3 hours ago
4
Your editorial on deepening poverty in the UK (27 January) rightly condemns the decade and a half (and counting) of austerity. Millions of people’s lives have been knowingly worsened by the state. To compound this, countless shared neighbourhood spaces have been closed or sold off, meaning there is less opportunity for community togetherness just when it is most needed.
The UK has the political and financial resources to create a society full of opportunity and security. Instead, successive governments have allowed poverty to continue and ultra-individualism to become normalised.
You highlight the ideological dimension of this. There is also a fundamental ignorance behind it. Our politics is dominated by people who have never lived on a low income and know little of what such a life involves. There are remarkably few ways for people to truly shape government decisions that will determine their own lives.
At regional and city levels, poverty truth commissions have led to new understandings within some councils and public bodies. Localised participation projects have managed to remove barriers, leading to people being heard as never before. But as long as this work exists only on small scales, progress will be inadequate.
The UK must reinvest in our social security system, but it must also find new ways to harness the wisdom of people who access that system. If we can do that, social security, and indeed politics as a whole, can become constructive rather than antagonistic.
Liam Purcell
CEO, Church Action on Poverty
You report on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation study that shows how poverty is growing ever deeper, with increasing numbers of people unable to meet basic needs, however wisely they spend their money (Record number of people in UK live in ‘very deep poverty’, analysis shows, 27 January). This explains why the food banks and other agencies in East Kent are experiencing a relentless rise in demand from destitute families.
In April, the removal of the two-child benefits cap, the expansion of free school meals and the uprating of universal credit and minimum wage at about one-and-a-half times inflation will all kick in, together with the new Crisis and Resilience Fund and the first round of substantial increased support for councils directed at areas of most need. This will lift about a 10th of the children below the poverty line in Thanet, Dover and Canterbury above it and help many others. It will be the biggest single improvement since Gordon Brown, as chancellor, implemented a series of policies aimed at reducing poverty in 2000-05.
Much more needs to be done, but let’s hope that the government continues in the right direction.
Prof Peter Taylor-Gooby
Director, East Kent poverty study
Debates about welfare and defence are often framed as a choice between “guns and butter”. That misses something more basic: national resilience depends on whether people have enough stability to endure shock.
In the UK, millions are already living in survival mode. Poverty, food bank dependence and chronic insecurity are not marginal problems. They indicate a society that has been quietly spending its resilience. This is not an argument against defence spending. It is a warning that a country which normalises precarity in peacetime weakens its capacity to respond to a crisis in wartime.
Dr Simon Nieder
Chesterfield, Derbyshire
