Philippa Stroud, who this week is launching an independent cross-party commission aimed at finding practical solutions to poverty, said the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis showed long-term policy change was needed to transform the lives of millions of people struggling in low income levels. Despite one in five UK citizens living persistently in poverty, he said the government had failed to come up with a genuine plan to tackle it and neglected an increasingly impoverished benefits system that left growing numbers of people unable to stay afloat. “We cannot continue as we are,” he added. Lady Stroud will lead a high-powered poverty strategy commission which aims to forge a political consensus on how to tackle poverty and what the public should expect from a social security system, avoiding what she sees as a partisan approach which seeks to divide public attitudes towards welfare for political gain. Philippa Stroud. Photo: Alecsandra Raluca Drăgoi / The Guardian “The lack of political will means that too often these issues have been neglected and government responses have been reactive or ad hoc. The cost of living crisis means we are no longer afforded that luxury. It is the issue that will determine the next election,” he said. “We wait until there is a problem like with free school meals [or with energy prices] and we react to it,” he told the Guardian. “But the reality is that underneath it all is the fact that the poverty levels in this country are very high and the government has no strategic approach to tackling poverty.” The growing number of workers living below the subsistence level undermined the government’s assumption that any job was automatically a pathway out of hardship, he said, adding: “We need a much more honest debate about poverty levels in the UK – what what really drives it and what the solutions actually are.” The UK has lacked an overarching poverty strategy since the Conservatives rejected Labour’s plan to end child poverty after 2010. They proceeded to cut £37bn from the welfare system for a decade of austerity. The latest figures showed 13 million people were in relative poverty in 2020-21, including just under 4 million children. After years of growth, poverty rates in the UK fell during the pandemic, largely due to a temporary £20-a-week increase in universal credit benefit. The withdrawal of this aid last October, combined with below-inflation benefit increases in April, is expected to further reverse this poverty reduction. The cost of living crisis has shed new light on poverty and the impact of welfare cuts. While poverty rates have fallen for pensioners in recent years, groups such as single parents have been disproportionately exposed to rising inflation, with around 7 million people living in “financial fear” and without food and heating. Committee members include Tory MP and former welfare secretary Stephen Crabb and Labor chairman of the work and pensions select committee Stephen Timms, as well as experts from business, charities and think tanks. Paul Johnson, the respected director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is an adviser to the committee. Crabb endorsed Stroud’s comments, saying the debate on poverty in the UK was too often dominated by attempts to exploit gross divisions between “scroungers and strugglers” for political gain. Addressing poverty, he said, should not be about “how to get votes, it is something that should raise our consciences.” An open letter signed by committee members said that while poverty had fallen for some groups such as pensioners, poverty rates in the UK remained stubbornly above 20% and the number of people in deep poverty had increased. “This was symptomatic of an approach that used poverty as a political football.” Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST The commission builds on the work of the cross-party Social Measurement Committee and is co-funded by the right-wing Legatum Institute – which Lady Stroud leads – and anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Stroud’s comments are striking given her role as Duncan Smith’s policy adviser between 2010 and 2016, when billions were cut from the welfare budget and the Department for Work and Pensions oversaw the introduction of policies such as the two-child limit and the benefit cap, which have led to an increase in poverty. She has argued that these cuts were imposed by the Treasury as the price of universal credit in the face of internal opposition from her and her colleagues – including former welfare minister Lord Freud, who recently called for the “vicious” two-child limit to be scrapped . A government spokesman said: “Absolute poverty has fallen by 600,000 people compared to 2019-20 and we know that the best way to support people is to help them into work. That’s exactly what we’re focusing on, with unemployment near the lowest rate since the 1970s and half a million people out of work over the past five months.”
