to just 15%.
HOUSEHOLDS
WITHOUT BANK ACCOUNTS
A fifth
of the poorest households still do not have any kind of bank
or building society account
Source: Govt figures 2002
"This is an astonishing improvement," says Guy Palmer,
one of the report's authors.
"This
is something that has not been in the direct control of government.
It's something that's happened because of the actions of others
such as housing associations."
There
have also been huge cuts in burglaries which have dropped
to their lowest level since the mid 1980s. Both of these are
important issues in tackling poverty as they go to the core
of quality of life.
But looking
at the bald statistics from another direction can tell you
a different story.
Single
parents are almost four times more likely to be burgled than
the average household.
Single
parents are also the most likely not to have any insurance
- and therefore the least likely to be able to replace stolen
belongings.
There
is a problem of banks not being keen to give bank accounts
to people on low incomes or intermittent earnings
Many of these parents will be among the one in five poorest
households in England and Wales without a bank account, a
level of "financial exclusion" which has not changed
for five years.
So if
they get burgled, they will find it virtually impossible to
get short-term loans to replace belongings without slipping
into chaotic and expensive debt.
"If
you are struggling on a low income then it becomes a simple
issue of having enough cash around just to meet day to day
needs so the bank account issue is very important," says
Martin Barnes.
"There
is a problem of banks not being keen to give bank accounts
to people on low incomes or intermittent earnings.
"The
High Street banks all offer basic accounts now they are not
publicising these and there's no evidence they are trying
to improve take-up."
Imaginative
policies
These
are complicated problems. When Labour took power in 1997,
it promised radical and innovative thinking.
Some of
its earliest ideas to tackle poverty have appeared quite radical,
such as Sure Start for single parents or after-school homework
centres on run-down estates. But are the schemes imaginative
enough?
"It's
perhaps too early to think about [any conclusions] on things
like Sure Start," says Guy Palmer. "They need to
take all of these and make them mainstream across the whole
country. The trends are favourable but there are some real
intractable problems."
Martin
Barnes agrees: "There's no question that there is a lot
of policy thinking going on and we must not forget that the
child poverty pledge is only three years old.
"But
sometimes the policies look like an impressionist painting
- some of the brush strokes are too broad to always understand."
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