Generally, poverty can be defined as when people confront challenges to match their scarce resources with their unlimited wants and needs. The many wants that people, usually the poor, worry about include getting enough and nutritious food, costs of utilities, transportation to attend various services and saving a given percentage of their income for unexpected emergencies.
In the UK, however, the government defines a person or household as poor when they live with an income that is 60 percent lower than the average UK income. According to this definition, currently there are one in sex people in the UK who live poor. Alarmingly,
Because the rate has been steady in the last few years, it further varies between different population groups, depicting that the standards of living and gaps between the poorest and middle-income households have not really improved in recent years. UK poverty statistics reveal that minority communities remain the highest among those households living with poverty in the country.
A. K. is forty-five years old, social renter and working father of 6 kids, youngest being just over two years old. He explains to us that soaring costs of living have worsened their living standards particularly in the winter. Though household income has not changed, the costs of basic food, energy have drastically increased, which made his family rethink their shopping and eating habits.
He told the Mojatu Magazine team that with such heavily constrained household budgets, the family grapples with meeting the very basic living conditions and let other innumerable needs, that would be essential for the kid’s welfare and growth, to forgo. He adds that for the last several months,
despite government energy support, he was unable to fully pay his energy bills. Statistics show that children from poverty-stricken communities suffer the most, they worry a lot, suffer unhappiness, and feel embarrassed in their schools and other social environments.
While households and families live with extreme levels of stress, so do community-based organisations. A community centre in northern London, with over ten years of service have as well added their concerns of shrinking of funds. They told our team that they have complexities in meeting basic running costs let alone to offer services to minority communities. The centre adds that accessing public funds and securing government grants has become difficult. As a result, they initiative fund-raising plans that will aid them keep their doors open for providing the very needed counselling, mentoring, and training services they extend to local communities.
In a nutshell, the 2020 pandemic has reversed all good work and progress made to reduce the rate and effects of deprivation, it further uncovered how the existing support agencies and policies are shaky and any economic successes can be ripped off with pandemics and social crises. The guardian reports that those living with relative poverty have increased from 13 percent in 2010 to over 17 percent in 2020. As a result, for working parents, prosperity would remain a desire but far from being attainable.
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