JRF calls for urgent action on ‘deep poverty’
‘The case for targeted support to help people on the lowest incomes could not be clearer.'
Rising energy prices will ‘devastate’ the poorest families, the Quaker-founded Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has said.
A new report by the charity says that urgent action is needed to ease the cost-of-living crisis caused in part by the energy price cap rise. Millions of families are in deep or persistent poverty, say the campaigners, with households on low incomes spending on average eighteen per cent of their income after housing costs on energy bills after April. For single adult households on low incomes this rises to a shocking fifty-four per cent, an increase of twenty-one per cent since 2019/20. Lone parents and couples without children will spend around a quarter of their incomes on energy bills, an increase of almost ten per cent in the same period.
Katie Schmuecker, from JRF, said: ‘The case for targeted support to help people on the lowest incomes could not be clearer. But this must go hand in hand with urgent action to strengthen our social security system, which was woefully inadequate even before living costs began to rise.
‘Our basic rate of benefits is at its lowest real rate for thirty years and this is causing avoidable hardship.’
The figures were released last month alongside a new report which reveals a worrying increase in the number of children growing up in very deep poverty, bringing the figure to around 1.8 million. ‘Very deep poverty’ means that the household’s income is so low it is completely inadequate to cover the basics.
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