Poverty In The UK Research Articles

Mental health, smoking and poverty in the UK

Mental health, smoking and poverty in the UK

A critical analysis of the new politics of fuel poverty in England

A household is fuel poor when it is unable to afford the level of energy services required to allow its members to live a decent life. From 2010 to 2015, the UK government transformed the politics of fuel poverty, with a new definition (‘Low income, high costs’ or LIHC), indicators and targets. Using a subjectivity framework to analyse the government documentation around LIHC, I find that: a distinction between poverty and fuel poverty is reinforced by the new politics, resulting in energy efficiency measures being prioritised as the appropriate solution. The austerity maxim of ‘helping those most in need’ is threaded through this new politics, belying an acceptance that not all fuel poverty can be alleviated. Further, LIHC underplays the role of changing energy costs, which now have no impact on the headline indicator. I argue that this new politics is symbolic, and unlikely to have positive impacts for most fuel poor households.

We can solve poverty in the UK – a strategy for governments, businesses, communities and citizens

We can solve poverty in the UK – a strategy for governments, businesses, communities and citizens

The Battle of Ideas About Global Poverty in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Flanders

The purpose of this research is to uncover the manner in which newspapers and non-governmental organisation (NGO) campaigns in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders represent poverty in developing countries. An inductive framing analysis, based on a social constructionist approach, reveals nine frames through which this subject is portrayed. The analysis shows how these frames propagate opposing positions about global poverty and how they drive the debates about aid effectiveness and the case for aid. The study is of relevance to NGOs, journalists, and other stakeholders who wish to increase insight into communications about global poverty and international development.

Spaces of exception: governing fuel poverty in England’s multiple occupancy housing sector

Homes in multiple occupancy (HMOs) – residential properties containing common areas shared by several households – are a growing feature of the housing landscape across the UK. They have often been subject to political stigmatization as a result, in part, of comprising poor quality dwellings. This paper uses a “spaces of exception” framework to explore the juridical and material mechanisms involved in the rise of fuel poverty among people living in HMOs. Having analysed evidence from interviews, census data and the secondary literature pertaining to the English context, we highlight the processes that have led to the biopolitical othering of this housing stock in institutional and infrastructural terms. We argue that the expansion and persistence of fuel poverty in HMOs are promoted not only by the disproportionate concentration of low-income residents in relation to the rest of the private rented sector, but also by the socio-technical configurations that underpin this type of housing. Fuel poverty can thus be seen as the joint outcome of broader practices of legal, political and material delegitimization.

Augmentation de la pauvreté en Angleterre depuis 2010 : crise ou idéologie ?

Au lendemain de la crise financiere de 2008, a Cheltenham, le leader de l’Opposition conservatrice – David Cameron – prononce un discours sur le theme de la rupture : entre le conservatisme neo-liberal de l’aile droite « thatcherienne » du Parti et celui – plus compatissant – qu’il dit incarner ; rupture du cycle de la croissance causee par la crise et les politiques qualifiees d’irresponsables du gouvernement New Labour dirige par Gordon Brown. Pour asseoir l’image compatissante qu’il cherche a donner a son parti, Cameron propose de reduire la pauvrete en creant une « Big Society » en parallele a des mesures d’austerite budgetaire presentees comme reponse sensee a la crise et au deficit public creuse par Brown. Durant l’ete 2014, le Trussel Trust publie un rapport controverse annoncant que le nombre de personnes ayant besoin d’aide alimentaire d’urgence serait passe de 346 992 demandeurs en 2012-2013 a 913 138 un an plus tard. Cette augmentation de la pauvrete est-elle une consequence de la crise ou le resultat des politiques d’austerite budgetaire du gouvernement de coalition elu en mai 2010 ? L’objectif est double : demontrer, dans un premier temps, que, malgre les denegations du ministere du Travail et des Retraites (Department for Work and Pensions), la hausse du nombre de personnes vivant dans la pauvrete alimentaire reflete une augmentation de la pauvrete absolue causee en partie par les politiques d’austerite budgetaire du gouvernement de coalition ; dans un second temps, que la crise est un pretexte a la mise en place de politiques de rigueur dans le domaine social. Le gouvernement de coalition, dirige par David Cameron, aurait en effet reforme le systeme de protection sociale tel qu’il existait quoi qu’il en soit, en vertu de principes fondateurs a la fois du conservatisme et du neo-liberalisme.

How paradata can illuminate technical, social and professional role changes between the Poverty in the UK (1967/1968) and Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (2012) surveys

This article brings together analyses of the micro paradata ‘by-products’ from the 1967/1968 Poverty in the United Kingdom (PinUK) and 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE) surveys to explore changes in the conditions of production over this 45 year period. We highlight technical, social and professional role continuities and changes, shaped by the institutionalisation of survey researchers, the professionalization of the field interviewer, and economisation. While there are similarities between the surveys in that field interviewers were and are at the bottom of the research hierarchy, we demonstrate an increasing segregation between the core research team and field interviewers. In PinUK the field interviewers are visible in the paper survey booklets; through their handwritten notes on codes and in written marginalia they can ‘talk’ to the central research team. In PSE they are absent from the computer mediated data, and from communication with the central team. We argue that, while there have been other benefits to field interviewers, their relational labour has become less visible in a shift from the exercise of observational judgement to an emphasis on standardisation. Yet, analyses of what field interviewers actually do show that they still need to deploy the same interpersonal skills and resourcefulness to secure and maintain interviews as they did 45 years previously.

Seeing disadvantage in schools: exploring student teachers’ perceptions of poverty and disadvantage using visual pedagogy

This paper describes exploratory research into the development of innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student-teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment. Social class emerges as the strongest factor in poverty and educational disadvantage in the UK. The resulting issues are often awkward for students to discuss and conventional pedagogies may not have effective ‘reach’ here. Findings from this study showed that the visual methods deployed gave students pedagogically well-structured spaces for the expression and exchange of a diversity of views about poverty and social class, engaging them in both heated discussions and prolonged ‘silences’. However, the pedagogies did not challenge the stereotypical deficit models of ‘the poor’ which some students expressed. Nevertheless, we argue that reconfigured versions of these visual pedagogies have considerable potential for innovative social justice work in teacher education.

Inclusive growth? The relationship between economic growth and poverty in British cities

There is growing concern in many developed economies that the benefits of economic growth are not shared equitably. This is particularly the case in the UK, where economic growth has been geographically uneven and often biased towards already affluent cities. Yet there is relatively little evidence on the relationship between growth and poverty in the UK. This article addresses this gap with an analysis of the links between economic growth and poverty in British cities between 2000 and 2008. We find little evidence that output growth reduced poverty. While growth was associated with wage increases at the top of the distribution, it was not associated with wage growth below the median. And there was no relationship between economic growth and the low skilled employment rate. These results suggest that growth in this period was far from inclusive.

Fuel poverty in the UK: beyond heating?

Fuel poverty is now widely recognised in the UK as a distinct form of social inequality and injustice, but exactly which energy-uses and services should be incorporated into conceptualisations of fuel poverty is rarely discussed explicitly. In this paper, we investigate how different energy-uses are portrayed as part of fuel poverty by national government and NGOs in the UK. We find that, to some degree, official definitions of fuel poverty in the UK include multiple energy-uses. However, this is not reflected in dominant policy and NGO discourses which predominantly frame fuel poverty as solely a lack of adequate space-heating. We conclude by discussing whether non-heating energy-uses and services should be more fully recognised and incorporated into fuel poverty discourses and policy measures, identifying two areas that warrant further research and debate.

Food Banks: A Lens on the Hungry Body

Food Banks: A Lens on the Hungry Body

Readjusting the political thermostat: fuel poverty and human rights in the UK

Fuel poverty − the inability to afford adequate warmth in the home − is a widespread problem across the UK. Cold, damp homes are detrimental to human health and contribute to thousands of ‘excess winter deaths’ every year. This article analyses fuel poverty from a human rights perspective – asking whether it engages human rights protections. It first discusses the definition, scale and health impacts of the problem. Second, it explores the relationship between fuel poverty and the rights contained within the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter. It concludes that fuel poverty readily engages rights to adequate housing, food and health and certain civil and political rights in extreme circumstances. It discusses the legal implications of these findings for fuel poverty policy, arguing for a ‘human rights approach’ to tackling the problem. These conclusions focus on the particularly drastic fuel poverty situation in the UK, but can also be applied globally to the various nations where citizens suffer similar problems and extend to the wider debate on the relationship between poverty and human rights.

Readjusting the political thermostat: fuel poverty and human rights in the UK

Fuel poverty − the inability to afford adequate warmth in the home − is a widespread problem across the UK. Cold, damp homes are detrimental to human health and contribute to thousands of ‘excess winter deaths’ every year. This article analyses fuel poverty from a human rights perspective – asking whether it engages human rights protections. It first discusses the definition, scale and health impacts of the problem. Second, it explores the relationship between fuel poverty and the rights contained within the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter. It concludes that fuel poverty readily engages rights to adequate housing, food and health; and certain civil and political rights in extreme circumstances. It discusses the legal implications of these findings for fuel poverty policy, arguing for a ‘human rights approach’ to tackling the problem. These conclusions focus on the particularly drastic fuel poverty situation in the UK, but can also be applied globally to the various nations where citizens suffer similar problems and extend to the wider debate on the relationship between poverty and human rights.

Readjusting the political thermostat: fuel poverty and human rights in the UK

Readjusting the political thermostat: fuel poverty and human rights in the UK

Big society or broken society?: Food banks in the UK

This article discusses the recent increase in food poverty in the UK, the reasons for this and some of the ways in which it is being addressed by the voluntary or third sector, with a particular focus on food banks. Through use of a number of anthropological concepts such as reciprocity and gifting, shame and stigma, some of the complexities and contradictions which arise in this situation are revealed. Through the prism of food poverty and food aid, the piece poses a series of questions about rights and entitlement, as well as the political economy of inequality and austerity and the policies implicated in them and seeks to demonstrate that anthropology has a contribution to make in this area.

Child poverty in the UK: Measures, prevalence and intra-household sharing

There is cross-party agreement on the urgency of addressing child poverty in the UK, but less consensus on how to define and measure it, and understand its causes and effects. The Conservative/Liberal Coalition government’s policy and rhetoric favoured individual explanations for poverty, portraying poor parents as making bad spending decisions, and transmitting their attitudes and behaviours on to their children. This article draws on the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion survey (PSE2012) to examine how far the realities of life for poor children match these explanations. Analysis covers four strands: the prevalence of child poverty; the demographics of poor children; the experiences of poor children; and how parents in poverty allocate household resources. Little evidence is found to support this ‘culture of poverty’ theory, and parents who are themselves in poverty are found to engage in a range of behaviours suggesting they sacrifice personal necessities to provide for children.

John H. McKendrick, Gerry Mooney, John Dickie, Gill Scott and Peter Kelly (eds), Poverty in Scotland 2014: The independence referendum and beyond, London: Child Poverty Action Group, 2014, 311pp, pb, £12, ISBN: 978 1 906076 94 8.

John H. McKendrick, Gerry Mooney, John Dickie, Gill Scott and Peter Kelly (eds), <i>Poverty in Scotland 2014: The independence referendum and beyond</i>, London: Child Poverty Action Group, 2014, 311pp, pb, £12, ISBN: 978 1 906076 94 8.

Shattering the silence: The power of Purposeful Storytelling in challenging social security policy discourses of ‘blame and shame’ in Northern Ireland

This article reports on a pioneering engagement project between team members from the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE UK) study, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland and marginalised communities, located in areas of high deprivation in Northern Ireland. Community conversations and a tailor-made methodology of ‘Purposeful Digital Storytelling’ to capture and share data, engendered empowerment, engaging individuals and communities as producers of knowledge and agents of change. Findings from this Participatory Action Research collaboration offer fresh insights into the potential of collective knowledge sharing to challenge the corrosive impact of poverty-induced shame.

Fuel poverty in the UK: Is there a difference between rural and urban areas?

Fuel poverty is a significant policy issue. An argument often made is that rural households are more likely to be fuel poor due to the nature of rural housing stock and the more limited choice of energy sources in rural areas. This paper uses panel data to compare the level and dynamics of fuel poverty in rural and urban areas of the UK. In addition to descriptive analysis, discrete hazard models of fuel poverty exit and re-entry are estimated and used to assess the influence of housing and personal characteristics on the time spent in fuel poverty. The results indicate that, on average, the experience of fuel poverty in urban areas is longer with a higher probability of fuel poverty persistence. However, on average the rural fuel poor appear more vulnerable to energy price increases while living in private accommodation or a flat increases their probability of remaining fuel poor relative to their urban counterparts. These results indicate policy effectiveness may differ across rural and urban space. However, they also emphasise the limits of spatial targeting. Monitoring the dynamics of fuel poverty is important for ensuring that policy targets are effective and reaching those most in need.

Report: Parental Smoking and Child Poverty in the UK: An Analysis of National Survey Data

Report: Parental Smoking and Child Poverty in the UK: An Analysis of National Survey Data