Poor and it is getting worse

Nearly a quarter of a million more children will be brought up in absolute poverty in four years. According to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an influential think-tank, the impact of the recession and the Government's austerity programme will result in 2.7 million families living below the poverty line by 2014 compared with 2.5 million today.

Tax changes introduced by the coalition government will, the leading independent fiscal thinktank finds, increase absolute poverty by 200,000 children and 200,000 working-age adults in 2012-13. Cuts to housing benefit alone will force a further 100,000 children into poverty.

Concerns are mounting that the icy conditions will have a devastating effect on those suffering from fuel poverty, especially the elderly, following yesterday's revelation that the Warm Front fund, which helps people with heating and insulation, would not take on any more cases until next April.With many of the big energy providers having already hiked up their prices, the immediate future looks bleak, with forecasters predicting that December temperatures will be as vicious as November, Europe's coldest on record. Age UK said it was "disastrous" for those who would normally have turned to the scheme for help.

Age UK's charity director Michelle Mitchell said: "Warm Front...has provided much-needed help for millions of older people during the past decade. With an estimated 3.5 million older people living in fuel poverty, it is a huge concern that many frail and vulnerable older people, who desperately need help to upgrade their heating systems or improve their insulation, will now be left to their own devices."

Office for National Statistics figures show that 28,160 deaths were related to the cold weather over four months last winter, and charities – which point out that the UK has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe – fear the figure will rise this year.

Significant health inequalities still exist between the country's richest and poorest according to the latest findings from the biggest annual survey of health in England, The Health Survey for England. Men and women in the lowest income bracket are three times more likely than those in the highest income bracket to have kidney disease and to smoke. The disparity in health between England's richest and poorest is particularly marked amongst women, with those in the lowest income bracket four times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and twice as likely to be obese than women in the highest income bracket.

But the increasing poverty is not just only a UK event.

The worldwide financial and economic crisis has cut global wage growth by half in 2008 and 2009. Japan's real wages fell nearly 2 percent in both 2008 and 2009 while Malaysia's and the Philippines' real wages fell by 4 percent in 2008. Thailand, on the other hand, fell by almost 2 percent in 2009. Analyzing data from 115 countries and territories covering 94 per cent of the approximately 1.4 billion wage earners worldwide, the Global Wage Report 2010/11 " Wage policies in times of crisis " shows that growth in average monthly wages globally slowed from 2.8 per cent in 2007, on the eve of the crisis, to 1.5 per cent in 2008 and 1.6 per cent in 2009.

Advanced economies saw a drop in real wages in 12 of 28 countries in 2008, and in seven in 2009. Since the mid-1990s the proportion of people on low pay, defined as less than two-thirds of median wage, has increased in more than two-thirds of countries with available data.

The Director-General of the UN International Labour Office , Juan Somavia, said “The recession has not only been dramatic for the millions who lost their jobs, but has also affected those who remained in employment by severely reducing their purchasing power and their general well-being.”