The Poverty Line

MrRee_2

Personally, I cannot see how any family - with 2 young children - can manage on less than £35,000 a year.

Anything less isn't living - it's just existing .. and shouldn't be allowed to go on IMO.

oldvicar

MrRee wrote: »

Personally, I cannot see how any family - with 2 young children - can manage on less than £35,000 a year.

Anything less isn't living - it's just existing .. and shouldn't be allowed to go on IMO.

Think you forgot to add on something for school fees for the little darlings. £60K+ minimum ...:D

MrRee_2

That £35k was a NET figure ... maybe I didn't make that quite clear?

milliondollarman76

MrRee wrote: »

Personally, I cannot see how any family - with 2 young children - can manage on less than £35,000 a year.

Anything less isn't living - it's just existing .. and shouldn't be allowed to go on IMO.

your right the people doing the existing shouldn't allow it to go on they should get a second job, start their own business, improve their qualifications....

Generali

MrRee wrote: »

That £35k was a NET figure ... maybe I didn't make that quite clear?

In Central London with a large mortgage I reckon a middle class life costs about £250,000 gross a year if you're on PAYE (incl school fees for 2 kids at a decent school).

oldvicar

But we're all middle class now aren't we. So we all need £250K gross?

vivatifosi

Generali wrote: »

The BBC article is wrong.

Relative poverty means poverty compared to the bloke next door. Absolute poverty means, for example, not being able to afford to put food on the table.

The former term means that you are 'poor' if you can't afford a mobile phone in the UK but rich of you can afford one in Botswana. The latter means you are poor if you can't afford decent accommodation, food, sanitation, water etc no matter where you live.

It's not just the Beeb Gen. I saw this reported elsewhere yesterday and it was the same quote of "absolute poverty". From what I could tell from the other article (sorry no link) was that they were both measures of relative poverty but the one they termed absolute was pitched lower than the other.

I wondered whether this was a mosspront on a PR bulletin that had lazily been misquoted without research by the churnalists or whether, more sinister, someone was trying to arbitrarily change definitions to suit their own views.

Generali

oldvicar wrote: »

But we're all middle class now aren't we. So we all need £250K gross?

Well we can't all have it so what can we do?

I stuck around in London until it was clear that I couldn't afford to be rich there and I didn't fancy the alternatives.

vivatifosi wrote: »

It's not just the Beeb Gen. I saw this reported elsewhere yesterday and it was the same quote of "absolute poverty". From what I could tell from the other article (sorry no link) was that they were both measures of relative poverty but the one they termed absolute was pitched lower than the other.

I wondered whether this was a mosspront on a PR bulletin that had lazily been misquoted without research by the churnalists or whether, more sinister, someone was trying to arbitrarily change definitions to suit their own views.

Either is possible. I suspect journalistic oncompotonce myself by AFP or Reuters.

PasturesNew

Only a figure "after housing costs" where housing costs were taken to be LHA rates, would be meaningful. It's rent/mortgage and council tax that chew through the cash as you can't change where you live if you're on the poverty line because you don't have the spare cash to be moving around.

For me, the single person figure given above of £165/week would work out at:

£104 - LHA 1-bed rate
£14 - council tax, band A, single person discount taken off
====
£118 / week on the roof over your head.

£165 - £118 = £47 left to live on, which is less than dole money (which'd be £67).

Pimperne1

PasturesNew wrote: »

Only a figure "after housing costs" where housing costs were taken to be LHA rates, would be meaningful. It's rent/mortgage and council tax that chew through the cash as you can't change where you live if you're on the poverty line because you don't have the spare cash to be moving around.

For me, the single person figure given above of £165/week would work out at:

£104 - LHA 1-bed rate
£14 - council tax, band A, single person discount taken off
====
£118 / week on the roof over your head.

£165 - £118 = £47 left to live on, which is less than dole money (which'd be £67).

God, that would be grim.