In the news: data in the UK Data Service collection across the web

Acritical lack of accurate and timely data has made it impossible to gain a full picture of poverty in the UK and how to tackle it, experts and charities warn. 

More than a quarter of people living in ‘deep poverty’ are black and minority ethnic, despite only making up 15% of the UK population, new analysis from the Runnymede Trust reveals today.

PRIME Minister Liz Truss is set to abandon plans to impose real-terms benefits cuts in an attempt to stave off a Tory mutiny brewing after just weeks in office.

It comes as senior Conservatives publicly urge Truss to raise benefits in line with inflation, rather than earnings, to avoid exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis with real-terms cuts.

Philippa Stroud, a Tory peer and chief executive of the Legatum Institute, called for an inflation-linked rise in benefits because “you don’t build growth on the back of the poor”.

Black and minority ethnic people in the UK are more than twice as likely as white people to experience “deep poverty” – extreme levels of hardship meaning they struggle to afford everyday basics such as food and energy, analysis has found.

The Welsh government has today launched a scheme that will see it fund the purchase of some flats that are embroiled in the building safety crisis, with the homes to then be transferred to housing associations #UKhousing
The scheme, which was announced by Julie James, Welsh minister for climate change, in December last year, will be offered to leaseholders who are deemed to be facing significant financial hardship and cannot sell their property because of safety problems. 

Empty power-lust is a dispiriting spectacle. The array of contenders jostling for the hollow crown are a motley ship of fools or knaves, striving to outbid each other with fantasy policies and vast tax cuts that never count the cost.

Downright chancers and jaw-dropping improbables stand alongside obscenely rich frontrunners with dubious tax records. None look likely to win back “red wall” seats, according to heavily negative polling in the Times: the better their name recognition, the more they are disliked, while only Keir Starmer has a positive score (with eight points).

Two things are about to happen in Britain. Next month ministers will increase the value of benefits by just 3.1% – the equivalent of a real-terms cut in light of soaring inflation. At the same time, household costs will rocket: energy bills will increase by 54% from April alongside record high rents and a national insurance hike. Food price inflation is at its highest in almost a decade, while even getting tested for coronavirus is about to add £6 to the bills. The Resolution Foundation says the conflict in Ukraine will further push gas and oil inflation in UK to above 8% this spring – the biggest hit to households since the 1970s.

There is a danger that in our discussions about levelling up, London is presented as a city whose streets are paved with gold, while the rest of the country is underfunded.

London is home to the highest rates of child poverty in the country, the highest rates of homelessness, and some of the worst deprivation in the country. It’s true that other regions and nations of the UK don’t get the same investment as London, but it’s also true that the wealth from those investments does not trickle down to ordinary Londoners just like in the rest of the country.

We do need to level up our country, but we can’t allow levelling up to be seen only in geographic terms – a debate over statistics by area, when what matters is the impact on people everywhere. 

The United Nations’ poverty envoy has warned Rishi Sunak that unleashing a new wave of austerity in this month’s budget could violate the UK’s international human rights obligations and increase hunger and malnutrition.

Olivier de Schutter, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, said he was “extremely troubled” by likely multibillion-pound spending cuts – including possible real-terms reductions in welfare payments to millions of the nation’s poorest families.

The disproportionate impact of cost of living rises on ethnic minorities, especially women, must be addressed

Benefits must go up in line with inflation because “you don’t build growth on the back of the poor”, one of the Tory architects of Universal Credit has warned Liz Truss.

The prime minister is considering increasing benefits by average earnings rather than the rate of inflation in a bid to save the public purse around £5 billion.

At the moment, wages are going up by 5.4 per cent, around half the rate of inflation.

Liz Truss is teetering on the edge of performing another big U-turn as Tory MPs warned she would lose a vote on delivering a real-terms cut to benefits while new research showed the move could push an extra 450,000 people into poverty.

Despite desperate pleas for party unity from senior ministers after weeks of bitter infighting, the row over welfare threatened to overshadow the prime minister’s attempt to reassert her authority when the Commons returns from recess on Tuesday.

London has continued to have the highest poverty rate in the country, with around one million Londoners in “deep poverty”, defined as more than 50 per cent below the poverty line, according to a new report.

Research by the Legatum Institute think tank focussing on London poverty immediately before the pandemic and during the second quarter of 2020, when Covid-19 struck the capital, has found the poverty rate increased from 28.8 per cent between the financial year 2019-20 to 29.3 per cent in April-June 2020.

A new report shows household income growth in the UK has plummeted. This is hardly the prosperity we were promised, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee

The number of children living in poverty fell around much of the UK, but rose in some areas.

The minimum wage has limits to how much it can carry the can for boosting earnings growth in the UK, reveals a study published today.

Government labour market policy needs to target boosting productivity to generate high-paying jobs and reverse weak growth in living standards, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the London School of Economics (LSE).