The VAT increase alone will cost the poorest tenth of families 2% of their income, compared to only 0.8% for the richest tenth. Then there are further bitter pills, also announced in Osborne’s speech, such as changes to benefit uprating (linking most to the historically-lower CPI rather than RPI), freezing of Child Benefit, and a new testing regime for Disability Living Allowance – all of which will hit the poor and vulnerable hardest.

These measures were presented as alternatives to benefit cuts. Yet, slipping under the radar, are a series of changes to Housing Benefit that give the lie to the claim of protecting the poorest. Announced in the speech itself was a reduction in the maximum rents payable to claimants (albeit the figures Osborne gave didn’t match those in the Budget report). In London especially, these are likely to create housing ghettoes – risking Parisian style banlieues on the outskirts of the city, while the centre becomes a wealthy ghetto.

Yet, in the small print of the Budget report, but unmentioned by Osborne, lie two further pernicious, and potentially far wider-reaching changes. First, there will be a reduction in the proportion of properties in any given area that can be paid for with Housing Benefit. At present, Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – the maximum figure that Housing Benefit will pay – is set at the median of local rents. In effect, this means that people on Housing Benefit can afford to rent half of properties of an appropriate size in their local area. That is now being cut to the 30th percentile – or, in other words, more than two-thirds of housing will now be out of reach of benefit claimants. For the true effect of this, it’s worth thinking about what Shelter have to say: ‘nearly half of claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent’. This number can only go up as the pool of housing available to claimants is reduced still further – and the shortfall will need to be made up from their already very low incomes.

The second other major change is that there will be a 10% cut in Housing Benefit for anyone who has been unemployed for a year or more. The effect of this is unambiguous: unemployed people will have to move house, become homeless, or make up the difference from an already pitifully-low £65.45 a week (or £51.85 a week for under-25s). This is nothing less than a stealth cut in benefits.

The Housing Benefit budget has risen by 50% over the past decade, but this is in large part due to a house price ‘boom’, the benefits of which people living in poverty have not shared. Rather than tackle the problem at source – the National Housing Federation estimates that government action could see the number of new social homes built this year slump by 65% – the poorest and most vulnerable are being made to pay. The change in uprating of Local Housing Allowance from RPI (which includes rising housing costs) to CPI (which doesn’t) – also announced yesterday – is particularly cruel, as it ensures that any future house price growth will not be reflected in increases in Housing Benefit. In other words, further stealth cuts in benefits have been built in systematically, and will happen year in, year out.

In summary, these measures, taken as a whole, amount to a stealth cut in benefits – at a time when they are at already historically low levels. Likely effects include an increased ghettoisation of people living in poverty; greater levels of eviction, debt and homelessness; and severe poverty and hardship for millions of people who will be forced to go without essentials to pay for a roof over their heads

There is a limited window of time to fight these changes. Reduced caps on Housing Benefit are due to be enacted in April 2011; reduction in Local Housing Allowance in October 2011; the 10% cut in Housing Benefit to long-term unemployed people in April 2013; and the change in uprating of LHA in 2013-14. Decent housing is a basic human right, and it is under threat as never before in the post-War era. Civil society and fair-minded politicians must fight to ensure that these changes are not allowed to stand.

Our analysis is quite clear: cuts in public spending hit poor people hardest – particularly women, who make up the majority of both public sector employees and public service users. What Toynbee does is put some figures on this. She asked Professor John Hills, Chair of the National Equality Panel, which produced the authoritative report An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, to calculate how the burden of deficit reduction would fall in two different scenarios. And the figures are stark: if the deficit were reduced through spending cuts alone, the bottom fifth of society would lose 12%, while the richest fifth would lose less than 1%. If the money were instead raised by increasing all existing taxes, the figures would be a far more equitable 3.4% and 3.7%.

What I take from this is an important reminder that cutting the deficit is not a cold, managerial activity. There are some profound political and moral choices to be made in how it is done. The new government’s commitment to slashing spending and raising a little through taxes (predicted to come in large part through increasing VAT – one of the most regressive taxes) would have negative consequences across society, but in particular upon the poorest and most vulnerable. But it is not inevitable. We have a deeply unfair tax system, in which the poorest tenth pay 46% of their earnings in tax, while the richest tenth pay only 34%. Rebalancing those inequities is one way in which we can cut the deficit while making our society a little bit fairer.

On a similar note, in its haste to balance the budget in the shortest time possible, the government must not lose sight of the need to keep investing in people. Short-term savings can be illusory, and miss the opportunity to make much bigger gains in the future. For example, for a relatively modest up-front investment in welfare reform, the system could be transformed to allow people to build on their potential, and ultimately make us all better off.

There are myriad options for getting out of the fiscal hole we’re in. We mustn’t let ourselves be told that making our society still less fair is the only way.

Moussa Haddad is Oxfam’s policy officer for sustainable livelihoods in its UK Poverty Programme.

I watch statistics on poverty pretty closely, and this report doesn’t tell us anything new. Every year prestigious bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) monitor poverty and inequality in excruciating detail. We also recently received the latest report by the National Equality Panel, ‘An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK’. There is no shortage of evidence out there in the public arena. I do often wonder how, in one of the richest countries in the world, there is so little public reaction to this regular explosion of shocking facts.

So far so predictable. Both parties in the new coalition government put reducing poverty and inequality at the heart of their electoral platforms. It is only natural that the new government should now examine official statistics in order to establish the extent of the challenge ahead. It’s good that the new government is being completely frank about the scale of the poverty problem this country faces.

Yet what is really significant is that the government appears to be trying to examine the root causes, not just the statistical manifestations, of poverty so it might take action that could help to resolve some of the problems that underpin Britain’s persistent malaise. This approach presents big opportunities to think afresh. It also contains risks if we misdiagnose symptoms of poverty and inequality as causes. Here are three examples:

Welfare dependency

Of course the benefits system doesn’t work. That’s a no-brainer, especially for the millions trying to cope with a stigmatising and hugely complicated system that doesn’t even deliver enough for people to live on. However, welfare remains as vital a buttress against greater poverty and suffering as any other public service. It’s not just a system that helps with money when people can’t get work; it also provides a much wider range of social protection services. We forget at our peril, that for people on low incomes, access to a decent education, to quality health services, to key universal benefits, are absolutely crucial to their ability to cope. When the government looks at the welfare system, it has to look at the whole picture – not just benefits.

The Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) policy reports and recommendations, which have clearly influenced the new government’s report, recommend reducing the number of benefits from 54 to two. Reform on such a monumental scale must be made sensitively. An equalities impact assessment could prove enormously valuable. In a time of austerity, reform should be particularly careful not to adversely damage those whose main job is actually caring for others. Changes to everything from child benefit to disability living allowance should be assessed on this basis.

Multiple disadvantage

This is a huge and un-addressed problem and I am glad to see that a chapter of this new report is devoted to it. There is, however, relatively little attention given to the way gender, race, and class intersect to perpetuate disadvantage. An Oxfam report out this week highlights how social protection mechanisms, particularly universal ones, benefit the poorest the most. The majority of people in more vulnerable groups – single parents, pensioners etc – are still women. Poverty for women is huge and persistent but not often immediately evident from many typical statistics.

Family structure

I have real problems with the assumption that family structure is per se a major cause of poverty. Do children in non-nuclear families tend to be poorer? Yes. Yet I have seen no clear evidence to suggest that ‘family breakdown’ is a cause and not an effect of poverty and deprivation. Also, there’s plenty of evidence about to suggest that single parenthood has little absolute impact on social problems. The alleged relationship of cause and effect becomes even more uncertain when social class and age are factored in. It seems that some statistics in this report are accurate, and yet presented as conclusive proof, when the relationship is not necessarily so clear-cut.

Extending inaccurate logic to deploring social choices contains risks. For those of us old enough to remember, there used to be a climate of stigma against single parents during the 80s, that was deeply corrosive and damaging. There is no reason to suppose that this new government will take the same approach, but planning to influence some social choices could bring disadvantages. In his first speech on the steps of Downing Street David Cameron celebrated the fact that ‘this country is more open at home’. He should stick to his guns on social liberalism while trying to tackle the structural causes of poverty experienced by families – a good approach to solve many of Britain’s social puzzles that are often caused by poverty and tawdry rates of wellbeing. For example, let’s make sure that women don’t end up poorer at the end of their lives by fixing a pensions system rigged against those with broken work records, where women still find that being in and out of caring means they will rarely qualify for a decent pension.

There is much to be welcomed in the DWP report. Yet we should be careful not to draw hasty conclusions about social choice by examining statistics through the prism of our particular assumptions. Let’s not shy away from encouraging deep thinking about what the causes of poverty and inequality in Britain really are. We have a chance to go beyond policies that tinker with statistical measures, and really change the fundamental underpinnings of persistent poverty in the UK.

If you just said ‘yes’ thrice, then make a 60-90 second film about why we shouldn’t return to business as usual.

Check out this website for more information, or alternatively, here’s Sienna Miller explaining the competition while paying homage to Subterranean Homesick Blues:

(RSS readers click through to watch the video)

A more progressive taxation system:

>>National Insurance has been rising rapidly but it is effectively capped meaning higher earners don’t pay any more than anyone else. Where possible necessary rises in NI, should be replaced by increases in income tax.

>>Reduce indirect taxes such as consumption taxes that disproportionately impact the poor, and reduce demand – much needed during this fragile recovery.

>>Resort to regressive indirect taxes only when they achieve worthwhile social goals, and offset regressive impacts elsewhere in the tax, and benefits system.

>>Reduce the tapers on tax, and benefits

Make welfare a genuine springboard for all:  Pay for strong, and comprehensive social protection (compared to consumer citizens, and narrow workfare policies).

>>Investing in a less myopic welfare system will be cost neutral over the long-term anyway as it will lead to greater employment in more highly skilled, and better paid roles that in turn will increase the net tax-take. The system should also be designed to prevent people being forced into the informal economy. The informal economy proves there is untapped productivity, which if utilised could increase tax receipts.

>>Invest a net £2.7 billion per year to increase earnings disregards and introduce a standard 55% withdrawal rate for both out-of-work and in-work benefits, to end the benefit trap.

>>The administration of the welfare system is far too complex and makes benefits less predictable, which in turn increases financial insecurity and people’s ability to make rational financial decisions – the system has to be radically simplified.

>>There also should be a full analysis of the differentiated effect these measures will have on women and men.

>>As a first step in welfare reform, roll out the Create Consortium’s proposals for a Community Allowance beyond the pilot areas, especially if further evidence supports the view that the model would prove cost-neutral.

Expanded community ownership: With measures to enable poor communities to organise, and access benefits. This would cost £5m to start up the infrastructure, and the facilitation, and would yield savings in the long-term.

Tackle debt at the bottom: Continue and increase investment into DWP’s growth fund that provides small loans with wider access, and longer repayments. £100m would directly enable 225,000 people access affordable credit (rather than having to use high cost lenders), and 80,000 people would be enabled to open a basic bank account or savings account.

Increase family-friendly jobs:

>>Create a pool of employees to provide extended maternity cover so small businesses have no excuse not to hire women.

>>Realise long-term ambitions to extend paternity cover; enabling couples to break away from traditional gender roles at the beginning of parenthood by ensuring the law doesn’t actively encourage one gender to take on the role of primary child-carer.

Economically empower women: £3bn to make childcare affordable, flexible, and accessible. The lack of affordable childcare in Britain (childcare in the UK is the most expensive in Europe) is a key stumbling block for women that want to work. This is the single best way to . Spending here would also enable good nurseries to meet their obligations to provide a minimum amount of free childcare without having to close because of financial pressures. The Government could also remain committed to its recent action on the gender pay gap.

Tackle domestic violence: Ensure secure and stable funding of specialist services for women and girls who have experienced violence (such as rape crisis centres), which are at constant risk of closure. Almost half of women in England and Wales experience domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking in their lifetime, but face a postcode lottery when seeking support

Increase the tax take through better Labour rights:

>>Increase enforcement of labour rights – eg. through more on-the-ground inspectors. The two key agencies the GLA and the EAS only have 64 inspectors between them to inspect the largest and most fragmented agency sector in Europe. We currently only spend about £3 million on these government bodies that have a remit to protect the most vulnerable in society.

>>It is proven that better enforcement is likely to lead to people being brought into the formal economy – increasing tax revenues, and enhancing observance of basic standards like the minimum wage.

Reduce fuel poverty: Invest £5 billion to fully insulate every home in Britain – saving around 10 million households over £200 a year on their energy bills, and helping to eradicate fuel poverty. Fully insulating every house in the UK would reduce household emissions (that amount to a quarter of national carbon emissions) by more than 20%.

Re-skill the unemployed: Provide training for roles in green growth, manufacturing and digital technology. A £5bn investment in the training and mentoring could help drive new growth. This properly funded overarching approach will be accompanied by robust policies to encourage sustainability, and strong policies to support manufacturing, such as targeted Government export insurance guarantees.

Improve social housing: Smash the social scourge of bad housing by investing £2.6 billion per year to meet the government’s annual target of 45,000 new social houses annually. This will also help the construction industry that remains in dire economic straits, and which is an enormous employer, is economically strategically important, and accounts for between 6% and 9% of UK GDP.

Alistair Darling should use the budget tomorrow to introduce a Currency Transaction Levy across Sterling – a safe and lucrative first step towards an international Robin Hood Tax.

Spend 2 minutes to urge the Chancellor to act.

This article also appeared on the Robin Hood tax website

Of those millions in poverty in this country, there is pretty much a 50/50 split between those in working and in non-working households – so the solutions are not clear-cut or one-dimensional. But one of the biggest culprits is the very thing that was set up to keep people out of poverty – the benefit system. It traps people where they are, and means that the move into work costs too much. For example, the Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) recent research concluded that it is common for people going in to work from benefits to keep a quarter or less of what they earn.

We’ve had year after year of welfare reform from governments. Over thirty years, benefit levels have been halved relative to wages, while the number of hoops people have had to go through to claim them has mushroomed. It’s time to accept that these approaches have reached a dead-end. Governments have failed to tackle the benefit trap, while an increase in means-tested benefits has exacerbated the in-work poverty trap, so that people become stuck where they are – whether that be on benefits or in low-paid work. Reforms have tinkered round the edges of a system that assumes people enter full-time work from unemployment in a single step, which has long since ceased to be the reality for most.

So, how could a Robin Hood tax help? Well, there are a few issues that meaningful benefit reform needs to tackle, which include:

• financial disincentives, which mean that being in work (particularly in the type of short term, part time, low paid jobs that tend to be available to people coming off benefits) often pays only marginally more – and occasionally even less – than being on benefits;
• the high risk of financial difficulties and debt caused by cash flow problems between benefits stopping and wages being paid, or vice versa. The complexity and slow administration of benefits also add to the costs of preparing for and entering work. The combined effect of this is that taking work can make people more vulnerable and insecure, rather than protecting them;
• non-financial costs and the challenges of moving to work. This may include difficulties and costs in meeting caring responsibilities; less time to maintain the social networks upon which all people, especially those living in poverty, rely; and the potential to cause or exacerbate mental and physical health conditions.

On the financial side, it just so happens that the CSJ’s research has produced detailed costings of what could be done to go some way towards ending the benefit trap. In essence, it comes down to three things: simplifying the range of benefits that are paid, both in and out of work; increasing the amount someone can earn before their benefits begin to be taken away; and decreasing and standardising the rate at which they’re withdrawn after that. These proposals are not perfect – they leave benefits at very low levels, and don’t sufficiently consider the non-financial aspects of people’s livelihoods – but they’re a great start. And, at an estimated £2.7 billion, it’s small change from a Robin Hood tax. It will also most probably pay for itself in time, as the enormous untapped potential of the informal economy is brought into the mainstream.

Spending this money now will allow people to gradually enter or re-enter the world of work, and give them the incentives to stay in employment. It will make sure that they face less of the financial and other risks of entering work, and that the state does more to mitigate those risks. And it will allow social security once again to live up to its name.

Structural impoverishment in Britain is rife.  13.5 million people live in poverty, that’s one in five. The historical trend and outcomes of recent attempts to make things better indicate that without radical reform this situation won’t change much in our lifetimes. If this was widely understood, decision-makers would be far more likely to implement radical but rational measures like the Robin Hood Tax.

The state of the Nation

Here are some hard facts:

Rich richer, poor poorer:
Since 2002 the poorest tenth have become £9 a week poorer (a lot if you can barely get by). Meanwhile, the richest tenth have £94 more a week (DWP). The assets owned by the richest tenth in Britain utterly dwarf the poorest tenth’s possessions; they are at least 100 times more valuable (The Government’s ‘Hills’ Report’, Jan 2010).

Tax just isn’t fair:
The poorest fifth pay more tax as a proportion of their income than the richest fifth (39 per cent as opposed to 35 per cent). (ONS, 2009). In that context the 0.05% Robin Hood Tax doesn’t really seem all that radical. Did you know that the differences within the top 0.5% of the country (where many high-flying bankers live) is many times greater than difference between the top 1% and the bottom 1%? It ranges from just over 2.5 million up to Roman Abramovic’s £11 billion so the richest man is actually at least 4,273 times richer than anyone in the top 2%.

It was like this even before recession:
The Government’s figures show little change in the real value of earnings across the distribution for men or women between 2002 and 2008, even before the recession started. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) latest data analysis, 2004-05 marked a “key turning point”, with poverty, unemployment and repossessions on the increase (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, December 2009). Poverty in Britain cannot be solved through economic recovery alone.

Things aren’t getting better:
The long view is far starker. Professor Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document in their influential book, ‘The Sprit Level’ how Britain is far more unequal than it was in the 1970s. Inequality rose increasingly rapidly during the 80s and was almost 50% higher by 1991 than it was at the end of the 70s. We’re still in more or less the same place we were at the end of the 20^th Century.
Politicians of all stripes recognise this picture and worry about the wider implications for the whole of Britain. Alan Milburn, who works on social mobility for the UK Government, said as long ago as 2003 “Children born — as I was — in 1958 were far less dependent on the economic status of their parents than those born in later years. Birth not worth has become more key to life chances. If these trends continue, Britain will be in danger of grinding to a social halt. Responsibility and enterprise will be thwarted.”

Poverty in Britain is a trap:
For years political actors have agreed that equality of opportunity is right. Yet the harsh reality is that gross inequality of outcome (itself often unjust) often leads to inequality of opportunity. Many people just don’t get the chance to develop the merit they require to flourish in a meritocracy. Just look at exam results (often slated as too high). Last year only 27 per cent of children eligible for free school meals got five GCSEs at grade C or above including maths and English, compared to 54 per cent of other students. In 2009, 175 boys at Eton got three As at A-level. For the entire population of state schoolboys on free school meals, the total was 75. Government figures show that the paths of children from low and high socioeconomic status who have the same high IQ start rapidly diverging when children are as young as 22 months old (Marmot Review, 2010). The fact that it’s hard to escape poverty means that the problem isn’t just big, its endemic.

Many are trapped in debt:
At the bottom of society, even if you total up the value of everything someone in the bottom owns, you still find them deep in debt. They don’t just have next to nothing; they have less than nothing. These are people who play by the rules but still need to borrow to stay afloat however hard they work. It’s impossible to live like this endlessly.

Your identity can make you poor:
The Government’s National Equality Panel has concluded, “the inequality growth during the last 40 years is mostly attributable to growing gaps within groups rather than between them”. But as the panel also points out, there are still systemic differences between groups that are totally unrelated to experience, education and access to services. For example, 67% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are living in poverty, compared to 27% of white children (DWP).

Women are worse off than men:
Data in the Labour Force Survey shows that even when allowing for shorter working hours, women in full time employment earn 22 per cent less per week than those of men. Women’s earnings are highest for women in their early

thirties, and they actually decrease for subsequent years. Only women with high qualifications who work in the public sector tend to see their earnings rising throughout their lifetime (Hills Report).

Being poor means more than having no money:
‘The Spirit Level’ points out that the inequality in developed countries directly correlates with worse levels of wellbeing (social problems like crime and bad health). The Government’s recent ‘Marmot Review’ of health inequalities showed that poor people in Britain live much shorter lives, and on average die seven years earlier than the affluent. They also spend more time disabled: 17 years earlier on average. This is surprising given that Britain has a National Health Service which is free at the point of use and which must meet basic standards. The stats point ultimately to enormous disparities between the lives people lead as a result of the amount of money they have.

Poverty in Britain is similar in nature to poverty anywhere:
In developing countries people are often locked in poverty because their monolithic undeveloped economy is intertwined with a rigidly stratified society that structurally militates against individual or small collective attempts to break free from poverty. There, new forms of economic activity can ultimately help to break these external constraints. One might assume that a developed economy that offered economic freedom, public education and health care, would contain the kind of society that enabled people to improve their lives by their own agency. The reality described briefly above completely contradicts that assumption.

Poverty harms us all:
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimate that poverty in Britain costs the economy £25 billion a year. This economic cost is just the beginning. The decreased wellbeing described above that results from inequality doesn’t just affect people in poverty; it creates social problems like crime, poorer mental health outcomes and decreased community cohesion that affect everyone.

Inequality in context

If any of this wasn’t clear to you before, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. The IFS have pointed out “Most people have little understanding of the income distribution, and many are much further up the scale than they imagine.” The number of people identifying themselves as ‘middle class’ has increased markedly in recent years. As Alastair Muriel who has led the IFS’s work recently observed in the Financial times, whilst you might think a young single graduate in a first job in the civil service fast stream or a top accountancy firm on around £25,000 would be about in the middle of the income distribution, only about a fifth of the population stands between that person and the Queen. Consider almost any classic scenario of ‘middle England’ and you are probably in for a shock. Only 13 per cent of the population are richer than a couple without children earning £50,000 between them. If they have two children under 13, they are still better off than 70 per cent of the population.

The fact that most people (rich and poor) are unaware of where they sit in the income distribution is part of the problem. Widespread unawareness helps to deter politicians from enacting policies that would reduce inequality – policies like the Robin Hood Tax.

Robin’s role

We can draw two lessons from the reality of UK poverty – one sobering, one cheering.

Firstly, even experts have underestimated how complex and comprehensive the problem is. The fact that poverty has only remained roughly stable over the past 20 years despite political consensus that poverty in a rich country is wrong shows poverty is a tough nut to crack.

Our lack of progress requires some deep soul searching. As outlined above, gross inequalities destroy any pretence of meritocracy by preventing many from acquiring the means to compete for opportunities that are only nominally available to all. This reality is already eliciting a variety of responses. For example, Philip Blond and John Milbank recently asked whether, if we want to make society fairer but we accept that some inequality is the product of real variations in merit and graft, won’t we need to find ways to differentiate between merited and unmerited inequalities before we start ending them? There are big discussions ahead, but one thing is certain: poverty will be endemic in Britain until there is massive social and economic renewal.

But more positively, if innovative measures like the Robin Hood Tax are passed the outlook will be much brighter. We might not know everything, we do know a lot. We know that basic faults in the system make things worse. The state’s actions sometimes inadvertently worsen poverty. That means the Government can achieve real change through reform. For example, aside from the blatant unfairness of much of the tax system, why is it that Marginal Tax Rates (the proportion of the additional income gained through working that is then rescinded to the Government through tax or the withdrawal of benefits) are far higher for people earning less than £13,000 than anyone earning more than that? In fact it is 50% higher than for people earning more than £150,000! This situation gets far worse if we go further down the income scale. For example, for those who can earn just enough to pay tax but can’t find more than 30 hours of work a week, working brings no material reward. When you play by the rules, do your best to contribute by working and still lose out, that’s not fair.

That’s just one of the reasons we need a Robin Hood tax. We estimate it will cost £2.7 billion per year to increase earnings disregards and introduce a standard 55% withdrawal rate for both out-of-work and in-work benefits, to end the benefit trap (based on calculations by the Centre for Social Justice and the IFS). A Robin Hood tax would give us billions each year so the landmark achievement of pro-poor welfare reform would be just the beginning of what a Robin Hood tax could do. Actually we could also end fuel poverty, create affordable housing, help break the manacles of personal debt, and meet the Government’s targets to halve child poverty.

If there’s one final lesson to be drawn from the small example of welfare reform it’s this: the Robin Hood tax isn’t about stealing from the rich and just giving to the poor. In a time of severe fiscal constraint, a Robin Hood tax would be a lifeline that if deployed effectively would allow people in poverty to make a better life for themselves and their children, a chance denied to many for decades, not just since the downturn.

A Robin Hood tax could help us create the society we all wish to live in. We may be in the shadow of recession, but we shouldn’t wait until recovery dawns to fight poverty. After all, Robin Hood didn’t wait for the Lionheart’s return.

Ben Morgan works on policy and public affairs for Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme. His post here first appeared on the Robin Hood Tax website.

Like all good press officers, I listen to the Today programme every morning. This morning I heard two things I had heard already. The first was an interview with the RSPB – how often are they on the Today programme? I’m sure it’s at least once a week. Who knew there was so much to say about birds? They must have a fantastic press office.

 The second was that the inequality gap is now the widest it has been since the end of the second world war. The JRF published research on this more than two years ago; we found that inequality was at a 40 year high – in fact I’m fairly sure today’s headline on the BBC website is exactly the same as it was back in July 2007.

 Some ask why the inequality gap is important at all. I guess that it comes down to what kind of society we want to live in – one where everyone has the same opportunities at birth, or one where the accident of who you are born to means your future is pretty much mapped out for you . It’s confusing though, as what is supposed to happen to people at the top? I can’t see doctors’ and lawyers’ children suddenly all taking blue collar jobs.

 With an election coming up, all the parties are focusing on what they will do about the inequality gap. There is a general feeling that people should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Duncan Banatyne’s autobiography is called “Anyone can do it”. But it’s not true. As John Hills points out today, the ladder is harder to climb as the gaps between the rungs get wider.

 So should we be trying to stop the rich getting richer or should we be trying to help more people out of poverty? The answer is probably a bit of both, but JRF is particularly interested in understanding why poor people are poor, and what can be done about that.

 We know that inequality is not inevitable; plenty of countries have a much smaller inequality gap. However, narrowing the gap is a long process and requires commitment not just from governments, but from all of us.

 PS – if anyone from the RSPB is reading, I’m just jealous!

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book ‘The Spirit Level’ set out comprehensively to demonstrate that more equal societies are better for everyone. In their update, which they wrote about in this Saturday’s Guardian, they also knock on the head some all too prevalent myths linking single parenthood with social breakdown.

They state that ‘national standards of child well being seem unaffected by high rates of single parenthood.’ Or put another way, a country with higher rates of children brought up by married parents, won’t necessarily be one with happier children.

This finding shouldn’t come as a bombshell. Last week the Children’s Society published a study of child wellbeing in the UK, showing that levels of family conflict were much more important than family structure in explaining how happy children told researchers they were with their lives – differences in family type explained only two per cent of how happy a child felt with their life.

The OECD, had already come to the same conclusions when they looked at international evidence on the impact of growing up with a single parent on how children get on. The research does show that children in single parent families have worse chances across a range of areas. But its not the fact of growing up with one parent rather than two that explains these – it’s the poverty and family conflict that all too often accompanies single parenthood. And as the OECD put it, “If there is a causal effect on child well-being of being brought up in a single parent family, it is likely to be small.”

Single parents are still an easy target when seeking culprits for social problems. But the research shows that policies targeting single parenthood alone won’t make life better for children. It’s much harder to try and tackle poverty, to provide good quality employment for families, and to ensure that when parents do separate, children don’t get caught in the middle. Gingerbread set out some ideas of how to start in December. We hope that the debate in the run up to the election can focus on the hard questions – and not on the easy stereotypes.

Will Horwitz works on communications for East London Charity Community Links. He is also an alumnus of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme. (Community Links are spending this week debating how the media portrays poverty).

A couple of years ago a headline in the Mail screamed “Welcome to Britain, land of the rising scum…. We’ve cornered the market on welfare layabouts, drug addicts and feral gangs.” An extreme example, certainly, but still perhaps illustrative of the way people on benefits, unemployed, or on low incomes are portrayed in the media.

Significant research over the last few years has shown how, even in less vitriolic publications – across newspapers, TV, and radio – depictions of people in poverty are unrepresentative, overwhelmingly negative, and often have scant respect for the individuals featured, despite the best intentions of many journalists.

We’ve decided to spend a week debating this on the Community Links blog. We’ve invited contributions from a wide range of people, from award-winning bloggers to young people from Newham. New ones will be going up every day. The first is a fascinating look at how coverage of the Edlington attacks illustrates the media’s focus on the ‘visible poor.’ Sign up for email updates or follow the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept up to date.

A couple of weeks ago I suggested some reasons why media portrayals of poverty are so important, and below are some questions to consider throughout the week. If you’d like to write a post then please get in touch, otherwise please do let us know your thoughts in the comments boxes under each post.

Finally, thinking and writing about these issues is important, but doing something is even more so. I hope we can arrive at some new ideas or new commitments to do something differently by the end of the week. In the meantime, please join the debate.

Some questions to consider

• Does it matter how the media portrays poor people?
• Are ‘poverty’ and ‘poor’ even the right words?
• Should charities engage with the media on this issue?
• Are you already doing work to change the way people are portrayed?
• What else could we do (as charities, individuals, journalists?)
• How does it feel to be portrayed in one of these programmes?
• What’s it like, as a journalist, trying to cover stories about these issues?