Why poverty in the UK now is worse than 50 years ago and its grip is tightening every day

Independent

11 hours ago

We're dealing with a divided Britain. We're dealing with a social crisis,' Gordon Brown said last week. It was a stark warning, yes, of the realities of a country steeped in instability – but it was also a recognition of something unnerving: regression.
'I live in the constituency in which I grew up,' the former prime minister continued telling the host of BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday. 'I still live here. I see every day this situation getting worse, and I did not think I would see the kind of poverty I saw when I was growing up; when we had slum housing, when we had travelling people coming to my school.
'This is a return to the kind of poverty of 60 years ago, and I think we've got to act now. And that's why it's urgent that we take action in this Budget,' he said.
Brown's comments came as he backed reforms to gambling taxes in order to generate the £3.2bn needed to scrap the two-child benefit cap – a policy that is now estimated to affect the lives of more than 1.5 million children. And his admission carries with it an unsettling truth: that, in 2025, the UK is not only facing new forms of deprivation, but potentially circling back to old ones, too.
Perhaps, half a century ago, it was easier to see. Back then, poverty appeared to live primarily in ghettoised estates – sprawling pillars of concrete; reeking stairwells, broken swings; kids playing outside in coats too small for them. In 1975, poverty had a physical presence in picket lines and soup kitchen queues, in a way that we'd like to imagine is now confined to sepia-tinged photos and 'gritty' ITV dramas or Ken Loach films.
But the decades since have not only dramatically transformed wealth and living standards, but what poverty looks like, too. Things have, undoubtedly, improved – on the surface anyway.
Average household incomes have doubled, moving the poverty line upwards. Lifespans have lengthened and rates of poverty among pensioners have seen considerable progress.
Yet, the number of children living in relative poverty is not only slightly higher than it was in the 1970s, but double the rate at 31 per cent, or 4.5 million. An incredible 56 per cent of people living in poverty in the UK are in a working household, says the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), and deep poverty – where families live on less than 40 per cent of the median income – is significantly more widespread than ever.
Now, families face more invisible barriers: digital exclusion (approximately 6 per cent of UK homes have no access to the internet), gentrification, unstable zero-hours contracts (1.05 million people), and the mental load that comes with managing survival every single day. Mind and the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute found last year that people living in poverty are twice as likely to experience mental health problems, while Turn2Us found that 7 in 10 low-income parents experience anxiety or depression as a direct result of financial stress.
The last few decades – burdened by austerity, cuts, Covid, war, inflation, the cost of living crisis, more cuts – have given rise to deprivation that crosses social class lines and postcode borders. Today, living below the breadline could even look like a semi-detached house with a car on the drive. But those more visible – unignorable – markers are now coming back into play.
According to the JRF's extensive research, as many as one in four people are going without basic needs and one in five are living in absolute low income after housing costs. More than one in 10 people – 11 per cent of the population, or 7.5 million – are struggling to eat.
'We've got poverty data going back to 1961,' says Peter Matejic, a chief analyst for JRF, 'and what we've seen is that for working-age adults and children, poverty rates have increased quite a lot over the last 50 years. If you had a profile of people in poverty 50 years ago and now, you'd have a very different mix of people in the room [in terms of class and education]. I think there'd be some success stories – like the quality of housing would be a lot higher now than it was there.
'But, certainly in the last decade or so, the more visible forms of poverty and deeper forms of poverty have actually increased. For all the progress we've made, we're now looking at regression.'
It's particularly true in schools where poverty is becoming impossible to miss. A recent report by the National Education Union (NEU) documented the reality of teaching today in horrors witnessed by teachers – one such example found that more than a third of teachers are personally providing essentials like toothpaste, sanitary products or warm clothing for their students.
Back in January, The Independent reported from a primary school in Lincolnshire where young children are in such desperate situations that they are living in tents, and teachers are now 'first responders', rather than educators.
'We have to provide food, clothing, sometimes even pay for bus fares,' one teacher quoted in the findings explained. 'We're not just teaching any more – we're crisis managing.'
In the mid-1970s, just 14 per cent of people fell below the relative poverty line – the official line drawn at 60 per cent of median household income after housing costs. Today it stands at 22 per cent in England. Essentially, says Matejic, much of the difference can be traced back to the 1980s – a pivotal decade defined by rising unemployment and significant tax reforms (particularly the reduction of higher tax rates for top earners).
'Higher rates of taxes were reduced for very high-income people, and there was quite a lot of growth of incomes at the very top of the income distribution as well,' continues Matejic. As a result, those on the bottom rungs of the ladder fell further behind into joblessness or because of benefit cuts, while those at the top surged ahead. The gap between the rich and the poor grew, as did that between lower- and middle-income households.
There have been periods of reprise – noticeably at the dawn of New Labour in the years after Tony Blair's 1997 election – and of escalation. 'Destitution more than doubled between 2017 and 2022,' explains Matejic – by the end of 2022, 3.8 million people (including 1 million children) experienced it, largely due to inadequate social security, rising costs of essentials and high levels of debt.
'The deeper you go, the worse it gets. Destitution – what we define as going without two of seven essentials like food, toiletries or shelter, or having such a low income that you can't afford them – is rising faster than deep poverty.'
Even record employment levels haven't been able to touch poverty, which has either flatlined or worsened for many. More than 8 million people are trapped in what is now routinely referred to as 'in-work' poverty, with 60 per cent of low-paid workers regularly skipping meals (according to a study by The Living Wage Foundation); half are falling behind on bills despite being employed. The country is teetering on breaking point: one in three low-income workers say they are 'one unexpected expense away' from being in crisis.
Further cuts to the welfare system – particularly to those unable to work, like carers and the disabled – have left millions more below the poverty line. Between 2010 and 2020, the poorest tenth of households saw their income fall by over 11 per cent, while the richest tenth lost just 2 per cent.
And when the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) compared cuts in the most and least deprived 10 local authorities just over five years ago, they found the poorest places were hit six times harder.
The two-child cap is only exacerbating the entire situation for millions of children in the UK. The original justification for the policy, which denies financial support for third and subsequent children born after April 2017, was to promote 'responsibility' in family planning, cutting the benefit was short-sighted. In reality, the decision failed to acknowledge the reality of modern living: illness, separation, redundancy and other unexpected events that life throws at us all, and that render us vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it also disproportionately affects marginalised groups like single mothers and ethnic minority families.
Worsening deprivation is in what happens next: right now, we're raising millions of children growing up with less opportunity, less security and, crucially, less hope than the generations before them. And this isn't simply rhetoric – it's a return to Dickensian levels of poverty, actively playing out in classrooms and kitchens across the country, and will be for years to come yet.
Scrapping the policy, most experts agree, is an imperative to improve rates of poverty and lives in the UK right now: this single change would lift a quarter of a million children out of poverty, and reduce the path of hardship for many more. But it can't stop there, says Matejic. 'You have to invest in social security to lower poverty,' he explains: uprating benefits in line with inflation, for example, restoring lost disability payments, and making universal support systems work with – not against – the rhythms of working life.
Investing in the labour market and in communities surviving on threadbare infrastructure, too, should be a priority: hollowed-out local authorities, oversubscribed schools, deteriorating hospitals and non-existent libraries. But, to make a difference long term, there needs to be a long-term plan in place. Social mobility is now at a standstill, workers' rights (especially those caught in the grift of exploitative zero-hours contracts) are worsening and a genuine living wage is still not in sight.
As long as poverty is treated like a personal failing rather than a systemic outcome, that won't change. Until politicians stop weaponising hardship and, instead, start addressing it with honesty and urgency, things will only continue to worsen.
The face of poverty may have changed in the last 60 years – sometimes we might not even recognise it. But the insecurity, powerlessness and injustice it brings only tightened its grip.