Today we are launching a major new report the state of the working poor in Liverpool. ‘Getting By? A Year in the Life of 30 Working Families in Liverpool’ takes the form of first-person testimonies from families with at least one parent in low-paid employment.
The report explores how poverty, job insecurity, debt and low wages combine to impact on their personal relationships and family life, as they struggle to navigate the cost of living crisis.
Despite being in work, they still struggle to get by on the minimum income standard. This is the level deemed necessary to achieve an acceptable basic standard of living, once wages, tax credits and in-work benefits are factored in.
It is an existence filled with anxiety as household bills, rent and childcare costs undermine finely-balanced family budgets. A place of chronic job insecurity and the ever-present spectre of debt. Where essentials make no allowance for luxuries and a stagnant minimum wage does not ‘make work pay.’
And where a mother working and bringing up children could teach the chancellor a thing or two about managing debt and making ends meet.
Mothers like Kate. She has four children and works as a cleaner for the minimum wage. ‘I just find it a struggle to go out to work and then at the end of the week there is nothing left, it is just disheartening, it gets me down,’ she told our researchers.
It is a familiar story. Despite going out to work and setting an example for her family, her wages do not leave her enough to get by on. ‘I worry about my credit cards, but saying that though I still use them, I have got to, there is no other way I can work round it.’
Or take Eileen. She is a 48-year-old lone parent, holding down two part-time jobs in order to bring up her three children. ‘I want to work for as long as I can and it worries me that the day will come when I cannot. My biggest concern is ever being a burden on my kids.’
The families featured in Getting By? are telling us in their own words that being trapped in the bottom half of an hour-glass economy does not leave them with enough to get by on, however hard they try.
There are literally millions of stories like this. That is why we commissioned Getting By? – to provide a platform for Liverpool’s working poor to tell their stories.
The approach is modelled on Beatrice Webb’s landmark Minority Report as part of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress in 1909, which argued that the poor were not the architects of their plight.
A century later we still need to make that case. Surely as a country we can do better.
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Frank Hont is cabinet member for fairness, equality and social exclusion on Liverpool city council
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