Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty
“I’ve mainly been living on soup just so my little boy can have what he needs really.” That’s not something you expect to hear from a young mother living in Britain today. Such stark choices are not supposed to exist in the fifth biggest economy and a country which believes in justice and compassion. And yet, that is the reality of life for many in the UK.
In 2017 more than one and a half million people were destitute in the UK, 365,000 of them children.1 That’s the equivalent of the populations of Birmingham and Liverpool combined.
Destitution is the most severe form of poverty. By and large it is the culmination of living on very little for a sustained period of time – it’s what forces a mother to choose between feeding herself and providing the basics for her son.
Perhaps surprisingly, the likelihood of destitution is actually greatest for men under the age of 35 – a group also greatly at risk from poor mental health, self-harm and suicide. One young man interviewed for the research told us: “Mentally it was a real strain. If it wasn’t for friends and family I don’t know if I’d still be here to be honest”.
Less surprising is the fact that destitution is most common in the cities of Northern England, the Midlands and Scotland which still bear the scars of deindustrialisation, as well as a few London boroughs. Although Oxford also features in the 10% of places with the highest rates of destitution, showing more prosperous areas are not immune.
That destitution exists on this scale should be shocking enough, but even more troubling is the fact that many people are being made destitute ‘by design’. Not because of peculiarly dire circumstances that are unpredictable or exceptional, but because of policy choices made which have left growing gaps within the social security system.
An ever-eroding safety net helps explain why single men are so vulnerable – they are most likely to be dependent on the minimum support the benefits system has to offer, and at a time when rents are rocketing and living costs rising. The inadequacies of the welfare system leaves people backed into a corner so that when their circumstances change, they have no alternative support to turn to.
There are three specific actions that the UK government could take now to protect those at risk of destitution and relieve the burden it is placing on the thousands of families already suffering.
Firstly, they should end the current freeze on working-age benefits. Most benefits for working age people have now been frozen since 2016, which means as inflation pushes up the cost of living, benefit recipients have been getting poorer.
Secondly, the use of sanctions within Universal Credit must be reformed so that people are not left destitute ‘by design’. Sanctions are an essential part of a conditional welfare system – without them there’s no backstop for when people aren’t playing by the rules. But sanctions should be proportionate, and applied fairly. The current regime means someone could receive a 3-year ban on receiving benefits, leaving them with little by way of financial support.
And thirdly, they should review the total amount of debt that can be clawed back from people receiving benefits, so people can keep their heads above water. At the moment, the system that is supposed to protect families from harm is actually making them more vulnerable. Many people in poverty are in debt to central government and their local council, and the methods used to collect funds for council tax arrears, benefit advances and utility bills are leading to destitution.
This is not about making the welfare system overly generous, or removing the expectation that where people can work, they should be actively looking to do so. It is about ensuring that individuals and families, facing often dire circumstances, can afford the basics – rent, electricity, food, shampoo, shoes. That’s surely the minimum a compassionate society should provide for those most in need.
When in 1899 a report by Seebohm Rowntree into poverty in York was read by then Liberal MP Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister responded that the findings ‘made my hair stand on end’.
Last week’s report should be no less shocking for today’s politicians.
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SubscribeTake courage, Stephen, and do what’s right for you. Not that I’m encouraging you to break the rules. We all know what happens when the editor of a national newspaper breaks the rules – nothing!
You understand your condition and you understand your vulnerabilities. Take advice from your consultant and apply the principles of hygiene and social distancing that will keep you safe. The Government could tell all shielding people tomorrow that they can stop doing it but you wouldn’t, would you? And neither would anyone else. So try to feel in control of your own life, rather than controlled by others. Use CBT techniques to calmly assess the risk of any outing rather than just feeling it’s risky.
And remember there are many of us out here cheering you on.
The second wave in 1918 came in the autumn. It was indeed more virulent than the first wave. Why?
During the first wave, distancing and travel restriction measures were established fairly quickly. That did two unfortunate things:
(1) There were significant populations with relatively little exposure to the first wave (as Tom Chivers notes about Covid-19 outside London),
(2) The milder strains of H1N1 (1918) that did not take people to hospital had their transmission rates suppressed by the distancing measures, while the nastier strains concentrated people in hospitals etc where medical and support staff were exposed.
Point (2) is very important when considering suppression measures. One must look not only at the immediate problem, but also at how what we do will influence the evolution of the pathogen. Normally a pathogen evolves in a milder direction because the mildly sick and asymptomatic people continue to circulate, while the very sick take to their beds. In 1918 the H1N1 was pushed towards greater virulence.
In spring 1918, the Influenza was felling large numbers of youthful people, so a general suppression policy was very understandable. Covid-19 is very different. Healthy youths run very little risk of severe illness, let alone death.
I fear the lockdown policy will turn out to be an “own goal”. There will almost certainly be a second wave in the autumn, because there is always a reservoir of coronaviruses in the population. That wave may be more lethal than the first wave, on account of what we have done this Spring. I hope I am wrong.
Or you could say he understands nuclear diplomacy better than the nuclear diplomats. If nuclear diplomacy is a game of bluff, you do actually need to be holding some cards to bluff with. Trump upsets a lot of people because he threatens those whose careers depend on the status quo. But that doesn’t mean the status quo isn’t threatened from other directions. Attempting to preserve the status quo simply because it is the status quo and ignoring the threats is a sure way to lose it.
I’m in America so forgive me if this question seems foolish. Were you really not allowed by the government to go outside to your own garden? Surely there is 0.0000000000000 chance that this virus would be passed to anyone by such a practice?
This is my husband – he has COPD and has had for nearly a decade. Before covid his only real issues were walking uphill and making sure he got his yearly flu jab. I just asked him now if he was scared of going out now lockdown is being relaxed somewhat (he is in the shielded group) – I was surprised to hear that yes he is a bit scared and will not be going out (barring a few late night walks when no-one is around) until it becomes clear whether or not there are going to be any consequences from the loosening of lockdown. This is not good news for me as I am the only one going out for essential shopping and, of course, have to be really careful that I do not catch the virus and take it back home and infect my husband. The media have more than played their part in making sure that everyone is terrified of catching the virus, regardless of actual risk, and I have sympathy for a new government who are having to deal with a situation that last occurred around a hundred years ago. I think this virus is here to stay and we need to learn how to live with it, and work out how the most vulnerable can be protected – it is NOT healthy or desirable to have people staying home for months on end with no interaction with the wider world and exercise in the fresh air (such as it is, given we live in a city).
But more importantly, what’s the ‘infection’ rate of a collapse of the economy? More like 100%, I’d say. That makes _all_ medical questions utterly irrelevant.
Covid deaths per million population: Sweden still below UK, but who knows (a) how it will progress and (b) whether the numbers are accurate given the widespread recording of covid on death certificates, regardless of test status. What we can say at this stage is that Sweden’s strategy has not resulted in a rampant epidemic in that country – perhaps they have even more common sense than we do in the UK.
Test message. Thank you 🙂