If you work in a shop, you’ll have noticed an extraordinary wave of thefts that retailers link to a growing black market in food. If you work in a hospital, you might have clocked a surge in diagnoses of malnutrition and other dietary deficiencies among patients. If you’ve walked around any large British city with your eyes open of late, you’ll have noticed a proliferation of street tents.
The crisis of penury gripping the UK has long been abjectly evident everywhere – except in the official poverty data. The chancellor and the prime minister have lost no chance to boast that Conservative-led governments have since 2010 “lifted” two million people, including hundreds of thousands of children, “out of absolute poverty”. The experts explain that this particular count will always go down just so long as poor people are thrown a few crumbs from a growing economy – and that those crumbs have been very small of late.
But voters tune out technical arguments. A vague sense that there are lies, damned lies and poverty statistics suggests you’re better off engaging your brain with something else.
The damning new dossier of official data published on Wednesday should be the moment to shake the country out of this sort of stupor. Like the totemic “3 million unemployed” of the 1980s, the record 4.3 million children growing up poor is one of those rare numbers that constitutes a real scar on the country.
What’s devastating for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt is that even their artfully picked “absolute” poverty yardstick is now measuring things getting rapidly worse. The number of children below that breadline has jumped by 300,000 in a single year, from 3.3 million to 3.6 million. Either way, all the supposed progress since 2010 is wiped out; leave housing out, and the tally of children in absolute poverty is not just up sharply this year, but higher than a decade ago.
In hundreds of tables in the document, there was bad news everywhere you looked – average living standards down, inequality up, more kids rated as “deprived” with reference to particular things the government asks about, such as warm winter coats and going on school trips. There was even a “significant” increase in deprivation among pensioners – a worrying turning of the tide, because reducing poverty among older people has been Britain’s greatest 21st-century social policy success.
The government reflexively asserted that in these challenging times, things would be three times worse without the various support measures it had provided through the recent energy crunch. There is something in that, but carefully factoring in the emergency and the response actually darkens the picture. The new numbers calculate living standards using the general rate of inflation, even though official statisticians have elsewhere calculated that the soaring price of essentials has recently meant living costs rising fastest for poor people.
Worse, the new data is already out of date. In the 2022/23 period covered, cost of living payments were indeed important, but that scheme came to an end last month. Inflation may finally be falling, but the price of energy, food and most other things are still way up compared to low incomes. In sum, we may still be understating the true extent of the problem for the world we’re moving into, a world without emergency relief.
To understand what all the numbers mean at a human level, we need to listen to people such as Yvette Clements, from Norwich, whose disabled daughter Rosie can’t regulate her own body temperature. There is, as she explained to the BBC, no alternative to keeping the heating on, but this had a consequence: Rosie no longer eats in the evening “because I can’t afford dinner”.
The effects include humiliation as well as hunger: millions are struggling to keep clean. One of them, Sandra (not her real name), whose life is dominated by extreme asthma, told the Guardian’s Frances Ryan that she was showering less as “the cost is just too much”.
MPs have thousands of similar stories from their own constituents, but we hear so little about them in Westminster that I’ve begun to fear that many don’t care – or at the very least have concluded that they aren’t stories that our creaking and cash-strapped country can do much about right now.
But here’s the thing. Poverty is getting in the way of pretty well everything that all the parties promise they are going to fix.
Take the NHS. All sides agree that saving it must involve a pivot from remedial to preventive healthcare. But all the frightening trends in the health of our population are umbilically linked to poverty. Even before the pandemic, women specifically in poorer communities had started to die earlier. Almost every imaginable mental health marker – covering diagnoses, drug prescriptions and self-reported anxiety – points to rising problems. Why? Well, England’s anti-depressant hotspots are overwhelmingly deprived, and UK-wide, economically less-secure people report waking up at night with worry much more often than everyone else
Or consider schools. When, as the Observer reported this week, there are pupils begging outside supermarkets, and teachers who find themselves routinely providing showers for the kids and laundering their clothes, they are never going to work well. The ladder of learning is a cruel joke for youngsters living in squalor with no chance of even a good night’s sleep, let alone excelling in homework.
Or indeed, the economy. It will never grow as it should when so many of our young people are having their horizons narrowed by the unremitting mental demands of poverty. But in Rachel Reeves’s big and interesting lecture this week, 58 mentions of “growth” were matched by only three of “poverty”: one referred to the distant past, one trends abroad, and a third proffering “growth” as the answer.
Yes, growth and secure work are one part of the answer. But the truth is that Britain has reached the desperate pass on poverty it has because squeezes, freezes and arbitrary cuts on social security, such as the two-child limit, are making life impossible for millions, including many toiling on low pay. The country can never be fixed until we restore our ideas of decency.
Tom Clark is a contributing editor at Prospect and a former Guardian leader writer
