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UK Poverty 2024 Contents

Acknowledgements 3

Foreword 4

Executive summary 6

Trends in poverty 17

The experience of being in poverty 99

Annexes 143

Notes 167

References 169

UK Poverty 2024 Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all the team at JRF who worked on the report, including:

Carla Cebula, Rachelle Earwaker, Joseph Elliott, Maudie Johnson-Hunter,

Peter Matejic, Becky Milne, Isabel Taylor, Spencer Thompson and Andrew

UK Poverty 2024 Foreword

by Paul Kissack, Group Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree

Foundation (JRF) and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust

It has been 20 years since we last saw a sustained fall in poverty in the

UK. Even then, the rapid rise in poverty seen in the 1980s had barely been

reversed.

Beneath these stubbornly high levels of poverty, an even more troubling

picture emerges. Over the past 20 years, very deep poverty has risen.

Six million people were in very deep poverty in 2021/22, one and a half

million more than two decades ago.

Look even further down – to the deepest form of poverty we monitor at the

Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) – and we see the scale of destitution

in the UK rising fast. Nearly four million people experienced destitution in

2022 – an extraordinary 148% increase over just five years. This included

one million children, nearly three times as many as in 2017.

In short, poverty in the UK is deepening. The deeper we look, the faster it is

rising. People in poverty are moving further and further below the poverty

Little wonder that the visceral signs of hardship are all around us. Foodbank use and the number of families living in temporary accommodation

are at record highs. Extreme forms of hardship, like having to rely

on charity to be able to eat or stay warm, have become shockingly

commonplace.

This is social failure at scale – a failure we pay for twice over.

First, there are the human costs resulting from the blighted lives of millions

of people who face avoidable hardship. Going without basic essentials

strips people of their dignity and damages their social connections. Living

in a cold, damp or insecure home, or not having enough food, damages

people’s physical health. The stigma attached to poverty can increase

social isolation, piling further pressure on people’s mental health, when

they are already burdened with worry about how to cover life’s essentials.

UK Poverty 2024 Foreword

Second, these failures pile pressures onto already stretched public services.

Physical and mental health conditions feed through to growing demands

on the NHS. The number of people unavailable for work through long-term

sickness grows. Local councils spend more and more money on temporary

accommodation in the face of growing homelessness. Teachers are unable

to close attainment gaps for children who turn up at school from damp or

temporary homes and without food in their stomachs. Poverty becomes

the enemy of opportunity: talent and potential are wasted in its wake.

This is a story of moral and fiscal irresponsibility. And it is a story we must

At the heart of that change is the need for secure, affordable housing, for

good jobs and – critically – for the rebuilding of our social security. Our

benefits system is not simply an expense to be avoided: it is an investment

in people’s collective security and future potential. It should be seen as

an essential piece of our social infrastructure. We should take pride as a

nation in our ability to support those who fall on hard times, just as we

take pride in the ability of our NHS to support those who fall ill.

Yet over the past decade, social security has fallen increasingly short, with

the real-terms value of payments reaching a 40-year low at the same time

inflation hit a 40-year high, pushing people deeper into financial hardship.

This is why JRF, along with The Trussell Trust, has been calling for all

political parties to commit to an ‘Essentials Guarantee’ built into Universal

Credit, to make sure the basic rate can never fall below what is needed to

cover life’s essentials like food and energy.

This report – our final UK Poverty report before a general election – sets

out the scale and nature of hardship across the UK. We find poverty in

every corner of the country, across all ages and in all types of families.

2024 will be a year of important choices, the consequences of which

could last far into the future as the nation goes to the polls. Political

parties in the UK will set out what they stand for and the sort of country

they wish to help shape. Any party serious about governing must be both

practical and ambitious if we are to turn the tide of deepening poverty of

the past 25 years.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Executive summary

This will be the final UK Poverty report before the next general election.

It is clear from the report that we are entering this election year with

unacceptably high levels of overall poverty, including appalling levels for

many groups. Since our last report was published a year ago, we have

seen more and more evidence of the desperate measures that households

struggling to make ends meet are having to take. At the same time, higher

tides of insecurity have washed over more and more people.

This report looks across a range of data sources and published insights to

build up a comprehensive picture of the current state of poverty across the

United Kingdom (UK). We know poverty can lead to negative impacts at

all stages of life, so it is critical to look closely at the available information

to work out who is worst affected, determine how levels have changed over

time and see what the future prospects are likely to be.

Poverty increased in the latest official data,

returning close to pre-pandemic levels

More than one in five people in the UK (22%) were in poverty in 2021/22

– 14.4 million people. Of these, 8.1 million were working-age adults,

4.2 million were children and 2.1 million were pensioners. To put it another

way, around two in every ten adults are in poverty in the UK, with about

three in every ten children being in poverty. The number and proportion of

children and pensioners in poverty rose between 2020/21 and 2021/22, as

did overall poverty. This means that poverty rates across these different

groups have returned to around their pre-pandemic levels. It may seem

counter-intuitive that poverty increased as we came out of the pandemic,

but this is consistent with incomes rising for middle-income households at

the same time as a range of temporary coronavirus-related support was

withdrawn.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Children have consistently had the highest poverty rates, while

pensioners along with working-age adults without children now

have the lowest

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

It has been almost 20 years and six prime

ministers since the last prolonged period of

falling poverty

Taking a longer-run view, we can see that overall poverty has barely

moved since Conservative-led Governments took power in 2010. The last

period of falling poverty was during the first half of the previous Labour

administration (between 1999/2000 and 2004/05), but it then rose in the

second half of their time in power.

In part, this reflects the series of hits to living standards that have affected

the whole population. Each of the five Parliaments since 2005 has recorded

lower quarterly income growth than the last 13 Parliaments before 2005,

stretching back to the start of available data in 1955. This started with the

economic slowdown even before the global financial crisis and persisted

through the crisis itself, then austerity, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic

and the current cost-of-living crisis.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

However, even with higher income growth in the 1980s, the-then

Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher saw an unprecedented

rise in poverty, up from broadly flat levels of poverty of around 14% before

1979, meaning current levels of poverty are around 50% higher than they

were in the 1970s. The large increase in poverty in the 1980s was because

income growth was very unequally shared over this period.

Poverty rates grew rapidly under Margaret Thatcher’s

administration and remained high, with only small decreases

in subsequent administrations

Source: Institute for Fiscal Studies’ (2023) analysis of Family Expenditure Survey and Households

Below Average Income data

Poverty is deepening

In 2021/22, 6 million people – or four in ten of those in poverty – were in

very deep poverty, with an income far below the standard poverty line.

More than twice as many (over 12 million people) had experienced very

deep poverty in at least one year between 2017/18 and 2020/21.

Between 2019/20 and 2021/22, the average person in poverty had an

income 29% below the poverty line, with the gap up from 23% between

1994/95 and 1996/97. The poorest families – those living in very deep

poverty – had an average income that was 59% below the poverty line,

with this gap increasing by around two-thirds over the past 25 years.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

The average gap to the poverty line was equivalent to £6,200 a year

between 2019/20 and 2021/22 for a couple with two primary-school-aged

children, but for the same family in very deep poverty, the gap was more

than twice that amount, equivalent to £12,800 a year. Over the past 25

years, the average gap to the poverty line for people who are living in very

deep poverty has grown by around two-thirds.

Since 1994/95, the percentage of people in poverty who are in

very deep poverty has increased, and now makes up the largest

group of people in poverty

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: The group in very deep poverty includes people whose equivalised household income after

housing costs (AHC) is less than 40% of median AHC income. The group in deep poverty, but not

very deep poverty, have an equivalised AHC household income less than 50% but more than 40%

of median AHC income. The group in poverty, but not deep poverty, have an equivalised AHC

household income less than 60% but more than 50% of median AHC income.

Looking at the deepest and most damaging form of poverty – destitution,

where people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to

stay warm, dry, clean and fed – we see from our latest Destitution in the

UK report that around 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022,

including around one million children (Fitzpatrick et al, 2023). These figures

have more than doubled since 2017. We see further evidence of deepening

poverty in the increasing number of food-bank users, with more emergency

food parcels being delivered by the Trussell Trust network than ever before.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Some groups have wholly unacceptably high

rates of poverty

We have already seen that children have higher risks of poverty overall

(29% versus 22% for the whole population), but larger families with three

or more children have consistently faced a higher rate of poverty (43%

of children in large families were in poverty in 2021/22). This is because

a number of benefit policies have a disproportionate impact on larger

families. These include the two-child limit, which restricts eligibility for

many child-related benefits to the first two children in a household, 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; 44% of children in lone-parent families were in poverty

in the latest data – 2021/22 – as were 32% of children in families where the

youngest child was aged under 5.

Poverty rates are very high for some minority ethnic groups. In

particular, between 2019/20 and 2021/22, around half of people in

Pakistani (51%) and Bangladeshi (53%) households lived in poverty, with

even higher poverty levels for children in those households (61% and 62%

respectively). Around four in ten people in households headed by someone

from an Asian background other than Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or

Chinese (39%) or households from Black African backgrounds (42%) 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 (25% 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.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Disabled people face a higher risk of poverty and have done so for

at least the past 20 years. 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 workingage adults in work increased from 42% in 2010/11 to 51% in 2021/22,

while poverty rates remained steady over that period. In the latest data,

there were 15.7 million disabled people in the UK – that is, nearly one in

four people (24%) – and just over a third of all families contained at least

one person who was disabled. The poverty rate for disabled people was

31%, 12 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 long-term, limiting mental condition – around 2.3 million people. The

poverty rate for this group was 38%, compared with 31% for people with a

physical or other type of disability.

Similarly, informal carers are much more likely than those with no caring

responsibilities to be living in poverty (28% compared with 20%). In

2021/22, nearly one in ten adults (4.8 million) were informal carers, with six

in ten 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 also face a higher risk of poverty, with

more than half of working-age adults (56%) in workless households being

in poverty in 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

part-time workers was double that for full-time workers (20% compared

with 10%) and 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

There is also a link between tenure type and poverty. In 2021/22, more

than four in ten social renters (43%) and around a third of private renters

(35%) were in poverty after housing costs. Within this group of renters in

poverty, around a third of social renters and half of private renters were

only in poverty after their housing costs were factored in, and so appear

to be pushed into poverty by the amount of money they have to spend

on housing. Among homeowners, around one in seven (15%) of people

who lived in a home that was owned outright were in poverty, while one

in ten people living in a home being bought with a mortgage (9%) were in

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Finally, the poverty rates of people claiming different income-related

benefits are much higher than the national average poverty rate. On the

one hand this is to be expected given the ‘low income’ eligibility criteria

for claiming these benefits, but on the other hand it demonstrates that the

level of benefits available is frequently not sufficient to enable recipients

to escape poverty. Indeed, the basic rate of Universal Credit is even below

destitution thresholds.

Poverty rates vary significantly between UK

nations and regions

In the latest data, the average poverty rates in England (22%), Wales

(22%) and Scotland (21%) had converged to around the same level,

although poverty rates were much lower in Northern Ireland at 16%.

These variations in poverty rates across the different nations of the

UK are driven by differences in labour markets (including the levels of

employment, the sectors worked in and rates of pay), housing markets

(the mix of tenures and housing costs) and rates of benefit receipt,

alongside wider demographic factors (age, family types and sizes).

The greater reliance on renting and the higher costs of housing are

a substantial driver in larger cities in particular, while lower rates of

employment, with fewer employment opportunities alongside a greater

concentration of employment in lower-paid roles and sectors, are more

significant drivers of poverty across many post-industrial and coastal

Child poverty rates in Scotland (24%) remain much lower than those in

England (31%) and Wales (28%) and are similar (if slightly higher) than

in Northern Ireland (22%). This is likely to be due, at least in part, to the

Scottish Child Payment. This highlights the effect benefits can have in

reducing poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

Poverty rates vary significantly between UK nations and regions

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2019/20 and 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

In the latest data, the West Midlands had the highest rate of poverty at

27%, followed by the North East and London (both 25%), Yorkshire and

the Humber, the East Midlands and the North West (all 23%). In the West

Midlands and the North East, around one in four working-age adults

were not in work or studying, compared with fewer than one in five in

the regions with the lowest rates of poverty (the South West, South East

and East of England). London has long had the highest rate of poverty

of the UK nations and regions, but the data for the latest years shows

an improving employment picture, with more employment in higher-paid

managerial and ‘professional’ roles and an increase in the number of

people in households where all adults are in work, but with higher rates of

poverty than the UK average due to high housing costs.

More timely data shows the continuing bite of

the cost-of-living crisis

In October 2023, around 2.8 million of the poorest fifth of households (47%)

were in arrears with their household bills or behind on scheduled lending

repayments, 4.2 million households (72%) were going without essentials

and 3.4 million households (58%) reported not having enough money for

This is why it is so important that the Government has uprated benefits in an

appropriate way and has re-established the link between housing support

and rents. However, it is very worrying that many of the Government’s

mitigations are ending, with no further one-off cost-of-living lump-sum

payments planned and possibly the Household Support Fund stopping –

especially when our analysis shows that the basic rates of benefits are below

destitution levels and JRF’s cost-of-living tracker finds that millions are

going without essentials.

Future prospects remain deeply worrying

It is clear from a range of indicators that the current economic situation

is bad, with inflation still running at around twice its target level, benefits

taking time to catch up with rising prices, employment starting to fall,

earnings still below their 2008 levels and housing costs increasing quickly.

Given the Office for Budget Responsibility (2023) forecasts falling average

household disposable incomes between 2021/22 and 2024/25, these

effects will have a profound impact on many people’s living standards for

years to come.

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

What can be done?

In our public attitudes work immediately before the Autumn Statement

in November 2023, 73% of people across the UK were very or fairly

worried about the cost of essentials, which was their second highest

area of worries after public services. There is also a recognition of the

scale of the problem (according to the British Social Attitudes survey,

the proportion of people who think there is quite a lot of real poverty in

Britain has increased by nearly 20 percentage points since 2006) and the

need for action (in surveys since 2017 the majority of the British public

have agreed that the Government should increase tax and spending on

health, education and social benefits).

We have now experienced nearly three tough years of accelerating

inflation and four desperate years since the start of the Covid-19

pandemic, with stagnant progress on headline poverty and increasing

levels of deep poverty and destitution even before then.

In our annual UK Poverty report published immediately before the

pandemic, we started the report with the following statement:

“For a decent standard of living, we all need security and stability in

our lives – secure housing, a reliable income, and support when things

get difficult. For too many of us, there is no such security. Millions

of people in the UK are struggling to get by, leading insecure and

precarious lives, held back from improving their living standards.

It’s time to take action on poverty and put this right.”

Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2020, p. 3

This remains our clarion call as we approach a general election. It is the

key test we will be using to evaluate political parties’ policies, and their

proposals to tackle hardship and expand the foundations of economic

security to everyone. This requires action to reset our social and economic

fundamentals in a number of ways, starting with the following:

• offering help and space for those looking for work to find a secure

job that sticks, while making work possible and desirable for those

outside the labour market if this is feasible

• raising the basic level of workplace rights and protections, including

expanding rights to flexible working, alongside improving financial

protection if people lose their job or cannot work for a period

• protecting time for families and for caring around working life, while

building up and strengthening the infrastructure of care services that

families can rely on

UK Poverty 2024 Executive summary

• ensuring social security provides sufficient income to afford the

essentials, alongside forging a ‘social safety net’ of crisis support,

practical help and social connection where people live

• putting future pension provision on a more secure footing by raising

minimum contribution rates and establishing good options for people

to use their savings pot to provide a secure standard of living in

retirement

• helping people accrue modest savings, access affordable credit, gain

relief from problem debt and hold assets (especially those without

access to family wealth)

• expanding access to secure homes, whether rented or owned, via

interventions to build more new homes and shift the distribution of

existing homes.

Beyond all of this, we need a vision for reducing poverty in the broadest

sense, making progress so that everyone can afford the essentials. This

must reduce the level, depth and extremes of poverty across the whole of

the UK, decreasing it quickly for the groups for whom poverty is virtually

endemic. A suite of policies that are proportionate to the size of the

problem is needed for this. These policies need to build into a coherent

overall plan to end poverty in the UK. The Government must act with

compassion, drawing on the lived experience of people who have gone

through hardship. It must also implement creative policy innovations that

enable everyone to live with dignity, to be able to seize opportunities and,

most importantly, to build a sense of hope for a better future.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Trends in poverty

Overall poverty rates for children, working-age

adults and pensioners 18

Poverty depth and duration 27

Family composition, age and sex 35

Ethnicity and poverty 45

Geography and poverty 52

Disability, carers and poverty 66

Work and poverty 77

Benefits and poverty 86

Housing and poverty 91

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Trends in poverty

Overall poverty rates for children,

working-age adults and pensioners

Why is this important?

We know that poverty has a wide range of negative consequences.

It restricts the options and opportunities available to people and limits

their access to things that are mostly taken for granted. Poverty at any

stage of life can lead to later adverse consequences.

Poverty constrains a person’s ability to afford to buy what they need and

participate in the activities that others in society routinely undertake. Low

incomes also reduce financial resilience to unexpected expenses, such as

car repairs or a faulty washing machine, and lead to households falling

behind with bills for utilities, Council Tax or other essentials.

Money worries in turn contribute to low-income adults and their children

being much more likely than wealthier adults and children to suffer from

depression or anxiety. Poverty can also affect the prospects of children,

who may fail to reach the same level of educational attainment as those

from wealthier families. This in turn can make escape from poverty even

harder when they become adults.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

The latest official poverty data – from the Department for Work and

Pensions’ Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data series –

corresponds to 2021/22. While the latest results are of higher quality than

those of the previous year, the Covid-19 pandemic has had an effect on

the data collection. Further details on the impact of the pandemic on the

data source are given in Annex 5. So we still need to exercise a degree of

caution in judging whether changes that we see in the data are due to real

effects or data-quality issues, especially changes during and following

the pandemic. We will continue to review our conclusions as further data

becomes available.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

In 2021/22, more than one in five people in the UK (22%) were in poverty

– 14.4 million people. Of these, 8.1 million were working-age adults,

4.2 million were children and 2.1 million were pensioners. Throughout this

report, when we use the term ‘poverty’, we are using the relative poverty

rate, after housing costs, unless otherwise stated. See Annex 1 for more

information on poverty definitions, as well as the trends using alternative

definitions.

The latest data tells us that close to three in ten children in the UK (29%)

were living in poverty in 2021/22. Around nine in twenty children in loneparent families (44%) lived in poverty, compared with five in twenty of

those in couple families (25%).

Adults and children in lone-parent families were by far the most likely of

any family member types to be struggling with poverty. When we looked

at pensioners, the poverty rate for single pensioners was almost double

that of couple pensioners, with around one in six pensioners overall living

in poverty.

Number of people in poverty and poverty rates for different

groups, UK, 2021/22

Group Number in

Poverty rate

People 14,400,000 22

Children 4,200,000 29

Working-age adults 8,100,000 20

Pensioners 2,100,000 18

Single pensioners 1,100,000 25

Couple pensioners 1,000,000 14

Single working-age adults, no children 3,000,000 24

Working-age adults in a couple, no children 1,900,000 13

Working-age lone parents 800,000 42

Working-age parents in couple families 2,400,000 21

Children in lone-parent families 1,500,000 44

Children in couple families 2,700,000 25

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Since the end of the latest data collection period for the Family Resources

Survey and Households Below Average Income data in March 2022, there

have been lots of signs of a very difficult situation continuing for poorer

households, with our latest cost-of-living tracker covering October 2023

showing that around 2.8 million households (47%) of the poorest fifth of

households are in arrears with their household bills or behind on scheduled

lending repayments and 4.2 million (72%) are going without essentials.

This is a slight improvement compared with October 2022, but still shows a

massive degree of financial strain for these households.

How has this changed over time?

The number and proportion of children and pensioners in poverty rose

between 2020/21 and 2021/22, as did overall poverty. The proportion

of children in poverty rose by 2 percentage points to 29%, while the

proportion of pensioners in poverty rose 3 percentage points to 18%. This

means that the proportions of the different population groups in poverty

have returned to around their pre-pandemic levels. Poverty increasing as

we came out of the pandemic might seem counter-intuitive, but this is

consistent with recovering average incomes causing the relative poverty

line to rise (median household incomes after housing costs rose by 2%

between 2020/21 and 2021/22), at the same time as a range of temporary

coronavirus-related support was withdrawn. Children and pensioners would

be the two groups where the impact of this would be most likely to be seen

– children, as they are the group most likely to be in poverty and thus to be

in families in receipt of benefits subject to changes, and pensioners, who

are more likely to be on a fixed income not affected by the post-pandemic

recovery.

Children have consistently had the highest poverty rates throughout the

past 25 years. Twenty-five years ago, a third of children lived in poverty.

This fell to 28% by 2004/05 and reached its lowest level of 27% between

2010/11 and 2013/14. After this period, child poverty rose, reaching 31% in

2019/20, before falling back to 27% in 2020/21 and then rising in the latest

data. Families with children are more likely to be receiving benefits than

families without children, so this pattern reflects changes in employment

levels, earnings and benefits. Recent analysis from UNICEF (UNICEF

Innocenti, 2023) shows that these increases over the last decade have not

been mirrored in the majority of the other 38 countries of the European

Union and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

included in their report.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

After the pensioner poverty rate more than halved from just under 30%

in the mid to late 1990s to 13% in 2012/13 (driven by increasing income

from private pensions and increases in benefits), it edged up from then to

2019/20, before a reduction to 15% in the data for the pandemic year of

2020/21. It stood at 18% in the latest year.

Children have consistently had the highest poverty rates, while

pensioners along with working-age adults without children now

have the lowest

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

The Institute for Fiscal Studies publishes poverty rates on a consistent

basis which go back to 1961. This enables us to take a longer-term

perspective, including comparing the performance of different

administrations. The chart below compares the poverty performance of

the current Government with those of its immediate predecessor Labour

administration and the Conservative Government before that. The Labour

administrations of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan have been

combined with that of the Conservative Edward Heath to give an idea of

performance before 1979.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Poverty rates grew rapidly under Margaret Thatcher’s

administration and remained high, with only small decreases in

subsequent administrations

Source: Institute for Fiscal Studies’ (2023) analysis of Family Expenditure Survey and Households

Below Average Income data

Note: Administrations since 1979 have been split by the political party leading the Government. The

Labour and Conservative administrations between 1964 and 1979 have been combined to show

longer-term performance over this period.

Poverty rates hovered between 12% and 17% during the administrations of

Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan. They then rose rapidly

under the administration of Margaret Thatcher, reaching around a quarter

in the early to mid 1990s. There was some reduction in the headline rate

under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but there has been a disappointing,

broadly static, picture since then.

The latest published data covers 2021/22, a year of recovery from the

pandemic, but the start of the cost-of-living crisis, with accelerating

inflation. It is worth noting the timings of different events affecting

household incomes since the pandemic, as well as data availability, which

are summarised in the graphic below.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

A schematic diagram of data availability, coronavirus lockdowns

and policy changes, alongside changes in inflation, unemployment

and inactivity, benefits and earnings, and housing costs

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What are the future prospects?

Future trends in poverty depend on what happens to its drivers, which

include employment and earnings, benefits and tax credits, and housing

costs, as well as how the cost of living is changing.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been massive and,

to some extent, temporary distortions to these key drivers. It will take

some time for these to move through the published data (in addition to

the pandemic affecting the ability to collect accurate data), meaning care

will have to be taken in interpreting the next few official poverty statistics.

However, our best judgement of changes since the end of the period

covered by the latest Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data and

future prospects is given in the table below.

Summary of changes to drivers of poverty levels

Driver Effect of

increase Since latest HBAI data Future prospects

Employment Generally

Falling rates of inactivity

but rising unemployment.

The Office for Budget

Responsibility (OBR)

forecasts falling

employment from late

2023 to mid 2025 and

for it still to be below its

2022/23 level at the start

Earnings Ambiguous –

can increase

poverty if

benefiting

middleincome

households

more than

low-income

Average earnings are

currently rising in real

terms – that is, going up

faster than inflation – but

are 7% below 2008 levels.

In April 2023, National

Living Wage rates

increased by around

inflation (9.7%).

The OBR forecasts wages

growing faster than

inflation from 2023 to

2028, but at a relatively

slow rate, so they remain

significantly below 2008

levels throughout the

period, with the net

effect of frozen tax

thresholds and National

Insurance cuts reducing

earnings. We also have

a higher-than-inflation

9.8% increase in the

National Living Wage;

however, this isn’t

perfectly targeted at the

lower-income households

with someone in work.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Driver Effect of

increase Since latest HBAI data Future prospects

Benefits Generally

Benefits are currently

close to a 40-year low

because the historic

inflation rate used for

uprating was much

lower than the inflation

rate across the whole of

2022/23, with the April

2023 increase not fully

closing the gap. Lumpsum payments have

mitigated this somewhat,

but the fall in the basic

rate remains.

Benefits have been

increased in line

with inflation as has

the benefit cap (the

maximum amount of

benefit someone out

of work can receive in

benefits). Local Housing

Allowance has been reset

to the 30th percentile of

actual rents. However,

the basic rate of benefits

is below destitution

levels and no further

funding of one-off costof-living payments or the

Household Support Fund

has been announced.

Generally

increasing

Rents and mortgages

are increasing at an

accelerating rate.

Many private rents are

related to the Consumer

Price Index (CPI), with

some housing costs

(for example, shared

accommodation) based

on the Retail Price Index

(RPI), which tends to be

even higher.

The OBR forecasts

extremely high growth in

rent and mortgage costs

throughout 2024 and

into 2025 due to higher

interest rates.

Inflation Limited

effect on

poverty but

will increase

the cost of

Now falling from a 40-

year high, which was

driven by high energy

prices, which are still

feeding into the costs

of many other items,

including essentials. Still

much higher than the

Bank of England’s target

The OBR expects falling

inflation throughout 2024

to reach the 2% Bank

of England target rate

in early 2025, but it will

be above it throughout

2024. Falling inflation

does not reverse the

increases in prices, but

simply means prices

have stopped rising so

Note: OBR = Office for Budget Responsibility.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

It is clear from this table that the current economic situation is by no

means positive, with all of the key drivers of poverty showing either a

negative or mixed picture. While the Office for Budget Responsibility

is forecasting improving trends in earnings and inflation, with benefits

keeping up with inflation albeit with a lag, much of this is just starting to

make up some of the (in many cases) extensive ground lost through the

cost-of-living crisis and beforehand. It is clear from the Office for Budget

Responsibility’s forecast of falling real household disposable incomes

between 2020/21 and 2024/25 that these effects will continue to have a

profound impact on many people’s living standards.

It is therefore worrying that many of the Government’s mitigations are

ending, including one-off cost-of-living lump-sum payments and possibly

the Household Support Fund, especially when JRF’s cost-of-living tracker

finds that millions of people are going without essentials and our analysis

shows that basic rates of benefits are below even destitution levels.

During a recession, relative poverty measures (which depend on how

poorer households are faring compared with the average household) are

highly dependent both on what governments do to protect the incomes of

poorer households and also on the impact of the recession on the average

household. We expect relative poverty to rise in the next set of data for

2022/23 as benefits rose by less than earnings. We would also expect a

larger rise in absolute poverty, as both earnings and benefits rose by less

than inflation.

Relative poverty in 2023/24 may actually show an improvement compared

with 2022/23 because poorer households’ incomes are falling less quickly

than the average household. However, this is likely to be only a short-term

effect, which reverses as the economy starts to grow again from 2024/25.

It could still mean the incomes of poorer households are falling, so with a

likely picture of more and more households going without essentials, there

will be little comfort in any short-term reductions in relative poverty.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Overall poverty levels are influenced by all subsequent sections. It is only

by looking across all these that a true picture of the current and future

situation can be ascertained.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Poverty depth and duration

Why is this important?

As this report makes clear, poverty affects the lives of millions of

people. But poverty is not a uniform experience. Living in poverty for

longer periods of time has a greater negative impact than shorter or

temporary spells. Also, families living in ‘deep poverty’, and especially

those experiencing destitution, are more likely to experience more severe

outcomes as they struggle to afford to meet even their most basic physical

needs: to be warm, dry, clean and fed.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Deep and very deep poverty

In 2021/22, around 9.7 million people across the UK lived in ‘deep poverty’

(that is, with an equivalised household income after housing costs that was

less than 50% of the UK median). Within this, 6.0 million lived in ‘very deep

poverty’ (that is, with an income less than 40% of the UK median). This

means that around four in ten people in poverty were living in very deep

poverty (41%), a further quarter (26%) were living in deep poverty but were

not in very deep poverty (with an income between 40% and 50% of the

UK median) and a third were in poverty but not in deep poverty (with an

income between 50% and 60% of the UK median).

To get a sense of the intensity of poverty experienced in the UK, the

poverty gap can be estimated. This demonstrates the size of the gap

between the median income of people in poverty and the poverty line.

It therefore shows the average amount of money that would be needed

to bring the incomes of people in poverty to the poverty line. Between

2019/20 and 2021/22, the poverty gap was 29%. That is to say, the median

household income of people living in poverty was 29% below the poverty

line. To put this in context, this is equivalent to a gap of £6,200 a year for

a couple with two primary-school-aged children living in poverty.

Between 2019/20 and 2021/22, the median household income of people

living in deep poverty was 30% below the deep poverty line. This is

equivalent to a gap of £5,400 a year for a couple with two primary-schoolaged children who were in deep poverty. The very deep poverty gap for

people on the lowest incomes was a similar monetary amount (around

£5,600 a year for such a family) but, given the very low incomes of people

in very deep poverty, the very deep poverty gap was much larger in

percentage terms (38%).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

However, while moves out of deep and very deep poverty to less deep

poverty will help to alleviate some of the worst hardship, families in less

deep poverty still have to make ends meet on very low incomes. Between

2019/20 and 2020/21, a couple with two primary-school-aged children with

the median income of someone in deep poverty would have needed their

income to increase by an average of £9,100 a year to move out of poverty

completely, while the equivalent family in very deep poverty would have

needed an additional £12,800 (or more than double their income).

Destitution

The deepest and most damaging form of poverty is destitution, where

people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs: to stay

warm, dry, clean and fed. Our latest Destitution in the UK report found that

around 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022, including around

one million children (Fitzpatrick et al, 2023).

Persistent poverty and very deep poverty

The Department for Work and Pensions publishes estimates of the

proportion of people who live in persistent poverty (here measured as

having an income after housing costs that is less than 60% of the annual

UK median in at least three years out of four) each year. The latest data

shows that, between 2017/18 and 2020/21, 12% of people across the UK

lived in persistent poverty. The persistent poverty rate was higher for

children (19%) than for pensioners (10%) and working-age adults (11%).

Persistent very deep poverty rates (looking at households with an income

less than 40% of the UK median in at least three years out of four) are

much lower than the persistent poverty rate.1

There is also a large amount

of churn in the group of people experiencing very deep poverty each year.

Between 2017/18 and 2020/21, an average of around 2.5 million people

moved into very deep poverty each year, with a similar number moving

out. Nonetheless, 3% of the UK population (equivalent to around 1.9

million people) experienced persistent very deep poverty over this period,

including 3% of children and of working-age adults, and 1% of pensioners.

As another 10.4 million people experienced very deep poverty in either one

or two years out of four, this means that more than 12 million people in the

UK experienced very deep poverty in at least one year between 2017/18

and 2020/21.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

People living in lone-parent families and larger families face a bigger risk

of living in persistent poverty. Between 2017–18 and 2020–21, one in three

people in lone-parent families and three in ten children in large families

were in persistent poverty. People in lone-parent families (8%) also faced a

much higher risk of persistent very deep poverty, but this was not the case

for children in large families. However, single adults in general were also

more likely to experience persistent very deep poverty.

Persistent poverty and very deep poverty rates for different

groups, UK, 2017–18 to 2021–22

Persistence rates

Very deep poverty

People 12 3

Children 19 3

Working-age adults 11 3

Pensioners 10 1

Single male pensioners 17 2

Single female pensioners 18 3

Couple pensioners in persistent poverty 6 1

Single working-age men with no children 14 6

Single working-age women with no

children 14 5

Working-age adults in a couple with no

children 5 2

Working-age lone parents 34 8

Working-age parents in couple families 13 2

Children in couple families 14 2

Children in lone-parent families 35 7

Children in one-child families 14 4

Children in two-child families 14 3

Children in large families (3+ children) 30 4

Source: DWP (2023e) and JRF analysis of Understanding Society, 2021–22 (Institute for Social and

Economic Research, 2023)

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Deep and very deep poverty

Although the poverty rate in the UK was lower in 2021/22 than it had

been in 1994/95 (22% compared with 24%), this was not the case for the

deep poverty rate (15% in both years) or the very deep poverty rate (8%

in 1994/95 and 9% in 2021/22). This means that a greater proportion of

people living in poverty are now living in very deep poverty than had been

at the start of this period.

After a fall in the proportion of people in deep and very deep poverty

(as well as in poverty overall) between 2019/20 and 2020/21, these rates

increased in the latest data, albeit not all the way to pre-pandemic levels.

This increase is likely to be due, at least in part, to the withdrawal of the

£20 increase to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit that was in place

until halfway through the latest survey year.

In 1994/95, someone in poverty was more likely to be in non-deep poverty

(38%) than they were to be in very deep poverty (35%) or less deep poverty

However, this changed over the next 25 years; by 2018/19, almost

half of people in poverty were in very deep poverty (47%). Although this

proportion fell during the Covid-19 pandemic, people in poverty were

still much more likely to be in very deep poverty (41%) than in non-deep

poverty (33%) in the latest data.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Since 1994/95, the percentage of people in poverty who are in

very deep poverty has increased, and now makes up the largest

group of people in poverty

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: The group in very deep poverty includes people whose equivalised household income after

housing costs (AHC) is less than 40% of median AHC income. The group in deep poverty, but not

very deep poverty, have an equivalised AHC household income less than 50% but more than 40%

of median AHC income. The group in poverty, but not deep poverty, have an equivalised AHC

household income less than 60% but more than 50% of median AHC income.

Over the same period, both the poverty gap and the deep poverty gap

widened. The average annual poverty gap between 1994/95 and 1996/97

was 23%, rising to 29% in the latest data. The corresponding deep poverty

gap rose from 22% to 30% over the same period. This means that people

in poverty and those in deep poverty now fall further below the poverty

and deep poverty lines than they did a quarter of a century ago. In fact,

between 2019/20 and 2021/22, the average gap between the median

income of people in poverty and the poverty line was equivalent to around

£6,200 a year for a couple with two primary-school-aged children, up from

£3,300 (adjusted for inflation) in 1994/95–1996/97. For deep poverty, this

increased from £2,600 to £5,400 a year. The very deep poverty gap has

been consistently higher, but is more volatile, potentially due to reporting

issues with very low incomes in survey data. Nonetheless, the size of the

increase of the very deep poverty gap (from £3,000 to £5,600) is unlikely

due to reporting issues alone.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The poverty gap and the deep poverty gap have grown at

similar rates since 1994/95–1996/97, but the very deep poverty

gap has been consistently larger

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: The poverty gap is the difference between the median equivalised income of people in

poverty and the relevant poverty line, as a percentage of the poverty line in each year.

Furthermore, people in very deep poverty have fallen even further behind

the overall poverty line over the past 25 years. Whereas between 1994/95

and 1996/97, a couple with two primary-school-aged children with the

median household income for people in very deep poverty needed

an increase in their annual income of £7,700 to move out of poverty

completely, this had increased by two-thirds to £12,800 between 2019/20

and 2021/22.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Destitution

The number of people experiencing destitution increased by almost

two-thirds (61%) between 2019 and 2022, while the number of children

in destitution almost doubled (with an increase of 88%) over the same

period. The sharp rise in destitution reflects, in particular, an increase in the

number of people lacking basic necessities, especially food and heating. As

the price of these essentials has soared, they have become unaffordable

for more people on very low incomes.

However, destitution was already increasing before the Covid-19 pandemic

and the cost-of-living crisis; between 2017 and 2019, the number of people

experiencing destitution increased by 54%. This means that the overall

number of people experiencing destitution was more than two-and-a-half

times higher in 2022 than it had been in 2017, and the number of children

experiencing destitution was almost three times higher.

Persistent poverty and very deep poverty

Persistent poverty and persistent very deep poverty have remained

relatively stable since 2010/11 to 2013/14 (the earliest period for which

the persistent poverty data is available). There has been a more notable,

though still small, increase in the proportion of people who experience

short-term very deep poverty (in one or two years out of four) over this

What are the future prospects?

Although the announcement that working-age benefits will be uprated

in line with inflation in April 2024 is very welcome, the real value of

benefits remains below its 2021/22 level and the freeze on Local Housing

Allowance was only temporarily lifted in the 2023 Autumn Statement

and will be reinstated in 2025/26, even if private rents continue to rise.

Furthermore, the £20 uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit has

been removed entirely. The lump-sum cost-of-living payments, which were

introduced to help people at the height of the cost-of-living crisis, will also

end in April 2024. Although these payments, along with the Government’s

energy support scheme, which has already ended, were not sufficient

to protect many families from deep hardship, the end of this additional

support will likely push more people into deeper poverty and destitution.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

People on the lowest incomes have already been the hardest hit by the

cost-of-living crisis. Record levels of inflation (which have been even higher

for essential goods such as food) have made it even more difficult for

many people in deep and very deep poverty to afford basic essentials for

their families, and prices continue to rise. Without more support to help

low-income families to cover these essential costs, we may see a growing

number of people becoming destitute.

We are less likely to see levels of persistent poverty or persistent very deep

poverty increasing in the short term. This is because immediate changes to

people’s economic situation have a more muted impact on the longer-term

measure of persistent poverty, which is based on household income over

the previous four years. However, if the real value of benefits falls further

or housing costs continue to rise over multiple years, levels of persistent

poverty and persistent very deep poverty will increase.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Experiences of deep and very deep poverty vary between different groups

(including by ethnicity and disability) and as a result of other drivers of

poverty, and longer and deeper experiences of poverty can lead to worse

outcomes. Many of these differences are highlighted in relevant sections.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Family composition, age and sex

Why is this important?

Levels of poverty differ between different family types, people of different

ages and people of different sexes. These dimensions also intersect, with

important implications for policy.

In particular, families with more children have consistently faced a higher

risk of poverty. A number of benefit policies have a disproportionate

impact on larger families. This includes the two-child limit, which restricts

eligibility for many child-related benefits to the first two children in a

household, and the benefit cap, which limits the total income a household

can receive in out-of-work benefits.

Families with children also face additional challenges if childcare

responsibilities limit their ability to undertake well-paid, flexible and

high-quality work, particularly in families with younger children and in

lone-parent families. A gender perspective is key to understanding these

patterns: most lone-parent families are headed by women, and women

usually bear the bulk of childcare responsibilities even in couples with

children.

But a gender perspective is often missing from debates about poverty,

which are usually based on household income and include implicit

assumptions about how incomes are shared within a household. Although

the Family Resources Survey does not collect information on respondents’

gender, it does record their sex. While this does not allow us to investigate

fully the relationship between gender and poverty, it can be used to build a

more complete picture of the links between sex and poverty.

Lifecycle factors are also at play. Over the course of their lifetime, an

individual may go from being dependent on the income of their parents,

to receiving most of their income from work (with potential periods

of childcare, unemployment and other events taking them out of the

workforce), often while supporting children of their own, to leaving the

workforce and drawing a pension.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

In 2021/22, one in five working-age males and one in five working-age

females were living in poverty (19% and 21% respectively). Poverty rates

were lower for male and female pensioners (16% and 19% respectively).

Levels of poverty among working-age adults are highest at the start and

towards the end of their working life, with around one in four 16–24 year

olds (24%) and working-age adults aged 60 or over (25%) in poverty.

Number of adults in poverty and adult poverty rates for

different groups, UK, 2021/22

Group Number in

Poverty rate

Working-age adults by sex

Male 3,900,000 19

Female 4,300,000 21

Pension-age adults by sex

Male 800,000 16

Female 1,200,000 19

Working-age adults by age

16–24 1,200,000 24

25–29 700,000 17

30–34 800,000 17

35–39 800,000 19

40–44 900,000 22

45–49 900,000 21

50–54 800,000 18

55–59 900,000 19

60+ 1,200,000 25

Pension-age adults by age

65–69 400,000 15

70–74 600,000 17

75–79 500,000 20

80+ 600,000 20

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

We saw in the first section on overall poverty rates that children have

higher poverty rates than working-age adults and pensioners. We also

know from other research that, among individuals who are in paid work

before they start caring for children in the home, the poverty rate doubles

after they have been providing care for five years (Thompson et al, 2023).

But levels of child poverty also vary between families, as shown in the table

below. In 2021/22, the poverty rate for children in families with three or

more children was almost twice as high as the poverty rate for children in

one- or two-child families (43% compared with 23% and 22% respectively).

We also know from the first section that lone-parent families, which are

predominantly headed by women, have the highest poverty rate of any

family type. More than two in five children in lone-parent families (44%)

were living in poverty in 2021/22, compared with 25% of children in couple

families.

Poverty rates also vary depending on the age of children in the family.

In 2021/22, three in ten children in families where the youngest child was

aged under 5 (32%) or between 5 and 10 years old (30%) were in poverty.

Meanwhile, around a quarter of children in families where the youngest

child was aged 11–15 (25%) or 16–19 (24%) were living in poverty.3

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Number of children in poverty and child poverty rates for

different groups, UK, 2021/22

Group Number in

Poverty rate

Number of children in family

1 700,000 23

2 1,500,000 22

3+ (‘large’ families) 2,100,000 43

Family type

Children in couple families 2,700,000 25

Children in lone-parent families 1,500,000 44

Age of youngest child in family

0–4 1,900,000 32

5–10 1,500,000 30

11–15 700,000 25

16–19* 200,000 24

Age of child

0–4 1,100,000 28

5–10 1,400,000 29

11–15 1,200,000 30

16–19* 500,000 32

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: * A person is defined as a child if they are 16–19 years old and they are: not married nor in a

civil partnership nor living with a partner; living with parents/a responsible adult; and in full-time

non-advanced education or in unwaged government training.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Many of these categories of families intersect. Here we look at the overlap

of children who live in families with different characteristics with elevated

risks of poverty, namely large families (those with three or more children),

families with young children (those with a child aged 0–4) and lone-parent

families. A large majority of children in poverty (around eight in ten) fall

into at least one of these groups. Around half of these, or around four

in ten children in poverty, fall into more than one group, with the largest

number of children in poverty living in large families with young children.

Many of these families will have been affected by the two-child limit on

benefits, which applies to families where a third or subsequent child was

born after April 2017 (with limited exceptions). This means that most large

families with young children will not receive Universal Credit or tax credits

for more than two children.

Different family characteristics often overlap for families with

children who are in poverty

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Totals do not sum due to rounding.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Children in families with three or more children have long faced a higher

risk of poverty than children in families with fewer children. However, as

shown in the chart below, this difference tended to narrow until 2013/14,

after which it began to widen again. By contrast, child poverty has been

relatively stable in families with fewer children. In 2020/21, the child

poverty rate in families with three or more children fell by 9 percentage

points, but around half of this fall was reversed in 2021/22, likely reflecting

the removal of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit

halfway through the year.

The child poverty rate in large families has been rising since

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Children in families with young children have also experienced an elevated

poverty risk for decades. This difference was also narrowing until 2013/14,

and, again, a large fall in the child poverty rate among this group in

2020/21 was largely reversed in 2021/22. The poverty rate among children

in families where the youngest child is aged 5–10 has also been rising and

is now very similar to that of children in families where the youngest child is

aged 0–4.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Children in families with young children have consistently had

higher poverty rates

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

While children are at a higher risk of poverty if they are in families with

younger children, the pattern is reversed if we look at the age of the

individual child. Although differences are small, children aged 16–19 are at

the highest risk of poverty, followed by children aged 11–15, children aged

5–10 and then children aged 0–4. Younger children have historically been at

a higher risk of poverty, so this is a new pattern, which has been emerging

over a long period but only became fully evident in 2020/21. Additional JRF

analysis indicates that part of the explanation could lie in the interaction

with the number of parents with whom the child is living, with an increasing

proportion of older children and a decreasing proportion of younger

children living in lone-parent families in poverty over time. However, it

remains to be seen whether this pattern will persist beyond the period of

the pandemic and associated policy measures.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

After a steady increase over the past 25 years, older children

now face the highest risk of poverty

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Another striking trend is pensioner poverty, which has been rising over the

past 10 years, following nearly two decades of decline. Although pensioner

poverty fell in 2020/21, particularly among female pensioners, which

narrowed the historical gap with male pensioners, these reductions were

almost completely reversed in 2021/22 when poverty rates for both groups

rose back towards their 2019/20 levels.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Pensioner poverty has been on a broadly upward trend since

around 2013/14, with female pensioners at a higher risk of

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Overall, the falls in poverty rates that we saw in 2020/21 were largely

reversed in the latest data. This was particularly the case for children

whose families are more likely to receive benefits and who are therefore

more likely to have been affected by the withdrawal of the £20 uplift to

Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit. This withdrawal is not yet fully

reflected in the data as the change happened halfway through the 2021/22

financial year. We would therefore expect to see child poverty, particularly

in larger and younger families, increase further. Similarly, the ongoing

cost-of-living crisis is only covered partially in the latest data, and levels of

hardship have only worsened since the start of it.

What are the future prospects?

The family types with the highest poverty rates – lone-parent families,

large families and families with young children – are particularly reliant on

the benefits system. Decisions around benefit uprating will therefore have

a direct, significant and long-term impact on millions of these families,

especially in a context of high inflation, so it is a huge relief that normal

uprating will take place in April 2024.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Meanwhile, the two-child-limit policy, which withdraws means-tested

support from third and subsequent children born since April 2017, continues

to be rolled out. The latest data, for April 2023, shows that the proportion

of families with three or more children that are affected by this policy

has exceeded 50% for the first time (Department for Work and Pensions,

2023b). As the proportion of children who are born after April 2017

increases, more children and more families will be affected by the policy.

This will directly affect the poverty rate in large families.

The recent expansion of means-tested childcare support, and the ability

of parents to claim this support upfront rather than in arrears if they

significantly increase their working hours, could help parents and their

children exit poverty by accessing higher levels of paid work. However, the

total cost that families can claim back is still capped at 85%, and the policy

is being accompanied by an increase in work-related activity requirements.

The quality and availability of childcare provision also matter, and some

parents, particularly those with young children, may prefer to care for their

children themselves. There are plans in many parts of the UK to extend

funded childcare provision to younger children.

Prospects for pensioner poverty are mixed. There are some reasons for

optimism: at a minimum, the ‘triple lock’ (whereby the State Pension is

increased by the highest of three different values: the growth in average

earnings, inflation or 2.5%) makes sure the value of the State Pension

keeps up with prices; pensioner incomes are less affected by changes

in the labour market; and more new pensioners will have some private

pension provision because of the introduction of auto-enrolment into

pension schemes. On the other hand, the shift from defined benefits to

defined contribution pension schemes will result in more risk and volatility

in occupational pensions in retirement, while lower homeownership will

mean more pension-age people need to cover the costs of private rental

accommodation over the coming years. The rising levels of inactivity

among people in their 50s and 60s since the Covid-19 pandemic are also

concerning, with people often underestimating their life expectancy after

retirement and how long a period their retirement income needs to cover.

How does this section interact with other sections?

The main interactions of these factors are with the labour market and

the benefits system. Certain family types, particularly those with young

children or multiple children and those with only one parent, find it harder

to work full time – particularly given the cost and availability of childcare.

Housing costs may also vary over someone’s lifetime. Families with

children often have higher housing costs and tend to be more reliant on

income from benefits.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Ethnicity and poverty

Why is this important?

There are large differences in the poverty rates between different ethnic

groups in the UK, including between and within groups that are often

considered to have similar experiences. Direct racism (through the

decisions and actions of individuals and organisations) as well as social

norms, policies and wider structures (like the labour and housing markets)

contribute to inequitable outcomes and poverty. It is essential to highlight

and understand these differences to solve poverty in the UK.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Poverty and very deep poverty

In the latest data, poverty rates were higher among many minority ethnic

groups than they were for white people in the UK. In particular, half of

people in Pakistani (51%) and Bangladeshi (53%) households lived in

poverty.4 This made them more than two-and-a-half times as likely as

people in white households (19%) to be in poverty. People in households

headed by someone from an Asian background other than Indian,

Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese, or by someone from Black African

backgrounds, were twice as likely as those in white households to be in

poverty in the UK (39% and 42% respectively versus 19%), while people in

households headed by someone from Black Caribbean backgrounds were

50% more likely to experience poverty than those in white households (28%

versus 19%).5

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Around one in five people from Pakistani-headed households (20%)

and almost one in four people from Bangladeshi-headed households

(23%) were in very deep poverty (with an equivalised household income

after housing costs that is less than 40% of the UK median). People in

households headed by someone from Black African backgrounds or from

‘other ethnic groups’ (which includes individuals who identified as Arab

or none of the specified ethnic groups in the survey) experienced similar

levels of very deep poverty (20%), even though they were less likely than

people in Pakistani and Bangladeshi households to experience poverty.

They were all more than twice as likely as people in white households to live

in very deep poverty (8% of white households lived in very deep poverty).

People in Pakistani and Bangladeshi households are by far the

most likely to be in poverty, although people from Pakistani,

Bangladeshi, Black African or ‘any other ethnicity’ households

experience similar very deep poverty rates

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Three-year averages are used due to small sample sizes in annual datasets. In line with the

Department for Work and Pensions’ approach, single-year estimates for 2020/21 are excluded due

to data-quality issues so these three-year averages are based on 2019/20 and 2021/22 data only.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Child poverty and very deep poverty

Poverty rates were even higher for children in Pakistani and Bangladeshi

households, six in ten of whom lived in poverty (61% and 62% respectively),

while around half of children in households headed by someone from

Black African backgrounds (53%) and from Asian backgrounds other than

Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese (50%) were in poverty. They were

therefore all twice as likely as children in white households to be in poverty

(the figure for the latter was 25%). Children in Black Caribbean households

also faced an elevated risk of living in poverty (45%).

Very deep poverty rates were also even higher among children. Three in

ten children in Bangladeshi households (30%) lived in very deep poverty,

meaning around half of children in Bangladeshi households who were

living in poverty were in very deep poverty and so faced particularly

deep hardship. Nearly a quarter of children in Pakistani households (24%)

and Black African households (24%) and more than a fifth from Asian

backgrounds other than Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese (21%)

and ‘other ethnic groups’ (23%) were also in very deep poverty. This is

compared with 9% of children in white households.

As typical family types tend to vary between different ethnic groups, a

higher average family size for some minority ethnic groups increases

their risk of poverty. However, even among large families (those with

three or more children), poverty rates tend to be lower in white families

than in families from minority ethnic groups: while 35% of people in white

households with three or more children lived in poverty, this rose to 64%

in Black households and 67% in Asian households (broader categories are

used for this analysis due to the smaller sample size of large families in

the data).

Persistent very deep poverty

People from Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic groups are not only more

likely to experience very deep poverty, but they are also more likely to

remain in very deep poverty for a prolonged period of time. Between 2011

and 2021, people in Bangladeshi and Black African households (both 10%)

were five times more likely than people in white households (2%) to live

in persistent very deep poverty (that is, to live in very deep poverty for at

least three years out of four). Those in households headed by someone

from Asian backgrounds other than Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or

Chinese (7%), Pakistani backgrounds (8%) or ‘other ethnic groups’ (9%)

also faced higher levels of persistent very deep poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Again, persistent very deep poverty rates were even higher among children.

More than one in ten children in Bangladeshi (12%) or Black African (11%)

households and those from ‘any other Black backgrounds’ (11%) or ‘other

ethnic groups’ (11%) experienced persistent very deep poverty. They were

all, therefore, more than five times more likely to experience persistent very

deep poverty than children in white households, 2% of whom experienced

People in Bangladeshi and Black African households, along with

those from ‘other ethnic groups’, are the most likely to live in

very deep poverty for a prolonged period of time

Source: JRF analysis of Understanding Society, 2021–22 (Institute for Social and Economic

Research, 2023)

Since the latest poverty data was collected, the cost-of-living crisis has hit

many people from minority ethnic backgrounds hard. Between February

and May 2023, around half of adults from Asian (53%) and Black (47%)

ethnic backgrounds said they were finding it difficult to afford their rent or

mortgage payments, compared with a third of white adults (33%). During

the same period, adults from Black ethnic groups (13%) and from mixed

or multiple ethnic groups (14%) were more than twice as likely as adults

from white (5%) or Asian (6%) ethnic groups to have run out of food and

not been able to buy more. At the same time, only a fifth of Black adults

found it easy to afford their energy payments (compared with almost half

of white adults) (Office for National Statistics, 2023b).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Even though they remain the most likely to experience poverty today,

poverty rates for people in Bangladeshi and Pakistani households have

fallen over the last quarter-century. Twenty years ago, the majority of

people in households headed by someone with a Pakistani (58%) or

Bangladeshi (72%) background were living in poverty. The poverty rate

for both groups is closer to a half today. In contrast, the poverty rate for

people in households headed by someone from a white ethnic background

has remained relatively stable – and much lower – with around one in five

people from that group living in poverty across this period. Poverty rates

among Black African-headed households have also changed little, but they

have consistently been twice as high (around 40%) as poverty rates among

white households (around 20%), with poverty rates among households

headed by someone of Black Caribbean ethnicity only slightly lower.

Levels of very deep poverty have generally followed the same pattern

as levels of poverty over this period. For example, among people living

in poverty, around four in ten people in Bangladeshi households, around

five in ten people in Black African households and more than half (55%)

of people in ‘any other ethnicity’ households were in very deep poverty

across this period. However, people in white households in poverty were

more likely to be in very deep poverty in 2019/20–2021/22 (42%) than

they had been in 2001/02–2003/04 (35%). This was also the case for

people in poverty in households of mixed ethnicity (44% in 2001/02–

2003/04 compared with 49% in 2019/20–2021/22) and from Black

Caribbean backgrounds (46% in 2001/02–2003/04 compared with 51%

in 2019/20–2021/22).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Poverty and very deep poverty rates have fallen for Bangladeshi

and Pakistani households over the past two decades, so they are

now similar to those for Black African households but still much

higher than those for white households

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What are the future prospects?

Around three in ten people in families from Bangladeshi (28%) and Black

(30%) ethnic groups receive income-related state support (compared

with 18% of white families) (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023d).

Bangladeshi families are also the most likely to receive Child Tax Credits

(16%) and Working Tax Credits (11%). Therefore, the value of benefits – and

the need for uprating them in line with inflation – is particularly important

for these groups. The Government’s decision to uprate all working-age

benefits in line with inflation in April 2024 is therefore welcome. However,

as the real value of benefits has been at historic lows and the basic rate of

Universal Credit does not cover even essential goods and services, many

minority ethnic families will continue to struggle as prices continue to rise.

Many people from minority ethnic backgrounds have been left in an even

more precarious position because of the cost-of-living crisis. Black adults

face a particularly high level of financial vulnerability. In spring 2023, only

a quarter of Black adults said their household could afford an unexpected

expense of £850 (compared with six in ten white adults) or that they think

they will be able to save money over the next 12 months (compared with

four in ten white adults) (Office for National Statistics, 2023b). They are

therefore likely to be less financially resilient and may find it harder to cope

with any future financial challenges.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Minority ethnic families are disproportionately affected by changes to the

benefits system. They are also more likely to be unemployed or working in

low-pay, temporary or insecure work, so labour market trends are critical.

Having larger families and being more likely to live in urban centres

such as London also lead to higher housing costs and a greater risk of

overcrowding for many minority ethnic families, so housing is also an

important area.

It is also crucial to consider the ways in which intersecting inequalities

increase people’s risk of experiencing poverty. Age, gender, family

composition, disability and geographic inequalities are all key drivers of

poverty themselves, but it is also important to consider how they interact

with ethnicity to lead to greater inequalities.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Geography and poverty

Why is this important?

Across the nations, regions and local areas of the UK, differences in

employment opportunities, levels of wages, the adequacy of benefits

and housing costs are important determinants of poverty rates. While,

ultimately, Westminster maintains control over many policy and fiscal

decisions, the devolution of powers to the Governments in Edinburgh,

Cardiff and Belfast, and to mayoralties in London and across England, as

well as the ongoing role of local authorities, present politicians and political

leaders at national and local levels with policy levers with which they can

seek to address poverty.

It is important to understand the way in which drivers of poverty interact

to produce different rates of poverty at national, regional and local levels,

and to monitor rates of poverty over time to ascertain the progress of the

UK Governments and political leaders in solving poverty across the UK.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

This section sets out the poverty rates and key drivers of poverty across

the nations and regions of, and local authorities in, the UK. Poverty rates

by nation and region are calculated using three-year averages; however,

due to data-quality concerns for the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic –

financial year 2020/21 – the average has been calculated excluding data

from this year. Therefore the poverty rates for 2019–22 (and 2018–21) are

based on two-year averages and carry a greater level of uncertainty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Average number of people in poverty and poverty rates by UK

nation/region, 2019–22

Nation/region Number in

Poverty rate

North East 700,000 25

North West 1,600,000 23

Yorkshire and the Humber 1,300,000 23

East Midlands 1,100,000 23

West Midlands 1,600,000 27

East 1,100,000 18

London 2,200,000 25

South East 1,700,000 19

South West 1,100,000 19

England 12,300,000 22

Wales 700,000 22

Scotland 1,100,000 21

Northern Ireland 300,000 16

UK 14,400,000 22

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

UK poverty rates by nation and region

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2019/20 and 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

In the latest data, the average poverty rates in England (22%), Wales (22%)

and Scotland (21%) had converged to around the same level, although

poverty rates were much lower in Northern Ireland at 16%. When we dig

beneath these headline rates for the UK nations, there is substantial

variation in poverty rates across the regions in England and in child

poverty rates between local authorities across the UK.

The variation in poverty rates across the UK is driven by the interactions

between the labour market (levels of employment, sectors worked in and

rates of pay), the housing market (mix of tenures and housing costs)

and rates of benefit receipt, alongside wider demographic factors (age,

family types and sizes). The main drivers of poverty vary across different

geographies – a greater reliance on renting and higher costs of housing

are a substantial driver in larger cities in particular, while lower rates of

employment, with fewer employment opportunities alongside a greater

concentration of employment in lower-paid roles and sectors, are more

significant drivers of poverty across many post-industrial and coastal

Research carried out by Loughborough University on behalf of End Child

Poverty (2023) provides further insight into the geography of poverty by

estimating the proportion of children who are in poverty after housing

costs by local authority. Below we include some commentary based on this

analysis of child poverty rates at local authority level.

In Scotland, one in five people (21%) were in poverty between 2019/20

and 2021/22. This was an increase after a relatively stable trend over

the previous decade of poverty rates between 18% and 19%. Previous

editions of this UK Poverty report identified tenure mix and housing costs

as important factors keeping the poverty rate lower in Scotland, with

fewer households renting generally and a larger share of renters in the

more affordable social rented sector than across the rest of the UK. In

the latest data (covering 2019/20 to 2021/22), the uptick in the poverty

rate in Scotland was driven by a fall in the rate of employment and a

corresponding increase in the rate of ‘economic inactivity’ (rather than an

increase in the rate of unemployment). Specifically, there was an increase

in the numbers of working-age adults saying they were retired or had longterm ill-health as their main reason for not being in or looking for work.

Child poverty rates in Scotland (24%) remained much lower than in England

(29%) and Wales (28%), although they were similar to (if slightly higher

than) that in Northern Ireland (22%). This is likely to be due, at least in part,

to the Scottish Child Payment. This highlights the effect benefits can have

in reducing poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

However, many areas of Scotland still have high levels of child poverty. In

the latest data, Glasgow had the highest rate of child poverty in Scotland,

with one in three children in poverty (32%), followed by North Ayrshire (29%)

and Clackmannanshire and West Dunbartonshire (28%); this compares to

a UK average child poverty rate of 29%. The lowest rates of child poverty

in Scotland were in East Renfrewshire (14%), East Dunbartonshire (15%),

Shetland Islands (15%) and Aberdeenshire (16%). The areas with higher

child poverty rates typically had lower rates of employment among

working-age adults (66% in North Ayrshire and 70% in Glasgow versus 75%

in Edinburgh) and a greater share of families living in rented

accommodation (48% of homes in West Dunbartonshire were rented

compared with 19% in East Dunbartonshire) – both risk factors for higher

poverty rates.

In Wales, the latest poverty rate was 22%. This was slightly lower than the

average of 23–24% over the previous decade. This lower rate of poverty

occurred despite a fall in the rate of employment and a corresponding

increase in the rate of economic inactivity seen in the data, largely due to

increased numbers of those who are long-term sick or disabled. However,

in Wales, the data for the most recent year shows a larger share of in-work

adults working in higher-paid managerial and ‘professional’ roles, a higher

share of households as outright homeowners and a higher share of people

in couples without children – all groups at a lower risk of poverty.

In the latest data, the local authorities in Wales with the highest child

poverty rates were Blaenau Gwent (30%), Ceredigion (30%), Merthyr Tydfil

(29%) and Cardiff (28%). These were all around the UK average of 29%.

Child poverty rates in Wales were lowest in Monmouthshire (21%), Vale of

Glamorgan (22%) and Flintshire (25%). Across the UK nations and regions,

Wales had close to the smallest range of child poverty rates between local

authorities, second only to Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland had the lowest poverty rate of any UK nation or region

at 16%, the lowest poverty rate ever reported for any nation or region in

the Households Below Average Income data series since 1994–97

(although Northern Ireland was only included from 2002/03). Previous

editions of this UK Poverty report have identified tenure mix as a

protective factor against poverty after housing costs. In Northern Ireland,

there are more outright homeowners, fewer renters and substantially lower

housing costs for low-income households than across the rest of the UK.

While the labour market profile of Northern Ireland has typically been

more reflective of areas of the UK with higher poverty rates (that is, higher

rates of economic inactivity, greater concentrations of workers in lowerpaid industries

and lower average earnings), the latest year’s data shows a jump in the

employment rate, a fall in the number of households where no adults are in

work and an increase in the share of workers who work in managerial or

‘professional’ roles.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Within Northern Ireland, Belfast, Newry, Mourne and Down (24%) and

Derry City and Strabane (23%) had the highest rates of child poverty,

while Lisburn and Castlereagh (16%), Ards and North Down (18%) and

Antrim and Newtownabbey had the lowest rates (19%). The areas with

the lowest rates of poverty had the highest proportions of people living

in owner-occupied accommodation (at or above 75%), whereas in Belfast

and in Derry City and Strabane, 47% and 38% respectively lived in rented

accommodation. Catholic people in Northern Ireland also had a much

higher rate of poverty than Protestant people, at 19% compared with 15%

(Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, 2023b); this is reflected

in the geography of poverty in Northern Ireland where areas including

Derry City and Newry have larger Catholic populations, while Lisburn and

North Down, for example, have larger Protestant populations.

In England, the poverty rate was 22%. However, the regional breakdown

shows a clear divide between the south of England on the one hand and

the Midlands and the north of England on the other, although London

stands out in the south of England as having a high poverty rate.

In the latest data, the West Midlands had the highest rate of poverty at

27%, followed by the North East and London (both 25%), and Yorkshire

and the Humber, the East Midlands and the North West (all 23%). In

the West Midlands and North East, around one in four working-age adults

were not in work or studying, compared with fewer than one in five in the

regions with the lowest rates of poverty (the South West, South East and

East of England). Across England, the North East and West Midlands had

the highest share of people living in households where nobody was in work

(30% and 27% respectively), compared with 21% in the South East and 22%

in the East of England. Moreover, workers in the North East, West Midlands

and Yorkshire and the Humber were more likely to be working in ‘routine

occupations’, which tend to be lower-paid roles. These regions also had

higher-than-average proportions living in rented accommodation than in

the regions with lower rates of poverty. They also had higher-than-average

proportions of people in families in receipt of Universal Credit or equivalent

legacy benefits – 25% in the North East and 23% in the West Midlands,

North West and Yorkshire and the Humber, compared with 13% in the

South East, 14% in the East and 16% in the South West.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

There is substantial variation in child poverty rates across local authorities

in these regions. In the latest years’ data, among the local authorities

with the highest child poverty rates in England were Birmingham (46%),

Sandwell (45%), Stoke-on-Trent (44%), Walsall and Wolverhampton (both

43%) in the West Midlands, and Manchester (45%), Oldham (44%), Pendle

(43%) and Blackburn with Darwen, Bolton and Hyndburn (all at 42%) in the

North West. In Yorkshire and the Humber, Bradford (39%), Hull (35%) and

Kirklees (34%) also had high rates of child poverty, while in the North East,

Middlesbrough (41%) and Newcastle (38%) had the highest child poverty

rates. Every local authority in the North East had a child poverty rate

higher than the UK average.

Many of the places in the north of England and the Midlands with higher

rates of child poverty are older industrial towns where, historically,

many workers would have been employed in manufacturing industries

and mining. Today, their labour markets (rates of employment, levels of

pay and the sectors in which jobs are available) are generally weaker

compared with elsewhere in England, which remains an important factor

underpinning higher rates of poverty.

London has long had the highest rate of poverty of the UK nations and

regions due to high housing costs, at between 27% and 28% for most

of the past decade. However, in the latest years’ data this fell slightly to

25%. The data for 2019/20–2021/22 shows an increase in the numbers

of working-age adults in full-time employment and working in higherpaid managerial and ‘professional’ roles. It also shows an increase in the

number of people in households where all adults are in work.

There was substantial variation in child poverty rates within London, with

just under half of children in Tower Hamlets in poverty (48%), and more

than four in ten children in Newham (44%), Hackney (43%) and Barking

and Dagenham (42%) in poverty. At the other end of the scale in London

were Richmond upon Thames (12%), Kingston upon Thames (19%), Bromley

(20%) and Sutton (22%). Of all UK nations and regions, London had the

greatest degree of within-region variation in child poverty rates, with a 35

percentage point difference in child poverty rates between Tower Hamlets

and Richmond, reflecting a striking inequality in levels of household income

across the capital. Tenure mix and housing costs, rates of employment and

earnings and demographic factors such as family composition and size all

play important roles in these varying rates of poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

As described in the ethnicity and poverty section, people from some

minority ethnic groups in the UK also had a disproportionately high risk

of poverty, and this interacts with the geography of poverty. London is

by far the most ethnically diverse region of the UK, where 40% of people

are Black, Asian or minority ethnic, followed by the West Midlands at 19%

and Yorkshire and The Humber at 14%. However, this aggregation to the

regional level masks that many cities and some larger towns across the UK

are much more ethnically diverse than towns and rural areas in particular.

In Leicester, Luton and Birmingham, more than half of people are Black,

Asian or minority ethnic (59%, 55% and 51% respectively), as are a large

proportion of the populations in Manchester (43%), Wolverhampton (40%)

and Bradford (39%) (Office for National Statistics, 2022c).

Minority ethnic households are more likely to live in rented

accommodation, are disproportionately likely to be single-earner

households and, among those in work, are more likely to work in lowerpaid occupations and have a lower wage. They are also more likely to be

younger, have children and have larger families. All of these characteristics

increase the risk of poverty for these groups, and are reflected in the

higher rates of poverty in places like Birmingham, Luton and Bradford.

Poverty rates in Great Britain were lowest in the East (18%), South East

and South West (both 19%) of England. Generally, this reflects the stronger

labour markets in these areas, with higher rates of employment, greater

proportions of workers working in higher-paid jobs and sectors, and a

lower proportion of people in households where nobody is in work. These

regions also have higher rates of homeownership and, related to this, the

population skews older, with a greater share of their population being

pensioners, and pension-age adults have a lower risk of poverty.

There was substantial variation in child poverty rates within these regions.

There were notably higher rates of child poverty in coastal areas in

particular, including Thanet (36%), Southampton (36%), Portsmouth (35%),

Hastings (35%) and Great Yarmouth (31%). Coastal cities and towns in

these areas have weaker labour markets, with higher rates of lower-paid

and often seasonal work, and high proportions of people in workless

households. Rates of child poverty were also higher than average in some

of the cities and larger towns in the south and East of England, including

Luton (39%), Slough (35%), Norwich (34%) and Bristol (33%). In these areas

the tenure mix and higher housing costs tend to be important drivers of

poverty. Slough and Luton are among the most ethnically diverse local

authorities in the UK, with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi (in Luton)

populations, and with more single-earner households, families with children

and large families, which also increase their risk of poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Child poverty rate estimates by local authority

Source: Child poverty rate estimates, after housing costs, from Loughborough University, 2021/22

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How have poverty rates by region changed over time?

Poverty rates across most nations and regions of the UK were lower in

2019/20–2021/22 than they had been 25 years earlier. However, over

the past two decades, poverty rates across most of the UK have been

stubbornly stagnant rather than falling. Where poverty rates have

decreased, this is predominantly due to falling levels of pensioner poverty

(although in recent years the poverty rate among this group has been

climbing again), alongside increasing rates of employment among

working-age adults (although the rate of in-work poverty itself has been

increasing).

In the above subsection we outlined changes in labour markets and

housing that have driven changes in poverty rates across different regions

in recent years. In the West Midlands, East Midlands and North West,

where the poverty rate has increased in recent years, this is partly driven

by a fall in the share of working-age adults in employment and an increase

in the share of people in households where one or more adults are not in

work. In London and Northern Ireland the converse is true, underpinning a

falling poverty rate in both areas.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

UK poverty rates over time by nations and regions

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What are the future prospects?

After March 2022, the end of the period covered by the latest poverty data,

inflation rates peaked at a 40-year high of over 10% towards the end of

2022. Inflation has been falling since then, although it remains much higher

than the Bank of England’s target. This means that prices are still growing

at a much faster rate than they have been for much of the past few

decades, but not as fast as they were at the end of 2022. Data published

by the Office for National Statistics in July 2023 shows that more than

nine in ten people across Britain have noticed that their cost of living has

increased over the past year, with the vast majority citing both the cost

of their food shopping and gas or electricity bills increasing in particular

(Office for National Statistics, 2023b).

A greater share of people in the north of England, the Midlands and Wales

reported experiencing the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis, including:

• having to spend less on food shopping and essentials

• shopping around more

• using less electricity and gas

• using charities for support

• falling behind on bills

• saving less.

However, right across Britain, a huge proportion of people reported

experiencing the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis. The scale of the

increase in the numbers reporting, for example, spending less on food

shopping and essentials and cutting back on electricity and gas use

between January–February 2022 and February–May 2023 was greater

than the variation in the proportions reporting experiencing these between

nations and regions (Office for National Statistics, 2023b).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Alongside general inflation, both social and private renters have seen

substantial increases in their rents, while sizeable interest-rate hikes have

created cliff edges of ratcheting mortgage repayments for mortgaged

home buyers as fixed-rate mortgages expire. In the social rented sector,

social rent increases in England and Northern Ireland were capped at 7%

and in Wales at 6.5% from April 2023, while in Scotland social landlords

increased rents by, on average, 5% (Scottish Housing Regulator, 2023).

Rent increases of this magnitude represent the largest increase in social

rent levels seen in recent decades, albeit lower than inflation at that time.

Among home buyers, the ratcheting up of mortgage repayments with

interest-rate hikes is likely to disproportionately affect more recent buyers

with larger outstanding mortgage debt, potentially exerting greater pain

in parts of the UK with higher house prices. These hikes in mortgage

payments have the potential to pull hundreds of thousands of people into

poverty (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2022).

In the private rented sector, government statistics show that there had

been record year-on-year increases in average rents across all tenancies

between 2022 and 2023 in every UK nation and region (with the time

series dating back to 2006 for English regions, 2010 for Wales, 2012 for

Scotland and 2016 for Northern Ireland) (Office for National Statistics,

2023e). Analysis of Rightmove’s rental price tracker since 2015 has shown

that asking rents have also been increasing at record levels since 2021,

typically with year-on-year increases in asking rents around or surpassing

10% (https://hub.rightmove.co.uk/rental-price-tracker). These had typically

sat between 0% and 3% increases, and rarely surpassed 5%, in the years

between 2015 and 2019. The substantially higher rate of rent inflation for

new tenancies points to the increased pressures faced by those having to

move home.

These trends in housing all point to the continued important role of housing

costs in driving poverty rates, although crucially the extent to which

they translate into increased poverty risk will be determined by how they

interact with the labour market (employment rates and wage growth)

in each nation and region of the UK and the adequacy of the benefits

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The section on benefits and poverty identifies that the basic rate of

income-related benefits has fallen dramatically in real terms since 2015.

As set out earlier in this section, some parts of the UK see higher rates

of benefit receipt, particularly in the north and Midlands of England, and

Wales, as well as larger cities in particular. The resetting of Local Housing

Allowance to the 30th percentile of rents will be particularly welcome in

larger cities with higher housing costs where the erosion of support forces

families to bridge shortfalls with other incomes. But it is in precisely those

areas where the return of the freeze of the allowance after 2024/25 will be

most keenly felt. The continued inadequacy of the benefits system is an

important factor that keeps poverty rates elevated and will continue to

drive geographic disparities in poverty.

Across all UK nations and regions, the rate of employment among workingage adults has been consistently climbing since the 1990s, reaching

record-high rates of employment in the late 2010s. The early periods of

the Covid-19 pandemic saw rates of employment fall, although the latest

data shows recovery towards late-2010s levels since then. In fact, since

2021, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the West Midlands and

Scotland have all recorded their highest ever rates of employment. This

also translates into falling inter-regional disparities in employment rates

across the UK; in 2003, the ‘range’ of employment rates across the nations

and regions was 11%, in 2013 it was 9% but by 2023 it had fallen to just 6%.

At the same time, most UK regions have also reported their lowest rates

of unemployment on record (dating back to 1992). This tightness in the UK

labour market is also intrinsically linked to the record levels of wage growth

seen in recent history across the country, although this still represents a

real-terms fall in earnings. It is possible that higher rates of employment,

if maintained, could underpin falling poverty, and the current trends

across the regions and nations of the UK could see reduced inter-regional

inequalities in poverty rates.

How does this section interact with other sections?

This section has focused on national, regional and local authority level

variation in poverty rates. However, there are clearly important differences

in the drivers and rates of poverty and experiences of poverty at the

more local level. Local economies, including jobs and the housing market,

interact to influence employment rates and rates of pay, as well as the

availability of affordable housing.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Disability, carers and poverty

Why is it important?

Disabled people face a higher risk of poverty and have done so for

at least the past 20 years. 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. As a result, disabled people and their families

frequently rely on benefit payments as a source of income, which at

current rates will almost inevitably lead to higher poverty rates.

Across the UK, millions of people provide unpaid care for an ill, older or

disabled family member or friend. Many carers find that they struggle to

balance work and care, and many have their own mental and physical

health problems as a result of their caring responsibilities, resulting in

poorer health outcomes (Carers UK, 2019; Public Health England, 2021).

There are also significant financial costs associated with caring, with

carers often using their income or savings to pay for support services and

care equipment (Carers UK, 2023). All of these factors mean that carers are

much more likely than those with no caring responsibilities to be living in

What’s the headline story from the latest data?

Disability

This section sets out poverty rates for disabled people6 and for individuals

within families where someone is disabled.

There are 15.7 million disabled people in the UK – that is nearly one in four

people (24%). Looking at this by age, 11% of children, 22% of working-age

adults and 44% of pensioners report being disabled. Just over a third of all

families contain at least one person who is disabled.

The poverty measure that has been used in this section looks at income

after housing costs, excluding disability benefits from household income.

This is because these benefits are designed to cover the costs associated

with being disabled. Therefore, including them alongside other forms of

income would give a misleadingly low assessment of the poverty risk. For

example, many disabled people need to buy specialist equipment to live

independently, including things like powered wheelchairs or screen readers,

while disabled children may need therapies such as physiotherapy and

speech and language therapy. Some impairments or conditions also have

a significant impact on energy costs and, for some, public transport is

inaccessible, meaning that some disabled people have no choice but to use

taxis and private-hire vehicles to get around (Veruete-McKay et al, 2023).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

In 2021/22, the poverty rate for disabled people was 31%, 12 percentage

points above the rate for those who were not disabled. The difference

continues to be particularly stark for working-age adults; disabled

working-age adults were twice as likely to live in poverty compared with

those who were not disabled (36% and 17% respectively).

Poverty rates are higher for disabled people

Disabled/not disabled Age group Poverty rate

Working-age adult 36

Pensioner 22

Not disabled

Working-age adult 17

Pensioner 17

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Nearly half of all people who were disabled and living in poverty had

a long-term, limiting mental condition – around 2.3 million people. The

poverty rate for this group was 38%, compared with 31% for people with

a physical or other disability.7

Similarly, in our cost-of-living tracker in

October 2023, we found that 86% of households in the lowest fifth of

incomes with a person with a mental disability were going without the

essentials, compared with 77% of those low-income households with a

person with a physical disability and 73% with any other disability.

The poverty rate among working-age disabled men was 38%, double the

rate for those who were not disabled (16%). For working-age disabled

women, the poverty rate was lower at 35%, although still 17 percentage

points higher than for women who were not disabled. The lower poverty

rate among disabled women compared with disabled men can be

explained in part by different family structures. Among working-age adults,

46% of disabled men were single without children, 12 percentage points

higher than for disabled women. As single working-age adults have higher

poverty rates than those in couples, the higher proportion of single men

within this group will contribute to the higher poverty rate for disabled

working-age men compared with disabled working-age women.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The poverty rate for individuals who lived in a family where someone was

disabled was 31%, 13 percentage points higher than those who lived in

families where no one was disabled. Of all families in poverty, just over

half contained someone who was disabled, compared with just over one in

three families not in poverty.

Poverty rates varied by who was disabled within the family; poverty was

especially high in families where there were both disabled adults and

children (39%).

Poverty rates are much higher for families containing a disabled

Disability mix within the family Poverty rate

No one is disabled 18

Disabled adults only 31

Disabled children only 27

Disabled adults and children 39

Source: Households Below Average Income, DWP, 2021/22

People living in a family with a disabled person were also more likely to

be in very deep poverty. The risk of being in very deep poverty for people

living in a family where someone was disabled increased by more than a

third between 2002/03 and 2019/20 to reach 14%, or 3.2 million people.

This reduced over the following two years, to 12% in 2021/22. Nonetheless,

this still means that 2.9 million people living in a family with a disabled

person were living in very deep poverty in 2021/22.

Disabled people are also more likely to move into very deep poverty,

particularly working-age families with a disabled adult (Taylor and

Schmuecker, 2023). People in families with a disabled adult are also slightly

more likely than those without to experience short-term or persistent very

deep poverty. Once again, this risk is greater for working-age families

(Taylor and Schmuecker, 2023).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

A key driver of higher poverty rates is the lower employment rate for

disabled people and in families where someone is disabled. In September

2022, half of disabled working-age adults (53%) in the UK were in

employment, compared with eight in ten (82%) non-disabled working-age

adults. This means that there was a disability employment gap of 29.8

percentage points (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023a). This gap

was greater for men, people aged 50–64 and people living in Northern

Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the North West and the North East of

England (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023a). Data from the Family

Resources Survey shows that disabled people with severe or specific

learning difficulties, autism, epilepsy and mental illness have the lowest

employment rates.

Different employment rates also help to explain the higher poverty rate

experienced by people with a long-term, limiting mental condition. Among

this group, 40% of working-age adults were in work, compared with 48% of

those with a physical disability and 52% of those with another disability.

Employment rates vary by disability type, but are much lower

than for non-disabled people

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Mental disability includes difficulty with learning, understanding or concentrating, memory,

mental health, and social or behavioural difficulties (for example, those associated with autism,

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or Asperger’s syndrome). Physical disability includes

difficulty with vision, hearing, mobility, dexterity, stamina, breathing or fatigue. The ‘other’ disability

category is a specific response category included in the Family Resources Survey to capture any

other disability not included in the given response list. Only people who say that their condition

limits their daily life a lot or a little are included in these categories.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Among families where someone was disabled, the workless rate (the

percentage of working-age adults living in families where no one was in

work) was 30% compared with 12% in families where no one was disabled.

Among working families, 17% of workers in families where someone was

disabled worked part-time hours only, compared with 10% of working

people in families where no one was disabled.

Different employment rates also affect the income profile for families. The

median equivalised income after housing costs for people in families where

someone was disabled was 78% that of people in families where no one

was disabled. When disability and carer benefits were excluded from this,

this fell to only 71%.

Nearly one in ten adults (4.8 million) were informal carers, with six in ten of

these carers living in families where someone was disabled. Six in ten were

women, and four in five were of working age. Around two-thirds cared, on

average, for fewer than 35 hours a week, with around a third spending 35

hours a week or more providing informal care.

Informal carers were more likely to live in poverty than those without

caring responsibilities (28% compared with 20%). Working-age carers had

a higher poverty rate than carers of pension age, and it was higher among

women than it was for men across both age groups in the latest data.

Poverty rates are higher for both female and male informal

carers than non-carers across all age groups

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Working-age informal carers were less likely to be employed than noncarers, a difference that could be seen among men and women. Around

two-thirds of male carers (68%) and nearly six in ten female carers (57%)

were employed. By contrast, around eight in ten men (79%) and seven in

ten women who were not carers (72%) were employed.

The amount of time spent caring also affects a carer’s ability to work. Six

out of ten working-age adults (63%) who were caring for 35 hours or more

a week were not in work – nearly three times the rate of those caring for

fewer than 20 hours a week (23%). Nearly four in ten working-age adults

caring for 20–35 hours a week were not in work (37%). Of those carers who

were working, those with higher caring responsibilities (35+ hours a week)

were more likely to work part time than those providing lower levels of care

(20–34 hours or less than 20 hours a week): 43%, 35% and 29% respectively.

The reduced ability to work means informal carers face a financial penalty.

Research by JRF estimates that unpaid social-care givers experience an

average pay penalty of £414 a month (nearly £5,000 a year), reaching

£628 a month (nearly £8,000 a year) after six years of providing unpaid

care (Thompson et al, 2023).

Informal carers are also more likely to be in very deep poverty. The risk of

being in very deep poverty nearly doubled between 2003/04 and 2020/21,

from 7% to 13%. This fell back slightly to 11% in the latest data, but was still

higher than for people who were not informal carers at 9%.

Families with an unpaid carer are more likely to move into very deep

poverty than those without. They also experience higher exit rates from

very deep poverty, which likely contributes to the particularly high level of

short-term very deep poverty among this group (Taylor and Schmuecker,

2023). This suggests that unpaid social carers, who may have to change

their work patterns for any paid employment to fit around their caring

responsibilities or who may experience delays in accessing disability

benefits for their family, are having to survive on more volatile household

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Disability

The poverty rate for disabled people has remained broadly stable at

around a third since 2013/14. At the same time, the proportion of the

UK population reporting being disabled has increased, as it has done

consistently over the past two decades, particularly among working-age

adults. This has resulted in larger numbers of people facing a higher risk of

being in poverty, as poverty among disabled people has consistently been

higher than among non-disabled people. After a closing of the poverty gap

in the early part of the 21st century, it widened notably from 2011/12 to

2013/14 and has remained at broadly the same level ever since. The data

from 2020/21 showed a drop in the poverty rate for disabled people, from

32% to 29%. This appears to be an outlier, with the poverty rate at 31% in

the most recent data, in line with the previous level.

Over the past 20 years, the poverty rate has been consistently

higher for disabled people than for people who are not disabled

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2002/03–2021/22, DWP

Within this, the poverty rates for people with a cognitive disability or

mental health condition have been consistently higher than poverty rates

for people with a physical or other disability.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Adults with a mental disability have had consistently higher

rates of poverty than people with physical or other disabilities

Source: JRF analysis of Households Below Average Income, 2012/13–2021/22, DWP

Note: Where an individual has more than one type of disability, they are counted in all relevant

categories. Disability-related benefits are excluded from household income.

Although the poverty rate for disabled people has remained steady, the

proportion of disabled working-age adults in work increased from 42%

in 2010/11 to 51% in 2021/22. The proportion of disabled people in work

who work part time has remained relatively steady at around a third since

2012/13, compared with around a fifth of those who are not disabled.

Alongside these increasing employment rates, the disability employment

gap for adults aged 16–64 fell between 2013 and 2019, before fluctuating

during the Covid-19 pandemic (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023a).

The most recent data from July to September 2022, however, shows that

the disability employment gap increased, and is now at its widest since

2018 (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023a). Between 2010/11 and

2021/22, there was also a large fall in the proportion of disabled workingage people receiving income-related benefits, from 39% to 26%.

So, while more disabled people are working, they are still less likely to be in

work, and less able to access full-time work. Therefore they often need to

rely on income-related benefits to supplement their income.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The proportion of adults who are informal carers has remained relatively

stable, at around 8–10%, over the past 15 years.

The poverty rate among carers has been consistently higher than among

those who are not carers. Following a similar pattern to poverty among

disabled people, the poverty gap between carers and non-carers widened

after 2012/13. The gap remained broadly stable (at around 3 percentage

points) until the latest two years, where the gap increased to around 8

percentage points. This could be due to changes in who is caring since

the Covid-19 pandemic, or due to data-quality issues over the pandemic.

Further data will help to determine whether this is a new trend.

The poverty gap between informal carers and people who

are not informal carers widened even further in 2020/21 and

remains bigger than it was before the pandemic

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What are the future prospects?

The outlook for future poverty among disabled people, their families and

carers remains concerning. The poverty gap between disabled and nondisabled people returned to pre-pandemic levels in the latest data, and

while a greater proportion of disabled people are now employed, many

are on low pay and still rely on income-related benefits. The value of many

of these benefits has been eroded since 2010 through lower-than-inflation

uprating, including the benefits freeze from April 2016 to March 2020. The

return to uprating in 2020 has not reinstated this lost value, and benefits

continue to be insufficient in protecting people and their families from

experiencing poverty.

The upcoming changes to remove the Work Capability Assessment (WCA)

will place even more weight on the Personal Independence Payment (PIP)

assessment as the single gateway to additional support for disabled

people. Although they may be well-intentioned, they are fraught with risks.

It is right that the Government is looking at ways to offer support to more

people who are currently deemed unable to work, which may help them

towards employment. However, using the Personal Independence Payment

alone to determine benefit levels and whether someone should be put

on the Department for Work and Pensions’ conditionality regime is not

necessarily the right answer. The current assessment process is fraught

with delays, errors and appeals, and the proposed reform risks more

disabled people missing out on the financial support they are entitled to.

The changes to the Work Capability Assessment that have been proposed

would tighten access even earlier in the application process and raise

similar concerns about the impact of increased conditionality on disabled

people who have may have limited capacity to work.

Although employment is historically high among working-age disabled

people, disabled people in work are more likely to be working part time

and the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people is at

its largest since 2018. With signs of the labour market weakening, through

falling vacancies and rising unemployment, disabled people are likely to be

more at risk from the effects of an economic downturn.

The Government introduced new provisions entitling unpaid carers to

one week of unpaid leave in 2023. However, many informal carers face a

significant financial penalty as a result of caring, and poverty rates among

informal carers are likely to remain higher than those among non-carers

unless the role of work and how we perceive care within it is radically

redesigned.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How does this section interact with other sections?

The key interactions are with the sections relating to work and benefits. The

labour market does not currently offer sufficient flexibility and accessibility

for all disabled people and carers who want to work. For those currently

unable to work, benefit levels are inadequate.

This section also relates to the section on health, which shows that the

experience of being in poverty itself can contribute to poor health, as well

as the cost-of-living section, as many disabled families face higher core

costs associated with someone’s disability.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Work and poverty

Why is this important?

Work is one of the main ways of protecting against poverty, but it is not

always sufficient to protect people from poverty given that the amount

and type of work undertaken in a family also affect their chances of

experiencing poverty.

After the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK economy was

starting to re-open. In April 2021, when data collection started for the

latest poverty data, many ‘non-essential’ businesses and outdoor venues

re-opened, followed by indoor business venues the following month.

Therefore, many people who had found themselves out of work or excluded

from work were returning to work at this time, and understanding what

happened to work after the Covid-19 pandemic plays an important role in

understanding the state of poverty in the latest available data.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

In 2021/22, 15% of all working-age adults in a household with someone

in work were in poverty. This is compared with 56% of people in workless

households. Despite poverty rates being much higher in workless

households, 64% of working-age adults in poverty lived in a household

where at least one adult was in work.

The poverty rate for working-age adults living in a working household

differs between the regions and nations of the UK. In 2021/22, Northern

Ireland had the lowest poverty rate for this group at 10%. This was much

lower than the rates in Yorkshire and the Humber and the North East

(both with a rate of 16%), London (17%) and – the worst hit – the West

Midlands (19%).

While poverty status is based on the income of the whole household and

on all income sources, not just earnings from work, poverty rates do vary

by whether someone is working full or part time and whether they are

an employee or self-employed. The poverty rate for part-time workers

was double that for full-time workers (20% compared with 10%) and

self-employed workers were twice as likely to be in poverty as employees

(23% compared with 10%).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Part-time self-employed workers have the highest poverty rate

of all worker types

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

At a more granular level of the workforce, there were differences in poverty

rates by sector. Workers in administration and support activities had the

highest poverty rate at 22%. Accommodation and food services (20%),

other service activities (19%), arts, entertainment and recreation (17%)

and transportation and storage (16%) made up the remainder of the five

industries with the highest poverty rates. This is likely to be linked to low

pay as the median pay in four of those five sectors was lower than the

median pay across all sectors in the UK (HMRC and Office for National

Statistics, 2021).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

The proportion of working-age adults in poverty who were living in working

households increased by 3 percentage points, from 61% to 64%, between

2020/21 and 2021/22. Despite this increase, it is still lower than the

record-high proportion of working-age adults in poverty living in working

households (68%) seen in 2019/20.

Changes to in-work poverty rates have differed across different parts of

the UK. In Northern Ireland, the poverty rate among working-age adults

living in households where someone was in work fell for the third period

in a row. It is now only 1 percentage point from having the joint lowest

rate on record. London has also experienced its third consecutive fall in

the poverty rate in working households in three years, although its level

remains the second highest rate in the UK. The West Midlands now has

the UK’s highest rate of poverty among working-age adults in working

households. This comes after it recorded a 4 percentage point increase

between 2018–21 and 2019–22, while the North East, which had previously

had the highest rate, saw a 3 percentage point decrease.

The overall poverty rate for workers had remained relatively stable in the

latest data. In 2021/22, 12% of all workers were in poverty compared with

11% in 2020/21 and 13% in 2019/20. Between 2020/21 and 2021/22, poverty

among part-time workers increased from 18% to 20%, returning closer

to the record-high level in 2019/20 of 22%. For full-time workers, this rate

remained much more stable (9–10%).

After falling in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the poverty rate

for self-employed workers also rose in the latest data, albeit not to prepandemic levels. In 2021/22, 23% of self-employed workers were in poverty

compared with 21% in 2020/21. This continues the long-term trend of

self-employed workers having a poverty rate of 20% or higher, it being

more than twice as high as employees’ poverty rate. For employees, the

unchanged rate of 10% keeps their poverty rate at levels akin to those of

almost a decade ago.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

In 2021/22, the administrative and support service activities sector was,

once again, the sector with the highest rate of poverty (after having been

overtaken by the wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles and

motorcycles sector, and the accommodation and food service activities

sector in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic). In the latest data, many

sectors’ poverty rates returned to levels around those recorded in the

year before Covid-19. Of those that didn’t, the transportation and storage

sector, and the real estate activities sector, had higher rates, while the

manufacturing sector, the accommodation and food service activities

sector, and the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector had lower rates.

Poverty rates remain highest in the administrative and support

service and accommodation and food service sectors, but

have fallen in the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector since

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22

Note: The ‘mining and quarrying’, ‘electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply’, ‘activities

of households as employers’ and ‘undifferentiated goods and services producing activities of

households for own use’ sectors were excluded from the analysis due to small sample sizes. Figures

for 2020/21 are not shown due to concerns about small sample sizes in the data.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

These changes to in-work poverty rates seen in 2021/22 came as much of

the UK’s economy re-opened after lockdown restrictions were lifted, and as

the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was wound down. This means that,

like last year, changes to poverty rates among different groups of workers

may reflect changes in the composition of people working in these sectors

during the pandemic. Nonetheless, the removal of the £20 Universal Credit

and Working Tax Credit uplift part way through the year may have caused

rates to increase by reducing the incomes of low-paid workers.

Since this poverty data was collected, the UK’s unemployment rate has

risen, increasing the risk of poverty in the increased number of families

with adults out of work. Between July–September 2022 and April–June

2023, unemployment increased from 3.6% to 4.2% (Office for National

Statistics, 2023c). Data from the Labour Force Survey suggests that this

is not primarily being driven by people losing their job (as the size of

the workforce has remained broadly stable) but rather people who start

looking for work being unable to find it, as the number of vacancies has

fallen dramatically.

Decreasing vacancies and flatlining job totals mean that

increases in unemployment are being driven by people unable

to find work

Source: Labour Force Survey, 2022–23, Office for National Statistics

Note: Figures are indexed to figures from the third quarter of 2022. The y axis does not start at zero.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Looking at the Labour Force Survey’s longitudinal data, we can see that

almost half (48%) of those individuals who moved into unemployment

between July–September 2022 and April–June 2023 had been inactive

in July–September 2022. In comparison, only 40% had been employed

at that time point (with the remaining 13% either under 16 years old or in

government employment schemes at that time).

The group of people who moved from economic inactivity to

unemployment between July–September 2022 and April–June 2023 can be

broken down even further, depending on the reason why they were not in

the workforce. More than a third of this group had been looking after their

family or home (37%), with the rest equally divided between students (28%)

and people inactive for other reasons (28%). Although we do not know

from the data why these individuals have been unable to find work, people

who try to re-enter the workforce may be held back if they do not have the

skills needed for roles they desire after a period of absence from the labour

force, if they are overqualified or overskilled for the roles advertised or if

they cannot find work that meets their needs due to a disability or caring

responsibilities. Many people who try to find work as a route out of poverty

may therefore be unable to find suitable work to increase their income.

Due to the small sample size available in the data, we are restricted in what

we can say about the 40% of people who became unemployed after being

in employment. However, this data does suggest that almost one in four of

the workers who became unemployed had been working in construction.

This might have been expected given the construction sector’s negative

growth in both April and May 2023 (Office for National Statistics, 2023f).

The sectors of work with the highest in-work poverty rates (including

administrative and support services, accommodation and food services

and other service activities) did not show a clear decline of job numbers

and vacancies. However, the construction sector, as well as the wholesale

and retail trade/repair of motor vehicles sector and transportation and

storage sector, which also showed potential signs of decline, did have

higher-than-average in-work poverty. Nonetheless, declining job numbers

and vacancies were also seen in the manufacturing and education sectors,

which have lower in-work poverty rates.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The construction, wholesale and retail trade/repair of motor vehicles,

transportation and storage, manufacturing and education sectors were

responsible for a combined 160,000 fewer jobs and vacancies in July–

September 2023 compared with April–June 2022 (Office for National

Statistics, 2023f). A continuation of these downward trends in jobs and

vacancies could result in additional upward pressure on the unemployment

rate, and increased levels of poverty as more people are unable to find

What are the future prospects?

Since this data was collected, the official employment rate has remained

at around 76%. We have even seen a record-high number of people in

employment, no doubt helped by historically high vacancy rates (Office for

National Statistics, 2023c). Taken at face value, these are positives. More

people in work, means more people are earning and have higher incomes.

However, there is much cause for concern about the future prospects for

in-work poverty. Recent increases in employment have tended to be driven

by increased numbers of part-time and self-employed workers (Office

for National Statistics, 2023c) who, as we have seen, face a higher risk of

poverty. This is of concern for the future prospects of in-work poverty as

the number of part-time workers is increasing after a fall during the first

year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Data from the Annual Population Survey

suggests that the number of part-time workers increased by 260,000

between 2021/22 and 2022/23, the largest year-on-year change in its

history. On top of this, the proportion of employees who work part time

is at its highest level in three years and the proportion of self-employed

workers who work part time is the highest on record. More self-employed,

part-time workers, in particular, increases the likelihood of higher in-work

poverty due to their having the highest rate of poverty of all worker types.

Recent changes to the labour market may reflect its recovery from the

Covid-19 pandemic and might level out in time. However, a continuation of

current trends – particularly increases in the number of part-time and selfemployed workers – could increase in-work poverty rates further, possibly

above the all-time high of 2019/20. This is an area that policy-makers will

need to follow closely in the coming months.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

More broadly, businesses have started to report holding back recruitment

because of economic pressures (Office for National Statistics, 2023c). This

will in no small part be due to increasing costs. The high inflation that the

UK has experienced over recent years is not just affecting the number

of jobs available, but is also eroding the value of workers’ earnings. We

see the scale of this when comparing nominal and real earnings. Since

2021/22, nominal earnings have increased healthily year-on-year. In fact,

some rates of growth have been close to the highest on record. However, in

real terms over this period, total pay (pay including bonuses) has fallen by

2.9% (Office for National Statistics, 2023d). This is one of the largest falls

on record. Regular pay (pay excluding bonuses) has fallen by 3.0% (Office

for National Statistics, 2023d), the largest fall in earnings growth since

comparable records began in 2001.

Falling real earnings will push down household incomes, and will greatly

increase the risk of workers experiencing in-work poverty. Real-term

earnings only started to recover in April–June 2023 when the cost-of-living

crisis one-off bonus payments received by NHS workers and civil servants

entered the data (Office for National Statistics, 2023c). While those who

did not receive the cost-of-living bonus payments may have fallen even

further behind, these payments finish in April 2024, which may push more

low-paid workers into poverty.

Providing some hope is the possibility that, in the coming years, benefits

uprating and earnings growth may offset some of any possible increases

in in-work poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The percentage point difference between real and nominal total

regular pay is far bigger than it has been at any point over the

past two decades

Source: Average weekly earnings in Great Britain, Office for National Statistics, October 2023

How does this section interact with other sections?

Work is one of the three major issues that drive poverty in the UK,

alongside housing costs and the performance of the social security system.

Higher employment rates, an increasing minimum wage, increasing wages

and more hours of work can only protect people against poverty so far

if housing costs are too high and the UK’s social security system fails to

be the lifeline that it should be. The negative effects on poverty from the

UK’s social security system and housing costs will moderate any positive

impacts of higher pay and more hours.

Individuals can also face barriers that prevent them from accessing work

that guards against poverty. This includes the cost and availability of

childcare and the need to provide care for any disabled adults or children.

Likewise, an individual’s health will determine their ability to access good

work that shields them from poverty. There are also regional inequalities in

the availability of work and the transport networks that affect getting to

and from work in a timely or affordable way.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Benefits and poverty

Why is this important?

A poverty-fighting social security system is a necessary part of any

solution to end poverty and destitution. It can replace or supplement the

incomes of people who cannot earn enough money through work to meet

their core living costs due to unemployment, underemployment, low pay or

low-quality work. It can also offer support when people experience shocks

to their income (for example job loss) or unexpected costs (for instance

due to sudden illness), as well as supporting people who are unable to work

full time (for example because of disability or caring responsibilities).

It can also support people who have higher core living costs than others.

For example, living with a disability often adds to the cost of living as your

energy costs may be higher. Similarly, having children is more expensive

than not having them because there are extra people in the household who

need supporting who do not contribute to the household’s income.

Around half of all families in the UK receive some form of financial state

support, of whom nearly half (46%, equivalent to 7.2 million households

in the Family Resources Survey) receive one or more of Universal Credit

(or its equivalent benefits), disability benefits, Carer’s Allowance or

Pension Credit. The State Pension and Child Benefit are the most widely

claimed benefits in terms of recipient numbers. Universal Credit is the

largest of the income-related benefits available, with around 5 million

families in Great Britain claiming this (Department for Work and Pensions,

2023c). Recipients of income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, incomerelated Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Housing

Benefit (working-age families), Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit

– sometimes described as ‘legacy benefits’ – are in the process of being

migrated to the Universal Credit system. Families with children, disabilities

or caring responsibilities are the most likely to claim income-related

benefits.

Social security policy choices are therefore important as they have an

impact on a significant proportion of the population, including those in

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

The poverty rates of people claiming different income-related benefits

are much higher than the national average poverty rate. On the one hand,

this is to be expected given the ‘low income’ eligibility criteria for claiming

these benefits, but on the other hand it demonstrates that the level of

benefits available is frequently not sufficient to enable recipients to escape

Poverty rates for people in families in receipt of benefits

Poverty rate for people in families in

receipt of benefit

Universal Credit or equivalents1 49

Disability benefits2 20

Carer’s Allowance3 34

Pension Credit 35

None of the above 15

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

1. ‘Universal Credit or equivalents’ covers families in receipt of Universal Credit or any of the legacy

benefits it is replacing, that is, working-age Jobseeker’s Allowance (income-related), Employment

and Support Allowance (income-related), Income Support, Child Tax Credit, Working Tax Credit

and Housing Benefit (for working-age adults).

2. Disability benefits include any form of Disability Living Allowance, War Disablement Pension/

Armed Forces Compensation Scheme, Attendance Allowance, Industrial Injuries Disablement

Benefit and any form of Personal Independence Payment. The income from these benefits has

been included as income, but the benefits are actually paying for the extra costs associated

with being disabled, rather than increasing recipients’ living standards. If these benefits are not

included as income, the poverty rate for this group rises to 39%.

3. Carer’s Allowance recipients are more likely to live with someone in receipt of disability benefits.

If disability benefits are not included as income, the poverty rate for this group rises to 51%.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Poverty rates for people in households claiming income-related benefits

increased by 10 percentage points over the 10-year period from 2011/12 to

2021/22, from 39% to 49%. Most of this increase occurred between 2011/12

and 2015/16, in part because of changes to the benefits system that meant

it became more targeted at families with the very lowest incomes. Since

2015/16, there has been little deviation from the rates in the table above,

although it was lower in 2020/21 when the £20 uplift to Universal Credit

and Working Tax Credit was in place at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This means that there was an incredibly high gap in poverty rates

between those who claimed income-related benefits and those who did

not over this whole period. Even accepting the high likelihood of poverty

being more prevalent among those claiming benefits with a low-income

eligibility criteria, the size of the gap is completely unjustifiable; recipients

of Universal Credit (or its equivalent benefits) have consistently been at

least three times more likely to be in poverty than those not claiming any

income-related benefits.

However, since 2015, the basic rate of income-related benefits has fallen

dramatically in real terms. The recent resumption of uprating in line

with inflation that took place in 2021 and 2022 has not done anything

to bring it back to its original value. In fact, soaring inflation between

September 2021 (when 2022 benefit rates were set) and April 2022 meant

that 2022 saw the greatest fall in the real-terms value of the basic rate of

unemployment benefits since 1972, when annual uprating began.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Between April 2015 (the last year before the benefits freeze)

and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the value of benefits

consistently declined. Although it increased when inflation and

earnings fell at the start of the pandemic and the benefits freeze

ended in 2020, it remains below pre-pandemic levels

Source: DWP abstract of statistics and ONS inflation and wage data

Note: CPI = Consumer Price Index and AWE = average weekly earnings.

This strongly suggests that the consistently high poverty rate among

benefit recipients has been kept high by more than a decade of cuts to

welfare spending8 and is not, therefore, wholly inevitable. Income-related

benefit payments fall a long way short of what is needed for enabling

recipients to escape poverty, indeed the basic rate of Universal Credit

is even below destitution thresholds. As a case in point, the temporary

£20 uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit during the Covid-19

pandemic caused a significant reduction in poverty in 2020/21, but by

2021/22 – when the uplift was removed halfway through the year – levels of

poverty in households that received benefits increased again (albeit not to

pre-pandemic levels).

Therefore, while the social security system does keep thousands of

households out of poverty, current payment levels mean that thousands

more continue to struggle needlessly.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

What are the future prospects?

In April 2024, most benefits will be increased by 6.7% in line with inflation

measured in September 2023 (with the exception of the State Pension,

which is raised by a higher percentage due to the ‘triple lock’ – whereby

the State Pension is increased by the highest of three different values:

the growth in average earnings, inflation or 2.5%). At the same time,

the rate of Local Housing Allowance will be brought back up to the 30th

percentile of rents (although it will be re-frozen in 2025/26). These are

welcome moves that will go somewhere to maintaining the current value of

benefits. However, the 2023 cost-of-living payments for benefit recipients

that alleviated some – but by no means all – of the immediate pressures

facing low-income families will come to an end in April 2024 and millions of

benefit recipients will still face severe hardship.

The lasting impact of the benefit freeze means that benefit rates overall

continue to be near an all-time low. This is compounded by other

elements of the social security system, including the continued impact

of rolling out the two-child limit and changes to sanctions and disability

assessments. Combined with soaring living costs, this continues to have a

devastating impact on families in poverty who receive Universal Credit (or

its equivalent benefits), disability benefits, Carer’s Allowance or Pension

Credit. Across households where someone is in receipt of at least one of

these benefits, on average 70% of gross household income is made up of

state support.

How does this section interact with other sections?

A well-designed benefits system can help protect people from falling

into poverty or falling into deeper poverty and enable people to escape

poverty. Low benefit levels are therefore one of the key drivers of poverty

(in combination with levels of work and earnings). A benefits system that

does not offer protection against poverty can cause anxiety as well as

financial hardship among those who struggle to access help.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Housing and poverty

Why is this important?

Homes provide the foundation for a decent life, connecting people to

work, education, services and their communities. The affordability and

stability of housing, alongside the quality and size of homes, are crucial in

themselves, but also, if unaffordable, can drag occupants into poverty.

The experience of being in poverty also influences the type, quality and

size of homes that households are able to access. It can result in instability

if families are unable to keep up with payments, and can be a driver of

overcrowding and concealed households if, for example, adult children

live with their parents as they are unable to afford a home of their own or

to find a home of the right size. At worst, households facing unaffordable

housing costs can experience destitution, homelessness or rough sleeping.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Housing costs are a major factor in determining whether people are pulled

into poverty, with the cost of housing a key driver of poverty for renters in

particular. In 2021/22, more than four in ten social renters (43%, 4.8 million

people) and a third of private renters (35%, 4.4 million people) were in

poverty after housing costs. Within these groups, a third of social renters

(36%) and a half of private renters (51%) were only in poverty after their

housing costs are factored in, suggesting they were pushed into poverty by

these high costs.

Among homeowners, 15% of people who lived in a home that was owned

outright (3 million people) were in poverty. For this group, the housing

costs included in this measure are negligible. One in ten people living in a

home being bought with a mortgage (9%, 2.2 million people) were also in

poverty. The vast majority of those in poverty in homes owned outright or

being bought with a mortgage were in poverty before housing costs were

factored in; housing costs were typically not a driver of poverty for these

groups in 2021/22.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Average number of people in poverty and poverty rates by

tenure, 2021/22

Tenure Number in

Poverty rate

Owned outright 3,000,000 15

Buying with mortgage 2,200,000 9

Social renting 4,800,000 43

Private renting 4,400,000 35

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

The poverty rate is highest for social and private renters, many

of whom are in poverty only after housing costs

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The high poverty rate among social renters reflects the priority given in

the allocation of social housing to those with the greatest level of need.

This is seen in the demographic composition of the social rented sector:

just over a fifth of social renters (22%) were in single-parent families

(compared with 5% in other tenures), the majority were in a household

where someone had a disability (58%, compared with 33% in other tenures)

and around a quarter of working-age adults in the social rented sector

were not in or seeking work due to long-term ill-health or disability (26%,

compared with 4% in other tenures). They are also more likely to have

larger families, which increases poverty risk as incomes must stretch

further; 53% of children in social rented homes were in families with three

or more children, compared with 28% in other tenures.

People living in the social rented sector are disproportionately in lowincome households; 68% were in the bottom 40% of household incomes

(before housing costs). This, and the higher rates of poverty among social

renters, are largely driven by much lower rates of employment, with only

half (50%) of working-age social renters in employment compared with

around four-fifths (79%) of other working-age adults. This disparity reflects

the high rate of work-limiting ill-health and disability among social renters

as well as the substantial proportion who were looking after their family

and home (6%, compared with 3% in other tenures). At the household

level, a third of working-age social renters were in households where no

adults were in work (34%, 9% in other tenures), and only a third were in

households where all adults were in work (33%, 65% in other tenures).

Even among adults in the social rented sector who were in work, they were

more likely to be working part time (28%, compared with 20% in other

tenures), in lower-paid roles (55% in roles classified as ‘routine’ compared

with 22% in other tenures) and in lower-paid sectors. They were more likely

to work in health services (18%, compared with 15% in other tenures), retail

and wholesale (17%, compared with 11%), administrative and support

services (9%, compared with 4%), transportation (8%, compared with 5%)

and accommodation and hospitality (8%, compared with 4%).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Given these higher rates of economic inactivity and greater concentration

of employment in lower-paid roles among social renting adults, it is not

surprising that they are much more likely to be in receipt of social security.

Among social-renting working-age adults, 56% were in receipt of Universal

Credit or its legacy benefit equivalents, compared with just 11% of other

adults, while 24% were in receipt of disability-related benefits compared

with just 6% of other adults. Among pension-age adults in the social

rented sector, 36% were in receipt of Pension Credit, compared with 5% of

other pension-age adults. Social-renting families are therefore particularly

vulnerable to any reduction in the generosity or coverage of social security,

such as the benefits freezes and caps we have seen over the previous

Private renters also have a much higher-than-average poverty rate, with

higher rents playing an important role in pulling a substantial share of this

group into poverty. On average across the UK, private renters in poverty

spend 60% more on rent than social renters in poverty. This helps to explain

why around half of private renters in poverty were only in poverty after

housing costs were factored in, compared with just over a third of social

renters in poverty.

Poverty rates were higher for private renters in the Midlands and north of

England than across the south and in the East of England and other UK

nations. Between a third and a half of private renters in poverty in the

Midlands and north of England were only in poverty after housing costs

were factored in. This indicates that the higher cost of private renting is

a driver of poverty for a substantial minority of those in poverty in these

areas. However, this effect was even more pronounced in the south and

East of England where, despite a lower poverty rate for private renters,

a majority of private renters who were in poverty were in poverty only

after housing costs. While there are stronger labour markets (including

higher rates of employment, levels of pay and availability of employment

opportunities) in these areas, the high cost of housing increases the risk of

housing costs pulling people into poverty.

How has this changed over time?

The poverty rate among both social and private renters has remained

relatively stable since 2010, at around 42–46% for social renters, and

fluctuating between 32% and 39% for private renters, having fallen through

the 1990s and 2000s from highs of 55% in 1996/97 for social renters and

44% in 1994/95 for private renters. This follows the general overall trend of

a fall in poverty rates through the late 1990s and early 2000s, followed by a

stagnation in poverty rates in the period since.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Among outright homeowners, poverty rates fell from highs of around 17%

in the late 1990s to 11% by 2013–15, although they have climbed since and

sat at 15% in 2021/22. As the predominant tenure of pension-age adults

– more than three-quarters (77%) of whom now live in a home owned

outright, up from 58% in 1994/95 – the increase has in part been driven by

an increase in pensioner poverty since around 2013/14.

The latest poverty rate for people living in a home being bought with

a mortgage is the lowest it has been in the time series, at 9%. This

had sat between 10% and 12% from 2009/10, after having peaked at

14% in 2007/08. A substantial level of income is required to achieve

homeownership and service a mortgage, which is why we see the lowest

rates of poverty among those who have managed to acquire their own

home in this way. As discussed later in this section, however, the hike in

mortgage interest rates is likely to reverse this trend and see poverty rates

among this group climb again.

There has been a large shift in the housing tenure lived in by the UK

population across the past 20 years. There has also been, by extension, a

shift in tenure lived in by those in poverty. Since 2000, the contraction of

the social rented sector has continued, the share of homes that are owneroccupied has fallen slightly and the private rented sector has doubled in

In 2000, just under half (45%) of people in poverty lived in the social rented

sector, 15% lived in the private rented sector and 40% lived in owneroccupied housing. Now, those in poverty are fairly evenly split across the

three tenures, with a third social renting (33%), just over a third in owneroccupied housing (36%) and just under a third (31%) private renting. This

change in tenure, with increased reliance on the private rental market and

a diminished role of the social rented sector, has brought with it increased

insecurity of tenure and higher housing costs for families in poverty. Had

the size of the social rented sector been maintained, the depth of poverty

experienced by those now in poverty in the private rented sector, who

otherwise would have been social renters, would be ameliorated and we

would likely see a lower overall rate of poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

The proportion of those living in poverty in the private rented

sector is much higher than it was 25 years ago

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

What are the future prospects?

The cumulative impact of recent trends in the housing market, including

substantial increases in rents – and asking rents for new private tenancies

in particular – along with hikes in mortgage interest rates, are likely to lead

to an increase in poverty levels.

Since the start of 2023, average private rents across all tenancies have

seen their largest year-on-year increases since the Office for National

Statistics’ Index of Private Housing Rental Prices data series began

(2006 for England regions, 2012 for Great Britain). This has been the case

across every UK nation and every region in England. Across Great Britain,

the average private rental growth in the year to August 2023 was 5.5%,

between two and three times the average annual rates of private rental

growth seen in the years from 2012 through 2021. This increase has been

largely driven by soaring rents for new private tenancies. Rightmove’s

rental price tracker demonstrates that asking rents have seen double-digit

(or near-double-digit) year-on-year increases since 2021 across all nations

and regions of Britain (see https://hub.rightmove.co.uk/rental-pricetracker).

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

Currently, private rent increases are likely driven by a combination of

demand-push and cost-pull inflation. Alongside historically high rates

of inflation, we have seen historically high wage growth and rates of

employment, which feeds through to higher rents, particularly as the

supply of housing is constrained. This means that landlords will likely seek

to maximise rents and the profits they can achieve from their properties.

At the same time, hikes in interest rates have ratcheted up the costs for

private landlords servicing interest on mortgages, and inflation has driven

up running costs, so to maintain profitability many may seek to pass some

of these increases on to tenants.

Hikes in housing costs increase the risk of poverty, particularly for those

who do not experience equivalent increases in their income through

wages or benefits. Importantly for those in poverty in the private rented

sector, support towards housing costs has been frozen since 2020. This

has meant that, by September 2022, Local Housing Allowance covered

only the cheapest 18% of private rental properties across England on

average (Elliott, 2023). The situation is even more dire for low-income

families seeking a new home in the private rental sector as Local Housing

Allowance only covered rent for 5% of properties coming on to the market

by the first quarter of 2023 (Waters and Wernham, 2023). The fact that

support continues to be frozen as rents climb means there are increasing

shortfalls that must be made up with other incomes. This policy decision

therefore risks deepening the experience of poverty for low-income private

renters and will prevent many from accessing adequate and affordable

housing altogether. This is why the resetting of Local Housing Allowance to

the 30th percentile of local rents from April 2024 is so important.

From April 2023, social rent increases in England and Northern Ireland

were capped at 7%, and in Wales at 6.5%, while in Scotland social landlords

increased rents by, on average, 5% (Scottish Housing Regulator, 2023).

While lower than the overall rate of inflation at the time, these increases

represent the largest increases in rents that the social rented sector has

seen over the past couple of decades. The increase in April 2024 may

be even bigger than in April 2023 if the policy of increasing rents by the

Consumer Price Index (CPI) + 1% is unaltered, which would see rents

increase by 7.7% based on the inflation rate as at September 2023. Rent

increases that are not accompanied by equivalent increases in incomes,

through earnings and benefits, will increase poverty rates and deepen

UK Poverty 2024 Trends in poverty

A group increasingly at risk of being pulled into poverty at present and

in the coming months and years are lower-income families buying with a

mortgage, particularly where they were already stretching their incomes

when they got onto the housing ladder. The tightening of the regulation

of mortgage lending that was implemented after the global financial

crisis means that there is now more stringent stress testing of mortgagerate increases against buyers’ incomes. In theory, this should mean that

increases in mortgage interest payments for many families buying with

a mortgage are still affordable within their incomes. However, within the

context of hikes for other expenditure such as energy and groceries, many

mortgage holders will be feeling the squeeze. The scale of the hikes in

interest rates risks pulling hundreds of thousands of people in households

buying with a mortgage into poverty as mortgage fixes expire (Joseph

Rowntree Foundation, 2022). Buyers who are early into their mortgage

term and those facing a loss of income are likely to be particularly

vulnerable to this.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Geography is an important determinant of housing costs. Private rents

and house prices are much higher in the south of England and larger cities,

and even social rents, set based on local property values and earnings, are

higher than average in these areas.

As is the case for the majority of this report, this section has provided

UK-wide numbers, the sample for which, reflecting the population, is

dominated by figures for England. It is worth noting, however, that the

substantial differences in housing policy and outcomes in the different

nations of the UK mean that these figures are more pertinent to the

English housing system than they are in Scotland and Northern Ireland in

particular.

The experience of

being in poverty

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Cost of living 100

Savings and debt 106

Food insecurity 116

Health and poverty 127

Education and poverty 134

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The experience of being

in poverty

Cost of living

Why is this important?

The cost of living is how much households spend on goods and services

to help them fulfil their everyday lives. People who live in households that

can afford to meet the cost of living can participate more fully in society. If

the price of goods, especially of essentials, increases at a faster rate than

incomes, this squeezes household budgets and puts pressure on those

already on lower incomes.

But millions of people across the UK remain in the grip of a cost-of-living

crisis; already-high prices continue to rise while increasing rents and

interest rates, along with a deteriorating job market, are increasing the

financial pressures on families across the income distribution, but on lowincome families in particular. The lowest-income households continue to

face higher-than-average inflation rates as they spend a higher proportion

of their income on essentials, such as food. Food inflation remained at

10.1% in the year to October 2023, even as overall inflation fell to 4.7%.

The support that has been available to low-income households has not

been sufficient to meet the rising costs they face. Millions of people are

being forced to go without essentials, falling behind on their bills and

taking on additional debt. As well as causing deep hardship today, this will

also damage the future and long-term financial resilience of millions of

people in poverty.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

JRF has been tracking the impact of the cost-of-living crisis so far on

low-income households, with five bespoke large-scale surveys at six-month

intervals since October 2021.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The picture continues to be dire for those on the lowest incomes (here

defined as those in the bottom 20% of equivalised household incomes

before housing costs are taken into account). In October 2023, around

2.8 million households (47%) were in arrears with their household bills or

behind on scheduled lending repayments, 4.2 million households (72%)

were going without essentials and 3.4 million (58%) reported not having

enough money for food.

These stark figures are all despite recent government support targeting

those on the lowest incomes. To alleviate severe hardship across the UK,

these figures need to fall significantly. Despite inflation falling, incomes

are clearly still struggling to keep up with prices, which continue to rise. As

other sections of this report outline, the costs of essentials such as food,

heating and transport have all increased significantly since 2021, and these

price rises are hitting people on the lowest incomes the hardest. Therefore,

government support has not been sufficient to protect low-income families

in the cost-of-living crisis.

Falling behind with bills

As outlined above, millions of households on the lowest incomes currently

do not have sufficient income to cover their bills. That means they are

falling into arrears, taking on loans to pay these essential costs or going

without the basics. In October 2023, 2.8 million low-income households

(47%) reported being in arrears. This was 12 percentage points higher than

the 35% of households in the next fifth of incomes.

But low-income households are not just falling behind with one or two bills;

many are unable to keep up with payments in a range of areas. More than

half of people in low-income households in arrears (52%) are in arrears

with three or more bills, and 38% are in arrears with four or more bills.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

More than a third of low-income households in arrears are

behind on four or more bills

Source: JRF cost-of-living tracker, Savanta ComRes, October 2023

Note: Low-income households are those whose equivalised income before housing costs is in the

bottom 20% of household incomes across the UK.

In October 2023, JRF’s cost-of-living tracker investigated whether lowincome households had taken out loans, and their reasons for holding

these, for the first time. We found that 2.2 million households (38%) in the

bottom fifth of incomes held a loan that they had taken out to help cover

the cost of essential bills, housing or food. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been

enough for most of them to cover other essential costs, as 78% of this

group also reported being in arrears with their household bills or credit at

the same time.

Going without essentials

In October 2023, 4.2 million households on the lowest incomes reported

recently going without essentials. This included going without heating,

adequate clothing and furniture in the six months to October 2023 or not

having enough money for food in the 30 days before October 2023. As

we are now in winter, and the energy price cap rises once more, there is

huge concern that those on the lowest incomes will not be able to afford to

heat their homes, as around 3.7 million, or 63%, of low-income households

reported not being able to afford to heat their homes during the cost-ofliving crisis.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

There has also been an impact on the lives of people in low-income

households above and beyond their ability to afford essential costs. Half

of people (51%) in households in the bottom fifth of incomes reported

having to reduce socialising with friends and family due to cost, equivalent

to people in 3 million households across the UK. Within this group, 16% of

people who had reduced socialising reported that this was a new measure

they had taken for the first time in the previous six months.

How has this changed over time?

There was a small degree of improvement between October 2022 and

October 2023, likely because benefits were uprated in line with inflation in

April 2023 and cost-of-living payments have been awarded to people on

means-tested benefits. Nonetheless, the number of households across the

UK struggling to make ends meet remains very high.

The proportions of low-income households experiencing

different forms of hardship fell slightly between October 2022

and October 2023

Source: JRF cost-of-living tracker, Savanta ComRes, October 2023

Note: Low-income households are those whose equivalised income before housing costs is in the

bottom 20% of household incomes across the UK.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The proportion of low-income households who reported being in arrears

with their household bills or behind on scheduled lending repayments also

fell slightly from 53% at the height of the cost-of-living crisis in October

2022. However, this figure increased by around a third in the two-year

period between October 2021 and October 2023, from 36% to 47%.

Impact of higher interest rates

Interest rates began rising in early 2022, when the Bank of England first

increased the Bank Rate. Between October 2022 and October 2023, the

rate more than doubled, from 2.25% to 5.25%. These higher interest rates

have not only increased the cost of borrowing, but they have also meant

that lenders have tightened their borrowing criteria. This has made it

harder for people – especially those in low-income households – to access

loans because they now have to meet a higher affordability threshold. This

is very difficult for families who are already struggling to keep pace with

their bills, and whose low incomes have already been squeezed.

As such, it is not surprising that the proportion of low-income households

holding loans has fallen across the majority of different types of loans –

spanning from credit cards to overdrafts to loans from loan sharks and

pawnshops. The proportion of households in the bottom fifth of incomes

who applied for a loan but were declined rose from 28% to 33% in just six

months from May 2023 to October 2023. While using credit to pay for your

bills is not a financially desirable position, it has been an important lifeline

to many. But with low-income families finding it more difficult to access

credit, it looks like this is a lifeline that is increasingly at risk of being cut off.

What are the future prospects?

Although levels of inflation have recently fallen in the UK, they still remain

well above the Bank of England’s target rate and, even in October 2023,

food inflation remained over 10%. While the uprating of benefits in line with

inflation in April 2023, along with the lump-sum cost-of-living payments,

have been welcome, they have been eaten up by large increases in the

prices of energy, food and housing for many low-income families.

Looking ahead, the UK Government’s decision to uprate benefits in line

with inflation in April 2024, as normal, and remove the freeze on Local

Housing Allowance (also in April 2024), is welcome. But even with the

recently announced benefit uprating, it is likely that the levels of hardship

described in this section will be maintained, rather than fall significantly.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The final cost-of-living payment to low-income households will be made

in spring 2024, even though many low-income families will continue to

need to cover increasing costs. With energy prices increasing by 5% in

January 2024, rents continuing to grow, and the prices of essential goods

such as food continuing to rise (albeit at a slower rate), many low-income

families will struggle to cover these essential costs. As many low-income

families have already been forced to take on debt to cover such costs, or

have already fallen into arrears, their financial resilience has already been

eroded and they face an increasing risk of experiencing poverty in the

How does this section interact with other sections?

The value of benefits, as well as of wages and the amount of work

available to those in employment or seeking work, is crucial to ensure

that low-income families can still afford essential costs in the face of high

inflation.

While the cost-of-living crisis has affected all households, some lowincome households face additional financial pressures that increase their

risk of hardship even as inflation falls. This includes low-income households

with additional expenditure needs, for example because someone in their

household is disabled or they live in an area with high housing costs. Lowincome households with no savings to use as a safety net will also struggle

more if their incomes cannot cover increasing costs.

The pressures of meeting the rising costs of essential goods and services

can cause stress and anxiety. It often means that families need to make

cuts in other areas, which can also affect overall wellbeing. Not being

able to pay bills and going without food, a warm home or toiletries have a

significant impact on people’s mental and physical health. It also makes

it harder for children to participate at school, which may have a long-term

impact on their future prospects.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Savings and debt

Why is this important?

Savings can help to provide a degree of financial resilience for households

when unexpected expenses arise, or when there is a loss of income. Being

able to draw down on savings can therefore help to prevent households

from falling behind on bills, taking on additional debt to afford bills or

expenses or going without essentials like enough food or a warm home.

Too many households are currently grappling with negative budgets (where

their income is not enough to cover their living costs), meaning that they

do not have enough money for food and essential bills, let alone finding

enough left over to save.

Conversely, people with a low household income but a large amount of

savings or other forms of wealth may be classified as living in poverty

based on their income alone. However, if they are able to live off these

savings (either entirely, or to supplement earnings or other forms of

income) then they may not experience the severe hardship faced by other

people in poverty.

Falling behind on bills or going into debt can place huge stress on the

mental wellbeing of a household, which can lead to depression, anxiety

and a greater chance of strained or ended relationships with partners,

family and friends. This is why it is important for households to have a

buffer of liquid savings (savings that can be turned into cash quickly) to

call on at short notice.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

This analysis focuses on levels of savings and debt in households with

a very low income, rather than strictly households in poverty. This is

because we are limited in the lack of data, particularly up-to-date data,

that allows us to investigate this. The main dataset used in this section

is the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) Financial Lives Survey (FLS).

This collects data on household income, although it is not equivalised to

take into account household size and composition as in the Households

Below Average Income data. Its lowest household income category is

set at £15,000 and under which, as shown in Annex 1, is very close to the

poverty line for a couple with no children (£15,600). This means that it will

encompass virtually all couples without children in poverty, but only some

of the poorest larger families in poverty (who need a higher household

income to be above the equivalised income poverty line) and some single

adults not in poverty (who need a lower household income to be above the

equivalised income poverty line). In JRF’s cost-of-living tracker, we can

assess an equivalised annual household income threshold of £14,600, and

those on slightly higher incomes of £19,000 and below per year.

The latest data shows that households on very low incomes are

disproportionately likely to hold low levels of savings or no savings at

all. According to the FCA’s Financial Lives Survey (Financial Conduct

Authority, 2023), 11% of all UK adults had no savings in 2022. However,

this rate varied significantly between respondents in low- and high-income

households.

In 2022, 23% of adults living in households with an income below £15,000

a year reported having no savings. This fell starkly to 9% for those with

an income of at least £15,000 but less than £30,000, and just 3% for

those with an income of £50,000 or more. Therefore, the highest-income

households were around seven times more likely to hold savings than the

lowest-income households. Around six in ten of those with a household

income below £15,000 a year had less than £1,000 in savings, compared

with less than two in ten of those with incomes of £50,000 or more. The

chart below highlights the stark differences in savings levels along the

income distribution.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Households with annual incomes under £15,000 are around

seven times more likely than households with incomes of

£50,000 or more to have no savings at all

Source: Financial Lives Survey, 2022, FCA

In October 2023, JRF’s cost-of-living tracker produced similar findings:

25% of UK households with a net annual equivalised household income

below £14,600 a year (in the bottom income decile) reported having no

savings at all.

When we look at the wider group of people in the bottom 20% of net

household incomes (with incomes under £19,000 net per year), we found

that four in ten households (39%) reported having less than £200 in savings

in May 2023, including 20% who had none at all. However, there were notable

differences in the levels of household savings reported by different groups:

• Around two-thirds (69%) of all Universal Credit recipients had less

than £200 in savings, with 41% having none at all.

• Around half (49%) of households with children had less than £200 in

savings, compared with 33% for those without children.

• Around six in ten (62%) social renters had less than £200 in savings,

compared with 56% of private renters, 33% of those with a mortgage

and 19% of those who owned their home outright.

• More than half (57%) of Black respondents reported that their

household had less than £200 in savings, compared with 42% of Asian

respondents and 36% of white respondents.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Households on very low incomes are also more likely to be experiencing

heavy burdens related to debt. In the FCA’s Financial Lives Survey, around

one in five households (21%) with incomes under £15,000 reported that

they had fallen behind on or missed payments for credit commitments

or domestic bills in at least three of the six months before May 2022.

Unsurprisingly, the proportion of those experiencing this form of financial

hardship fell significantly as household incomes increased, with just 3% of

households with incomes of £50,000 or more experiencing this.

Households with annual incomes under £15,000 are around

seven times more likely than households with incomes of

£50,000 or more to have fallen behind on their bills in at least

three out of the last six months

Source: Financial Lives Survey, 2022, FCA

The Financial Lives Survey also found that around four in ten households

on incomes under £15,000 reported increased difficulties in keeping up

with their bills and credit commitments between May 2021 and May 2022.

This compares to around two in ten households on incomes of at least

£50,000 but less than £100,000 – half the rate of those on the lowest

incomes. This is, once again, unsurprising given that the lower your income

the more likely you are to struggle to meet your expenses when their costs

increase.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

In October 2023, JRF’s cost-of-living tracker showed a similar trend.

Across all respondents in the bottom 20% of household incomes, 47%

of people reported being in arrears (being behind on household bills

or credit commitments) in October 2023, and half of this group (52%)

were in arrears with three or more different bills. Within this, more than

half (55%) of people in households in the bottom 10% of household

incomes (with income under £14,600) were in arrears on at least one bill

or credit commitment. This fell to 39% of those in the second lowest 10%

of household incomes (with a household income between £14,600 and

£19,000) and 34% of those in the third lowest 10% of household incomes

(with a household income between £19,000 and £26,000).

Similar to the savings picture outlined above, while all households in the

bottom 20% of incomes faced poorer outcomes, some groups in this

income bracket were faring even worse than others:

• Around seven in ten (69%) of all Universal Credit recipients were in

arrears with at least one household bill. Within this group, 50% of

those in arrears were behind with three or more bills or commitments.

• More than seven in ten households with children (71%) were in arrears

with at least one household bill, with 55% of those in arrears being

behind with three or more bills or commitments.

• More than six in ten mortgage holders (63%) were in arrears with at

least one household bill, closely followed by 58% of private renters

and social renters, compared with just 25% of those who owned their

home outright.

• Around three-quarters of respondents with mixed ethnicity (73%) were

in households in arrears with at least one household bill, as were 69%

of Black respondents. This compares to 61% of Asian respondents and

42% of white respondents.

Furthermore, more than a fifth of households (22%) in the bottom 20% of

incomes reported having taken on a loan or used credit to pay for essential

bills such as rent and energy between April 2021 and October 2023. Within

these households, this was even higher among Black respondents (41%),

18–34 year olds (31%) and families with children (33%). It also varied by

housing tenure, at 32% for mortgage holders, 27% for private renters and

24% for social renters.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

But even taking on these loans has not helped to prevent many of these

households avoid arrears. In fact, 80% of those who used a loan to pay

their bills were still in arrears, and 63% of this group were in arrears with

three or more bills. They were also not escaping going without essentials –

94% of those taking out loans to pay their bills also reported going without

at least one essential, such as food, a warm home or adequate clothing for

the weather, in the six months before the survey.

Finally, the impact that going into debt has on a household can be

significant. The Financial Lives Survey found that people in households on

low incomes were disproportionately more likely to feel anxious, stressed

and embarrassed, have relationship problems with friends and family

members, be less productive at work or to take time off, experience

loneliness and feel like there is nowhere to turn as a result of holding debt.

Holding debts where repayments can take up a significant proportion of

your income can be enormously stressful. As we have shown above, this is

particularly the case for households who need to rely on debt to meet their

basic needs, including the 27% of those in the bottom 20% of incomes who

hold a loan with a loan shark, payday lender, doorstep lender or pawnshop,

often at very high interest rates.

Households with annual incomes under £15,000 are more than

twice as likely as households with incomes of £50,000 or more to

be experiencing anxiety and stress as a result of holding debt

Source: Financial Lives Survey, 2022, FCA

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

How has this changed over time?

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the average level of savings across

Britain increased. However, this did not hold true for all households,

with those on the lowest incomes least likely to be able to build a safety

net of savings. This is unsurprising, as low-income households were

disproportionately more likely to have lost work, to have been furloughed

or to have used up savings to meet their bills. The Bank of England’s survey

of household finances in 2022 found that households who had been able to

maintain their expenditure through the cost-of-living crisis were primarily

able to do so by drawing down on savings (Bank of England, 2022). But of

course, many low-income households did not have savings available for

In the Financial Lives Survey, the proportion of low-income households

(with incomes less than £15,000 a year) who had no savings at all actually

increased from 19% in 2020 to 23% in 2022. In contrast, this halved

from 6% to 3% for those with household incomes of £50,000 or more.

Conversely, the proportion of households with incomes less than £15,000

who had savings of more than £10,000 stayed around the same, while this

increased by 10 percentage points, from 42% to 52%, for households with

incomes of £50,000 or more a year.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Higher-income households managed to increase their savings

levels through the pandemic, while those on the lowest incomes

Source: Financial Lives Survey, 2022, FCA

Households across the income distribution are finding it increasingly

difficult to keep up with their bills and credit commitments, but this

is proving particularly hard for low-income households. The Financial

Lives Survey found that there was a large increase in the proportion of

households with incomes under £15,000 who said that they found keeping

up with their bills a heavy burden, from 20% to 31%, between 2020 and

2022. There were also – albeit smaller – increases across the rest of the

income distribution, further emphasising the squeeze on incomes that

rising costs have had.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

There has been a huge rise in the proportion of households on

incomes under £15,000 that have found keeping up with their

bills a heavy burden, compared with a much smaller rise for

higher-income households

Source: Financial Lives Survey, 2022, FCA

The Financial Lives Survey also found that, in 2022, nearly four in ten

households with incomes under £15,000 a year said it had become a lot

more of a burden to keep up with their bills over the previous 12 months.

This was around two and a half times more than the rate of 15% from 2020.

But every income group has seen a big increase, as rising prices squeeze

incomes. Even for those with household incomes of at least £50,000 a year,

21% reported their bills being a lot more of a burden, compared with just

5% in 2020.

What are the future prospects?

As interest rates rise, those who have savings and are able to put money

aside each month will see their financial stability improve, whereas those

who have had to turn to debt or have fallen behind on bills because of

affordability constraints will continue to struggle.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

JRF’s cost-of-living tracker found that 33% of households in the bottom

fifth of incomes have been refused a loan or a type of credit during the

cost-of-living crisis. As interest rates rise, lending becomes more expensive

and the threshold for meeting lenders’ requirements rises, the proportion

of households on the lowest incomes who can access affordable credit will

fall. Our tracker also found that the proportion of low-income households

taking on loans, and the amount of debt they hold, has fallen. While using

loans to ensure you can pay your bills and buy your essentials is not an

ideal situation, it can be a lifeline for many on low incomes, and tightening

lending conditions and otherwise tight budgets mean many families could

struggle further financially to make ends meet.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Living in poverty affects people’s ability to build up, and sustain, household

savings and increases their risk of getting into problem debt. This is

worsened further when the cost of living – and so the prices of essentials

such as housing, energy and food – rises.

Furthermore, the stress caused by low savings and debt can contribute

to mental health issues, with people who are behind on bills or have low

levels of savings more likely than more-financially resilient people to report

indicators of mental distress.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Food insecurity

Why is this important?

Food is an essential human need. If people are living in food insecurity,

because they are unable to afford enough nutritious and varied food, or

because there is a risk of this, their health and wellbeing will suffer. This will

have knock-on effects in other areas of their life, such as their ability to

work, which can lead to a vicious cycle.

People living in food-insecure households are more likely to develop

a range of physical and mental health conditions (Bash, 2023). Food

insecurity can be particularly detrimental for children, since an

inadequate diet can impede their physical, cognitive and emotional

development, leading to poorer educational attainment and depriving

them of a fair start in life. These effects can take place even before the

child is born: children are at a higher risk of premature delivery, low

birthweight and slow cognitive development if their mother experienced

food insecurity during pregnancy.

Since the ability to afford food is determined by prices as well as income,

food insecurity has become especially critical during the cost-of-living

crisis. Indeed, increases in the cost of essentials, including food, have

driven increases in the overall price level. Lower-income households are

more exposed to these increases as they tend to spend a higher proportion

of their income on essentials.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Around one in six people in poverty (17%) were food insecure in 2021/22,

meaning they were either not able to afford enough food, were at risk of

this or could not afford enough nutritious food for a healthy and varied

diet (full details of how food security is measured in the Family Resources

Survey can be found in the box below). This represents around 2.4 million

individuals. In comparison, only 4% of individuals who were not in poverty

were food insecure.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The experience of food insecurity is widespread among people on low

incomes, but its prevalence appears to grow the worse off people are.

Research by Heriot-Watt University for JRF found that a majority (61%) of

people who experienced destitution – the severest form of hardship – lacked

food in 2022 (Fitzpatrick et al, 2023). JRF’s cost-of-living tracker found that

in the 30 days before being surveyed in October 2023, six in ten households

in the bottom fifth of incomes (58%) had either cut down on or skipped

meals, or gone hungry because there was not enough money for food.

That is 3.4 million households in the bottom fifth of incomes going without

the food they need. The prevalence of food insecurity in the UK is also

reinforced by other work such as polling by The Food Foundation (2023).

The food security status of individuals in poverty after housing

costs, 2021/22

Household

food security

In poverty Not in poverty

Poverty rate by

food security

(%) (millions) (%) (millions) (%)

High 71 10.2 91 47.1 18

Marginal 12 1.7 4 2.1 44

Low 9 1.2 2 1.2 51

Very low 8 1.2 2 1.1 53

Food secure 83 11.8 96 49.2 19

Food insecure 17 2.4 4 2.3 52

All 100 14.2 100 51.4 22

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables. Figures may not sum

due to rounding.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Food security questions in the Family Resources Survey

In the Family Resources Survey, the respondent is read three statements

about food security and asked whether the statement was ‘often true’,

‘sometimes true’ or ‘never true’ for them in the last 30 days.

1. [I or we] worried whether our food would run out before [I or we] got

money to buy more.

2. The food that [I or we] bought just didn’t last, and [I or we] didn’t have

money to get more.

3. [I or we] couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.

Unless all three questions are answered as being ‘never true’, the respondent is

then asked the following questions:

4. Did you (or other adults in your household) skip or cut meals because there

wasn’t enough money for food? How many days did this happen?

5. Did you (or other adults in your household) ever eat less than you felt you

should because there wasn’t enough money for food?

6. Were you (or other adults in your household) ever hungry but didn’t eat

because there wasn’t enough money for food?

7. Did you (or other adults in your household) lose weight because there

wasn’t enough money for food?

8. Did you (or other adults in your household) ever not eat for a whole day

because there wasn’t enough money for food? How many days did this

From the questions, a 10-point household score is generated. One point is

scored for each ‘positive’ answer, that is, answers of ‘often true’, ‘sometimes

true’ and ‘yes’ (with an additional point if ‘3 days or more’ is selected for the

second part of questions 4 and 8).

High food security (score = 0): the household has no problem, or anxiety

about, consistently accessing adequate food.

Marginal food security (score = 1 or 2): the household had problems at

times, or anxiety about, accessing adequate food, but the quality, variety and

quantity of their food intake were not substantially reduced.

Low food security (score = 3 to 5): the household reduced the quality, variety

and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal

eating patterns were not substantially disrupted.

Very low food security (score = 6 to 10): at times during the past 30 days, eating

patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake

reduced because the household lacked money and other resources for food.

Food-secure households are those with a high or marginal food security status.

Food-insecure households are those with a low or very low food security

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The prevalence of food insecurity varies between different groups of

people in poverty. In 2021/22, more than one in five children in poverty

(22%) experienced insecurity, compared with 18% of working-age adults.

But both children and adults were equally likely to experience very low

food security (9%). Meanwhile only 3% of pensioners in poverty were food

insecure.

Comparing family types, people in poverty in lone-parent families were the

most likely to experience food insecurity. Three in ten people in lone-parent

families in poverty (31%) were food insecure, although single adults without

children also had an elevated risk (22%) compared with equivalent couple

households (12%).

Children and people in lone-parent families face a higher risk of being in

poverty than other groups. The fact that these groups are more likely to be

food insecure, even when looking at people in poverty alone, indicates that

they experience an additional degree of hardship that is not captured in

the headline poverty statistics.

Among people in poverty, food insecurity is most common

among children and people in lone-parent families

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

People in households receiving means-tested benefits are also more

likely to be food insecure, with 30% of people who are in poverty and on

Universal Credit or legacy benefits facing food insecurity in 2021/22. This

was five times the rate of those who were in poverty but not on Universal

Credit or legacy benefits (6%). More recently, JRF’s cost-of-living tracker

found that three-quarters of households in the bottom fifth of incomes

who were on Universal Credit (76%) reported cutting back on food or going

hungry in the previous 30 days, compared with an average of 58% across

all low-income households.

This highlights how the UK’s benefits system is failing to ensure a basic

standard of living. Not only is the basic rate of benefits insufficient to cover

the cost of essentials, but there are also a number of policies and design

features that can leave recipients with a shortfall of cash with which to

buy adequate food. These include the five-week wait for the first Universal

Credit payment, deductions from Universal Credit to pay off debts and

arrears, freezes to Local Housing Allowance rates (which are planned to

be frozen again after being reset to the 30th percentile of rents in April

2024) and the social sector size criteria (also known as the ‘Bedroom Tax’)

(Schmuecker and Bestwick, 2023).

Disabled people and their families in poverty also face elevated risks of

food insecurity. More than two in ten people living in a household with

someone who is disabled (23%) faced low or very low food insecurity in

2021/22, compared with one in ten people in poverty with no one disabled

in the household (10%). JRF’s cost-of-living tracker reinforces this finding,

with 64% of households in the bottom fifth of household incomes with a

disabled member cutting back on food or going hungry in October 2023.

Disabled people are less likely to be in paid work and more likely to be

on benefits. They can also face additional, disability-related costs, which

disability benefits are intended to cover. However, the quality of disability

assessments and the lengthy application process for these benefits can

result in shortfalls (Schmuecker and Bestwick, 2023). Even when people

are in receipt of these benefits, their entitlement may not cover all of their

disability-related costs and they may need to cut back in other areas to

pay for these.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Among people in poverty, those on Universal Credit and those

with a disabled person in the household are more likely to

experience food insecurity

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables. Universal Credit

includes legacy benefits. The poverty measure used to compare people with and without a disabled

person in the household excludes disability benefits from household income as these are designed

to cover the additional costs associated with having a disability.

The latest poverty statistics contain information on food-bank use for the

first time. In 2021/22, around 400,000 people in poverty had used a food

bank in the previous 30 days, and 1.3 million had used one in the previous

12 months. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong relationship between food

insecurity and the use of food banks: 14% of people in poverty facing very

low food security had used a food bank in the previous 30 days and 41%

had used one in the previous year. By contrast, among those with high

food security, less than 1% had used a food bank in the previous 30 days

and 2% had used one in the previous year.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

At the same time, it is possible that some people facing marginal food

security would have fallen into low food security if they did not have access

to a food bank and some facing low food security may have fallen into

very low food security. If food insecurity is defined as not being able to

afford food in a socially acceptable way, anyone who needs to use a food

bank can be considered food insecure, even if they do not appear as such

in the official data.

Among people in poverty, those in food-insecure households are

more likely to use food banks

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables. The number of people

who used a food bank in the past 30 days is subtracted from the number of people who used a food

bank in the past year.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Being in food insecurity tends to be associated with lacking other items

in addition to food. The chart below shows the proportion of working-age

adults in poverty who reported having an item, depending on whether they

were or were not in food insecurity. People in poverty often lack particular

items, even if they are not experiencing food insecurity, but this is

particularly pronounced among those who are food insecure. For example,

whereas more than half (52%) of people in poverty who were not food

insecure were able to replace worn-out furniture, only around one in eight

(12%) of those who were food insecure were able to do so. These findings

echo more recent data from JRF’s cost-of-living tracker, which found that

78% of households in the bottom fifth of incomes who were going without

other essentials were also going without food in the six months before

October 2023.

People in poverty who experience food insecurity are cutting

back on other items too

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables.

Since the ability to afford food is determined by prices as well as income,

food insecurity has become especially critical during the cost-of-living

crisis. Since this data was collected, increases in the cost of essentials,

including food, have driven increases in the overall price level. Between

April 2022 and October 2023, prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages

grew by 21%, more than any other broad category of consumer goods

and services and more than twice the rate of increase in consumer prices

overall (10%).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Lower-income households are more exposed to these increases as

they tend to spend a higher proportion of their income on essentials.

In 2020/21, food and non-alcoholic drinks made up 15% of household

spending among the poorest 20% of households (compared with 9%

among the richest 20%). The only category that made up a greater

proportion of low-income households’ spending was housing, water and

electricity. Given soaring inflation, they will inevitably have faced deeper

hardship since 2021/22.

How has this changed over time?

We now have three years of official data on food insecurity. Among

people in poverty, the number of people who are food insecure remained

at around 2.4 million between 2020/21 and 2021/22, after a fall from 2.8

million in 2019/20. It remains to be seen whether the fall was related to the

Covid-19 pandemic and, if so, whether it has reversed in the period since

the latest published data.

The number of people in poverty who are food insecure has

remained at around 2.4 million

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

Note: Shared households are excluded from household food security tables.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The data indicates that food insecurity has likely worsened since 2021/22

as the cost-of-living crisis continues and food prices play a more central

role. Food banks in the Trussell Trust network distributed around 3.0

million emergency parcels across the UK in 2022/23, more than one

million of which were for children (The Trussell Trust, 2023). This was the

largest number on record and represented a 37% increase since 2021/22.

The magnitude of changes varied across the UK, but the increase was

widely shared, with more than 90% of local authorities seeing increases

in the number of parcels distributed. Since records began in 2017/18, the

number of food parcels distributed in the Trussell Trust network has more

than doubled. Research shows that these increases are directly related to

inadequacies in the social security system, which are leaving more and

more people with no choice but to rely on food banks and other charitable

responses (Fitzpatrick et al, 2023).

The number of emergency food parcels delivered in the Trussell

Trust network has more than doubled over the past five years

Source: Trussell Trust end-of-year statistics

This pattern is mirrored in data collected in JRF’s cost-of-living tracker,

which found that the number of households in the bottom fifth of

incomes that cut back on food or went hungry in October 2023 was 58%.

Furthermore, the proportion of destitute households that lacked food

increased from 57% in 2019 to 61% in 2022, at the same time as the total

number of destitute households increased by nearly two-thirds (Fitzpatrick

et al, 2023).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

What are the future prospects?

There is no reason to believe that food insecurity will abate in the near

future without significant interventions to address it. Even though inflation,

and the rate of the increase in the prices of food and non-alcoholic

beverages, have been falling since March 2023, they still remain much

higher than the Bank of England’s target rate. Prices overall increased by

4.6% in the year to October 2023, but the price of food and non-alcoholic

beverages increased by 10.1% over the same period (Office for National

Statistics, 2023a). Even when inflation settles at a lower rate, prices

themselves will remain high.

Benefits will be uprated by inflation in April 2024. However, benefits will

still not rise as quickly as the cost of food, which has risen higher than the

headline inflation rate and represents a larger proportion of income for

low-income households. Furthermore, the various features of the social

security system that actively contribute to food insecurity – such as the

five-week wait for Universal Credit, deductions and sanctions – remain in

place. The end of the cost-of-living payments for low-income households

in April 2024 and the lack of an energy bill rebate over the winter are also

likely to push more households into food insecurity.

There continues to be no UK Government strategy to tackle food

insecurity, despite the fact that millions of people are unable to afford

adequate diets, although the Scottish Government recently introduced its

own approach. The rapid and continual increase in the use of food banks

is unsustainable and shows that we are currently heading in the wrong

direction.

How does this section interact with other sections?

Food insecurity is closely linked to poverty and the cost of living. As high

inflation makes food even more unaffordable for people on low incomes,

it is disproportionately experienced by people on benefits and people

living in households with at least one disabled person. In turn, it can lead

to, or exacerbate, poor physical and mental health and, as it is linked to

cognitive ability, it can also make it harder for children to concentrate at

school and lead to poorer educational attainment.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Health and poverty

Why is this important?

The circular relationship between health, income and deprivation is long

established. Poorer health generally reduces the possibility of better life

outcomes and opportunities. It can restrict employment prospects, reduce

earnings and bring on additional living costs associated with long-term

illness and disability that must somehow be met. In turn, these can lead to

living in deprivation, low income and poverty.

People in poverty or those living in deprived areas with one or more health

conditions are less likely to be able to access health-promoting services

or assets such as better housing. All people living in poverty, whether

they have existing health conditions or not, suffer extra stresses on dayto-day decisions that can cause or exacerbate long-term conditions –

perpetuating the poor-health poverty loop.

Health has likely become even more closely linked with poverty given the

impact that Covid-19 had on people on low incomes and those living in

areas with higher levels of deprivation. However, much of the data used in

this report does not cover the time since the pandemic. This means that

the full impact of the pandemic on people in poverty cannot be understood

fully from this year’s report.

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Among working-age adults, people living in poverty are more likely to

suffer from poor health; in 2021/22, 16–34 year olds, 35–49 year olds and

50–64 year olds in poverty were all around one-and-a-half times more

likely to be in poor health than those not in poverty in the same age group.

The gap decreases for older age groups: 46% of people aged 65 and over

in poverty were in poor health compared with 42% of those not in poverty.

These differences are probably driven by multiple factors, including the

availability and uptake of health screening and the longer life expectancy

of higher-income households who may nevertheless have health issues

towards the end of their life.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Percentage of adults living in less than good health by poverty

status and age range

Age range In poverty

Not in poverty

16–34 25 16

35–49 37 22

50–64 48 32

65+ 46 42

Source: JRF analysis of Family Resources Survey/Households Below Average Income, 2021/22

These patterns are also seen in mental health outcomes. Individuals in

the lowest household income quintile (calculated before housing costs)

were more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety than those with

higher household incomes. For example, 30% of people in the poorest

fifth of households reported lacking energy compared with 17% in the

richest quintile, 6% reported feelings of depression compared with 2% in

the richest quintile and 4% reported losing sleep compared with 2% in the

richest quintile (Clark and Wenham, 2022).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

The lower a person’s income, the more likely they are to

experience a symptom of anxiety

Source: JRF analysis of Understanding Society, 2021/22 (Institute for Social and Economic

Research, 2023)

Health inequalities exist from birth and continue through an individual’s

life. As shown in last year’s UK Poverty report, female life expectancy for

those living in the 10% least deprived areas in England in 2018/20 was, on

average, eight years more than that for those in the 10% most deprived

areas (Office for National Statistics, 2022a). The male life expectancy gap

was even greater (10 years).

In Scotland, these differences are more pronounced: male life expectancy

in the most deprived areas is 13.7 years less than in the least deprived

areas, while the gap in female life expectancy is 10.5 years shorter

(National Records of Scotland, 2022a).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

In Wales and Northern Ireland, data comparing the 20% most and least

deprived areas also shows gaps in life expectancy. These gaps are smaller

than those in England and Scotland, although this is probably due – at

least in part – to the larger groups, covering a wider range of deprivation

levels, being compared. In Wales, female life expectancy (measured in

2018–20) in the least deprived 20% of areas was 6.3 years longer than in

the most deprived areas, and male life expectancy was 7.5 years longer

(Office for National Statistics, 2022b). In Northern Ireland, the female life

expectancy gap between the least and most deprived 20% of areas is

5.1 years and the male life expectancy gap is 7.3 years (Northern Ireland

Statistics and Research Agency, 2023a).

The same pattern emerges when comparing the healthy life expectancy

of people in the most and least deprived areas of England. On average,

a female living in the least deprived areas will spend 82% of their life in

good health, compared with 66% for a female living in the most deprived

areas. Given the shorter life expectancy of women from deprived areas,

this equates to 19 years fewer lived in good health. For a male, this gap is

18 years; a male born in the most deprived areas will live in good health

for just 71% of their life compared with 85% for those in the least deprived

area (Office for National Statistics, 2022a).

In Scotland, the gaps in healthy life expectancy are once again larger;

a female living in the least deprived areas of Scotland will live 85% of

their life in good health, compared with 65% living in the most deprived

areas, while a male living in the least deprived areas will spend 85% of

their life in good health compared with 68% living in the most deprived

areas (National Records of Scotland, 2022b). This means that both men

and women in the most deprived areas of Scotland are expected to have

24 fewer years in good health than their counterparts in the least deprived

areas (National Records of Scotland, 2022b). When comparing the 20%

most and least deprived areas in Wales and Northern Ireland, the healthy

life expectancy gap is 13.4 years for males and 16.9 years for females in

Wales (Office for National Statistics, 2022b) and 11.2 years for males and

15.1 years for females in Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Statistics and

Research Agency, 2023b).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

There is evidence to suggest that the above health inequalities mean that

people in poverty require additional support from the medical services

provided by the NHS. For example, we found, using Understanding

Society, that people in poverty are more likely to need to visit their

general practitioner (GP) more frequently than those not in poverty. After

controlling for demographic factors that are associated with the likelihood

of someone needing to visit their GP (age, health, sex, ethnicity and the

depth of deprivation of the area they live in), people in poverty were found

to be 11% more likely than those not in poverty to visit their GP six or more

times a year. In addition to what this says about the health of people in

poverty, it also highlights how poverty is putting pressure on the UK’s

services and institutions, such as the NHS. Based on this concern, JRF will

be working with The King’s Fund in the coming months to find out more

about the impact of poverty on the NHS.

How has this changed over time?

Since life expectancy estimates were first made available by level of

deprivation in 2011, the life expectancy of those living in the most deprived

areas of England has never been lower. This is the case for both females

and males, with the latest figures yet to fully encompass the Covid-19

pandemic. In 2018–20, females were expected to live, on average, for

nine fewer months and males for four fewer months than they had been

in 2011–13. In contrast, the life expectancy of both men and women living

in less deprived areas increased over the same period (Office for National

Statistics, 2022a).

In Scotland, data on life expectancy by deprivation is only available over a

shorter time period. Here, male life expectancy in the most deprived areas

fell by 18 months and female life expectancy fell by 17 months between

2013–15 and 2019–21 (National Records of Scotland, 2016, 2022a). In

Wales, where data is only available to compare the 20% most and least

deprived areas, male life expectancy in the most deprived areas has fallen

by four months and female life expectancy by 10 months since 2011–13

(Public Health Wales Observatory, 2022). In Northern Ireland, where life

expectancy data by level of deprivation goes back to 2015–17, male life

expectancy has decreased by four months and female life expectancy by

six (Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, 2023a).

Although the proportion of life lived in good health has increased, this is

not necessarily reflecting an improvement in healthy life expectancy. As

reported above, overall life expectancy is falling for people from the most

disadvantaged backgrounds. Any increase in the proportion of life lived in

good health for this group may therefore be, in part, a consequence of the

duration of healthy life expectancy stagnating.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Compared with 2020/21, all age groups in poverty have experienced an

increase in their likelihood of living with less than good health. The group of

most concern is those aged 16–34 who have their highest level of less than

good health since records began (25%). Since 2012/13, their levels of less

than good health have increased by 47%. The next youngest group (35–49

year olds) have also experienced an increase over the same time period.

However, this increase is smaller and does not take the level of that group

to a new high. Both older age groups in poverty (50–64 year olds and

those aged 65+) have experienced a small reduction in their levels of less

than good health in that same timeframe.

Younger adults in poverty are more likely to be living in less

than good health than they were in 2012/13, but this is not the

case in older age groups

Source: Family Resources Survey and Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

It is not unreasonable to suggest that these increases will have been

caused by ongoing medical issues linked to Covid-19, but there are also a

number of other factors that could be at play. This includes the ongoing

cost-of-living crisis and the UK’s increasing levels of very deep poverty,

which exacerbate poor mental health (Taylor and Schmuecker, 2023) and

can also worsen poor physical health (De Hert et al, 2011).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

What are the future prospects?

The findings presented here show worrying trends of growing poor

health. Considering that the full, even short-term, impact of the Covid-19

pandemic is not fully captured in some of the data used in this report,

there are even more reasons for concern. Whether these trends are due

to growing levels of poor health before the pandemic, an early sign of the

longer-term impact that Covid-19 will have on health, or a combination of

the two, we could see even worse health outcomes in the years ahead.

More than ever, the inequalities that lead to disparities in health across the

UK will not disappear without government action. Without specific policies

aimed at improving public health through prevention, intervention and

the treatment of health conditions and other causes of ill-health such as

overcrowding and poor housing, further decreases in life expectancy and

healthy life expectancy must be expected.

As poverty causes ill-health, reducing levels of poverty will also have a

positive impact on health outcomes. Any exposure to poverty in childhood

is associated with worse health outcomes in adolescence and into

adulthood (Lai et al, 2019) and the potential impact is greater for children

in persistent poverty. This is particularly worrying given the impact of

the cost-of-living crisis on living standards and years of chronically high

poverty levels.

How does this section interact with other sections?

The most obvious link is with the disability section, but health could be

considered to have a relationship with all other sections of this report. For

example, we know that people from minority ethnic groups have higher

rates of poverty and are more likely to live in deprived areas, and we

know that people living in those areas face a greater risk of poor health.

Many people struggling with poor health face loss of earnings through

employment and indeed may be unable to work, leading them to interact

with the benefits system. As well as impacts on wellbeing, those in poor

health may also have increased living costs and children suffering with

poor health may see an impact on their future prospects.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Education and poverty

Why is this important?

A good-quality education can transform lives by opening up the world of

work and wider opportunities for a fulfilling and healthier life. Schools and

colleges help us to learn essential skills that we need to interact with the

world around us, for example to pay bills or to read a bus timetable. But

too many children are leaving school without these skills, including being

able to confidently read and use numbers. Schools also provide emotional

support for many children and families and are anchors to communities

and systems of support.

Educational qualifications are needed to access much employment, and

higher qualifications are related to higher pay and lower levels of poverty.

Yet attainment gaps between the most and least advantaged children are

found from early years (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 2017) through to

graduate outcomes across the UK (Office for Students, 2022).

Education is a devolved power and this means that education varies

across the four nations of the UK, so it is not directly comparable. In most

cases, schools and UK Governments do not collect information on the

incomes of parents, so we need to use other information that is available

to identify when children might be growing up in a household in poverty or

with low/lower incomes.

In this section, we mainly use free school meals (FSM) data. Students

are eligible for free school meals if their parents receive social security

support for low incomes.9

In Scotland, the Government uses the Scottish

Index of Multiple Deprivation, which measures the level of deprivation in

someone’s neighbourhood rather than within the individual family (Scottish

Government, 2020). At some points we use parental occupational status

as an alternative measure if there is no income data available. Lower

occupational status is associated with lower incomes.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

What’s the headline story in the latest data?

Pre-school years

Even at a young age there is a gap in educational attainment for young

people by parental income level, and this continues throughout the

different stages of a child’s education. The Centre for Longitudinal Studies

follows children over their life and found that, in the UK, children born in

the year 2000 had lower attainment in cognitive tests in the early years

if their parents had lower incomes. The gap in vocabulary development

between children in the richest and poorest families (top and bottom 20%

of incomes) was, on average, 10 months at age 3 and 15 months at age 5

(Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 2017).

As well as supporting child development, good-quality, affordable and

flexible early-years care can also allow parents living on a low income to

access work, or more hours of work (Jarvie et al, 2023), increasing their

household income and, ultimately, reducing the number of children living

below the poverty line.

Primary and secondary school

The attainment gap seen in the pre-school years is also evident at the

beginning of primary school. In England in 2021/22, children from the

10% most income-deprived neighbourhoods were less likely to reach all

early learning goals around the age of 5 than children from the least

income-deprived 10% of neighbourhoods. Just over half of children from

the most income-deprived neighbourhoods reached the expected levels

of attainment, compared with nearly three in four children from the least

income-deprived areas.

In Scotland, at a similar age, there was a noticeable attainment gap in

reaching expected levels across a range of developmental areas between

children from the least-deprived 20% of areas and children from the

most-deprived 20% of areas. This includes a 13 percentage point gap in

listening and talking and a 21 percentage point gap in literacy.

In Scotland, at the end of primary school, there was a 22 percentage

point gap in literacy and a 19 percentage point gap in numeracy between

children from the most and the least deprived neighbourhoods (based

on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). At age 11, there was a

23 percentage point gap in the proportion of children reaching expected

levels at Key Stage 2 (KS2) in England. There is no equivalent primary

school data currently available for Northern Ireland or Wales.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Attainment gaps persist from primary into secondary education. In

Northern Ireland, there was a gap of 25 percentage points between

children entitled to free school meals and those not, in attaining five

General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) at A*–C including

maths and English. In Wales, there was a 28 percentage point gap in

the GCSE entries awarded an A*–C grade. In England, just three in ten

disadvantaged young people got a pass at GCSE in both English and

maths, compared with nearly six in ten young people not known to be

disadvantaged (see table below for a definition of disadvantage). In

Scotland, the gap between children in the most and the least deprived

neighbourhoods seems smaller (19 percentage points) but the level being

measured was lower at just one qualification at Level 5.

Attainment in England

2021/22 Disadvantaged

Not known

disadvantage

Attainment

Proportion of pupils

reaching expected

standards in

reading, writing

and maths at Key

43% 66% 23 percentage

Percentage of

pupils achieving

grades five or

above in English

and maths GCSEs

30% 57% 27 percentage

Source: Key stage 2 attainment, UK Government and Key stage 4 performance, UK Government

Note: GCSE = General Certificate of Secondary Education. Disadvantaged pupils are ordinarily

defined as those who have been registered as eligible for free school meals at any point in the

past six years and children looked after by a local authority or who have left local authority care

in England and Wales through adoption, a special guardianship order, a residence order or a

child arrangements order. Across levels and countries, we have used 2021/22 data to match the

Households Below Average Income dataset year and because this is the latest data available in

Northern Ireland and Wales.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Attainment in Northern Ireland

2021/22 FSM Non-FSM Attainment

Percentage of

pupils achieving

at least five

GCSEs A*–C (or

equivalents)

including GCSE

English and maths

59% 84% 25 percentage

Source: Qualifications and Destinations of Northern Ireland School Leavers, Department of

Education, Northern Ireland (Cash et al, 2023)

Note: FSM = free school meals. GCSE = General Certificate of Secondary Education. Primary school

attainment by free school meals is not regularly published in Northern Ireland.

Attainment in Scotland

2021/22 Most deprived

20% of areas

deprived 20%

Attainment

Percentage of

primary 7 pupils

achieving literacy

61% 83% 22 percentage

Percentage

of primary 7

pupils achieving

67% 87% 19 percentage

One or more at

SCQF Level 5 upon

leaving school

76% 96% 19 percentage

Source: Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence levels, Scottish Government (2022) and

Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations, Scottish Government (2023)

Note: SCQF = Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework. Due to rounding, the attainment gaps

may not equal the difference between the proportion of children from the most and least deprived

areas attaining the specified level.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Attainment in Wales

2021/22 FSM Non-FSM Attainment

Percentage of

GCSE entries

awarded A*–C

47% 75% 28 percentage

Source: GCSE entries and results for pupils in Year 11 by FSM, StatsWales

Note: FSM = free school meals. GCSE = General Certificate of Secondary Education. The teacher

assessment of Key Stage 2 is no longer published by free school meal status (Welsh Government,

Across education systems we also know that there exist intersectional

attainment gaps with variation in attainment for children in low-income

families by ethnicity, gender and whether they have any additional support

needs (Shaw et al, 2016; Strand, 2021). Children with additional support

needs experience a significant attainment gap across the devolved

nations. We also know that children living in poverty are more likely to be

identified as having an additional support need and are often unable to

access the support they need (Shaw et al, 2016).

Higher education

In the UK in 2021/22, half of entrants into first undergraduate degrees

had parents who were in either higher or lower professional or managerial

occupations. Around one in five entrants had a parent working in a routine

or semi-routine occupation. Just 1% had a parent who was long-term

unemployed or had never worked (this could be due to a range of reasons,

including disability and caring responsibilities).

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

Percentage of higher-education first-degree undergraduate

enrolments by highest parental occupational status in the UK,

Highest parental occupational status Percentage of first-degree

undergraduate enrolments

Higher managerial and professional occupations 24

Lower managerial and professional occupations 26

Intermediate occupations 14

Small employers and own account workers 8

Lower supervisory and technical occupations 5

Semi-routine occupations 13

Routine occupations 9

Long-term unemployed or never worked 1

Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency (2023)

Note: This analysis only includes students in their first year, with level of study set at their first degree.

We know that people with higher qualifications are less at risk of being

trapped in poverty. In 2021/22, just over one in ten working-age adults with

an undergraduate degree or above were living in poverty, compared with

more than four in ten working-age adults with no qualifications. Having no

qualifications also doubles working-age adults’ risk of experiencing very

deep poverty.

Qualifications affect people’s access to good work and having no

qualifications increases working-age adults’ risk of being inactive and

unemployed. In 2021/22, nine in ten adults with a higher degree were in

employment, compared with half of people with no qualifications (or who

did not know what their qualifications were). However, it is important to

note that the proportion of individuals who are disabled is nearly three

times higher among people with no degree than for those with a degree

qualification. This is likely to contribute to the higher inactivity rate for this

group. Disabled children often have additional learning needs and face

an education attainment gap and, as noted in earlier sections, disabled

people face significant barriers to accessing the labour market. These

factors combine to highlight some of the ongoing structural disadvantages

that disabled people face through their life course, contributing to their

greater risk of experiencing poverty.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

This is compounded by the fact that, in 2021/22, the average gross weekly

pay for working adults aged 16–64 with no qualifications (or who did not

know what their qualifications were) was £369 a week. This increased to

an average of £442 a week for someone with a qualification below degree

level and for someone with a higher degree it averaged £769 a week.

How has this changed over time?

As each of the UK’s education systems is distinct and has made changes

to its structure, examinations and measurements of success, it is difficult

to track comparable changes over time. However, we can be certain

that there has consistently been a gap between the least and most

disadvantaged children, that this is not new and that the gap will not

close in the near future with current rates of progress. The Programme for

International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organisation

for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), measured students’

reading ability, outwith the school curriculum, in 2018. It showed little

improvement in the socio-economic reading attainment gap in the UK

between 2009 and 2018 (Mostafa and Schwabe, 2019).

In 2020, students in each UK education system did not undertake normal

exams due to the Covid-19 pandemic; instead, teachers evaluated their

work, meaning that there is a break in attainment data over this period. In

addition to this, education systems, schools and teachers have continued

to require extra efforts to overcome the impact of the pandemic on

learning, which is likely to have contributed to sustained attainment gaps

in 2020/21.

Nonetheless, we have seen a widening in the attainment gap at Key Stage

2 level for children in England between 2017/18 (19 percentage points)

and 2022/23 (22 percentage points) (excluding years missing due to the

pandemic). This is because attainment has fallen for both groups but has

fallen further for disadvantaged pupils than for children not known to be

disadvantaged, increasing the attainment gap between these groups. At

GCSE level, there are only two years of comparable data, due to a change

in measurement combined with the impact of the pandemic, which shows

little change in the attainment gap. Recent work by the Education Policy

Institute (Hunt, 2023) supports these findings on disadvantage gaps,

suggesting a continuing widening of the gaps at all levels since 2017. The

Institute also found that at GCSE level, young people who experienced

persistent disadvantage (meaning that they were eligible for free school

meals for at least 80% of their education) were almost two years behind

students who had not experienced persistent disadvantage between 2011

and 2022.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

In Scotland, the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic also meant

that children were assessed through teacher evaluation instead of typical

exams, and the attainment gap at Level 5 reduced from 21 percentage

points in 2019/20 to 18 percentage points in 2020/21. However, this gap

widened slightly to 19 percentage points in 2021/22. Before this, the gap

between young people in the most and least deprived neighbourhoods

achieving one pass reduced between 2009/10 and 2016/17 as the

attainment of children from deprived neighbourhoods increased. However,

the attainment gap has remained stable since then.

In Wales, the attainment gap between students who are and who are

not in receipt of free school meals in achieving A*–C grades awarded at

GCSE level remained relatively constant between 2016/17 and 2018/19,

sitting at around 28 percentage points. In 2019/20, the academic year

in which GCSE exams were most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the

attainment gap fell to 25 percentage points. However, this has increased

back to around 28 percentage points in the latest two years of data.

Since 2005/06 in Northern Ireland, attainment at GCSE level for young

people entitled to free school meals has improved in line with those not

on FSM; this means that the attainment gap has remained relatively

constant. However, this gap fell from 29 percentage points in 2018/19 to

25 percentage points in 2021/22.

What are the future prospects?

The additional challenges faced by families with children in the cost-ofliving crisis are likely to affect young people’s learning and attainment.

As families cut back on essentials as they struggle to keep up with rising

costs, the numbers of children attending school hungry are likely to rise,

affecting their ability to take part and attain in school. JRF’s latest costof-living tracker found that 40 percentage points of families with children

in the lowest fifth of incomes had cut back on food for their children during

the cost-of-living crisis.

Taking part fully in school, from having the right school uniform to

attending school trips, also comes with costs that a growing number of

families will struggle to cover as the costs of essentials rise (Child Poverty

Action Group, 2023). JRF analysis found that in October 2023, one in four

families with children in the lowest fifth of incomes had taken on debt to

cover the cost of purchasing a school uniform. Parental stress and worry

are also known to have a negative impact on young people’s ability

to learn in school, and this is likely to increase as a growing number of

families worry about making ends meet.

UK Poverty 2024 The experience of being in poverty

As mentioned in the ‘Family composition, age and sex’ section, the

impact that increased childcare provision in England (and alternative

proposals from the devolved nations) has on reducing child poverty and

the attainment gap requires close attention over the coming years. By

reducing the cost of childcare, governments could raise families’ incomes,

particularly if it makes employment – or increased hours of employment –

a more viable option for parents in low-paid work. The introduction of more

high-quality childcare for low-income families could also boost learning

for children from low-income families in the early years and contribute to

reducing the attainment gap as they progress into school.

It is also clear that across the nations of the UK, policy decisions made

during the Covid-19 pandemic have exacerbated socio-economic

inequalities in attainment (Kippin, 2023). To avoid further widening the

attainment gap, the Governments in the UK must focus education policy

on closing attainment gaps so that these errors are not repeated in future

policy decisions.

How does this section interact with other sections?

The main link is with employment outcomes, where low qualifications are a

key driver of low pay. However, our experience and level of education often

affect other aspects of our lives such as our health and where we live.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 1: Poverty definitions 144

Annex 2: Macro economy 149

Annex 3: Average incomes and inequality 156

Annex 4: Public attitudes to poverty 159

Annex 5: Notes on data quality impact on

analysis in the Family Resources Survey 164

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 1: Poverty definitions

Being in poverty is when your resources are well below what is enough to

meet your minimum needs, including taking part in society. There are a

range of ways of measuring this. Headline measures include the following:

• Relative poverty after housing costs – that is, where someone’s

household income is below 60% of the median, adjusted for family

size and composition. This looks at whether the incomes of poorer

households are catching up with average incomes.

• The Social Metrics Commission’s core measure of poverty, which

is having low material resources compared with inescapable costs,

including housing costs. This looks beyond income at all material

resources, assesses extra costs, including those due to disability

and childcare, and includes people sleeping rough. It also uses a

smoothed poverty line to avoid potentially misleading year-on-year

• Absolute poverty after housing costs – that is, where someone’s

household income is below a fixed line based on an inflation-adjusted

2010/11 poverty line (set at 60% of median income after housing

costs in 2010/11). This looks at whether the incomes of poorer

households are increasing faster than inflation.

One important thing to note is that these measures are based on

household income and vary in how sensitive they are to changes in the

cost of living and high inflation. Of these measures, absolute poverty is

most directly affected by immediate changes in the cost of living, with

the poverty line rising by inflation. Relative poverty and the Social Metrics

Commission measure are less sensitive to changes in the cost of living,

with changes in both mainly determined by how the incomes of poorer

households compare to those with higher incomes. Material deprivation

measures, which are based on whether families say they are unable to

access or afford a range of particular goods and activities, are also useful

measures during periods when prices are rising quickly.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

In this report, when we use the term ‘poverty’ we are using the relative

poverty rate after housing costs to measure poverty unless otherwise

stated. Previous analysis has shown that all measures agree on some of

the key groups who have higher rates of poverty, including:

• children

• people in families not containing full-time workers

• people in lone-parent families

• people in families containing a disabled person

• people in families with three or more children

• people in rented accommodation

• people in households headed by someone who does not have a

white ethnicity (particularly those of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Black

ethnicity).

There has been little recent progress in reducing relative poverty or poverty

as determined using the Social Metrics Commission measure. Reducing

poverty on those measures tends to be more difficult than reducing

absolute poverty, as they both require the incomes of lower-income

households to catch up with the average household, while absolute poverty

just requires incomes to grow faster than inflation. There have been periods

when incomes have been falling, not least recently during the period of

very high inflation, which is likely to feed into rising absolute poverty. In the

longer term, incomes do tend to rise, and absolute poverty tends to fall,

as can be seen in the chart below, which is the equivalent of the relative

poverty chart in the overall poverty rates section earlier in this report. This

shows the strong performance in terms of reducing absolute poverty in the

early years of the last Labour Government, with performance of the current

and previous Conservative Governments being similar to each other, with

the current Government starting from a higher base (each series starts

with the relative poverty rate in the election year).

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Absolute poverty rates have fallen under both the current and

previous Conservative Governments, but the biggest fall was

under the last Labour Government

Source: Institute for Fiscal Studies’ (2023) analysis of Family Expenditure Survey and Households

Below Average Income data

Adjustments (known as equivalisation) are made to incomes to make

them comparable across households of different sizes and composition.

For example, the process of equivalisation would adjust the income of a

single person upwards, so their income can be compared directly to the

standard of living of a couple. The relative poverty thresholds after housing

costs and what the median household income would be if adjusted to

correspond to various family types are given in the table below.

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Poverty thresholds vary by family type

Median income Poverty threshold

(60% of median)

Deep poverty

threshold

(50% of median)

Very deep

poverty threshold

(40% of median)

Household type Weekly Annual Weekly Annual Weekly Annual Weekly Annual

Lone parent with two

children, one aged 14 or

over and one under 14

£600 £31,300 £360 £18,800 £300 £15,600 £240 £12,500

Couple with two

children, one aged 14 or

over and one under 14

£810 £42,200 £486 £25,300 £405 £21,100 £324 £16,900

Couple with two

children, both under 14 £700 £36,500 £420 £21,900 £350 £18,200 £280 £14,600

Single adult, no children £290 £15,100 £174 £9,100 £145 £7,600 £116 £6,000

Couple with no children £500 £26,100 £300 £15,600 £250 £13,000 £200 £10,400

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

The average annual poverty gap is calculated as the average gap between

the poverty line and the median income of someone in poverty over a

three-year period. Similarly, it can be expressed in terms of an adjusted

income corresponding to different family types. The same can be seen

for the equivalent deep poverty gap and the very deep poverty gaps, and

the distance to the poverty line for people in deep poverty and very deep

poverty as in the tables below. Note, these tables do not mean that gaps

are bigger for people in different family types, rather they just show what

the single relevant overall poverty gap figure would be when expressed for

different family types.

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Poverty, deep poverty and very deep poverty gaps when

adjusted for different family types

Poverty gap Deep poverty gap Very deep

poverty gap

Household type Weekly Annual Weekly Annual Weekly Annual

Lone parent with two

children, one aged 14 or

over and one under 14

£100 £5,400 £90 £4,700 £150 £7,800

Couple with two children,

one aged 14 or over and

one under 14

£140 £7,200 £120 £6,300 £120 £6,400

Couple with two children,

both aged under 14 £120 £6,200 £100 £5,400 £110 £5,600

Single adult, no children £50 £2,600 £40 £2,300 £40 £2,300

Couple, no children £90 £4,500 £70 £3,900 £80 £4,000

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2019/20–2021/22, DWP

Distance to poverty line for people in deep poverty and very

deep poverty when adjusted for different family types

Distance to poverty line for

people in deep poverty

Distance to poverty line for

people in very deep poverty

Household type Weekly Annual Weekly Annual

Lone parent with two

children, one aged 14 or

over and one under 14

£150 £7,800 £210 £11,000

Couple with two children,

one aged 14 or over and

one under 14

£200 £10,500 £280 £14,800

Couple with two children,

both aged under 14 £170 £9,100 £250 £12,800

Single adult, no children £70 £3,800 £100 £5,300

Couple, no children £120 £6,500 £180 £9,200

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2019/20–2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 2: Macro economy

In looking at how poverty is changing, it is important to consider the

performance of the wider economy. The health of the economy will have a

bearing on many of the factors that determine poverty levels. This includes:

• tax revenues to fund public services, social security and other state

• the performance of the labour market in terms of the number of jobs

available and going wage rates

• the impact of inflation on the cost of living.

This annex draws on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR’s) latest

Economic and Fiscal Outlook report (EFO), and compares this to the EFO

published immediately before our last assessment of prospects for poverty

in the UK (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2022, 2023). The relationship

between macro-economic variables and poverty is complex, and forecasts

always come with a degree of uncertainty, so this should be seen as

indicative.

While not a comprehensive measure of the economy, real Gross Domestic

Product (GDP) per head of population gives an indication of how the

economy is faring over time. This indicator fell dramatically in the second

quarter of 2020, following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and

associated lockdown measures. After a rebound in 2021, the energy-price

shocks that initiated the cost-of-living crisis generated further headwinds

on GDP. A combination of data revisions and better-than-expected

performance has meant that real GDP per head of population has not

fallen as low as the OBR previously forecast. However, as of the third

quarter of 2023, we have still seen no growth since 2021, and the size of

the economy remains below pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, due to

a combination of demographic and technological factors, the OBR now

expects GDP to grow more slowly than previously forecast, so that the

long-run outlook has actually deteriorated.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Despite better-than-expected performance since the pandemic,

the long-run outlook for GDP has deteriorated

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2022 and November 2023

Note: EFO = Economic and Fiscal Outlook. GDP = Gross Domestic Product.

After a decade of rising employment, the employment rate fell during

the Covid-19 pandemic, although the furlough scheme ensured that this

was not as severe as the fall in GDP. The proportion of the 16+ population

in employment fell by almost 2 percentage points in 2020, equating to

a decrease of 800,000 people in employment. We have seen a partial

recovery since the beginning of 2021, which has so far exceeded the

OBR’s 2022 forecast, although the reliability of the underlying data has

become a concern, meaning these increases may be overstated. In any

case, the employment rate remains a full percentage point below its prepandemic peak, and the prospects for employment growth remain weak.

This is mainly due to the sharp rise in economic inactivity that followed the

pandemic, driven largely by those reporting a long-term sickness, although

unemployment is also forecast to rise.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Employment has only partially recovered since the pandemic,

and the forecast remains subdued

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2022 and November 2023

Note: EFO = Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

Inflation, the rate at which prices increase, has been a chief concern since

the beginning of the cost-of-living crisis. Inflation as measured by the

Consumer Price Index (CPI) remained low through to the start of 2021,

but then rose rapidly to a peak of around 11% in 2022 – a rate of increase

that had not been seen for around 40 years. Inflation has since begun to

subside – that is, prices are growing at a slower rate. However, whereas

the OBR was previously forecasting this fall to continue apace until the

economy entered deflation – with prices actually falling – it now anticipates

that the fall in inflation will trail off until reaching the Bank of England

target of 2% at the end of the forecast horizon.

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We may be past the peak, but inflation is now forecast to remain

higher for longer

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2022 and November 2023

Note: CPI = Consumer Price Index. EFO = Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

One result of high inflation is that average real earnings – that is, average

earnings adjusted for inflation – have been eroded. Earnings quickly

recovered following the pandemic, but fell again in the second half of

2021 as inflation took hold, and now remain below their pre-pandemic

level. This means that, remarkably, real earnings are still lower than they

were before the financial crisis some 15 years ago (not shown in the chart

above). As with GDP, average real earnings have outperformed the OBR’s

2022 forecast for the past year, but are now expected to grow more slowly

so that the overall result is a deterioration in the forecast. Average real

earnings are now expected to remain below their pre-pandemic level until

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Earnings have been eroded by inflation and are not expected to

recover for many years

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2022 and November 2023

Note: EFO = Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Average earnings have been index-adjusted for the

Consumer Price Index within each EFO and rebased to 2008 Quarter 1.

Another consequence of high inflation is increased pressure on public

services. The pandemic saw a historic rise in public spending – defined

here as departmental spending – reaching over 20% above its 2008/09

level in real terms. However, since 2021/22, inflation has eroded the value

of public spending, resulting in real-terms cuts. Real public spending

remains much higher than its pre-pandemic level, but the forecast for

real spending has reduced in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest

publication due to higher-than-expected inflation, at a time when many

public services are already stretched.

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Public spending remains much higher than before the pandemic,

but is being squeezed by inflation

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2022 and November 2023

Note: Total of resource and capital spending by department, deflated using GDP deflator in each

forecast.

Furthermore, most of the increase in public spending since before the

pandemic is due to the budget for health and social care. Budgets in

many areas spiked in 2020–21, but have since been falling back to their

pre-pandemic levels in real terms. Some budgets actually fell, notably

education. On the other hand, the resource budget for health and social

care is projected to remain significantly higher in 2024–25 than in 2019–20

in real terms. The reasons for this are complex, but are likely related to

poorer health across the population, increasing the number of patients as

well as health and social care workers (Warner and Zaranko, 2022).

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Most of the increase in public spending since before the

pandemic is on health and social care

Source: HM Treasury, Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis, July 2023

Note: Excludes budgets for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Figures from 2023–24 onwards

are projected. Figures are not directly comparable to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s

Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

Projected change in real resource budget from 2019 to 2020, £ billion, 2022–23 prices

2019–20 2020–21 2021–22 2022–23 2023–24 2024–25

Other Health and social care Education

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 3: Average incomes and inequality

One way to measure changes in overall living standards is to track average

incomes. This also helps us understand changes in poverty, since the

relative measure of poverty that we use in this report is based on median

household income. In particular, increases in the median will raise the

poverty line, which in turn will lead to increases in poverty if the incomes of

low-income households do not grow as quickly.

The chart below shows how average incomes have changed since 2008/09

according to three measures:

• median equivalised household income after housing costs (the

threshold used for our poverty statistics), as measured in the

Households Below Average Income (HBAI) dataset

• the equivalent measure before housing costs

• real household disposable income (RHDI) per head of population.

Real household disposable income is derived from the national accounts

and includes the money households have to spend on consumption, or to

save and invest, after taxes, National Insurance contributions, pension

contributions and interest have been paid.10

Real household disposable income fell in 2022–23 – and is

expected to keep falling until 2025

Source: OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, November 2023 and Households Below Average Income,

2021/22, DWP

Note: AHC = after housing costs. BHC = before housing costs. HBAI = Households Below Average

Income. OBR = Office for Budget Responsibility. RHDI = real household disposable income.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

The income measures based on the Households Below Average Income

dataset follow a similar pattern to the real household disposable income

index, with a fall in average incomes between 2009/10 and 2011/12

following the financial crisis, before a period of broadly growing average

incomes to 2019/20. The coronavirus pandemic halted this trend, with all

three data series showing a fall between 2019/20 and 2020/21. After a

rebound in 2021/22, the real household disposable income series showed

a large fall in 2022/23, which is forecast to continue until 2025/26. On this

measure, average incomes will remain below their pre-pandemic level until

2027/28. This would be a historically unprecedented outcome.

Two of the most commonly used measures of income inequality are the

Gini coefficient and the 90:10 ratio. The Gini coefficient shows how incomes

are distributed across all individuals. It ranges from zero (when everybody

has identical incomes) to 100% (when all income goes to only one person).

The 90:10 ratio is the median income of the top 20% (quintile 5) divided

by the median of the bottom 20% (quintile 1). The chart below shows that

income inequality fell following the financial crisis (between 2009/10 and

2010/11), followed by an overall increase up to 2019/20. There were large

falls in 2020/21, likely due in part to the introduction of temporary benefit

measures. These measures were withdrawn halfway through the latest year

of data, 2021/22, which saw a slight increase in the Gini coefficient but a

reduction in the 90:10 ratio.

Income inequality fell in 2020/21, likely due to pandemic-related

payments protecting the incomes of poorer households

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2021/22, DWP

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

The outlook for inequality remains uncertain, depending as it does on the

distribution of changes in earnings and employment as well as the impacts

of tax and benefit policies, among other factors. The overall effect of

tax and benefit policies announced in this Parliament has been broadly

progressive, as have increases in the National Living Wage (Resolution

Foundation, 2023). However, many of these policies have already begun to

take effect in the latest data, and the tax and benefit measures announced

in the latest Autumn Statement will benefit middle- and higher-income

households the most.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 4: Public attitudes to poverty

It should be a fundamental responsibility of the Government to provide

adequate support to people on low incomes and out of work. This should

not be reliant on public attitudes. Nevertheless, the British public continues

to be more supportive of government action to help people on low incomes

and to provide an effective social security system to support those in need,

rather than weakening this safety net.

The British Social Attitudes survey has looked at public attitudes on a wide

range of topics, including perceptions of poverty, government spending,

social security and employment, since 1983. Data from the latest wave

of the survey, conducted in 2022, found that seven in ten people (69%)

thought that there was quite a lot of real poverty in Britain, up from 52%

in 2006, although slightly less than the 71% who thought there was lots of

poverty in 1994 (Baumberg Geiger et al, 2023). Furthermore, eight in ten

thought that poverty had increased over the previous 10 years (78%). This

is the highest figure recorded since the question was first asked in 1986.

The proportion of people who think there is quite a lot of real

poverty in Britain has increased by nearly 20 percentage points

since 2006, and the proportion who think poverty has been

increasing has more than doubled

Source: British Social Attitudes survey, 2000–22

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Since this data was collected, polling carried out in February 2023 by

YouGov on behalf of Christians Against Poverty found that more than six

in ten respondents (65%) thought that poverty had increased in their local

area over the previous 12 months and more than eight in ten (85%) thought

it had increased across the UK (Christians Against Poverty, 2023).

The British public also continues to become increasingly supportive of

government action to help people in need (Curtice and Scholes, 2023).

Attitudes towards government tax and spending on health, education and

social benefits have become more favourable over the past decade, and

almost doubled from 31% in 2010 to 60% in 2017. Although this has fallen

slightly, the majority of the British public (55%) still supports increases in

spending in these areas. In contrast, fewer than one in ten people have

supported cuts to tax and spending throughout this period.

The majority of the British public has thought that the

Government should increase tax and spending on health,

education and social benefits since 2017

Source: British Social Attitudes survey, 1983–2023

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

The public’s views on the scope of government activity have also changed

over the past 40 years. Although support for many areas of government

activity fell from the 1980s to the 1990s, recent surveys have found that this

has rebounded. In 1985, when these questions were first asked, just under

half (45%) of people said that it should definitely be the Government’s

responsibility to ‘reduce income differences between the rich and poor’,

and a further quarter (24%) said it probably should be its responsibility.

By 2006, these figures changed to 25% and 38% respectively. Therefore,

the proportion of people who thought that it should either probably or

definitely be the Government’s responsibility fell from seven in ten to closer

to six in ten. In the most recent data, more than half of people (53%) said

that reducing these income differences was definitely the Government’s

responsibility (the highest level of support on record), with another three in

ten (28%) thinking it probably was.

At the same time, the proportion of people who thought it definitely should

be the Government’s responsibility to ‘provide a decent standard of living

for the unemployed’ fell from 42% in 1985 to 10% in 2006, although it

did recover to 38% in the most recent data. The proportion who said this

probably should be the Government’s responsibility remained relatively

stable at around four in ten people throughout this period. Therefore, the

proportion of people who thought this was either probably or definitely the

Government’s responsibility fell from eight in ten in 1985 to five in ten in

2006, but rebounded to eight in ten in 2022.

The recent cost-of-living crisis has increased the public and policy-makers’

focus on the impact of inflation. Attitudes towards the Government’s role

in this area have also seen drastic changes over the past four decades. In

1985, six in ten people (59%) said it was definitely the Government’s job

to ‘keep prices under control’, with an additional three in ten (31%) saying

it probably was. By 2006, the proportion who said this was definitely the

Government’s responsibility had halved (31%), although the proportion

of people who said it probably should be increased to 49%. However, in

2022 – in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis – people were even more

supportive of government action in this area: nearly seven in ten (68%)

said it was definitely the Government’s responsibility to ‘keep prices under

control’, with around a quarter (26%) saying it probably was, meaning

more than nine in ten people thought the Government probably or

definitely should play a role in this area.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

The proportion of people who thought it was the Government’s

responsibility to tackle inequality fell in the first two decades of

the British Social Attitudes survey, but is now similar to levels in

Source: British Social Attitudes survey, 1985–2022

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

The fact that an increasing proportion of the British population believes

that the Government has a responsibility to act in these areas may, at

least in part, be due to the concerns they have for public services and the

cost of living. In November 2023, JRF’s polling found that nearly threequarters of adults across the UK (73%) were worried or very worried about

both public services and the cost of essentials, with almost a third of

adults (32%) very worried about both areas. The majority of Labour and

Conservative voters, as well as those who said they did not know who they

would vote for in the next general election, were worried about both public

services and the cost of essentials (Johnson-Hunter and Calver, 2023).

As high inflation and the increased cost of living across the UK have led to

increasing pressures on low-income families, public opinion has continued

to be in favour of a benefits system that offers proper support to meet

their financial needs as costs continue to rise. According to polling by

Yonder Data Solutions on behalf of Thinks Insight & Strategy for JRF,

72% of the public support an Essentials Guarantee that would ensure

that – at a minimum – Universal Credit is set at a rate that covers the cost

of essentials, and cannot be brought below this level by deductions (The

Trussell Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2023).

Furthermore, YouGov’s own polling conducted in January–February 2023

found that more than seven in ten people across Britain thought that

people on out-of-work benefits should be able to afford utilities such as

electricity, gas and water (76%), food that allows them/their children to eat

a balanced and healthy diet (74%) and school shoes and uniforms for their

children (73%), with 69% saying they should be able to afford non-designer

clothing (Smith, 2023).

The findings outlined above from the British Social Attitudes survey

suggest that the British public largely takes a thermostatic approach to

government tax and spending – that is to say, that public support for

higher levels of tax and spending rises when they are cut, and falls when

they are increased. This goes some way in explaining the rise in support

when government spending was cut throughout the 2010s. However,

increased government spending during the Covid-19 pandemic and

specific financial support schemes introduced at the height of the cost-ofliving crisis have not tempered this support as the British public continues

to think that poverty is increasing across the country and supports

government action – including an effective social security system – that

would address this.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

Annex 5: Note on data quality and impact on

analysis in the Family Resources Survey

The majority of findings in this report come from data collected in the

Family Resources Survey (FRS) in 2021/22 and the Households Below

Average Income (HBAI) data that was generated from this. These datasets

are the UK’s official source of poverty estimates. They are used to estimate

current levels of poverty across the UK and whether, and how, the poverty

rate has changed over time. Our previous UK Poverty reports have also

drawn extensively on figures that the Department for Work and Pensions

(DWP) has made available from these datasets.

As in 2020/21, the restrictions in place during the Covid-19 pandemic

affected data collection for the 2021/22 FRS. Although many of these

restrictions were eased or lifted over the course of the year, fieldwork

interviews continued to be carried out by telephone during the 2021/22

survey year, rather than face to face as they had been before the

pandemic.

The DWP only published a limited number of tables from the 2020/21

FRS and HBAI, due to concerns about the impact of moving to telephone

interviewing on response rates and survey biases. In particular, its analysis

of the data found that there were more outright homeowners and fewer

renters in the sample than there had been in the previous year, while the

sample also contained more pension-age respondents, as well as fewer

households with children and respondents without a university degree-level

qualification than the population as a whole.

To overcome some of the issues identified in the 2020/21 data, a number

of steps were taken for the 2021/22 data. This included increasing the

sample size to around 16,000 households, up from around 10,000 in

2020/21 but still below the 20,000 households in previous years. This means

that the precision around estimates from the data (and so the width of

confidence intervals around these) was wider than in pre-pandemic data

but narrower than for 2020/21 estimates. The DWP also introduced a

biannual grossing control for the sample across Great Britain to ensure

the weighted sample was equally spread across the first and second six

months of the survey year.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

After its own analysis of the 2021/22 data, the DWP has concluded that

there are fewer biases in the latest dataset than there had been a year

earlier. Although it continues to urge caution with the interpretation of

some results, particularly in comparison to previous years’ data, many of

the data issues identified in 2020/21 have been addressed. This has meant

that the composition of the 2021/22 sample was more representative,

although the shifting survey mode still had some impacts on the data, and

not all of the biases they may have introduced can be controlled for.

Overall, the composition of the overall sample in 2021/22 was more

representative in a number of ways that are particularly relevant to this

• There was a higher proportion of young respondents, and a lower

proportion of older respondents, than there had been in the 2020/21

sample, but pension-age respondents were still over-represented in

• As in 2020/21, there appear to be higher proportions of respondents

living in certain family types in the 2021/22 sample. In particular,

there were more pensioner couples and fewer working-age couples

with children than before the pandemic. The DWP believes that the

grossing regime largely addresses this. However, this has knock-on

effects for the composition of the weighted sample, with more benefit

units with three or more children (and fewer one-child families) and

fewer young families (with children under 5 years old).

• There was a higher proportion of renters and a lower proportion of

owner-occupiers in the 2021/22 sample, but owner-occupiers were still

over-represented in the sample.

• Working-age respondents educated to university degree level or

higher remained over-represented in the sample, so the additional

grossing controls that were introduced in 2020/21 to rebalance the

sample were maintained in 2021/22.

• People with visual, hearing and memory impairments continued to

be under-represented in the 2021/22 sample, as they were in 2020/21.

Although the DWP warns of a modest mode effect that may have

affected disability estimates after moving from face-to-face to

telephone interviews, it considers these estimates to be sufficiently

reliable and comparable with data from earlier years.

• A smaller proportion of minority ethnic households were in the

2020/21 sample, with much smaller sample sizes leading to more

variation than seen in previous survey years. Although Bangladeshi

households continue to be under-represented in the latest data, the

latest weighted sample is more in line with equivalent samples from

before the pandemic than the 2020/21 data.

UK Poverty 2024 Annexes

It is also important to note that the DWP has advised that the 2020/21

data should not be included in calculations of any three-year averages

for estimates, used primarily for breakdowns by UK nation or region and

by ethnic group. This means that the figures presented in this year’s UK

Poverty report have been calculated slightly differently than those used

in previous reports, as the latest three-year average is, in fact, only an

average of estimates from the 2019/20 and 2021/22 data. Last year’s

estimates have also been updated to include only data from 2018/19 and

2019/20, and so do not correspond exactly with those included in last

year’s report.

Many of the data-quality and sample-bias issues that the DWP flagged for

the 2020/21 data appear to have been resolved in the latest data. Although

some remain, largely due to potential mode effects caused by the move

from face-to-face to telephone interviews, the DWP has not cautioned

against small-group analysis to the same extent as it did in 2020/21. Even

though some findings still need to be treated with more caution than in

pre-Covid reports, the HBAI and FRS data – even with these limitations –

is an important source of information to gain a better understanding of

people’s risk and experience of poverty during the first two years of the

pandemic. While it may still be difficult to distinguish between differences

in findings that are driven by real-world changes and those that are driven

by changes in data collection methods since the start of the pandemic, it

still offers us the best insights into people’s experiences of poverty over

this time period.

UK Poverty 2024 Notes

1. The income measure used to calculate the persistent very deep poverty

rate is not identical to that used by the Department for Work and

Pensions in its analysis. Therefore the persistent poverty rates and

persistent very deep poverty rates are not directly comparable.

2. Values do not add up to 100% due to rounding.

3. Excludes 16–19 year olds who were not in full-time work or education or

training as they would be classified as working-age adults.

4. Due to small sample sizes in the data, poverty rates across all groups

reflect three-year averages. However, due to data-quality concerns

for the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the latest averages do not

include data collected in 2020/21. Due to the individual-level dataset

that is available to estimate levels of poverty and very deep poverty

among people from different ethnic groups, some of these figures

differ slightly from those published by the Department for Work and

Pensions.

5. An additional category including people from ‘any other Black

background’ is also included in the data. However, the number of

respondents in this category in the Family Resources Survey and

Households Below Average Income data is too small to report findings

for this group, although these respondents are included in results shown

for the overarching category of ‘Black or Black British’. It is included for

the analysis of Understanding Society, where the sample size for this

subgroup is larger.

6. Disability is defined according to the core definition within the Equality

Act 2010: ‘a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and

long-term adverse effect on the ability to carry out normal day-to-day

activities’.

7. Mental disability includes difficulty with learning, understanding or

concentrating, memory, mental health, and social or behavioural

difficulties (for example, those associated with autism, attention deficit

hyperactivity disorder or Asperger’s syndrome). Physical disability

includes difficulty with vision, hearing, mobility, dexterity, stamina,

breathing or fatigue. The ‘other’ disability category is a specific

response category included in the Family Resources Survey to capture

any other disability not included in the given response list. Only people

who say that their condition limits their daily life a lot or a little are

included in these categories.

UK Poverty 2024 Notes

8. For a comprehensive list of changes, see Hobson (2020). These include:

the benefit cap, the High Income Child Benefit Charge, localisation of

Council Tax support, reforms to Employment and Support Allowance

(ESA), the under-occupation deduction (commonly known as the

‘bedroom tax’), changes to the calculation of Local Housing Allowance,

the introduction of Personal Independence Payments, abolishing

the Social Fund, turning Support for Mortgage Interest into a loan,

introducing the two-child limit for certain benefits, introducing

Universal Credit and changes to uprating, including a benefits freeze.

9. People are eligible for free school meals for a variety of reasons,

including if their household is in receipt of low-income benefits such as

Universal Credit (if the household’s income after tax is less than £7,400

a year) or Income Support (Turn2Us, 2023).

10. Real household disposable income also includes non-profit institutions

serving households, such as charities, trade unions and religious

organisations, so changes in the series may not be solely due to

changes in household incomes. However, non-profit institutions are a

relatively small component.

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is working with governments, businesses,

communities, charities and individuals to solve UK poverty. This report

provides a comprehensive, independent and authoritative overview of

UK poverty in 2024, which we hope will make more people want to solve

poverty, understand it and take action.

A pdf version of this publication is available from the JRF website

www.jrf.org.uk. Further copies of this report, or any other JRF publication,

can be obtained from the JRF website www.jrf.org.uk/publications or by

emailing publications@jrf.org.uk.

A CIP catalogue record for this report is available from the British Library.

electronic means for non-commercial purposes is permitted. Otherwise,

no part of this report may be reproduced, adapted, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the

Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

First published January 2024 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

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