We’ve already told you quite a bit about what poverty looks like in the UK. But, you may well ask, don’t we have benefits, welfare and social security, in short, a safety net, which tackles that very problem? Allow me to point you to 13.5 million people who might well query how effective that safety net really is.

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.

Now that you’re clued up, have a look at this hilarious video of the Robin Hood dance. Have a bit of a wiggle and then why not get your local Member of Parliament to do the dance too?

Okay, so maybe that seems a bit impossible but what you can ask them to do is show their support by signing the Early Day Motion 913.

It’s simple! Just go to this site, type in your postcode and find out if your MP has signed the EDM. If they haven’t, ask them to and if they have, say thank you.

The record for MPs signing an Early Day Motion was over 500 way back in 2002 so let’s see if we can beat it and get a step closer to making the Robin Hood Tax a reality!

Maya is Oxfam’s Midlands Political Campaigner.

UPDATE 08/03/10: The EDM has 83 signatures, keep up the good work – lets get to 100!

Most people don’t know how much poverty there is in Britain. The ugly truth is much worse than most realise, making a Robin Hood Tax even more important.

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.

Kate Bell is Director of Policy, Advice and Communications at the single parent charity Gingerbread.

Gingerbread is the national organisation supporting single parents in England and Wales. It is 92 years this month since we were formed as the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child – but some of the problems we’re facing today would have looked pretty familiar to our founders.

In 1918 we were campaigning against the Bastardy acts which stigmatised the children of unmarried parents. Today, we’re launching our ‘lose the labels’ campaign, as single parents have told us they’re still being stereotyped and stigmatised.

Single parents head one in four families today, and bring up over three million children. Their average age is thirty six, most work, and most were in a stable relationship when they had their child. But our members tell us they’re still portrayed as scroungers and bad parents – 83 per cent said that the media portrays them in a negative light.

Gingerbread’s campaign aims to tackle the stereotypes. We’ve got Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to sign up to a pledge to tackle prejudice against single parents; you can ask your MP to sign up too here. We’ve also produced a film to try and challenge the stigma.

We hope that we’re starting a debate about how single parents are portrayed, and we hope its one that will lead to fairer treatment. We want single parents to be seen as individuals, not as a short-hand for social problems. Ninety two years on, its time to lose the labels.

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!

Kate Bell is Director of Policy, Advice and Communications at the single parent charity Gingerbread

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.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently produced a guide for journalists on reporting poverty, as part of their public attitudes to poverty project. We were commissioned to promote the resource to journalism educators and support them to cover the subject of poverty in the classroom.

We have done presentations and workshops with journalism post graduate and M.A. students, and the lack of awareness of poverty in the UK shown by the students was quite shocking.

The students were polite, interested, but had very little knowledge of poverty issues.  In fact more questions were asked by the presenters of the students’ courses than by the students themselves.

We asked students if any of the different courses they were taking covered poverty or social issues in general, but although they were available none had covered these areas, as they were optional rather than mandatory subjects.

When pushed for input the students asked a couple of questions.  One thought that people living on benefits received subsidised bus and rail travel and one thought that benefits included having gas, electricity and water bills paid.  A further student informed the group that he had claimed job seekers allowance and that he felt embarrassed at first, however, once some of his friends had lost their jobs and “joined him on the dole, it wasn’t so bad”.

From my point of view I am not surprised that the level of reporting poverty is so poor, as the students had such little awareness of the depth of poverty in the UK, the deep harm that poverty causes society and the desperation people feel when living in grinding poverty.

They also ignore the support that people living in poverty give to each other in communities which are reported as ’sink estates’, and don’t necessarily realise that language such as deprived, poor, worklessness, etc is offensive and demeaning.

This project aims to help journalism students understand what poverty is like in the fourth richest nation in the world.  That trying to live on benefits in 21^st century Britain is near impossible.  That people living in poverty in the UK certainly don’t choose to exist on extremely low incomes. And that aspirations are high despite the inequality and discrimination suffered by those living in poverty.

UKCAP has a short time to complete this project and therefore I see this blog as a wonderful opportunity for people to voice their views on the media. However, I also believe it is a great opportunity for us to help the media understand and find a better way of reporting life in poverty in the UK.

This post was originally published on the Community Links’ blog linksUK, who are hosting articles this week about how people on low incomes appear in the media.

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?

Voters want clarity on how they will be taxed, but they also need their leaders to get it right.

Referring to the scheduled 0.5% increase in the rate of National Insurance (on top of an identical increase last year) during a measured performance on Radio Five Live yesterday afternoon, David Cameron said that his party is “looking as hard as we can at public spending programmes and trying to see if we can avoid at least a part of this great big tax rise on Middle Britain and on jobs,” adding in a separate interview later that he hoped to find a “way of avoiding the most damaging parts of the national insurance increase”.

The comments have caused some confusion, notably in the Financial Times and the Guardian this morning, over the extent to which the Conservatives will seek to avoid the measure. Last month Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborn said his “number one priority is to try to avoid bringing [the national insurance increase] in”.

The temptation to vacillate on such aims must be considerable. After all, according to the Financial Times the measure is expected to raise about £7bn a year. Yet it is a shame that episodes like these, where awareness of tax policies are inadvertently increased, are normally used by most commentators to pick holes in the name of partisanship. We should use these moments to re-evaluate the ways in which we raise and spend public money according to our priorities that are universal, one of which is surely the mission to end poverty in the UK.

National Insurance (or NI) is fundamentally a regressive tax. The Government has tended towards increasing NI rather than income tax. Perhaps this is because they believe that psychologically it is easier to ignore and therefore more difficult for opposition politicians to attack. Yet it is a tax that is capped to 1% above incomes of £43,875 in 2010-11, so even though the rise will not affect incomes under £20,000, it is odd that the main general tax rise contained in the Pre-Budget Report is not equitable. A relative increase in income tax on all incomes above £20,000 to start with would have realised greater revenues and would have been fairer – but perhaps a little more difficult to stomach politically.

In a time when every bit of revenue is precious because new revenue streams are going to be essential and spending heavily restricted, we have to be bold and implement any tax increases in the way that does the minimum damage to the fight against poverty in the UK – even if that means a tougher sell at the ballot box or on the airwaves. On NI Mr Cameron appears to be travelling in the right direction, we just don’t yet know how far he’ll go. If they explain their policy in terms of fairness, they might find it easier to justify finding the money elsewhere.

The existing tax system takes a substantially larger proportion of the income of the poorest tenth than it does from the richest tenth. Here are just a few of our ideas for how to make the tax system fairer. Oxfam recommends that the UK Government:

• Shift indirect taxes to income taxes at higher earnings levels
• Where the tax system is reframed in favour of environmental taxation, regressive effects should be tempered by increasing the progressiveness of other aspects of the tax system – this will help prevent the economy from overheating when it returns to growth.
• Tax cuts should be aimed at low-paid people, who are more likely to release capital into circulation.
• Tax and benefit tapers – marginal tax rates – should be lowered to strengthen work as route out of poverty and prevent people from being trapped in low-paid work.
• Increase tax thresholds.
• Reduce the taper at which housing and council tax benefits are withdrawn, making tax credits more flexible and responsive to changes in income so they are not abruptly withdrawn as income rises.
• Implement effective financial reform at the G20 and in Europe in order to ensure tax is collected without harming the competitiveness of the UK’s the financial services industry.

Oxfam’s briefing ‘Close to Home: UK poverty and the economic downturn’ is available HERE.
UPDATE: Cameron has confirmed that he is still looking for the money to pay to avoid the increase in National Insurance in 2011.