UK
Never-ending cuts = human devastation. Red Weekly column.
By Sian Errington, Labour Outlook
The past six weeks brought even more reports to add to the enormous and continuously growing pile explaining how widespread, and deep, poverty in this country now is. To recap; official figures put the number of children living in relative poverty at 4.5 million. Trussell Trust commissioned analysis found that such is the scale of poverty, hunger and hardship that the human and social cost is itself leading to a loss of £38 billion a year in economic output. The Jospeh Rowntree Foundation (JRF) released the bleak analysis in March that “[2024] may in fact prove to be the high point for living standards [in this Parliament]”, with April 2025 disposable incomes after housing costs remaining £400 a year below 2020 and by April 2030 forecast to be a further £1,400 worse off on average than today. Within this, the real disposable incomes of lower income households are projected to fall twice as much as those at the middle and top, i.e. not only are we all going to be worse off overall, but the gaping inequality will become wider, with the depth of hardship becoming deeper.
These latest reports obviously use data from preceding years measuring where a decade and a half of Conservative attacks on incomes through benefit cuts and suppressed wage growth led us, with many varied analyses repeatedly showing that wages had not actually recovered from the hit they took after the financial crash and recession in 2008. The same can be said of the trajectory of the economy as a whole. In short, very recent history tells us what is going to happen if Labour enacts benefit cuts and continues with a neo-liberal economic framework that has failed to deliver for the overwhelming majority of society for many, many years. There are no surprises here.
If we dig a little deeper into incomes, we see how not just the deep and breadth of hardship is worsening, but how what we all believe is a minimum, acceptable standard of living is moving further and further away from more and more people.
The JRF/Loughborough University Minimum Income Standard gives a picture of what as a society we collectively believe makes an acceptable, standard of living. – and it is more than just being able to survive. It brings in childcare – including for the odd ‘night off’, not just to undertake paid employment, occasional hairdresser trips and takeaways, having a hobby and taking part in seasonal and cultural activities, with decorations and extra food and drink for guests, gifts for family members, a daytrip and a week holiday in the UK by the seaside as well as eating well, living in a safe warm home, having utilities, transport and a smartphone and internet.
It puts some welcome concrete details into the statistics, looking at what income (wages plus any benefit entitlement) different household compositions need to achieve this minimum standard of living. Again, it makes for a grim statement of fact about recent years; a couple with two children with one adult working full-time on the National Living Wage and the other not working reached just 66% of the MIS in 2024 compared to 74% in 2023. That is quite a drop. In 2008 a working age adult on benefits without children would receive 42% of what was needed to achieve the minimum income standard; this had fallen to 32% in 2019.
If we use the (slightly blunt but illustrative) instrument of looking at what a single, working age adult minimum income standard has been and compare it with the ONS annual survey of hours and earnings we can see that in 2010 a single working age person needed annual earning of £14,437 to achieve a minimum standard of living. You get above the minimum income standard at the 30 percentile point – so nearly a third of all employees were in a job that paid below this standard in that year. In 2024, the minimum income standard for a single working person (£28,000) fell between the 40th and 50th percentile of all employees annual earnings – i.e. over 40 percent of all employees receive an annual wage that if they are a single, working adult they could not achieve a minimum standard of living on.
Over the same period, for men full time employees the minimum income standard fell below the 10th percentile of earnings in 2010 and occurs at the 20th percentile in 2024; for women full time employees it has risen from occurring between the 10th and 20th percentile in 2010 to between the 30th and 40th percentile in 2024.
None of the above takes into account that alongside this grinding down of incomes people have simultaneously experienced longer waiting lists for NHS treatment, and the emotional and physical stress that comes with that, alongside deteriorating public transport, local services and high streets.
Recent history is a clear lesson about what flows from cuts – and we have decades now of underinvestment in what we as a society need. It would be laughable, if not for the damage we know will be done, for a government to opine about the economic mess they inherited to then pursue the same framework and direction that created the mess. It has been commented upon elsewhere that Labour cuts, for example to the Winter Fuel Allowance and to disability benefits, are deeply unpopular and are not a change – let alone a change people voted for. It is more of the same.
Opposing cuts at every stage is right and needed – we need to fight austerity at every turn, but alone it is not enough. Economic investment is forecast to fall over the Parliament. Yet it is desperately clear we need greater and sustained investment that delivers socially beneficial infrastructure and services. The left and labour movement need to build up a socialist economic policy that is based on this alternative of investment not cuts, public ownership and control, welfare not warfare, a green revolution and redistributive measures. Because to actually improve living standards we need not just a break from the economic trajectory we are on, but a break from the economic framework that got us here.
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