Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2004
On 1 December 2004, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)
published the annual analysis of indicators of poverty and social
exclusion by the New Policy Institute. Four key issues emerge:
working-age adults without dependent children; the economically
inactive who want paid work but are not officially unemployed; the
quality of jobs at the bottom of the labour market; and young adults
with poor or no educational qualifications:
- The number of people
living in low-income households continues to fall. All of
this fall has been among children (and their parents) and
pensioners. In contrast, the number of working-age adults
without dependent children who are in low income has risen
in recent years.
- There has been substantial
success over the last decade in reducing unemployment and
in reducing worklessness among couple households. There
has been much less success in reducing the numbers of
people who are economically inactive but want paid work,
in long-term worklessness due to sickness and disability,
and in worklessness among single-adult households. There
is a large overlap between these groups and they are a
major challenge for future policy.
- While work strongly
reduces the risk of being in poverty, it does not
eliminate it: two-fifths of people in low-income
working-age households now have someone in paid work. A
quarter of all those earning less than £6.50 per hour are
directly employed by the public sector.
- Low pay is only one of the
disadvantages of jobs at the bottom of the labour market.
Two-fifths of people who find work no longer have that
work six months later, the same proportion as a decade
ago. More than half of employees on below-average incomes
are not contributing to a non-state pension.
- Progress in increasing the
number of children and young adults with an adequate
minimum level of educational qualification has now
stalled, with no further advance since 2000 compared with
significant progress during the second half of the 1990s.
Around a quarter of young people at each of the ages of
11, 16 and 19 are still failing to reach a basic level of
attainment.
The report can be viewed on the
Joseph
Rowntree Foundation website.
A separate report (Monitoring
poverty and social exclusion in Scotland 2004) by the same team, looking particularly at Scotland, can
also be viewed on the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation website
