UK Poverty Post

What do journalism students know about poverty?

The UK Coalition Against Poverty have begun an excellent programme working with student journalists, introducing them to the realities of poverty in the UK and how to report on it. Eileen Devaney, UKCAP national coordinator, reflects on the experience so far…

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 [...] Continue Reading…

How should the media portray poverty?

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 [...] Continue Reading…

Child poverty targets are diverting policymakers from the causes to the symptoms of poverty

By Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange.

In the FT this morning Nick Timmins suggests that the Conservatives are considering widening the child poverty target into a wider set of indicators in order to get a more in-depth measure of poverty.

The current child poverty targets certainly need to be reassessed, because they are distorting and undermining anti-poverty policy.

As Professor Peter Saunders pointed out in a recent Policy Exchange paper, the current targets are not really child poverty targets at all. [...] Continue Reading…

Let’s make tax more fair

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 [...] Continue Reading…

The quiet death rattle of social mobility

An interesting article by Will Hutton in Sunday’s Observer adds to the slow trickle of discussion around social mobility, set off by Alan Milburn’s report on ‘access to the professions’. More often than not, it’s a debate that’s being seen through the prism of the ‘politics of envy’, and ‘class war’. Public attitudes, though, seem a touch more nuanced – with a sense that there is too much inequality sitting alongside a tolerance of ‘deserved inequalities’.

Belatedly, this government has [...] Continue Reading…

NeedNOTGreed

Oxfam are proud members of the NeedNOTGreed coalition, which is working hard to raise awareness of the range of issues that force people to work in the informal economy. These issues are many, varied and complex, and there’s no silver bullet that will solve them on its own.

But General Election time is rapidly approaching – and the changes we can realistically hope for between now and then aren’t necessarily the big, systemic ones we’d like to see. With this [...] Continue Reading…