UK Poverty Post

Anti poor prejudice in the press leads to bad public policy

One area of Oxfam’s work in the UK is on public attitudes to people in poverty and people on benefits. To some this seems a rather academic way of fighting poverty, rather than directly dealing with its effects. However the way politicians respond to the negative public and media discourse around poverty can have a profound effect on people’s lives. As I found last week, small changes in the housing benefits legislation – brought in to grab one day’s headlines and currently under consultation – could have a punitively damaging effect on large families.

So the background… I spent much of last week writing a response to a government consultation on the change in the Local Housing Allowance, which will cap – at five – the number of rooms for which a large family can claim housing benefit. The current regulations don’t have a limit but are based on making sure everyone has adequate living space.

In October last year the media created a furore by highlighting a few exceptional cases in which large families were living in expensive houses on benefits. In particular, the case of Toopakai Saiedi – an Afghan mother of seven whose family were living in a house with rent of £12,000 a month. The Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn complained; ‘One person who will not be losing any sleep over the impact of the financial crisis is Toorpakai Saiedi, an Afghan mother of seven living in West London and receiving £170,000 a year in benefits…she is luxuriating in a £1.2 million double-fronted, seven-bedroom Edwardian villa, her staggering rent of more than £12,000 a month picked up by the British taxpayer. ” While the Sun asked the somewhat unbalanced question: ‘Do you think state spongers should be stopped or are you fine with freeloading?’

The government’s consultation on the law admits that this case is unrepresentative; this media campaign missed the true face of people living on housing benefits and the problems of overcrowding. According to the housing charity Shelter, in 2006/07, 554,000 households in England were overcrowded… overcrowding has a detrimental effect on family relationships and health, as well as having a damaging influence on children’s education and emotional development.

However, the government’s housing policy seems not to respond to the work of expert housing charities such as Shelter. Instead, James Purnell announced the current review with the aim of bringing in a 5 bedroom cap – hailed as a “victory for the Sun” – on Oct 21st. This policy is entirely symbolic, as can be seen by the relatively small number of families that will be affected, an estimated 5,000 people (less than one per cent of the housing benefit case load). Policy and media discourse that suggest poor people are lazy or greedy is often based on these atypical cases and leads to hugely unhelpful lack of information on poverty and ultimately to bad policy.

This change goes against current government policy on ending child poverty. Children are disproportionately represented in large households who claim benefits for houses with over five rooms, making up around 3,000 of the 5,000 households that will be affected.

This kind of knee jerk response to a regressive media campaign has the potential to condemn children to a cycle of re-housing, repossession, and overcrowding for the crime of having been born in a large family. It is one of many recent issues highlighting the importance of campaigns on public attitudes to poverty.