Poverty in the UK

Thousands of people are struggling to make ends meet in the UK every day, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said.

An additional 700,000 UK children and pensioners have fallen into relative poverty – households with less than 60% the median income – over the past four years.

Since 2013 an extra 300,000 pensioners and 400,000 children are now living in poverty and the “prospects for solving” the problem “currently look worrying”.

“It is a real struggle for thousands and thousands of people every day to make ends meets,” Campbell Robb, chief executive of the JRF, told Radio 4‘s Today programme.

New threats to the poorest households include rising housing costs, higher food and energy bills, debts and not being able to contribute to a pension, said the foundation.

Despite the government protecting the value of the basic state pension since 2010, the foundation says Pension Credit, a benefit paid to the poorest pensioners, has not kept pace with rising costs. The charity says ending the benefit freeze is the single biggest change the government could do to help the 14m people – 4m children and 1.9m pensioners – now living in poverty.