London has the second highest rate of poverty of any English region, with 2.2 million of its nine million people meeting the criteria, according to a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Only the West Midlands, with a rate of 27 per cent, emerges more badly than the capital, whose rate of 24 per cent is also higher than those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The report defines poverty as a household having an income that is below 60 per cent of the national median after they have paid their housing costs, adjusted for family size and composition.
This measure of “relative poverty” is widely used and of particular relevance to London, where housing costs are high. The report says that 46 per cent of the Londoners in poverty qualify only after housing costs are factored in.
The report finds that the poverty rate among London’s children is even higher than its overall rate, with more than one in three in poverty – 34.8 per cent.
The child poverty picture varies across the Greater London area, with rates at their highest in the inner east of the city. The parliamentary constituency areas of Bethnal Green & Stepney and Stratford & Bow have rates of around 50 per cent, according to the report, with West Ham & Beckton, East Ham and Poplar & Limehouse close behind.
The constituencies of Tottenham and Hackney South & Shoreditch had the next highest rates – 44 per cent in both cases. The lowest constituency rates were found in Richmond Park (11 per cent), Twickenham (13 per cent) and Wimbledon (16 per cent).
The report says that the number of people across the UK who are “food insecure” increased by one million between the financial years 2021/22 and 2022/23, a period which coincided with the removal of the uplift to Universal Credit that took place during the pandemic and the sharp rise in the cost of living that came soon after. The latest data from food banks in the Trussell network show a 171 per cent increase in the distribution of emergency parcels in the London region, the largest in the country.
Ongoing increases in social housing rents are seen in the report as a potential future source of more and deeper poverty in London, because the benefit cap might mean fewer low-income tenants’ costs being covered.
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