======= At 2002-07-18, 15:17:00 Professor J.H. Veit-Wilson wrote: =======

>Please can we come back to what this programme is about. It asks the
>question, 'how does the government know that the benefit levels are
>adequate?' It is not about the statistical relation between trends in
>average earnings and benefit levels. It is not about economic theories
>about hypothetical work or savings incentives [especially since I've been
>told they bear little if any relationship to empirical research findings
>about actual human behaviour]. It asks how the government knows that this
>benefit gives enough money to live on decently.

>I have added that 'decently' because Paul Ashton's reply, inasfar as it was
>relevant to the question and not to various asocial economic theories,
>suggests that his view of decency was that the poor could decently satisfy
>their needs from jumble sales, charity shops and car boot sales [I quote].
>He queries the standards of nutrition embodied in the criticisms of
>inadequacy [the figures which Paul Nicolson quoted], so he needs to be
>reminded that they come from the foremost UK nutritionists, with whom I
>expect Paul would not want to argue. He must tell us if he thinks that the
>government should support any lower level of nutrition than the minima the
>experts recommend.

>But Paul's strongest point was his view that we should ask the poor
>themselves what they thought of the adequacy of benefits. Good! Let's do
>just that.
---------------------------------------

I have been writing about poverty and low incomes in one form or another
since completing a thesis on 'UK Poverty Lines' for the research section of
my first degree, over 20 years ago. With one exception (in an accepted but
not published piece for the Sunday Times some 18 years ago), I have never
personalised the issue. Now that I am at, or past, the fag-end of my
limited academic involvement in the subject, perhaps I should say a little
about where I have been 'coming from'.

I have lived almost all my life under one definition or another of
'poverty'. Brought up by a financially-poor war-widowed mother, spent some
time in a children's home when she became ill, left school at 15 to add to
the family income, married at 21 and being good Catholics had four children
within five years. In all my working life I never achieved a wage equal to,
let alone above, the national average. During my last two years as a
full-time research associate at Liverpool University, I managed a total
income close to that level with the profits from a business I had at the
same time (a newsagents serving the good people of Toxteth).

Not only have I had many years on a low wage, I have experienced living on
Supplementary Benefit and Income Support for short intervals between jobs
before going to university, and for longer periods on two occasions more
recently. I graduated at the time of the recession of the early eighties
and it took two years before I obtained employment. I suffered during that
time more from the indignity of being unemployed than from having a low
income from the state to provide for my family (in fact I was getting more
in benefits than I could reasonably expect to earn -- which was the subject
of the ST piece). It was during this time that I finally kicked smoking --
it was squandering family resources.

After leaving UL and going into business on my own, I experienced real
hardship a couple of years or so later when the business failed -- I became
a bankrupt. And unemployed for a year. Unless you have
personally experienced this, you cannot fully appreciate just how much
worse that is than merely having to live on state benefits.

I currently earn a basic hourly wage below the national minimum rate. I
last went to boot fair just three weeks ago, a charity shop a couple of
years ago. Don't underestimate the pride many have in getting a bargain, or
overestimate the stigma of using these places.

All this is not to elicit a sympathetic response of any kind, merely to
point out that I have shared that experience of living on a low income for
many years. Yet I do not think, nor did I when on benefits, that the level
of state benefit is too low. Neither for families nor for single people.
Nor do I think I'm that unusual; as Richard Berthoud's research for the PSI
showed, 80 per cent of families on SB had not 'run out of money most
weeks,' 71 per cent had not 'had a period of real anxiety' over money, and
77 per cent were not in debt when interviewed. Since that research, benefit
levels, especially for families, have increased substantially.

Paul Ashton
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2002-07-18