In the first US Presidential
debate, Mitt Romney mentioned “poor kids” and then corrected himself to say
“lower-income kids, rather”. That was the nearest the candidates or the
moderator got to using the word “poverty”. The job in hand was to get the votes
of the “the middle class” and presumably it was assumed that not enough of them
had any interest in poverty. Indeed, they might react badly to any candidate
who did.
We seem to have a similar
problem on this side of the pond. With all the talk of austerity, and despite
increasing inequality, poverty doesn’t get much of a look in. And prospects for
the future, on present policy, are truly grim.
Last month, a new report
by the Resolution Foundation – based on work by the Institute for Fiscal
Studies and the Institute for Economic Growth – estimated that, even without
further cuts in public expenditure and with steady growth, poverty will
increase further during the present decade.[1] Indeed, even a household
on the middle income of £22,900 will be worse off, while one on £50,000 (which
some disingenuously describe as “middle class”) will be better off. You can
guess for yourself what the prospects are for those over £50,000.
However, since the
publication of this report, further substantial cuts in public spending have
been announced and the latest IMF figures show that, as a percentage of GDP, by
2017 public expenditure in the UK will be even less than that in the US. It
doesn’t get much worse than that in my book: it puts the UK at the
bottom of the list for major developed nations in terms of public spending.
And if all this isn’t bad
enough, surveys suggest that, despite rising poverty, many people want less
spent on social security benefits (or “welfare”, to use the more pejorative
term imported from the US). The notion of the “undeserving poor” is back with a
vengeance. And it’s not difficult to understand why. Sadly, too many people
believe that if statements are in a government press release or published in a
newspaper, then they must be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. This is how misleading, not to say completely untrue, statements about
disability benefits have led people to believe that fraud is most rampant in
that part of the benefit system where fraud (presumably committed by
non-disabled people) is in fact virtually non-existent.
What is true is that
poverty is a result of political choice, as demonstrated so clearly in David
Brady’s recent book, Rich Democracies, Poor People. Poverty isn’t simply the
result of “choices people make”, as some would have us believe. It is the
direct result of public policy.
Poverty, as an issue,
matters to disabled people for many reasons, which of course is why “an
adequate income” is one of the 12 pillars of independent living. Official
statistics suggest that 30% – more than 3 million – disabled people in this
country live in poverty and that disabled people are twice as likely to live in
poverty as non-disabled people. Yet, on very conservative estimates, a disabled
person’s cost of living is at least 25% higher than that of a non-disabled
person. This means that not 30%, but 60%, of disabled people live in poverty.
Not 3 million, but 6 million.
The further assault on
public services and social security benefits will drive even more disabled
people into poverty. It’s clear why those in charge of public policy don’t want
to talk about it. But the rest of us have to.
Roger Berry
Trustee, Disability
Rights UK (in a personal capacity)
[1] The most common definition, adopted in the Child Poverty Act, is
that a family is living in poverty if its income is less than 60% of median
household income, currently around £14,000.
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