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I was recently asked to speak to the theme of ‘the art of ignoring the poor’ at an OECD/ATD Fourth World conference to launch the report of a cross-national study of the hidden dimensions of poverty. ATD’s work to enable the voices of people in poverty to be heard has helped me understand the importance of the psycho-social and the relational in understanding how poverty is experienced. That is not to understate the importance of the material – the lack of resources sufficient to participate fully in society, which is what defines poverty, and the economic insecurity or precarité and powerlessness typically associated with it. But the material has psychological effects and poverty is given meaning through relationships with others at both the interpersonal and societal level (including through interactions with professionals and officials). 

CPAG was founded more than fifty years ago to bring the facts of family poverty to government and public knowledge and to press for reform. The devastating report (2018) by Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, shows how government withdrawal of responsibility and resources during the past decade has led to more families being pushed into poverty, and relief work by NGOs to alleviate poverty is not enough to compensate sufficiently.

Latest DWP figures show a consistent picture since the benefit cap was lowered back in November 2016: almost 75% of all capped households are headed up by a lone parent; a majority of all capped households (56%) are lone parent families with a youngest child under 5 years old; the benefit cap can be avoided by working a certain amount, but the rate at which this happens hovers around the 40% mark; almost 80% of capped households would not have been capped under the original cap.

Yesterday the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights shared his final report on poverty in the UK with the UK Government. While it paints a very bleak picture of poverty in the UK – something it says is ‘obvious to anyone who opens their eyes’ – the silver lining is that ‘many of the problems could readily be solved if the Government were to listen to people experiencing poverty, the voluntary sector and local authorities.’