out of work

Nearly one in five households in Britain has no one who works and is entirely dependent on taxpayer-funded handouts, figures revealed. It means more than seven million people – including almost two million children – are now living in homes where no one is in paid employment.

Around 5.4 million people of working age live in Britain’s 3.9 million workless households, the figures showed. These households are also home to 1.9 million youngsters, equivalent to 16.1 per cent of all the children in Britain. Taken together, it means 7.3 million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job. Overall, lone parent households with dependent children were most likely to be workless, with a figure of 39.7 per cent.

A regional breakdown of the statistics, which cover the three months to last June, showed that the North-east had the highest proportion of workless households with 24.3 per cent – nearly one in four. Similar levels of worklessness were endemic in Wales and Inner London, where 22.9 per cent of households had no one who worked for a living.