What are the links between poverty and ethnicity?

I have spent a good part of the last couple of years developing a new programme for JRF, focusing on the relationship between poverty and ethnicity. It's been fascinating and lots of people have been incredibly generous with their time and expertise. It has also been very challenging: the area is extremely broad, tensions often run high, language is vital and issues tend to become more and more complex the further you examine them.

Research so far shows that the poverty and ethnicity are linked: the differences in poverty rates across different ethnic groups is one clear indicator of that: 17% for white British people, 23% for Indian people, 24% for black Caribbean people, 25% for people from Chinese or 'other' backgrounds and 52% for Pakistani and Bangladeshi people.

There are also big differences in employment rates, pay, education and caring responsibilities. However, here things become more complicated. The simple story of people from all ethnic minority backgrounds having uniformly worse outcomes than people from white British backgrounds doesn't hold. Two key areas are work and education; in both of these the evidence so far shows some interesting and complex patterns.

In the workplace, research has demonstrated very clearly that there is discrimination in recruitment against people with names that do not appear to be white British. This tends to be more common in the private sector and smaller employers than in the public sector and larger employers. However, discrimination does not explain all of the differences in employment rates, nor levels of in-work poverty across different ethnic groups. Part- time work and self employment are more common among some ethnic groups, as is working in particular types of sectors – all of which affect pay. Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black people are also paid less on average than those with similar qualifications from either white British or Indian backgrounds. All of these patterns are affected by the decisions that people make, where they live, and the social networks they have.

In education, when children start school, those from Indian, Chinese and Bangladeshi back grounds tend to be behind those from white British backgrounds. However, this changes over time so that Indian and Chinese pupils end primary school with the highest attainment. In secondary school, young people from Traveller backgrounds have the lowest attainment overall while white British boys from poor backgrounds make the least progress. However, recent analysis has highlighted variations across the country in results for children from the same ethnic and social backgrounds; another reminder of the dangers of making broad statements about ethnicity.

Looking across the available research, a couple of key themes emerge. First, thinking about ethnicity in isolation is pointless. To understand how ethnicity affects people’s choices and opportunities you also need to think about a range of other things including their gender, age, class, health, religion, history and neighbourhood.

Second, outcomes for individuals come from the interaction of two broad sets of factors:

• Informal processes: individuals' decisions and assumptions; perceptions of risk and opportunity; how families, communities, employers and others shape attitudes.
• Social and economic structures: labour markets, housing, services, social norms.

Too much of the debate on these issues reflects only one side of this. Some talk as if individual decisions are all that matter and people can simply be persuaded or pressured into making the 'right' choices and this will lead them out of poverty. Others challenge this by emphasising the importance of structural disadvantage so strongly that it sounds as if people are simply victims of unfair practices and have no control and no role in addressing their own situation.

The final thing that has struck me very strongly is the importance of location in all these issues. National patterns tend to look very different once you start to break them down by local areas. Interesting variations emerge. Why are just 29% of black African women in Camden in full-time employment as opposed to 40% in Southwark? Why are three times as many Pakistani women in Camden employed compared with Newcastle? Why is Peterborough one of the places in the country where Asian people are most concentrated in deprived neighbourhoods, and black people the least concentrated in them?

Over the next five years we will be funding in-depth research that aims to significantly advance our understanding of how poverty and ethnicity are linked. We aim to use this to develop more effective strategies for tackling poverty across the UK and among all ethnicities. At the moment this feels very exciting, and also rather daunting.

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