Poverty in the United Kingdom

Despite being a developed country, those living at the lower end of the income distribution in the United Kingdom have a relatively low standard of living. Data based on incomes published in 2016 by Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that, after housing costs have been taken into consideration, the number of people living in the UK in relative poverty to be 13.44m (21% of the population) In 2015, a report by Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that 21.6% of Britons were now in relative poverty. The report showed that there had been a fall in poverty in the first few years of the twenty-first century, but the rate of poverty had remained broadly flat since 2004/5.

It has been found by the Poverty and Social Exclusion project at Bristol University in 2014, that the proportion of households lacking three items or activities deemed necessary for life in the UK at that time (as defined by a survey of the wider population) has increased from 14% in 1983 to 33% in 2012.

In the early 1950s, it was believed by numerous people that poverty had been all but abolished from Britain, with only a few isolated pockets of deprivation still remaining. Much of this assumption was derived from a study of poverty in York carried out in 1951 by Seebohm Rowntree and his colleague G. R. Lavers, which showed that in 1950 only 1.5% of the survey population lived in poverty, compared with 18% in 1936 when a previous study had been conducted in that town by Rowntree. Rowntree and Laver cited full employment policies, rises in real wages and the expansion of social welfare programmes as the key factors behind this positive development. They could also show that, while 60% of poverty in 1936 was caused by low wages or unemployment, the corresponding figure in 1950 was only 1%. A leader in The Times spoke positively of this ‘remarkable improvement – no less than the virtual abolition of the sheerest want.’

Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, however, a "rediscovery" of poverty took place, with various surveys showing that a substantial proportion of Britons were impoverished, with between 4% and 12% of the population estimated to be living below the Supplementary Benefits’ scales. In 1969, Professor A. Atkinson stated that

According to this definition, between 2-5 million Britons were trapped in poverty. In addition, some 2.6 million people were in receipt of Supplementary Benefits and therefore living on the poverty line. This meant that at least 10% of the population were in poverty at his time.

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