THAT 14 million people within the UK, including greater than 4 million children, reside in poverty is a “wearily familiar” statistic that masks human suffering, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF’s) chief executive, Paul Kissack, has said.
In his foreword to the JRF’s latest poverty report, the primary to look under the brand new government, he writes: “There are few things more foundational for national life than economic security: the power of families to afford the essentials, and of kids to go to high school from a secure, warm home, properly clothed, with food of their bellies. But for too many families, this shouldn’t be the truth of their lives.”
The report, UK Poverty 2025, published last week, is predicated largely on data from before the General Election, and says that 21 per cent of the UK population reside in poverty, of whom 8.1 million are working-age adults, 4.3 million are children, and 1.9 million are pensioners.
These figures, JRF says, are much like those reported in 2021/22, suggesting “an image of stability”. Poverty levels for all three groups had returned to pre-pandemic levels. Child poverty rates have been consistently higher than pensioners’ and working-age adults’.
The report says: “Taking an extended view, we will see that overall poverty barely modified through the Conservative-led Governments from 2010 to the most recent data covering 2022/23. The last period of falling poverty was through the first half of the previous Labour administration (between 1999/2000 and 2004/05), but it surely then rose within the second half of its time in power.”
In that 20 years, poverty has deepened. People described as being in “very deep” poverty, with an income far below the usual poverty line, is now the most important group.
“Between 2020/21 and 2022/23, the typical person in poverty had an income 28% below the poverty line, with the gap up from 23% between 1994/95 and 1996/97. The poorest families — those living in very deep poverty — had a median income that was 57% below the poverty line, with this gap increasing by almost two-thirds over the past 25 years.”
Larger families with three or more children have consistently faced a better rate of poverty, it says: 45 per cent of kids in large families were in poverty in 2022/23. Disabled people, carers, renters, people claiming advantages, and other people in workless households were also at a disproportionately higher risk of poverty.
More recent figures were equally bleak, owing to the continued affects of the cost-of-living crisis. In October 2024, about 2.6 million of the poorest fifth of households (44 per cent) were in arrears with their household bills or behind on scheduled lending repayments; 4.1 million households (69 per cent) were going without essentials; and three.2 million households (54 per cent) in the reduction of on food or went hungry.
“It is obvious that levels of poverty and hardship within the United Kingdom are unacceptably high,” the report concludes.
It recommends steps to: improve employment rates and job security; improve financial protection if people lose their jobs or cannot work for a period, with, for instance, paid leave for meeting caring demands or in sickness; increase the worth of carer advantages; ensure social security base rates are high enough to afford essentials, including permanently re-linking the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) to local rents and removing the two-child cap on advantages; help people to accrue modest savings, obtain inexpensive credit, gain relief from problem debt, and hold assets; and expand access to inexpensive, secure, decent homes, whether rented or owned.
