Call for action as a third slip into poverty

A new analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the overall UK poverty rate in 2014 was, at 16.8 per cent of the population, 12th highest compared with 27 other European Union countries.

Furthermore, 6.5 per cent were in persistent income poverty - the equivalent of approximately 3.9m people.

And between 2011 and 2014, almost a third, 32.5 per cent of people in the UK, were at risk of poverty for at least a year.

Charity Oxfam has warned that the Government must tackle poverty and social security cuts or risk seeing rates soar to ever great heights by the end of the decade.

Women are more at risk of experiencing longer term poverty than men, the analysis also suggests. The gap between men and women remaining in poverty over several years has been “relatively stable” at 1.5 per cent but the UK was behind countries including Lithuania, Spain and Poland.

The poverty rate was calculated based on the number of people whose income after tax is less than 60 per cent of the national average - equivalent to £9,956 for a single person without children and £20,907 for a family of two adults and two children.

Head of household and income expenditure statistics at the ONS, Richard Tonkin, said: “Over a four-year period it’s actually surprising how high the proportion of the population is whose incomes slip below that.

“In the UK, compared with other countries, people have a relatively high risk of slipping into relative low-income poverty. But high exit rates mean people are much more likely to escape poverty than in other countries.”

Households with single people were more likely to remain in poverty for longer than households with two adults, the report added.

And people who left school without any formal qualifications were twice as likely to experience poverty at least once between 2011 and 2014 than those with a degree or higher.

Rachael Orr, the head of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme said: “The fact that such a large proportion of the British population have recently experienced poverty proves that getting people into work isn’t the route out of poverty that it should be.

“Just under two thirds of children and working-age adults in poverty are in working households. The Government needs a clear and coherent strategy to tackle poverty or cuts to social security will see poverty rates in the UK reach even greater heights by 2020.”

A Downing Street spokesman said: “Relative poverty in 2013/14 - which is the most recent year for which data is available - was at its lowest level since the 1980s, income inequality is lower than it was in 2010, and living standards rose to their highest ever level in 2015.”

Yesterday, the charity Independent Age warned that a “silent generation” of older pensioners were thousands of pounds a year worse off than younger “baby boomers” and more likely to live in persistent poverty. It found an estimated 950,000 – one in five – pensioners aged over 75 live in poverty, and women and single pensioners were more likely to be struggling.