Positive thinking

Katy Jones, Manchester Metropolitan University One in every 200 people in Britain is homeless – sleeping on the streets or stuck in temporary accommodation, including hostels and B&Bs, according to analysis from housing charity Shelter. But it might surprise you to know that despite not having a secure home, a small but significant proportion of people experiencing homelessness are in paid employment. Getting a job is often presented as a solution to getting people off the streets. Indeed, former prime minister Theresa May, in a speech about tackling homelessness, said : Dealing with homelessness…is about more than just accommodation…the key thing is ensuring people can be in work and can be earning and not find themselves in that situation. But work does not always offer a route out of poverty – and many people who are in work continue to face housing insecurity . Indeed, a recent analysis from the housing charity Shelter found that 55% of families in temporar...

Hulya Dagdeviren, University of Hertfordshire and Sheilla Luz, University of Hertfordshire   Debt is a growing problem for people on low incomes and it has been made worse by the austerity policies that followed the 2007-08 financial crisis. The UK’s poorest households have the highest debt-to-income ratio in comparison to other income groups. This often means they struggle to repay their debt because it is so high in relation to their earnings. Many are forced to cut back their spending on basic necessities just to keep up with repayments – or they may borrow more, increasing their debt burden further. Our calculations, based on the latest Office for National Statistics data , show that the financial liabilities of the UK’s poorest households (excluding mortgages and student loans) were more than two and a half times their monthly income after tax and other deductions. What is more remarkable is that a significant proportion of this is accounted for by unarranged de...

Andrew Smith, University of Bradford and Jo McBride, Durham University   The UK is experiencing record levels of employment , with over 32m people in work. But many workers and their families continue to struggle to survive financially – it’s estimated 5.5m workers are paid below the Real Living Wage , which is set at a level at which people can afford to “live”, based on the minimum income standard . But what’s missing from these statistics are those people who have to work in more than one low paid job to make ends meet. This is the focus of our research – which has never been conducted in the UK before. The Forgotten Workers We interviewed 50 low paid workers in multiple forms of employment in the regions of Yorkshire and North-East England. We expected to speak to workers with two or three jobs, but were surprised and alarmed to find a number with four, five, six and even seven different jobs. All of the workers we spoke to had multiple jobs as they were st...

   Gillian Richards, Nottingham Trent University The UK has one of the widest attainment gaps in education within the developed world. This effectively means that if you are born in the UK to a family living in disadvantaged circumstances, you are much less likely to achieve your potential than your peers. And research shows it may take another 50 years to close this gap . Many young people who grow up in an area that is considered a “cold spot” of social mobility – like many of the UK’s seaside towns and former coal mining communities – are caught up in cycles of deprivation. This affects their aspirations, academic self-confidence and adult life choices. My recently published research looks at the realities of what it’s like to grow up in one of these areas. I spoke to 89 schoolgirls living in a former mining community – designated by the government to be within the UK’s worst 10% in terms of deprivation. In the community i looked at in my study, most me...

   Martin Cohen, University of Hertfordshire The “obesity epidemic” deserves much more serious attention than it is getting. It is, after all, thought to be killing nearly 3m people a year worldwide. It is putting huge pressure on health services, yet the public policy response in developed countries such as the US and UK is pitiful, largely confined to finger-wagging at children’s sugary treats. The story that has not been getting out is that there is a clear and extraordinary correlation between obesity and social inequality. Obesity is invariably presented as a diet issue for nutritionists, whereas social inequality is deemed the domain of sociologists and economists. Put another way, even as the inequality gap becomes more and more obvious there’s been a medicalisation of a social problem. Yet obesity is not just a matter for nutritionists: rather, it is a product of social inequality and requires a collective social response. This failure to face up ...

Noortje Uphoff, University of York Poverty remains a widespread problem. In the UK, 30% of children are growing up in poverty. More than half of these children are in working households , and poverty is on the rise even for children whose parents work in government-funded jobs . According to new research from the University of Geneva, these children may be at risk of poorer health in adulthood – even if they escape poverty later in life. This suggests that childhood adversity doesn’t just affect our choices, but also directly compromises the biological ability of our bodies to stay healthy. Our childhood affects our health across the course of our lives. Stress, it seems, is a major contributor. While a life lived with financial, educational and social security and stability may not be free of worries, a disadvantaged childhood means more exposure to a number of difficult circumstances and events . These may include social tensions, domestic abuse, neglect, food and ...

   Dianna Smith, University of Southampton and Claire Thompson, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Statistics from food banks across England show a frightening rise in the number of people using their services, meaning that more and more people don’t have enough money to feed themselves. Between April 1, 2016 and March 31, 2017, the Trussell Trust provided 1,182,954 three-day emergency food packages – up 73,645 from the previous year. People affected by food poverty face severe threats to their health and well-being. As well as the stress, depression and anxiety that can result from not having enough money to feed their families, people experiencing food poverty also face a higher risk of obesity , because the only foods they can afford tend to be cheap, sugary, processed and fattening. Some researchers have already mapped out who is using food banks, which is a big step towards understanding the problem. But academics like ourselves are i...

   Paul Gregg, University of Bath How to address inequality in society by redistributing incomes through taxes and benefits has long divided left and right. But equalising opportunities, commonly called social mobility, has wide political credence. The constrained opportunities of children who grow up in less affluent households is not just an issue of natural justice but also of wasted talents. In an era of stagnant productivity and wages, poor social mobility represents an economic as well as a social cost to Britain. And Britain’s record on social mobility is among the worst in advanced countries, along with the US and Italy. The Social Mobility Commission, which I was a member of until I resigned alongside the chair Alan Milburn in early December, sought to highlight this and to argue for policy engagement to address it. Our latest report highlighted that Britain is not a good country to be born poor and that across the country there is huge variati...

Steve Schifferes, City, University of London Every three years, all Nobel Prize winners in economics are invited to gather in the tranquil setting of the German island of Lindau to meet a selection of bright young economists and discuss the state of their profession. But this year such tranquility was challenged by worrying political developments across the globe. Perhaps unexpectedly, one of the central themes of the meeting became what to do about inequality. While not all laureates would go as far as Jean Tirole, the 2014 Nobel Prize winner, who said that economic inequality itself is a form of “ market failure ” , it is clear that the political and social effects of growing inequality are drawing increasing attention from those at the top of the economics profession. In a panel discussion on inequality, James Heckman , the 2000 Nobel laureate, pointed out that inequality had grown faster in the US and the UK than other Western democracies. Heckman said that chan...