UK Poverty Post

My experience at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty

Last Thursday (20th October) the inaugural annual lecture of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Poverty – chaired by Kate Green OBE MP – took place in the Houses of Parliament. The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, addressed the audience – made up of organisations that work with poverty in the UK and several MPs.Antony Metcalfe, manager of the Fairbridge programme in Wales and one of our partners present at [...] Continue Reading…

How hungry do people in the UK have to be?

Food poverty has been hitting the headlines recently, as UK hunger spreads. At FareShare the charities we serve have seen a 40% increase in demand for food in the past year, with many reporting that as well as supporting rough sleepers, asylum seekers and the vulnerably housed there are now young families and pensioners queuing for food too.

Why is this happening? Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows 5.8 million people in the UK [...] Continue Reading…

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach: a bottom-up approach to overcoming poverty

This post first appeared on the ippr website.

We’re used to hearing – depressingly often these days – about people living in poverty as being variously feckless, undeserving, or suffering from dependency: in short, as passive, unthinking victims. What if, instead, we started from the premise that people living in poverty are, like everyone else, rational actors in their own lives – doing the best they can, in the circumstances in which they find themselves?

That is the logic of the [...] Continue Reading…

The Magic Breakfast that keeps school kids from going hungry

Oxfam believes that everybody in the UK should have enough money to feed themselves and their families, whether they are in or out of work.  That’s why I paid a visit last Friday to The Magic Breakfast club at Randal Cremer school in Hackney, to understand why for an increasing number of families, breakfast is getting harder to provide.

WORDS: Mora McLagan PICTURES: Lydia Goldblatt

“It’s a lifeline” [...] Continue Reading…

European Commission adopts Robin Hood Tax proposal

This post first appeared on the Robin Hood Tax website.

President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso announced on Wednesday that the European Commission has adopted the proposal for a Financial Transaction Tax.
Barroso, addressing the Commission in his State of the Union speech, said that banks needed to pay back their debt to taxpayers.
“In the last three years, member states have granted aid and provided guarantees of €4.6tn to the financial sector,” he said. “It is time for the financial sector [...] Continue Reading…

We’re all in this together; but some of us are more in it together than others

Yesterday’s IFS report on what they call the Great Recession makes for depressing reading. In the years of recession itself, real (inflation-adjusted) incomes were somewhat protected by the previous government’s actions (as well as some curiosities around the interaction of volatile inflation and retrospective benefit uprating). But incomes have since fallen heavily, and look set to continue to do so for several years. Median net household income is estimated to have fallen by 3.5% last year – the highest [...] Continue Reading…