Poverty increases among children and pensioners across UK
It’s not easy to be a vulnerable person in the countryside. We know it costs more to live in rural England due to distance from services. We know there are limited job opportunities for young people. We know once you lose the ability to drive its hard to retain a stake in rural places. This story is I suspect bad news for rural dwellers who fall into such categories of people. It tells us:
A household is considered to be in relative poverty if their income is below 60% of median income of £507 a week in 2017-18, while they are in absolute poverty if their income is below 60% of the 2010-11 median income, adjusted for inflation.
The latest figures show the number of children living in absolute poverty increased by 200,000 in 2017-18. Relative child poverty also increased before housing costs, and fell slightly after housing costs.
As a result, 30% of children, or 4.1 million, were living in relative poverty (after housing costs) in 2017-18 in the UK and 70% of children living in poverty were in working families.
The percentage of pensioners in relative poverty before housing costs rose from 17% to 18% between 2016/17 and 2017/18.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank said the recent increase in child poverty had been primarily driven by the freeze in the value of working-age benefits, made worse by a spike in inflation to 3% in late 2017.