A new Joseph Rowntree report underlines the corrosive impact of years of anti-welfare rhetoric. A reframing of the debate is urgently needed
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest report on poverty in the UK, published this week, should be read first and foremost as an indictment of all Conservative governments between 2010 and 2024. During almost a decade and a half of Tory rule, the JRF estimates that no progress at all was made in reducing overall levels of relative hardship. No surprise perhaps. Through wide-ranging, ideologically driven welfare cuts, ministers actively sought to make life harder, not easier, for many of the least well-off.
The grim legacy of that approach is that in 2023-24 – the last dataset available – about one in five people were in relative poverty, defined as less than 60% of median income. But it also turns out that 6.8 million people were struggling to survive on far, far less than that, having effectively been economically cut adrift. Some 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022. As the JRF’s chief analyst, Peter Matejic, puts it: “Poverty in the UK is still not just widespread, it is deeper and more damaging than at any point in the last 30 years.”
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