A government-commissioned report has warned that the decade 2010-2020 could mark a watershed moment where the general rise in living standards do not reach the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s State of the Nation Report paints a depressing picture of Britain in 2015, saying:
“The link between effort and reward on which social mobility relies has been broken by changes in the housing market – with home ownership rates halving among young people in 20 years – and the labour market – with 5 million workers trapped in low pay.
“When combined with cuts in welfare and public spending, these changes put Britain on track to become a permanently divided nation unless radical new approaches are taken by the next government to meet this 2020 challenge. It finds no political party is being honest about the impact of planned spending cuts or has sufficiently ambitious plans to tackle entrenched levels of low pay.”
The authors target government policies of austerity in unfairly targeting the poorest and those most in need, and proposes that the Office of Budget Responsibility should publish an assessment of each Budget for its impact on social mobility and child poverty, to allow the public to see which groups are being worst affected by cuts.
The report also proposes a number of changes to government policy to try to rectify the situation including the introduction of the living wage by 2025 and a focus on providing jobs and affordable housing for young people, who have been excluded from the UK’s recent growth out of recession.
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Hi,
“2020 could mark first decade without fall in absolute poverty in UK, report warns”. This is in consensus with many European countries for example Holland as the European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) report ‘2.5 million people in the Netherlands live below the poverty line’ representing 14% of the population.
The root cause of the ‘poverty and inequality problem’ – some 35 > 40 years ago political thinking appears to have got together with global corporations (totally controlled by the rich and powerful) to formulate a future economic model that we call globalization. This model had a big flaw in it for 90% of the people. It made the economic model to enrich the super rich indefinitely and impoverish the vast number of the world’s people. Indeed even after the 2008 financial meltdown that the people had to support with tax money or otherwise the system would have collapsed, the rich got richer and richer. This had/has never happened before as all financial collapses previously before this event had affected everyone and all were impoverished in one way or another. Therefore something changed some three to four decades ago and where our politicians must have got together with the mighty corporations (to devise a new global economic model that enriched the few and kept down the majority (something again that had never really happened before). Therefore is ‘globalization’ the panacea that we all thought it would be? I think not in my humble opinion