Right. I can't give you an absolutely comprehensive list, so I think I'll just dip into a few things the government has embarked on over the last 10 years and whether they've been successful.
The first is that, interestingly, there's been a shift in the poverty figures around children in the last 10 years. The government came in and decided they were going to target—I felt rather narrowly, with this expression that they wanted to eradicate child poverty by 2020—a group of children; they followed the child. Of course, the group that was more likely to be in poverty at that stage were the children in lone-parent relationships. So they targeted them with what I think became today quite a confusing number of different particular benefits. You know, there are tax credits for people trying to get into work. There are child tax credits, which are aimed hugely at those lone parents at the end of the day.
Now what actually happened is that to some degree they have been successful in lifting the children of lone parents up in terms of income. What has actually happened, though, is two things. The first is that I think there are now a growing number of children of couple families who are now falling back into quite deep poverty.
Second—I'm just looking because I've got a figure here somewhere that shows that, and I think these are the figures here now—the proportion of working-age adults in poverty overall hasn't actually fallen, though the level of worklessness in general in the economy has. So you can see this group has absolutely stood still while everybody else has moved forward. This means the poverty rate among working households has actually increased in the U.K. now. Now more than one in seven working households in the U.K. are what you'd describe as in poverty, below 60% of the median income.
Next, the number of households with children in poverty, whose head is workless, actually declined by some 300,000, although that's now static and it's beginning to slide in the other direction. While that is the case, the number of households with children in poverty whose head is working has actually risen by 200,000. So you can see there's been a swing-around. If the family isn't working, the likelihood is that their children are less likely to be in poverty. If the family is now working on these areas, it's likely to be in poverty.
Half of all children in poverty now live in a household in which someone is working. What's happened is that they've succeeded in shifting these figures around. There's been some improvement, but that I think has reached a pretty static position and it's beginning to decline. What they have done is wheeled the whole thing around.
Part of the reason is that the households we're referring to, an awful lot of them are in part-time work. Now, the trouble with part-time work...there's nothing wrong with part-time work in the sense that part-time work for a couple in a household can often be used to supplement income for that household. It may work for the person who is doing it because it's flexible and they can look after their children, but the main income may be earned by somebody else, and that therefore becomes sustainable. The problem in a household where the only income is part-time income is that it's simply not sustainable. You can't live on that particular income, so the government does provide supplementary benefits, as it were, to try to lift that up. The problem for a couple household is that those are nothing like as extensive as they are for a lone-parent family. That's why you see more couples who have work falling back into poverty, because there's a gap now. We call it the “couple penalty”. If you're a lone parent, you get a lot of support. If you're a couple, you don't get as much.
We've also made the point in our work that, in truth, everything should be set to move people from part-time work in due course to full-time work, over 32 hours a week, and the problem there is this. The government, because they have supported people into part-time work, as people want to move from, say, 16 hours a week, which you might describe as part-time work, to 32 hours a week...what happens is the withdrawal rates as a result of their fall-off in their benefit support are so dramatic that in the case of a lone parent, for example, moving from 16 to 32, she can lose up to 90% of the income earned between 16 and 32 hours a week. So for every pound earned, she may take home only 10p. That's a higher tax rate than for the wealthiest people in the country. In fact, I don't know of anybody in the country who would put up with paying a tax rate of 90%. But they do.
So you find for those in that group they have a problem. There is no incentive for them to move beyond 16 hours because that period between 16 and 32 hours is very painful for them. They work long hours in that sense, but they don't get any great reward for it. It's only when they break through, at 32 hours roughly, that their tax rate then collapses back to the bottom end of it and they start to earn reasonable money. But it's very difficult to get them through that.
What's happened, again in part-time work, interestingly, is that there's a disparity now between people on supported benefits, even if in part-time work, and those who are out working where their job is their sole income. I can give you an example here.
A single mother with two children now receives more than a whole series of people. She'll get roughly £262 a week. That's more than the average waiter, who might earn about £113 a week; a cashier, at roughly £128; someone who's stacking shelves in a supermarket, at about £155; a library assistant, at the low grade, at £170; a hairdresser, at about £188; a child minder, at £240; and a street trader, at about £240 to £250, though the last figures are difficult to estimate.
So there's another element to this, and we took evidence from a number of people who said there's not much point in my really trying to get onto the bottom rung because, frankly, I'm going to find that my income will fall off. The reasons for that, obviously, have to do with the housing benefit, and the fact that their support in other areas will fall away and they'll lose it, so they're left wholly having to survive on what they earn.
So all the recommendations we've brought forward on this are to try to smooth that transition period out. What's critical is that work should be seen to pay. If work doesn't appear to pay for people on benefits, they simply will not take it.
Now, all of us around this table, I would hope, understand that work ultimately pays, in the sense that it develops—even if the disparity at the beginning were less—and benefits don't. So these people will in due course go on to earn more than their benefits are worth. But it is very difficult to persuade people who need to take a cut in their income that it's worth doing.
Another area that we found is very difficult for people who are working part time and therefore are still in poverty is that they face another problem. Some of those who have begun part-time work, with a view to developing it, have had a very high churning rate, particularly lone parents, who go in and crash out in a matter of weeks again. Then what happens is that the old “jungle telegraph” beats, as I call it. In other words, information is passed around from people by word of mouth in these areas; most people aren't reading newspapers or documents, but are just talking. So the news goes around by word of mouth that if you take a job, it's more than likely you'll be out of it; that they'll push you towards a job, you'll go into work, and you'll be out of it. It's the worst thing you can do, because it can take up to a month to receive the housing benefit again. What happens is you're now materially worse off for having gone into work for a month, or maybe a month and a half, or two months, as you rush around trying to re-engage your benefits, because the state is very slow to put those together. So the advice that goes around is, don't do it. What happens is that a lot of people then become quite work-shy, because they're scared they're going to be in the same position, the word of mouth being that you're not going to be in a sustainable job.
This is the other point we make, which is one of the biggest problems that goes on in the system. As a country we're very keen on pushing people into work, but in actual fact we do very little to sustain them in work. There's a very good organization in the U.K. called Tomorrow's People. It's a voluntary organization. It prides itself on getting people into work from the most difficult circumstances, and then maintaining them at work for a long time; 75% of those they get into work are in work a year later. The best you can say for government programs, I think, is that 13% are in work something like 20 weeks later.