A new study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation focuses on unemployed adults in the UK. The study says that jobless benefits for adults without children have not increased in 20 years. Meanwhile, the study also had good news for Scotland, the foundation says that part of the UK is doing better. According the BBC the number of jobless adults now is greater than the number of poor seniors. The research, carried out by the New Policy Institute, suggested the number of working age adults without children in low-income households had risen in recent years, to about 220,000. "As the rest of society has got better off, so this group has sunk ever further behind," the study said. The study also suggested that Scotland's child poverty rate was one of the lowest in the UK.The proportion of children...
from the Daily Mail, UK By Steve Doughty A single man or woman needs to earn more than £13,400 a year to live decently, a research report found yesterday.It said that anyone making that money can achieve a living standard that most people in the country would consider acceptable.The £13,400 level means someone can pay rent on a council flat and afford food, heating and occasional treats like a cinema ticket or a simple meal out, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.Rowntree, a research group widely respected on the political left, said an individual could expect to reach the benchmark by earning just over £1 an hour more than the minimum wage for 37 1/2 hours a week.Its report warned that getting to a socially acceptable standard of living is much harder for a traditional family with a...
from The Guardian Lucy Ward, social affairs correspondentLabour's drive to tackle poverty is being undermined because persistent low pay means work is no longer a reliable route out of poverty in Britain, according to a report published today.A study for the Rowntree Foundation examining the record of Tony Blair's government finds that, though many children and pensioners have been successfully lifted out of poverty since 1997, the root causes of the problem have not been addressed.The ninth annual Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report argues that the large numbers of people on low pay and the "seeming acceptance of gross inequalities of rates of pay" mean future poverty is as inevitable as ever.Though the government has achieved "limited success" in cutting poverty, it has done...
from The ScotsmanEBEN HARRELLALMOST 20 per cent of all Scots - nearly one million people - are living in poverty, according to a report to be published today.More than 200,000 of these impoverished Scots are "working poor" - employed, but unable to make a living wage, the report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds. The report uses an EU-endorsed definition of relative poverty - an income less than 60 per cent of the national average - different from the type of absolute poverty found in the third world.Even so, the report paints a bleak picture of the estimated 900,000 children, adults and pensioners struggling to make ends meet; the annual income after tax for an impoverished single adult, according to the report's definition of poverty, is £5,000 a year.The report, titled...