‘Relative child poverty may have risen to its highest rate in at least 15 years, despite high levels of employment’ says the annual Living Standards Audit (pdf) from the Resolution Foundation, in July 2018.
In this report, the Resolution Foundation estimate how household incomes have performed over the past year, producing a ‘nowcast’ of the figures before the official data is released.
The report finds:
- There is the decline in worklessness. In the mid-1990s, 15% of working-age families contained no-one in employment and politicians frequently argued for action to change this. Two decades of relatively robust employment growth means that today this figure is just 10 per cent, and a large share of these comprise families with severe disability or sickness and single parents with very young children.
- Even as more people have moved into work so a greater share of income for working families in the bottom half of the income distribution has been derived from benefits
- The latest detailed data on household incomes covers the 2016-17 financial year. It shows that typical household incomes for working-age families grew by just 1.4 per cent (in real terms) less than the average (2.1 per cent) recorded between 1994 and 2007.