Comment: Bleak outlook on wages does little to dampen DWP cheer

Britain may be a prosperous country but its citizens are being impoverished

 As the latest official labour market statistics reveal, more of us may be working – but we’re no better off as incomes stagnate and the cost of living rises. It can only mean more working households will effectively lose citizenship as they become chattels of the DWP’s Universal Credit system…

By Mark Cantrell

Image courtesy of Pixabay

SOME might say it’s all just a matter of perspective, but while officials at the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) see 2017 ending on a high note, others see a “bleak” continuation of stagnant living standards combined with austerity.

The latest Labour Market figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) can certainly be cherry picked according to taste, much like any statistical package, but the finding that wages have continued to decline isn’t one of them. Indeed, it offers a stark reminder that our pay packets aren’t going as far as they used to

In its release this month, covering the period August to October 2017, the ONS revealed that average weekly wages rose in “nominal terms” by 2.5% over the previous year. However, these figures don’t take into account price inflation. When this is taken into consideration, average weekly earnings for employees in Great Britain were found to have fallen by between 0.2% and 0.4% compared with the year before.

That hasn’t deterred the DWP from taking the figures overall as an endorsement of the Government’s controversial – and troubled – Universal Credit, which is currently in the process of replacing “legacy” social security benefits across the country.

“We’re ending the year on a strong note with figures showing the unemployment rate has fallen every month in 2017, and is now at the lowest it’s been in over 40 years,” said minister for employment, Damian Hinds. “Employment is at a near-record high, and there are over three million more people in work now compared to 2010 – that’s more than the population of Greater Manchester.”

Others, however, are less enthusiastic about the ONS figures (or even Universal Credit, for that matter) and see nothing in them to crow about. The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), for instance, suggested the figures indicate that this has been a “bleak year for living standards”.

“Real wages have now fallen for the last eight months in a row,” she added, “and working people will be worse off this Christmas than they were a decade ago. Boosting pay packets should be a priority for the Government – not a side issue.”

O’Grady isn’t the only one who finds little reason to share the minister’s festive cheer. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) pointed out that people in low-paid sectors of the economy have little reason to rejoice. As the organisation’s analyses into poverty have found, there are some 3.7 million workers struggling to make ends meet as they endure in-work poverty.

“Wages are yet again rising more slowly than prices,” said Ashwin Kumar, the JRF’s chief economist. “Combined with frozen benefits, 2017 has been a year of stress for family finances. But people working in retail and hospitality, who already face low wages, are being hit particularly hard. In real terms, earnings have fallen by 1.4% since last year in these sectors, compared to a 0.4% fall for the average worker.

“Work should provide a route out of poverty, but one in every eight UK workers are finding that this isn’t the case – despite record employment. With rising inflation, many working people are struggling to make ends meet. By investing more in adult training and skills so workers can progress in jobs, and ending the freeze on working age benefits, the Government could make a real difference to families, by helping to close the gap between stagnant wages and rising prices.”

Between May to July and August to October, the number of people in work fell, according to the ONS, but so too did the number of unemployed people. The numbers of people aged 16 to 64 who are economically inactive (that is not working or not seeking or available for work) increased. In terms of those numbers, the ONS reported:

• There were 32.08 million in work. This was down 56,000 on the May to July period, but was up 325,000 on the previous year

• The employment rate for August to October 2017 was 75.1%, lower than in May to July (75.3%) but higher than for the same period of 2016 (74.4%)

• There were 1.43 million people classed as unemployed, that is those not in work but seeking and available for work. This was down by 26,000 from May to July and 182,000 fewer than in 2016

• There were 8.86 million people who were economically inactive, 115,000 more than in May to July, but 56,000 fewer than in the previous year

So more of us are working now, but if employment is not paying enough to make ends meet, then it can do little to alleviate poverty. The day before it released the labour market figures, the ONS revealed that inflation had risen to 3.1% in November, its highest level in almost six years. The rise only adds to the pressure already experienced by those on low incomes, working or otherwise.

“Around 5.5 million people are paid less than the real Living Wage, and are now feeling the squeeze as prices continue to outpace wage growth particularly in the run up to Christmas. Many families are already operating on a shoestring, and struggling to make ends meet will become even harder,” said Katherine Chapman, director of the Living Wage Foundation.

Debbie Abrahams MP, Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, added a political element to the occasion, calling the labour market figures and the rise in inflation “further evidence of Tory economic failure”.

“Both employment and real wages are falling while the price of household essentials balloons, leaving millions of people worse off than they were in 2010,” she added. “Eight million people in working households live in poverty, and many will struggle this Christmas as a direct result of this government’s austerity policies.”

To compound matters, the Government remains committed – a few minor tweaks aside – to fully deploying its flagship Universal Credit nationwide. The programme replaces a range of working age benefits into one, covering people who are employed as well as those who are out of work.

In theory, Universal Credit is meant to simplify the benefits system and add substance to the ministerial mantra of making work pay. As Hinds added: “Universal Credit is helping people get into work quicker, and ensuring they get more money in their pockets for every hour they work. Universal Credit supports both the unemployed and the low paid, as people don’t have to end their benefit claim when they find a job. This is especially important at this time of year, when many people take on temporary seasonal work.”

This is very much the standard party line on Universal Credit. However, a growing body of evidence amassed from its staged implementation shows it’s the lucky few for whom these words tally; more often than not, Universal Credit has proved something of a machine for generating poverty and even destitution.

Almost from day one, there have been concerns with Universal Credit, from its underlying ethos, through its design, to its implementation and practice: the notion that people more likely used to weekly wage cycles must be expected to budget for monthly payments instead; the long built-in delay before claimants receive their first payment; what many regard as a draconian and ‘hair trigger’ sanctions regime, that can leave people with no income for months at a time – these are but some of the traits that have caused deep disquiet among those concerned with alleviating poverty.

Last month, for instance, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) released its AusterityGeneration report, decrying the impact of stagnating incomes, a rising cost of living, and the impact of frozen benefits and welfare cuts on families with children. It warned of bleak prospects for an entire generation.

“This report is the closest anyone has come to producing a cumulative impact assessment of a decade of social security cuts on families with children,” said Alison Garnham, CPAG’s chief executive.

“It’s an incredibly detailed piece of work but its basic story is straightforward and shaming: since 2010, rather than investing in our children, Government policy has been creating an Austerity Generation whose childhoods and life chances will be scarred by a decade of political decisions to stop protecting their living standards. This is the choice that’s being made in our names.

“The promises of increased rewards from work made to families with children under the new Universal Credit benefit has been broken. The Universal Credit we see today is not the Universal Credit that was sold to everyone a few years ago. Even after taking into account increases in the minimum wage, rising tax allowances and extra childcare help, working families will be the biggest losers from cuts made to the benefit system.”

In short, Universal Credit overturns the foundational principles of the social security system: far from playing its part in alleviating the worst excesses of poverty – hunger, squalor, insecurity, destitution – it effectively enables them.

Report after study has found that Universal Credit is leading to more people falling behind with their rent; food bank usage rockets as people find they lack the means to feed their families; it generates homelessness.

For all the flaws identified in the Universal Credit system, however, there is a darker interpretation to its maladies than simply poor design and implementation, combined with blinkered ministerial zeal: one might argue that it is – more or less – working as intended.

Where once, the Welfare State provided a social security safety net (however imperfect) that recognised a right of all citizens (at least in theory) to support in times of distress, the process of welfare reform has created something else. As time goes by, Universal Credit looks less like a means of welfare support and more like a punitive mechanism for the State to directly manage a sizeable segment of the UK workforce – a kind of nationalisation of low-income labour.

In a twisted kind of way, then, you might say stagnating incomes is good news for the DWP: it allows the department to extend its reach into the lives of millions of low-income working households. Whereas under the old system, they may have received support from one or more in-work social security benefits, assessed on their means, under Universal Credit they will become subject to a strict conditionality regime.

Under this regime, more working households will effectively find their lives are subject to oversight and micro-management by DWP officials: they’ll be required to seek higher paying jobs, or harass their boss for more hours, or take on a second job, with little regard to their circumstance. Regular visits to the JobCentre will be required, and woe betide those unlucky enough to find it clashes with their shift patterns. Failure to comply with the conditionality rules will mean a sanction – that is they will lose benefit payments.

In effect, Universal Credit treats people in work pretty much the same as it treats those who are unemployed, disabled or sick – with a disregard bordering on contempt. It almost seems tailor-made to browbeat acquiescence to a no-rights labour market of the future, built on precarious, low-income jobs, where there is little carrot but plenty of stick. Bleak indeed. One might almost smell a conspiracy, if our current crop of politicians – architects of Universal Credit included – weren’t so prone to cock-up (Brexit is surely their masterpiece on that score).

Britain needs a pay rise, that’s for sure – but it also needs to reconstitute a properly functioning social security safety net. We need a system that treats recipients as citizens – rather than ‘chattels’ – and one that seeks to alleviate hardship rather than weaponise hunger as a coercive tool.

It’s been done before; we can do it again. It all depends on our perspective – what kind of country do we want to be?

This article was originally published on Medium, 18 December 2017.

UK Indie Lit Fest 2017: They Came To A City

Yorkshire city's grass roots festival offered bookworms their independence day

It's often a struggle for indie authors and small presses to gain attention, writes Mark Cantrell, but the second annual UK Indie Lit Fest held in Bradford offered them the perfect opportunity to flog their books – if they weren't too busy just chatting with readers, that is

Author and playwright J. B. Priestley in the foyer of the Kala Sangam Arts Centre, Bradford. Copyright (C) Mark Cantrell

MOST authors are not exactly flush with cash, but if there's one thing that's as elusive as making money, then it's the opportunity to catch the eye of the book-loving public.

Readers may not necessarily translate into the 'readies', of course, but they are an essential element in the alchemy that –some day – published authors hope will transform their fortunes. The trick is to find them. But that's easier said than done.

Most authors wrestle with the realities of obscurity. Raising and maintaining awareness is critical. That's true even for those that have the machinery of a big publisher behind them. Established names must strive to ensure they don't 'fall off the radar'; newcomers struggle to draw attention to themselves and maybe become a 'name' some day.

Author Joshua Sutton. Copyright (C) Mark Cantrell

For indies and self-published authors, or indeed small press publishing houses, it's harder still to find the space to make themselves heard. In a publishing landscape dominated by the big players, there's little room left in the events and retail eco-system for the 'small mammals' running through the grass roots. That's where the UK Indie Lit Fest comes in.

The festival was launched last year in Bradford, West Yorkshire: the brainchild of local author Dawn Singh and a team of volunteers. Now established as a non-profit community interest company, the event returned in August 2017 – by all accounts bigger and better – promising to become a regular fixture in the county's literary calendar.

“A lot of the literature festivals are very exclusive, and the ones that aren't cost a fortune for authors to come along,” said Singh, who is also the managing director of small press Follow This Publishing. “I applied for one and was accepted. They wanted £70 for a table. Now, to have to travel to another part of England, pay for travel and then possibly stay overnight, and then pay £70 for a table when you're an indie author and don't have much money – it's ridiculous, really. So we wanted a festival that was going to be affordable for indie authors and free for the public.”

So that's precisely what Singh and her team did. This year, the UK Indie Lit Fest was held at the Kala Sangam Arts Centre in the heart of the city. The event hosted 40 authors from across the country, with an international contingent skyping in to talk to visitors about their work and the craft of writing. During the day, it offered members of the public a series of readings, workshops, and the opportunity to chat with authors. Oh yes, they could also buy some books.

Curiously, perhaps, selling books wasn't necessarily as high up the agenda as one might expect; more valued was the chance to meet and talk. Actually, it's not all that curious. Nobody likes a hard sell, but as a literary event it's a fairly safe bet that everyone there was a bibliophile, so it's only natural they'd want to natter about their mutual affection.

In that sense, the event was a great forum for readers and authors alike to shoot the breeze, get to know each other, and see where it all leads. Selling a book or two there and then, well that just serves to make a social occasion all the sweeter.

“Obviously I hope to sell books, but if I don't, I don't,” said paranormal fiction author Joshua Sutton. “For me it's more about meeting authors, finding books I like, and developing more friendships, really. It's not just about the selling: it's also about the meeting people. Really there's no better way for a book nerd to spend a weekend.”

For Irene Lofthouse, author of Strange Tales in the Dales, events such as the Indie Lit Fest are good venues to “have a chat” and “meet people I haven't seen in ages”.

“I never expect to sell. It's always a bonus if I do,” she added. “It's a way of upping your profile; it's a way of talking to people; it's a way for people to find out what you do.”

Author Razwan Ul-Haq. Copyright (C) Mark Cantrell

Razwan Ul-Haq, artist and author of Sultan vs Dracula, explained he was looking for “inspiration and some friendly natter”. He added: “I came along to meet authors and other publishers and just talk and see what's going on.”

For indie authors, then, the value of festivals isn't necessarily found so much in cash sales, but rather in a more elusively defined social capital. As Singh pointed out, however, the wider festival circuit tends to be geared towards the requirements of the major league publishing industry, meaning indie authors and small presses often face being squeezed out.

Events such as the Indie Lit Fest are “critical”, according to Ul-Haq, and not simply because it creates a little space for indies to do their thing. There's a matter of diversity too – the chance to find fresh voices, new ideas, a different take on life and living, beyond the confines of a corporate monoculture.

“Sometimes, if you go to the commercial [festivals], it's not the authors that you are meeting; it's not the publishers – it's the reps,” he added. “If we just leave things to companies and corporations who are doing things for a profit, then we're only going to have a very narrow set of views that people can read.”

Author Irene Lofthouse. Copyright (C) Mark Cantrell

Lofthouse said: “It's difficult for people to get published, by the big publishers or by small, independent presses, because there's such hoops to jump through these days. And of course they're all looking for the big blockbusters, [or] they're looking for a series of different things, so this is a way to network with people, to see what they're doing, and to see books that I wouldn't normally see in a bookshop and I can go, 'actually I really like that'.”

At the end of the day, it's in the human connections born of a shared love of literature where the seeds of literary success are sown. Down at the grass roots, then, the UK Indie Lit Fest offered authors and reader alike some much-needed fertile ground to flourish. 

This article was first posted on Medium, 18 September 2017.

Book Review: Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Eviction has become a way of life in America’s private rented housing market

It's easy to blame the poor for their plight, writes Mark Cantrell, but it blinds us to the cruel truth revealed in Matthew Desmond's expose of America's private rented housing market – evictions are an essential part of making it a lucrative business

FOR many of us, there's a simple way of escaping a dystopian condition: we just close the book. Do that with Matthew Desmond's Evicted, however, and we just shut our minds to the plight of people who have no such easy option. 

We're used to dystopia as fiction, after all, but the sad truth is that millions of people across the world already endure a life in dystopia of one kind or another; they do so under the noses of fellow citizens quick to judge but far removed from the grim realities they endure.

Desmond offers a case in point, with his exploration of the way the private rented housing market perpetuates poverty and social exclusion in the United States. It's easy to blame the hapless tenants for their poor lifestyle 'choices'; Evicted doesn't shy away from such individual failings but makes it clear that ultimately it's the system – the market – that is at fault.

The book deals with the real-life experiences of poor families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as they struggle to find and keep a home at the bottom end of the city's private rented housing market. It's a grim litany of slum properties, often unfit for human habitation, but which cost the tenants dear – and not just in terms of the size of their rent cheque. Poverty is no easy ride.

The book is 'set' in 2008 and is based on Desmond's immersion in the world of some of America's poorest families. He lived in the city as one of them for two years while he researched the book, recording the stories of those struggling to survive, but also something of their hopes and dreams. The results are all too human.

Written with all the colour and character of a novel, Evicted ensures its subjects – both tenants and landlords – are fleshed-out human beings, rather than cold case studies. The narrative also serves to draw the reader in, immersing us in their lives, and putting us in their shoes as surely as any work of fiction would for its make-believe characters; it makes the chilling realities of their circumstances hit home all the harder.

Desmond presents us with a condition that would crush the spirit of the best of us, yet it's the daily reality for millions of poor Americans, who somehow endure against all the odds. Even so, Evicted reveals they exist at the mercy of a lettings business that is all-too-often an evictions industry, propelling poor families inexorably towards homelessness.

We might call their day-to-day reality a 'misery-go-round' of slum housing followed by eviction, then on to another slum property, followed by eviction, in a cycle that is hard to escape. It wasn't always so, the author points out, and this is why focusing on the supposed character failings of individuals rather misses the point – conveniently so for those profiting out of this state of affairs. 

As Desmond informs us in the prologue, evictions were once a rarity. They were curiosities neighbourhoods would turn out to watch; sometimes, though, they would gather in an effort to resist their neighbour being turfed out of their home. As for the Marshals, they were “ambivalent” about carrying out evictions. “It wasn't why they carried a badge and a gun.” The world has turned since, such that evictions are more likely to be met with a shrug of indifference, rather than neighbourly solidarity.

Those were the Depression-era days, when perhaps communities hadn't been so hollowed-out and cowed by the routine of everyday evictions. Nowadays, as the book adequately demonstrates, an entire economic sub-system has built up around repossessing properties in this way. It's a chilling thought: that the livelihoods of an army of American families have come to depend on the endless displacement of their poorer counterparts from one slum property to the next.

“These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders,” Desmond writes. “There are moving companies specialising in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings. These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices with old desks and broken file (sic) cabinets – and most tenants don't even show up. Low income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb.”

The dystopia of it all doesn't end here. As Desmond goes on to explain, eviction's “fallout is severe”. It damages families, blights the life chances of children, and it harms communities too, weakening their social and economic resilience. In times past, there might have been poverty, but there was also community. In modern times, going by Desmond's book, eviction nurtures the first but weakens the last.

As Desmond goes on to say: “Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighbourhoods, uproots communities, and harms children. Eviction reveals people's vulnerabilities and desperation, as well as their ingenuity and guts. Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head … We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.”

If eviction has become commonplace among poor communities in the United States, Desmond makes it clear that it is an experience exacerbated by race and gender. The soul-crushing cycle of bad housing and eviction claims every ethnicity, dispossesses man and woman alike, but some bear its burden more than others. As the author put it: “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

At the root of it all are the tenants; no, not in the sense of the blame game. In fact, their 'failings' turn out – according to Desmond – to be an essential element that makes the business a profitable one for landlords. It's a bizarre scenario, seemingly counter-intuitive, yet it makes a certain kind of twisted sense – having a tenant behind on their rent can be advantageous to a landlord's business.

“Tenants able to pay their rent in full each month could take advantage of legal protections designed to keep housing safe and decent. Not only could they summon a building inspector without fear of eviction, but they also had the right to withhold rent until certain repairs were made. But when tenants fell behind, those protections dissolved,” Desmond explains.

“Tenants in arrears were barred from withholding or escrowing rent; and they tempted eviction if they filed a report with a building inspector. It was not that low income renters didn't know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them... Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.”

Make no mistake; Evicted can be a difficult read – not in the sense of the writing, which is quality, but in the sense of the subject matter. It's a grim journey into some of the harshest conditions any of us will encounter in a supposedly civilised society. It's hard to envision how people can possibly live like this, and yet they do – numbering in their millions; victims of a system indifferent to their hardships, but with a quick eye for an opportunity, whether to make some cash out of them, or to make a moral judgement.

But if reading this book was sometimes draining for this reviewer, imagine what it must be like for those who live the life Desmond recounts: day after day, month in month out, year on year and one generation to the next: trapped in this grinding misery-go-round of bad housing and poverty, fickle eviction, and the crushing loss of security, identity and community that goes with it. It's a miracle any one can live like this at all.

Grim though it is, Evicted is well worth the read. If it doesn't make you angry, then maybe it will at least make you think. And we need more of that if ever as a society we are to begin to change things for the better – for everyone.

Evicted is an American tale, rooted in that nation's social, economic and cultural context, but it has a global resonance. After all, the United States is not the only land where poor families endure the dystopia of bad housing and poverty. We're all haunted by that dreadful spectre...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

By Matthew Desmond

Penguin Books

March 2017

Paperback (420 pages)

ISBN: 978-0-141-98331-8

£10.99

MC

This book was received unsolicited from the publisher at the offices of Excel Publishing early in 2017. It was originally intended by the writer to run a review in an edition of Housing magazine, however redundancy put paid to that idea. He subsequently first published this review on Medium before posting it here.
 

Extreme poverty is creating another kind of banking crisis

Food banks symbolise a fractured and failing society

Food banks are emergency lifelines for a growing number of people and they have no place in a supposedly civilised society, writes Mark Cantrell – their existence ought to shame us all

Soup kitchen in Montreal, Canada, circa 1931 (Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

FOOD banks doubtless speak volumes about the willingness of people to donate goods or time to help others less fortunate, and in that respect they are something of a ‘good’ news story, but this mustn’t be allowed to sugar coat what ought to be a source of immense outrage.

 

Food banks, it must be noted, are not ‘drop-in centres’; recipients must be referred for emergency aid, so their usage is controlled. Even so, like the soup kitchens of yesteryear, offering morsels of subsistence to those caught at the sharpest end of the Great Depression, they are symbolic of a profound crisis eating away the flesh of our society’s cohesion. But they offer no solution to the underlying problems that brought them into being; it’s not their purpose, after all.

 

The bittersweet truth is that food banks should not exist; not in a society that considers itself modern, humane and progressive. They are something that belongs to the past, to the soot-stained, monochrome world that existed before the creation of the Welfare State. 

 

And therein lies the cruel link. As the Welfare State has been whittled away by ‘reform’ (read cuts), the safety net has been severed from its moorings, and so food banks have risen from a rare curiosity to a horrible reality. To present them as a ‘good’ thing, rather than a source of dismay, is to normalise an emergency response to a gathering crisis.

Collateral cast-offs

EARLIER this year, the Trussell Trust, which runs a network of over 420 food banks in the UK, revealed it had seen a staggering rise in demand for its emergency assistance in the space of a year. Between April 2016 and the end of March this year, the anti-poverty charity provided 1.2 million three-day food packages, compared to 1.1 million in 2015-16. Almost half a million of the recipients – 436,938 – were children.

Last month, the trust followed this up with the findings of what is said to be the biggest nationwide study on food bank use to date, looking at the experiences of more than 400 households referred to food banks. The report, produced by researchers from the University of Oxford, doesn’t just look at the numbers – it delves into the circumstances that brought participants to a food bank’s door in the first place.

So, what did this research reveal? The story of food bank usage is one of low incomes but also insecure incomes, fluctuating from one week to the next, with households struggling with rising prices and high housing costs. Delays in welfare benefit payments – or indeed a capricious sanctions regime implemented by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) – don’t help either. Many households have come to live on the razor’s edge of destitution; it doesn’t take much to push them over.

“Last year, Trussell Trust food bank volunteers provided 1.2 million emergency food supplies to people in crisis,” said David McAuley, the trust’s chief executive. “This pioneering research confirms to us what those volunteers have been telling us: every day they are meeting people trying to cope with low, insecure incomes and rising prices that mean even the smallest unexpected expanse can leave them destitute and hungry – be that an unexpected bill, bereavement or the loss of income caused by a benefit delay. Particularly concerning are the very high numbers of disabled people or people with mental health problems needing food banks.”

The report’s key findings on the circumstances such households face broke down into the following areas:

• Financial and food insecurity: Almost half of households reported their incomes were unsteady from week-to-week and month-to-month. Severe food insecurity (meaning they had skipped meals and gone without eating sometimes for days at a time in the past 12 months) accounted for 78% of those referred to food banks, while over half could not afford heating or toiletries.

• Price rises: Three in five households had recently experienced rising or unexpected expenses, with 25% of these saying higher food expenses were to blame, “confirming the impact of food inflation on squeezed budgets”.

• Housing: 28% of those who had experienced rising expenses said this was due to housing costs, such as rent or energy, going up. Private rented tenants were more likely to find it difficult to keep up with rents than those who lived in social rented housing.

• Disability and mental health: Over 50% of households included a disabled person while 75% experience ill health in their household. Mental health affected people in a third of households.

• Debt: One in three households were finding it difficult to make minimum monthly repayments of outstanding loans, and nearly one in five of those in debt owed money to payday lenders.

Beyond these circumstances, the report also found a number of factors that are key to driving up demand for food banks. These are:

• Benefit delays: Nearly two in five people were waiting for a benefit payment, with most of these waiting up to six weeks, though a fifth were waiting for seven weeks or more. A third of these delays were for Employment Support Allowance payments, with people assessed as capable of taking steps to move into work in the future found to be at particular risk of needing a food bank.

• Income shocks: Two in three people had been hit by a recent ‘income shock’, with most experiencing a sharp rise in housing costs or food expenses.

• Low income: The average income of the households in the month before being referred to a food bank was reported to be around £320, with 20% of households still needing to pay housing costs. This, the report says, is “well below” low income thresholds, before and after housing costs, and is a fraction of the national average. Furthermore, 16% had no income at all in the last month.

“The stories emerging from food banks across the country have surprised and shocked many people but until now we have not been able to put them in a numerical context,” said the report’s lead author, Dr Rachel Loopstra, who is a lecturer in nutrition at King’s College London and associate member of the Department of Sociology at Oxford University.

“Our survey data show how people using food banks are unable to ensure they always have enough food to eat because their incomes are too low and too insecure,” she added. “We observed how commonly income or expenditure shocks, whether arising from a delay in receiving a benefit payment, from a benefit sanction, or from rising energy costs, tipped households into food bank use.

“But these shocks, and resulting food bank usage, occur among people who live with extremely low incomes and chronic food insecurity, where meeting basic needs is an ongoing struggle. The severity and chronicity of food insecurity and other forms of destitution we observed amongst people using food banks are serious public health concerns.”

The report makes it clear that some of society’s poorest – and most vulnerable – are being left to fall into destitution; for such people the notion that a Welfare State will offer them security and support in their time of need has become something of a cruel joke.

McAuley added: “These findings reaffirm how vital the work of food banks and generosity of donors is, but are also a clear challenge to the new government to do more to stop people ending up in crisis in the first place… Making work more secure and tackling the high cost of living would also have a significant impact on the lives of people in extreme poverty.”

Tight squeeze

EXTREME poverty doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The problems are rooted in society’s economic realities and the ways in which policymakers choose to address them. It’s a by-product of political choices and policy decisions, as much as ‘acts of God’ or, more aptly, the market’s ‘invisible hand’.

The most recent figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed that 7.3% of the UK population were experiencing persistent poverty. This is equivalent to around 4.6 million people. The ONS defines persistent poverty as experiencing relative low income in the current year, as well as at least two out of the three preceding years. That’s a lot of people feeling the pinch – and learning the hard way that work doesn’t automatically pay.

People referred to food banks may face the most precarious circumstances, but they are not alone in facing squeezed incomes and insecurity. This month, the Joseph RowntreeFoundation (JRF) published its latest annual report on living standards, revealing how working families are struggling to make ends meet.

Despite a rise in the National Living Wage and tax cuts intended to help ease the pressure on their budgets, the JRF’s report found that a return of inflation and a freeze in working benefits has in fact left working families on low incomes worse off than before.

A single person now needs to earn £17,900; a couple with two children needs to be earning £40,800; while a lone parent with a pre-school child needs to earn £25,900 a year if they are to reach the so-called Minimum Income Standard (MIS).

This is a ‘barometer’ of living standards for households on low incomes, carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. It is based on what members of the public think people need if they are to achieve a decent living standard, and it is updated according to economic and policy changes.

“This year we have seen a return to inflation for the first time since the freeze in benefits and tax credits was introduced,” said Donald Hirsch, author of the JRF’s report. “It is clear from these results that this freeze if preventing better minimum wages from feeding through to improved family living standards.

“A particularly important feature of this is that for every extra pound earned, about 75p is typically lost by low earning families in additional tax and reduced tax credits or Universal Credit. Unless the amount that you can earn before these credits are withdrawn rises along with prices and earnings, it will be very difficult to deliver the improved living standards for struggling families that have been promised.”

A family with two children (aged three and seven) working full-time for the National Living Wage and using childcare would face some significant shortfalls in their households budgets, according to this latest research:

• A family where only one of the parents works is £120 a week shy of achieving MIS in 2017; up from £103 a week in 2016.

• A lone parent is £67 a week below MIS compared to £55 in 2016

• A working couple are £59 a week beneath the MIS threshold, compared to £50 in 2015.

“Working families are facing bigger holes in their budgets worth hundreds of pounds, despite a higher National Living Wage and tax cuts,” said Campbell Robb, the JRF’s chief executive. “It means millions of families are facing a struggle to make ends meet as the cost of getting by in modern Britain rises even higher. Struggling families tell us as well as juggling the bills, it’s things like after school clubs and swimming lessons that must be sacrificed to cover the essentials.

“With the Bank of England forecasting inflation will increase even higher this year, families are facing no respite. We need Government to take action and ensure living standards do not fall backwards. Lifting the freeze on working age benefits and tax credits must be a start along with allowing people to keep more of their earnings.”

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), echoed Robb’s call for Government action. “Working families are facing a hard time, with prices rising faster than wages. And government cuts to tax credits are making a bad situation worse,” she said.

“The Government needs a proper plan to get wages rising. Ministers must stop holding down the pay of public sector workers, and give them their first proper pay rise in seven years. The minimum wage needs to rise faster, to reach £10 an hour as soon as possible. And more public investment must be targeted to communities that do not have enough decent jobs.”

End game

With such mounting pressure on living standards, it ought to come as little surprise then that those at the bottom of the pile can find themselves squeezed out. Like the JRF and the TUC, the Trussell Trust is calling for intervention to help reduce poverty, extreme or otherwise.

Poverty is a deep-rooted and age-old problem, but it’s not beyond human capacity to resolve. Ultimately, it’s a matter of will. Until we decide to act, then extreme hardship – and food bank use – will continue to rise: a measure of our inhumanity and our failure.

For now, food banks exist – a lifeline for those who need them – and we must accept that cold fact, but it doesn’t mean that we have to let them settle into permanence. With the need for food banks rising, it is in fact all the more vital that we find ways to challenge the conditions and the circumstance that gave rise to them in the first place.

This article was originally posted on Medium and was subsequently published on International Policy Digest, 19 July 2017.

A perfect engine for driving homelessness

In a nation with nowhere to call home

They couldn’t have designed it better if they tried. Welfare reform and a lack of genuinely affordable housing have combined to create the perfect vehicle for driving people out of a secure home. No wonder homelessness is rising

By Mark Cantrell 

First published in Housing magazine

SOONER or later something’s got to give; maybe it already is. Society’s foundations are beginning to buckle under the strain of a housing crisis compounded by welfare reform. Now the cracks are beginning to show, if recent reports on rising homelessness are anything to go by.

But neither the housing crisis, decades in the making, nor the more recent erosion of the social safety net, result from the acts of some malign deity; both are the product of human agency. Quite where conspiracy ends and cock-up takes the upper hand (or is it the other way around?) is anybody’s guess, but the sum total of policy for the best part of a decade appears to have combined to create the perfect mechanism for excluding more and more people from a secure home.

While those on moderate incomes might ‘just about manage’ and somehow cling on, at least for now, inevitably it’s those at the lower end of the income spectrum who are in imminent danger of being priced out of a home – if they haven’t already.

The theme is well-made by the latest ‘Homelessness Monitor: England’, funded by the charity Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). The state-of-the-nation report leaves no doubt: people are caught between the lack of genuinely affordable housing on one side, devouring the lion’s share of incomes; welfare reform on the other, hacking away the support they might once have received.

Councils are feeling the pinch too. According to the report, almost two thirds of local authorities in England – that’s 64% – are struggling to find tenancies for homeless people, while half are finding it “very difficult” to assist people into private rented accommodation.

Young homeless people and large families are the hardest for local authorities to house, it adds, with 85% of responding councils admitting they have difficulties finding a place for single people aged 25-34, and 88% saying the same for large families.

Indeed, the report highlights a potentially bleak future for young single people, identifying them as being at a far greater risk of homelessness than older adults. The report cites a toxic cocktail of rising unemployment, “spiralling” rents, and – in particular – declining benefit protection for withering their future life chances.

“The combination of continued welfare reform, increasing housing pressures and cuts to local government funding, are making it even harder for low income households to find a place to

live,” said the report’s lead author, Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, of Herriott Watt University. “The Homelessness Reduction Bill, once enacted, will enable local authorities to provide more help for all households at the prevention stage, with particular improvements for single people. But as this year’s report shows, more investment in affordable housing solutions are required to meet this need.”

Sadly, it seems highly likely that the provision of more genuinely affordable homes is the last thing we’ll see as a bulwark against a feared increase in homelessness. But there’s plenty more welfare reform – as cuts to provision are euphemistically called – with the continuing rollout of Universal Credit, the ending of entitlement to housing benefits for 18-21 year olds, and cuts to local housing allowance.

The “overwhelming majority” (89%) of councils who responded to the survey for the Homelessness Monitor expressed concerns that Universal Credit will exacerbate the problem, mainly because they fear it will put private landlords off letting to homeless people. Meanwhile, local housing allowance falls well short of rents in many localities, as research by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) has recently reminded. Again, it presents a further barrier to councils finding a roof for homeless people.

“The situation for the thousands who find themselves homeless in England is becoming more and more desperate each year,” said Jon Sparkes, chief executive of Crisis. “Until the number of truly affordable rented homes increases significantly, councils will continue to come under huge financial pressure, with dreadful consequence for the most vulnerable in our society.

“Private renting is often the only choice homeless people have. That’s why Crisis is calling on the Government to invest in schemes that support people into the private rented sector, such as establishing and underwriting a national rent deposit guarantee. The Government is already pouring billions into Help to Buy support. What we really need is ‘Help to Rent’.”

Brian Robson, the JRF’s policy and research manager, added: “A dearth of affordable, secure rented housing is driving up homelessness in the UK. Theresa May’s Government has been clear that rented housing has a vital part to play in solving the housing crisis but, without more action, a lack of housing will mean that increasing numbers are left at risk of homelessness.

“The Government has set out welcome plans to build new homes, but these will not be within reach of families who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. We need action to make sure that new homes are available to people at all income levels, and that there is a safety net in place for those who are at risk of homelessness. The Government is considering action to increase the amount of support available, but this will only work if there is enough funding and enough homes to cope with demand. In the immediate term, lifting the freeze on working age benefits would help to stop people’s incomes falling even further behind.”

Prior to the Chancellor’s Spring Budget, the Local Government Association (LGA) offered its own take on how housing shortages are piling the pressure on England’s town halls. The organisation said that over the last three years, councils have spent an estimated £2.6bn to house people in temporary accommodation. Almost 75,000 households are currently living in temporary accommodation, the LGA said; the figure having risen 50% since 2010. The organisation cited a “steady decline” in affordable housing and “squeezes” on household incomes.

“Funding pressures are combining with a lack of affordable housing and private sector rents rising above household incomes to increase homelessness,” said Lord Gary Porter, the LGA’s chairman. “It is also leaving many councils struggling to find suitable accommodation for those in need, particularly those who are young, vulnerable, or with families...

“A renaissance in housebuilding by councils and a plan to reduce the squeeze on household incomes are both needed if we are to stand any chance of solving our housing crisis, reducing homelessness and the use of temporary accommodation, and sustainably reducing the housing benefit bill.”

Earlier, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) launched a report – Housing First – calling for a step-change in how rough sleeping is dealt with. The report, which was backed by Crisis, calls for people sleeping rough to be given their own home along with specialist support to offer them a stable base to get their lives back on track, rather than relying on hostels, as a means of ending chronic homelessness.

“For too long, people have been forced to crisis point before they receive homelessness assistance,” said Andy Cook, the CSJ’s chief executive. “That is why, alongside this key recommendation to end rough sleeping and chronic homelessness, the report outlines the opportunities and interventions to prevent homelessness at the earliest point. Furthermore, this report proposes policies to ensure that those who are homeless can more easily access affordable housing.”

Sparkes said of the report: “[It] could represent a major turning point in our approach to ending homelessness in England. Housing First is based on the simple yet powerful concept that the best way to tackle homelessness is to provide people with accommodation of their own. This sounds obvious, yet it is often the opposite to the way rough sleepers and long-term homeless people are treated.”

Great stuff, but there’s a critical caveat, one that links the rough sleepers with the general homelessness population, with the plight of young people facing benefit cuts, with the households in temporary accommodation, as Sparkes duly pointed out.

“It is important to remember that Housing First does not address the causes of homelessness,” he said. “Government must also address the impact of welfare reform and lack of affordable housing if we are to truly end homelessness in this country.”

We’re back to that again: the double bind that is housing and welfare. No wonder we’re on shaky ground. 

# # #

Homelessness Monitor England

• 64% of responding councils reported difficulties in accessing social tenancies for homeless applicants, while half (49%) described it as very difficult to assist applicants into the private rented sector
• Council spending on homelessness has increased by 13% since 2010 reflecting the priority attached to the area by central government but over the same period spending on housing has dropped by 46% in real terms, with an even larger cutback on the Supporting People programme (67%)
• Nearly 58,000 people were accepted as homeless by their council in 2015/16 – 18,000 higher than 2009/10
• Housing provision would have to increase by a fifth on last year’s level just to keep pace with demand, let alone ease market pressure
• Including informal ‘homelessness prevention’ and ‘homelessness relief’ activity, as well as statutory homelessness acceptances, there were some 271,000 ‘local authority homelessness case actions’ in 2015/16, a rise of 32% since 2009/10
• Loss of a private tenancy accounted for 31% of those accepted as homeless in England
• Placements in temporary accommodation have risen sharply, with the national total up by 9% in the year to 30 June 2016 – a rise of 52% compared to 2009/10
• While accounting for 9% of the national total, B&B placements have been rising quickly, and now stand almost 250% higher than in 2009
• So-called ‘out of area placements’ – where homeless people are placed outside of their home area – now account for 28% of the national total – up from 11% in 2010/11

# # #

Official figures

• Local authorities in England accepted 14,420 households as being statutorily homeless between 1 October and 31 December 2016, down 3% on the previous quarter and down 0.4% on the same quarter of last year
• The total number of households in temporary accommodation on 31 December 2016 was 75,740, up 10% on a year earlier, and up 58% on the low of 48,010 on 31 December 2010
• Local authorities took action to prevent and relieve homelessness for 50,970 households between 1 October and 31 December 2016, down 3% on 52,520 in the same quarter of 2015
• The autumn 2016 total number of rough sleepers counted and estimated is 4,134
• This is up 565 (16%) from the autumn 2015 total of 3,569
• The number of rough sleepers has increased by 3% in London and 21% in the rest of England since autumn 2015
• London had 964 rough sleepers in autumn 2016, which is 23% of the England total. This is down from 26% of the England total in autumn 2015

This article first appeared in the April/May 2017 print edition of Housing magazine. It subsequently appeared on the Housing Excellence website, 26 May 2017

Housing White Paper

You’ll never fix the broken market without social housing

The Government’s much-anticipated repair-plan for Britain’s broken housing market is missing a critical part of the fix. It begs the question, do ministers really want to solve the crisis – or just contain it to manageable limits?

By Mark Cantrell

This article first appeared in the February/March 2017 edition of Housing magazine

THE Housing White Paper was billed as a “bold, radical vision” to fix Britain’s broken housing market, but we’ve heard it all before. On the day, the package that finally arrived hardly resonated with originality and it left many feeling decidedly unconvinced.

The White Paper was soon labelled “timid” and “vacuous”. Indeed, shadow housing minister John Healey greeted its publication with an incredulous: “Is that it?” 

Meanwhile, UK Business Insider reported analysts at Barclays Bank were so unimpressed by what they regarded as its lack of substance that they likened it to “homeopathy”. Ouch, so “watered down” it’s not even snake oil, then?

That may be a tad uncharitable. But it remains the case that the White Paper’s formula is really quite derivative, repackaging much previous policy, with a tweak here, and a twist there; it’s hard to interpret this as any kind of radical departure. Yes, it puts renting back on the agenda, loosening the Cameron regime’s all-but-exclusive focus on buying. Yet for all the sweet talk it offers renters, it remains very much a manifesto for ownership.

“The idea of owning or renting a safe, secure place of your own is, for many, a distant dream,” said Sajid Javid, secretary of state for communities, as he launched the White Paper in the Commons. “Behind the statistics are millions of ordinary working people. I’m talking about the first-time buyer who’s saving hard but won’t have enough for a deposit for almost a quarter of a century; or the couple in the private rented sector handing half their combined income straight to their landlord.

“The symptoms of this broken market are being felt by real people in every community. It’s one of the biggest barriers to social progress this country faces. But its root cause is simple. For far too long, we have not built enough houses.”

Indeed. If nothing else, then, the White Paper at least demonstrates that ministers have grasped there’s a problem. That’s got to be worth something.

Unfortunately the secretary of state’s words ring rather hollow – because of the emptiness at the heart of the White Paper. There’s a gap where genuinely low-cost social housing ought to be, if this was a serious contender for change.

At best the document is ambiguous about the fate of this tenure; at worst, its proposals threaten to escalate the decline of remaining social assets, depriving not only current but future generations of a secure – and sought-after – housing option. This absence has been noted.

Though the word ‘social’ wasn’t used, it is nevertheless implicit in some of the industry’s responses. It contains a “glaring omission”, Campbell Robb, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) observed, and that’s “a lack of new, genuinely affordable homes to rent for families struggling with rising rents, particularly in high-cost parts of the country”.

“For many people in the UK, high rental costs make the difference between just about managing and not being able to manage at all,” he added. “Poverty in the private rented sector has doubled in the last decade, leaving millions trapped in insecure, expensive housing. Increasing supply is crucial, but the cost of renting matters too and [this] offer is out of reach for many of those on low incomes.”

Terrie Alafat, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said: “We still believe the Government could do more to help those who need housing the most by supporting the building of more homes at rents that are truly affordable. Our projections show we could lose 250,000 of these homes between 2012 and 2020, which is very worrying when they are the only truly affordable housing option for many people – including some of our most vulnerable.”

Quite simply, we know the housing market is broken. We’ve known it for years. There’s no silver bullet for solving the housing crisis, that’s true, but we know that social housing is an essential part of the package. However, too many, for too long, have simply ignored this. The White Paper continues that sad tradition.

Fortunately, the tenure does have advocates. The socioeconomic case for social housing was well-made by the Capital Economics report for SHOUT (Social Housing Under Threat). Many individuals, meanwhile, from within and without the housing world, have tirelessly spoken up for the tenure. Furthermore, there’s plenty of expert analysis that reveals how rising housing costs increase poverty and inequality, such as the work undertaken by the JRF.

All told, there is evidence aplenty of a demonstrable need for investment in the delivery of more social homes. A properly functioning social housing system could be thought of as a stabilising foundation for a wobbling and top-heavy market. With sufficient numbers, it could be opened up beyond the poorest and most vulnerable. Its lower price bracket could serve as a serious challenge to the generally higher rents of the private market. In so doing, it would offer a more humane means of lowering the housing benefits bill than crude cuts and caps.

What’s more, a properly function system of social housing could offer families the scope to move from one part of the country to another, for jobs say, without having to risk sacrificing the security and stability, not to mention the genuine affordability of a social home. The tenure can also offer a stable platform for those who so choose to save for a deposit to buy. All it needs is the backing hitherto enjoyed by home ownership.

Alternatively, we can dismiss such notions as hopelessly naive and continue to push for more expensive housing, which, it must be said, has been the broad thrust of the approach for some considerable time. As it is, we should perhaps ask ourselves – and answer honestly – do we really want to solve the housing crisis, or do we just want to rein it in to more manageable levels? After all, from a certain perspective, and within limits, the crisis is a good thing: the desperation of those at its sharp end can be lucrative lubricant for the machinery of commercial interest.

That’s a cynical view, no doubt, but these are cynical times, and the White Paper does nothing to slay the ‘golden geese’ of proliferating, premium-priced ‘affordable’ housing products. The bottom line, really, is simply this: Britain’s broken housing market won’t be fixed without many more social homes.

# # #

Renters’ charter?

DAN WILSON CRAW, director of Generation Rent, said: “Sajid Javid has the right analysis about the plight of renters, but his White Paper has failed to offer us anything of substance. By limiting longer tenancies to new purpose-built, private rented homes, the Government has offered renters the bare minimum. The institutional investors building homes for rent are already keen to encourage long-term tenants, and it will typically be the better-off who can afford to rent them.

“The vast majority of tenants will remain in existing properties, with no certainty over their home beyond the next 12 months. The Government should incentivise all landlords to offer tenants greater security by putting a cost on the use of evictions where the tenant has done nothing wrong.

“Until the Government builds enough to overcome the housing shortage, high rents will continue to stifle living standards, and ambition here is also lacking. Renters on stagnant wages need homes that cost no more than a third of their income, not ones let at 80% of the market rent, with a sticker that says ‘affordable’.”

GRAEME BROWN, interim chief executive of Shelter, said: “Talk of longer-term tenancies is welcome but risks being disingenuous unless these are rolled out across the board, not just for a handful of people living in new build-to-rent properties. 

“The scourge of inadequate tenancies, and indeed our broken housing system, are fuelled by the shocking lack of affordable homes available to rent or buy, so the Government is right to want to ‘get Britain building’... The white paper poses the right questions, what we need now is quick and bold action that helps people in need of a decent home tomorrow not in 10 years.”

DAVID SMITH, policy director at the Residential Landlords Association, said: “Unfortunately, the White Paper falls a long way short of the radical changes for renters that we were promised. There may be more build to rent resulting from this in our large towns and cities, but without any plans to support the hundreds of thousands of smaller landlords who make up the bulk of the supply, there will continue to be a major shortage. Landlords are happy to offer longer tenancies provided the climate is right to do so. They give landlords certainty and they are good for tenants as rents tend to increase less often.”

JOHN SHIPLEY, Liberal Democrat shadow housing minister, said: “This White Paper is utterly vacuous. It is not the ambitious, radical plan we need to solve the housing crisis. There is no mention of the one million homes commitment by 2020 and no new money for investing in the homes we need – it’s clear the Government has no real grip on the situation at all.

“We desperately need genuinely affordable housing and many more homes for rent and yet there was nothing announced to help the 35,000 people who have been on housing waiting lists for over 10 years. It’s a disgrace.”

COUNCILLOR MARTIN TETT, the Local Government Association’s housing spokesperson, said: “All types of homes – including those for affordable and social rent – have to be built to solve our housing crisis and flexibility around Starter Homes is much-needed recognition of this. It is important that councils have powers to ensure a mix of homes is built, alongside the infrastructure to support strong communities.”

He added: “Local government believes even more needs to be done to rapidly build more genuinely affordable homes to help families struggling to meet housing costs, provide homes to rent, reduce homelessness and tackle the housing waiting lists many councils have.

“For this to happen, councils desperately need the powers and access to funding to resume their historic role as a major builder of affordable homes. This means being able to borrow to invest in housing and to keep 100% of the receipts from properties sold through Right to Buy to replace homes and reinvest in building more of the genuine affordable homes our communities desperately need.”

TOM COPLEY, London Assembly Member, said: “More than anything we need an upsurge in truly affordable housing, but unless Government is willing to lift the cap on councils’ borrowing this will be difficult to achieve. While a first glance suggests this White Paper will probably have limited impact on London, the spectre of the forced sale of council homes in the capital to pay for Right to Buy discounts still hangs over us.

“The Government have indicated that they have finally woken up to the need to look beyond home ownership, with the shift in focus onto Build to Rent. But this is to attract institutional investors – and whilst the promise of longer tenancies is welcome, its bearing will be miniscule unless it is extended to existing rental properties, where the vast majority of renters actually live.

“With the Government insisting on clinging steadfastly to its definition of affordable rent as 80% of market prices, any positive step it takes towards making life better for renters will be undermined.”

This article first appeared in the February/March 2017 print edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 10 April 2017