Updated: 21/10/2009
Updated: 21/10/2009
The research, conducted in the summer of 2007 looked in detail at the issue of income poverty across the city, identified the factors which lie behind poverty and made proposals for a number of measures for dealing with it.
“It should come as no surprise to anyone involved in the City’s regeneration to discover it is generally poor and has pockets of extreme, long standing poverty,” said report author and CAB Chief Executive Simon Harris.
“What was striking was to see the full extent of the problem within the city. For example only one sixth of the city’s neighbourhoods had a household income above the national average in 2005.
“Our research, which compared the situation in the city with a significant amount of very recent national research on poverty, demonstrated clearly that the reasons for the city’s poverty include worklessness, high levels of benefit dependency, low wages, low levels of qualification and recent arrival in the UK.
“We also discovered distinct correlations between poverty and ethnic origin and between poverty and being in debt,” said Simon Harris.
The report made a number of recommendations about measures that should be put in place to reduce income poverty and increase household income in the city.
The main recommendations involved creating better paid jobs and then supporting people into those jobs. The report recognise the challenge this poses, particular in the current economic climate, and stresses the need, where work is the best route out of poverty, to support people, especially those who have not worked for the long time from worklessness back into work.
This involves providing advice and employment rights, in work benefits and transitional debt advice. It also requires access to affordable child care.
One of the barriers to work identified by residents interviewed as part of the research was the difficulty in accessing child care and its cost.
The report also concluded that work would not benefit many people in the city because of their circumstances and there needed to additional support for people who will remain on benefit for significant periods of time.
“Our experience, gained over many years of working with people in these circumstances is that some people will never work again, because of their health, age or caring commitments,” said Simon Harris. “Some people will take longer to find suitable work than others. It is vital that their needs are not ignored and the campaign to increase household incomes in the City does not simply rely on job creation but acknowledges the need to tackle the poverty experienced by those reliant on benefits too.”