Captain Haddock wrote:This is not 'poverty' this is the shame of having being the only one in your class still using a Nokia.
In the UK we are ALL living at a incredibly high standard of living.
A bit of help with the issue for your perusal, Oh Capt, my Capt.
The global financial crisis was a watershed moment. In its wake, stagnating incomes and
earnings have become the norm for a large proportion of adults in our country. In real terms,
earnings are still 5 per cent below their 2008 peak. But deep-seated structural changes in the
labour market over many years had already created the conditions for a widening inequality
in the nation. Britain’s flexible workforce gives us global economic advantage,
but a two tier
labour market is now exacting too high a social price. Commission research suggests
that barely one in ten low-paid workers at the start of the last decade had escaped low pay
by the end. Without concerted action, it is highly likely that the growing divide between the
social prospects of those with skills and those without will widen in the future as technological
change threatens to de-skill growing numbers of today’s jobs.
The education system is not doing nearly enough to anticipate these changes. Despite some
success in narrowing the gap in education attainment between poorer children and their
better-off classmates, the deep-seated social gradient in how well children do in school has
not been flattened. From the early years through to universities, there is an entrenched and
unbroken correlation between social class and educational success. Repeated attempts to
reform the education system have not produced a big enough social mobility dividend.
Britain’s social mobility problem has a profound spatial dimension as well as a social one.
Many regions have fallen further and further behind London and the South East.
More than
half the adults in Wales, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the West Midlands
and Northern Ireland have less than £100 in savings. Limited education and employment
opportunities in many urban and rural communities – not just those in the north – are forcing
aspirational youngsters to move out in order to get on. These ‘left behind’ parts of Britain are
becoming socially hollowed out.
The gap between the housing haves and have-nots is accentuating this social and wealth
divide. People who own their homes have average non-pension wealth of £307,000,
compared to less than £20,000 for social and private tenant households. Closing that gap
requires more people to get onto the housing ladder, but the reverse is happening. Homeownership
rates among the under-44s have fallen by 17 per cent in the last decade as their
household incomes have grown at only half the rate of their housing costs.
Our country has reached an inflection point. The rungs on the social mobility ladder are
growing further apart. It is becoming harder for this generation of struggling families to
move up. Across our country’s local economies, education system, and labour and housing
markets there are major market failures. New forms of government action are needed to
address them. Employers and educators will need to act differently too. The approaches of
the past, although they have brought some progress, are no longer fit for purpose. We are in
a different world.
SOURCE:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/569410/Social_Mobility_Commission_2016_REPORT_WEB__1__.pdf PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2016
Let's not wash our hands of the problem.