A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation sets out the nature of poverty in the UK in the runup to 2024’s General Election. It also sets out the scale of action necessary for the Government to
deliver the change it has promised. The report has identified groups with unacceptably high rates of poverty.
Families with children
Children have higher risks of poverty overall (30% versus 21% for the whole population), but larger families with 3 or more children have consistently faced a higher rate of poverty (45% of children in large families were in poverty in 2022/23). This is because a number of benefit policies have a disproportionate impact on larger families. These include the 2 child limit, which restricts eligibility for many child-related benefits to the first 2 children in a family whether the family is in or out of work, and the benefit cap, which limits the total income a household can receive in out-of-work benefits. Reductions in the poverty rate of children in large families drove child poverty downwards until 2012/13, but increases for this group have driven child poverty back up again since then. Families with children also face additional challenges if childcare responsibilities limit their ability to undertake well-paid and high-quality work, which is often the case for lone-parent families and families with younger children (as well as for larger families); 44% of children in lone-parent families were in poverty in the latest data – 2022/23 – as were 36% of children in families where the youngest child was aged under 5.
Minority ethnic groups
Poverty rates are very high for some minority ethnic groups. In particular, between 2020/21 and 2022/23, over half of people in Bangladeshi (56%) and around half of people in Pakistani (49%) households lived in poverty, with even higher poverty levels for children in those households (67% and 61% respectively). Around 4 in 10 people in households headed by people from Black African backgrounds (40%) were in poverty, with around half of children in these households in poverty. All these groups were much more likely than people in households headed by someone of white ethnicity (19%) to be in poverty (24% of children in households headed by someone of white ethnicity were in poverty). Minority ethnic groups with higher rates of poverty tended to also have higher rates of very deep and of persistent poverty.
Disabled people
Disabled people face a higher risk of poverty. This is driven partly by the additional costs associated with disability and ill-health, and partly by the barriers to work that disabled people face. However,
the proportion of disabled working-age adults in work increased from 42% in 2010/11 to 53% in 2022/23, while poverty rates remained steady over that period. In the latest data, there were 16 million disabled people in the UK – that is, nearly 1 in 4 people (24%) – and almost 4 in 10 families contained at least one person who was disabled. The poverty rate for disabled people was 30%, 10 percentage points higher than the rate for people who were not disabled. Nearly half of all people who were disabled and living in poverty had a longterm, limiting mental condition – around 2.4 million people. The poverty rate for this group was 50%, compared with 29% for people with a physical or other type of disability.
Informal carers
Similarly, informal carers are much more likely than those with no caring responsibilities to be living in poverty (28% compared with 20%). In 2022/23, 1 in 10 adults (5.1 million) were informal carers, with 6 in 10 of these carers living in families where someone was disabled. Their reduced ability to work means informal carers face a financial penalty, with unpaid social-care givers experiencing an average pay
penalty of £414 a month (nearly £5,000 a year).
People in workless households
People in workless households also face a higher risk of poverty, with more than half of working-age adults (54%) in workless households being in poverty, according to the latest data. However, because such a high share of the population is in work, around two-thirds of working-age adults in poverty actually lived in a household where someone was in work, despite these households having a much lower poverty rate of 15%. The poverty rate for parttime workers was nearly triple that for full-time workers (22% compared with 8%), and part-time self-employed workers were more than twice as likely to be in poverty as employees (23% compared with 10%). Workers in the administration and support activities sector had the highest poverty rate at 22%. Part-time self-employed workers had even higher rates of 28%. Workers in the accommodation and food services (23%), administrative and support service activities (21%), and agriculture, forestry and fishing (21%) had the highest poverty rates of the sectors of work we
looked at.
