Poverty exists throughout Britain, even in the often idealised countryside
The government needs to launch a serious campaign to tackle severe deprivation in the UK, whilst ensuring rural poverty is not forgotten.
Photo by Sophie Merlo on Flickr
In 2005, David Cameron delivered a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies. It was perhaps his best ever. He called for the “elimination of poverty” and condemned social deprivation as a root cause of inner-city unrest. He pointed to flaws of the then government’s approach to welfare; too much “form-filling” and “bureaucracy” had resulted in the exclusion of “millions… who are defeated by the bureaucracy, and end up with none of the support to which they’re entitled”. He expressed shock and anger that, “in the fourth richest country in the world” anybody had to rely on “food parcel[s] to survive”.
Clearly, action did not match up to rhetoric. When David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, there were 66 food banks. There are now over 2200. In a U-turn that would make Theresa May blush, in 2012 Cameron described food bank usage as “part of what I call the Big Society”. Despite the scepticism of many in politics or the media, there should be no doubt that extreme poverty exists in Britain, and that it is on the rise. While inequality has stayed static over the past decade, rising prices, economic uncertainty, and ill-considered welfare reforms have tipped millions of people into deep financial hardship.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation describes this as destitution - defined as having a lack of access to the necessities of a decent life (e.g shelter, food, clothing and utilities). Their recent report, Destitution In The UK 2020, found that 2.4 million people lived in these conditions during 2019, including 550,000 children. This is consistent with the Department for Work and Pensions’ new food insecurity measure, which found that 4% of households faced “very low food security”, and saw “substantive disruption” in their food intake due to lack of money. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger reported in 2014 that: “with rising national income nobody would have predicted that… there would be a significant number of hungry people in Britain, but there are” and that hunger is now regarded “as a permanent fact of life” in many communities.
Aside the economic and social cost to society of such dire poverty, this should not be acceptable on a moral level. In a country with Britain’s vast resources, no child should go to school hungry or come home not knowing whether they will get a decent meal in the evening. No family should have to choose between paying utilities or putting food on the table.
Popular wisdom dictates that poverty is almost exclusively an urban phenomenon. Rural areas are perceived as idyllic, unspoiled lands of great natural beauty. But the picturesque views can often serve to hide a far less pleasant reality. As researcher Alistair James Scott describes, “while urban areas are the more deprived… [poverty] is not confined to urban areas”. Importantly, Scott found that those in rural areas were more likely to suffer ‘opportunity and mobility deprivation’, defined as a lack of access to basic services and facilities.
Poverty in rural areas can be incredibly isolating, with the long distances between settlements serving to segregate the rural poor from wider society. Government statistics indicate that 20% of rural residents live more than 4km from a GP, 59% from a bank or building society, 33% from a job centre, 52% from a secondary school and 44% from a supermarket. 45% are more than 8km away from a hospital and 72% more than 8km from a job centre. While these distances may seem small in the modern world, the cost of transportation is far higher in rural areas; households in hamlets with a car spend an average of £139 a week on transport, compared with £79 in urban areas. This contributes towards the 10-20% more that those in the countryside have to spend on everyday goods. According to a study by several of Britain’s top universities, at the same time as rural poverty has increased, austerity has decimated local funding, including ‘hollowing out’ rural services through the closure of libraries, youth centres and transport.
The report also found that the merger of district councils into unitary authorities had resulted in fewer funds reaching rural areas; the creation of the Dorset Unitary Authority resulted in a 7% reduction in the areas core spending power, while West Suffolk has seen its budget slashed by 16.8% since 2015/16. Due to the large distances involved and the expectation that poverty is a chiefly urban problem, there are fewer food banks in rural areas: despite Cumbria suffering some of the worst poverty in the UK, there is only 1 food bank for every 62,000 residents.
The UK needs a serious, well-funded anti-poverty campaign to prevent more people from falling into financial hardship, destitution, and hunger. It should not be acceptable that in the world’s tenth richest country anybody lives in such conditions. Poverty curtails freedom and ruins lives. Children born into deprivation will be more likely to suffer from addiction and damaging mental health conditions. They will attend worse schools, will achieve less in those schools and will ultimately live shorter lives. Contrary to popular belief, the countryside is not immune from these issues. While future anti-poverty efforts will inevitably focus primarily on urban areas, the plight of the rural poor can be ignored no longer.
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