Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2016: the latest annual report from the New Policy Institute, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The report brings together the most recent data to present a comprehensive picture of poverty in the UK. Disability Rights UK says that the report is a damning indictment of Government policy towards disabled people.
It comes just a month after a United Nations report highlighting the Government’s failure to uphold disabled people's rights.
Instead of aiming to ensure no disabled person lives in poverty the Government is pressing ahead with benefit reforms that will further damage disabled people’s independence and standard of life.
Disability Rights UK will continue to press for an end to cuts such as the bedroom tax, ESA sanctions, the benefit capping of ESA claimants and next year’s £30 week cut to ESA for new claimants.
In addition, we will lobby for changes to PIP so that it does reflect the additional costs of disability and no longer results in hundreds of disabled people each week losing their Motability cars.
We are also committed to providing meaningful employment and careers for disabled people through our I Can Make It and Leadership Academy projects
In addition, Disability Rights UK provides the Secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Disability who have just produced a report, Ahead of the arc, which offers Government a plan to support a million disabled people into work
Disability and Poverty
In relation to disability and poverty, its key findings are:
- 7.1 million people in poverty are either disabled themselves or live in a household with a disabled person; that is half of all people in poverty.
- There are 4.2 million disabled people in poverty, 29% of all people in poverty.
- Of disabled people in poverty, 2.8 million are working-age adults (19% of all people in poverty), 1.1 million are pensioners (8%), and 320,000 are children (2%).
The report states:
“Disability needs to be central to our understanding of poverty. Disabled people face extra costs, such as equipment or appliances, as well as potentially higher costs such as higher heating bills due to immobility. Once we partially adjust income for the extra costs that come with disability by removing the social security benefits given to help with them, we find that 50% of people in poverty are either themselves disabled or living in a household with a disabled person.
Disabled people face higher poverty rates than non-disabled people, and are more likely to lack basic goods and services for reasons of cost. Working-age carers also face higher poverty rates than average if they provide over ten hours of informal care a week. Most long-term (two years or more) workless couple families with children have at least one disabled adult.”
The report also finds that there are 5.3 million informal carers in the UK, of whom 1.2 million are in poverty. The majority of carers in poverty are working age (85%) and caring for someone other than their spouse (70%).
