Mike Phipps reviews Broke: Fixing Britain’s poverty crisis, edited by Tom Clark, published by Biteback

This new book, edited by Tom Clark, is full of shocking statistics. The Introduction tells us that diagnoses of malnutrition in hospital patients has more than doubled since 2010. The official count of rough sleepers has also doubled over the decade. Single disabled people were roughly four times more likely than the non-disabled to be falling behind with their bills, to face a six-fold excess risk of growing cold and a nine-fold increase in the chance of going hungry.

But the human stories behind the statistics are also explored. “Those who know what it is like to be truly broke will see themselves reflected in these pages,” writes Kerry Hudson, who described her own experiences of childhood poverty in her memoir Lowborn, in the Foreword of this book.

In a chapter on housing, Jem Bartholomew reports that 280,000 households in England were made or threatened with homelessness in 2021/22. Many of these result from no-fault evictions by landlords, “a cornerstone of 1980s Thatcherite reforms, which tips the power balance so far against tenants that Conservative governments have admitted a need to abolish it since Theresa May was Prime Minister.“

This lack of rights fosters a reluctance to speak up, which in turn entrenches dangerous and dehumanising living conditions. But banning no-fault evictions is no magic tonic, as the Scottish experience reveals.  In Scotland, unaffordable rent hikes, or a landlord claiming they need to live in the property, have become ‘evictions by the backdoor’.

His study looks not just at possible legal remedies to the  situation, but also at the activism of tenant groups ACORN and the London Renters Union in blocking evictions.

Samira Shackle contributes an important chapter on food poverty, which has increased at a startling rate in recent months. “The Food Foundation’s May 2022 survey found that around 7.3 million people – around one in every seven – were food insecure, a staggering increase of 57 per cent over a period of just three months. By the autumn, the number was 9.7 million.” Talking to food bank users, benefit sanctions were frequently cited as a reason for lack of access to basic foods, the price of which have increased by 80 per cent in six months.

Soaring energy bills are another concern, covered in Cal Flyn’s chapter. Energy Action Scotland published an analysis that showed that residents of some Scottish council areas  saw bills rise to more than £4,000 a year – the median Scottish household income is £27,716 – a consequence both of harsh climate and poor quality housing.

Cold homes are associated with both mental and physical illness. Long-term exposure to the cold increases the risk of respiratory and circulatory illnesses, as well as exacerbating the symptoms of many chronic conditions. Mould, as recent headlines underline, can be especially dangerous for children. In response, there are now more than 4,000 ‘warm banks’ open across the UK.

Energy companies breaking into homes which house vulnerable occupants to install prepayment meters have also been in the news. A recent survey found that more than 3 million Britons, or one person every ten seconds, had been disconnected at least once in the past year because they could not afford to top up their meter.

But as Jennifer Williams points out, fear of debt is also a huge constraint on low-income people using sufficient energy. Poorer families are twice as likely to be in debt as everyone else, partly because the rate of inflation for basic essentials is far higher than across the board. Moreover, the fear of drifting into unsustainable indebtedness, with unscrupulous loan sharks preying on the most vulnerable, has a huge impact of people’s mental health.

Poverty and poor health are recurring companions in these chapters. While it continued to increase elsewhere in Europe, longevity hit a plateau in the UK in 2012 and in the most deprived areas life expectancy actually fell outright. In a detailed study of Glasgow, Dani Garavelli found that men in the most deprived 10 per cent of the city could expect to die 15.4 years earlier than those in its wealthiest communities, a gap that has widened in recent years.

But this is not a problem confined to the post-industrial poorer parts of Britain. “In his front room in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Mike is working out how many meals he has to skip this week to make sure his wife can afford to eat,” are the opening words of Frances Ryan’s chapter on disability.

Such extreme poverty is now being normalised, even in the most prosperous parts of Britain. Over 40 per cent of those below the official poverty line – 6.1 million people – are either disabled or living with a disabled person. A fifth of single disabled people are effectively destitute. A February 2022 survey found that around 600,000 disabled people had just £10 or less per week left after taxes and housing to pay for food, heating and everything else.

This situation is the direct result of government policy, including frequent reassessments to prove people are still ‘unfit to work’, as well as the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition’s bedroom tax. “I have interviewed dozens of disabled families who have relied on extra space for anything from oxygen cylinders and specialist beds to a room for carers to sleep in but who nonetheless had their benefits cut due to having a ‘spare’ bedroom,” writes Ryan.

State policy is also a key cause of destitution among migrants, as Daniel Trilling explains here, by restricting access to benefits and banning them from working. No Recourse to Public Funds, applied to people who actually have the right to live in the UK, “was dramatically expanded by the coalition government in 2012, as part of a wider set of reforms designed to make the immigration system more punitive, known collectively as the ‘hostile environment’.”

Asylum seekers are banned from claiming and working, while they wait for ever longer lengths of time to have their claims adjudicated, receiving small subsistence payments during this time. Unsurprisingly, a recent survey found 28 per cent of destitute households were headed by a migrant.

The people profiled in this book are by no means all passive victims. There’s a chapter on trade union organising in the gig economy and a detailed list of campaigning resources at the end. This feels vital as, however compelling the arguments against poverty made here may be, there is clearly a lack of will among the political class to address them. Not for nothing is the last section of the book entitled “Not waiting, but taking”.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.