When Philip Hammond said there was “light at the end of the tunnel” ahead of this week’s spring statement, it’s unlikely he was speaking about Margaret Blenman. Margaret – a foster carer from London – was found in the sea off the Brighton coast last November after she was evicted from her home because of spiralling debts caused by the bedroom tax.
The local paper, the Argus, reported this week that an inquest heard the 48-year-old had told housing officers on the day of her eviction they were “lucky not to find a dead body”, before she was pulled out of the sea two days later. The only reason Margaret had to pay the bedroom tax was because her “spare room” was empty while she waited for another foster child to sleep in it.
These cases are complex – death, particularly apparent suicide, cannot and should not be reduced to simple causes. But it’s difficult to ignore stories such as Margaret’s – and there are many – or the niggling feeling that the ties that bind us as a society are being shamelessly and coldly cut away.
Next month, a series of further “welfare” changes come into force – changes that research by the Resolution Foundation thinktank shows will amount to another £2.5bn-worth of cuts to social security, hitting around 11 million families. These come on top of existing measures such as the bedroom tax, and include freezing working-age benefits for a third year – in essence, capping the money the state provides below the rising price of rent, food, and bills. Meanwhile, the rollout of universal credit will remove £200m from the system – largely off the back of long-term sick and disabled people, and working families.
It would be easy to see this as another assault on Britain’s social security system – and in many ways it is. The same thinking that led to a foster mother being docked housing benefit for caring for vulnerable children will now see single parents skipping meals because of the benefit freeze and wheelchair users unable to pay for a carer as they switch to universal credit. But really, this goes beyond budget cuts to the “welfare” bill. It is part of a wider shift in the harm the state is willing to inflict on its citizens – and the scale of hardship that’s now being normalised in one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
This harm is not even simply being done to the usual small minority – say, the unemployed or migrants – who are traditionally abandoned by rightwing governments (althoughm yes, that is happening too). Increasingly, this harm is coming for the families the Conservatives have long claimed to be on the side of – and vast numbers of them as well.
The evidence is undeniable. Hundreds of thousands of children and pensioners are now in poverty compared with 2012, with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding the first sustained increases in child and pensioner poverty for 20 years. More than a million people in the UK are officially classed as destitute – that’s so poor they can’t afford to eat properly, keep clean or stay warm and dry – while the gap in life expectancy between the poorest and most advantaged females has reached a record high as of this month.
Even the comforting myths we were told to cling to – that, as Theresa May puts it, work is “the best route out of poverty” – have been blown away. Research by Cardiff University last year found a record 60% of people in poverty live in a household where someone is in work – a risk that has grown by a quarter in the last decade – as nurses finish a shift to go and queue at a local food bank in order to be able to feed themselves.
Yet ministers learn no lessons: new analysis by the Children’s Society and Child Poverty Action Group shows that once universal credit is fully rolled out, almost 300,000 low-income working parents in England will be excluded from free school meals for their children. They are “doing the right thing” and working hard, but having help pulled from under them by the government regardless.
Much like work being a get-out clause to poverty, there’s a longstanding myth that our individual fortunes are of our own making – that when we do well it is solely off our own initiative, and when others suffer it is because they have somehow failed to try hard enough. But, of course, we are each of us connected – to our families, teachers, strangers and the government too. It was notable that, as the Resolution Foundation warned this week that families face a vast fall in living standards in the coming years, it made a point of stating that some of this “is the direct result of government policy”.
And this week research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into the impact of tax and benefit policies since 2012 laid bare the consequences of political decisions: an extra 1.5 million children in poverty by 2021 (hitting ethnic minority families hardest), and with disabled households losing as much as £6,500 a year.
Poverty – and the illness or death that comes with it – is not the failure of one government or even one political party, yet it is hard to shake the sense that in recent years something is changing. The vague promise Hammond gave this week to increase public spending “in the years ahead” is reflective of a growing mindset that protecting society’s safety net is optional – something that can be abandoned for a decade without millions feeling the consequences. It’s as if we are sleepwalking towards a loss the scale of which it may be hard to grasp until it’s too late. Margaret, washed up and discarded on the coast, should not only be a mark of shame but a warning to us all.