Disadvantaged families in Britain are benefiting from rising standards in schools and falling unemployment. But there has been no corresponding reduction in income or health inequalities, according to the latest available statistics.
The improvement in key education indicators and continued reduction in working-age adults claiming means-tested benefits are identified in the third edition of Monitoring poverty and social exclusion, the independent annual guide to trends compiled by the New Policy Institute and published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But it highlights other measurements - notably the millions of children and adults living in households with less than half average income - that emphasise the undiminished scale of the Government's task in tackling family poverty.
The report is the most comprehensive and up-to-date of its kind and brings together information on 50 different indicators relating to income, children and young people, working age adults, older people and communities. Most of the series data extends as far as 1999 or 2000. However, the most recent set of official figures on low income households ends in March 1999 - just before important anti-poverty policies like the Working Families Tax Credit, the national minimum wage and the minimum income guarantee for pensioners came into force.
Income poverty
The 1998/9 figures show no reduction in the 4 million children living in households with less than half the national average net income (after allowing for housing costs). Around 2 million children were living in families where no adult was in paid work. The same statistics identified 14 million adults in households with less than half average income - nearly a million more than in the early 1990s, and more than double the number in the early 1980s. They included 8 million adults in homes where disposable income was less than 40 per cent of the national average – half a million higher than in 1996/97. The indicators also show 1 million older people (23 per cent of single pensioners and 8 per cent of couples) with no income other than their state pension and benefits.
Education
The proportion of 11-year old children failing to achieve the expected standards in English and maths fell by a quarter between 1996 and 1999. Schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods shared these general improvements. A similar improvement applied to the number of 16-year olds obtaining GCSE passes at grades A-C. The number of pupils excluded from school also fell sharply in 1998/9 with a proportionately greater drop among children from minority ethnic groups. Even so, 150,000 pupils are leaving school each year without GCSEs above grade D and exclusion remains four times as common for black Caribbean pupils than for whites.
Employment
Although the ‘headline’ count of unemployed people has fallen since 1993 from 3 million to 1 million, official surveys have identified a growing number of ‘economically inactive’ people who say they want work. The net effect is that the number of people who are not working but would like to work has fallen more slowly from 5 million to 4 million. There has also been an increase in the number of households where no one has worked for two years or more from around 1 million to 2 million over the same period. The continuing economic vulnerability of young adults is indicated by the half a million 16 to 24-year olds who were unemployed earlier this year and another million in work paid less than half the male median hourly wage. Thus, more than a third of ‘economically active’ young people at this age appeared to be either unemployed or on low pay.
Health
The 'premature' death rate among under 65s continues to fall. However, there are widening geographical variations. The number of local authorities where rates are significantly above average has grown by half since 1995. Obesity, chronic sickness and mental illness all show significant inequalities between social classes. The number of accidental deaths has fallen continuously in the past ten years, but children whose parents are manual workers are twice as likely to die in accidents as those from non-manual classes. Girls in the manual classes are five times as likely to become mothers in their teens as those in non-manual classes. Suicide rates among 15 to 24-year olds are similar to a decade ago, but increasing numbers of young people are being treated for problem drug use.
Housing
Levels of overcrowding have almost halved in the last ten years. The proportion of low-income households without central heating has also declined in the past five years from 15 per cent to around 10 per cent. Although the number of home-buyers more than a year in arrears with mortgage payments dropped from a peak of 150,000 in 1993 to around 30,000 in 1999, this number was still more than double that of a decade ago. The number of families living in bed and breakfast and other temporary accommodation has been rising since 1997 and has regained the peak levels of the early 1990s.
Social polarisation
Around two-thirds of heads of households in council and other ‘social’ housing in 1999/2000 did not have a paid job, compared with a third in other tenures. Three- quarters of social housing residents were on weekly incomes of less than £200 compared with a quarter of those living in other tenures. One in six of the poorest households in 1998/9 did not have any kind of bank or building society account compared with one in twenty households with average incomes. The six years up to 1999 saw a significant reduction in the number of pensioner households getting any help from their local authority to live independently at home.
Guy Palmer, Director of the New Policy Institute, said: “Our analysis shows that while people who are disadvantaged have generally shared in the overall improvements in education, this does not yet appear to be the case in income, health and other areas. Clearly many of the problems of poverty and social exclusion continue unabated. Equally clearly, the Government has introduced a range of important initiatives to tackle the problems whose effectiveness cannot yet be assessed. A fair evaluation will require continued monitoring to establish whether general improvements in living standards and the quality of life are being shared by those on low incomes. At worse, we should be looking for inequalities in areas such as health to get no worse. At best we should hope to see them eliminated altogether.”
