Dirt poor

Respected independent social change organisation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), has just published the fourth in a series of reports into extreme poverty, Destitution in the UK 2023. 

The Foundation's website states: "...ending poverty in the UK is a moral cause: to ensure dignity and respect for everyone, and to address exclusion and powerlessness." The fact that such an organisation, and such a report, is needed in the first quarter of the 21st century is a shocking indictment in itself but, given that the UK government is unwilling to change the status quo and, in fact, seems set on making the situation worse, thank goodness JRF exists to challenge it.

The study reveals that approximately 3.8 million people in the UK experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children. This is almost two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017, and nearly triple the number of children. Therefore, the need for urgent action to tackle destitution in the UK is clear - except, it would appear, to the UK government. (The dictionary definition of destitution is "poverty so extreme that one lacks the means to provide for oneself".)

The damning report reveals what it describes as "the shameful increase in the level of destitution in the UK, with a growing number of people struggling to afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. This has deep and profound impacts on health, mental health and people’s prospects; it also puts strain on already overstretched services." 

One of the advantages (perhaps the only one) of being seventy years old, as I am, is the perspective one's longevity gives to social and political developments in the UK, good and bad, from the mid-20th century to today. I was lucky enough to be born into a society which had created, in 1948, a comprehensive health and social welfare safety net for all its citizens. My generation, the post-war 'baby boomers', was brought up in an era of full employment and rising prosperity. That began to falter in the 1970s but welfare provision reached its peak in 1978 before facing cutbacks in the wake of the election of Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1979 and her swingeing monetarist policies, inspired by her guru, American economist, Milton Friedman.

Those cutbacks have either not been significantly reversed, or have actually increased, under successive governments, both Labour and Conservative, ever since. Forty years of stagnation or reversal in social security benefits has led inexorably to the situation so graphically outlined in the JRF report. It shines a bleak spotlight on the struggle to stay warm, dry, clean and fed in modern Britain and rightly calls this out as shameful. Doubly shameful in that it is not accidental or the effect of unmanageable social and economic forces, it is a matter of government policy. In other words, it is a choice of our government, acting in our name. Well, not in mine!

Thankfully never having experienced lack of warmth, shelter or food I'd like to focus instead on something I have experienced, the struggle to stay clean. I remember vividly being taken by my mother, at a very young age, to a public bath or wash house in a town somewhere in the South-West of England. My father was working on a civil engineering project at the time and we were living in a caravan on site, an informal arrangement with no facilities, so bathing would have been difficult. I can still recall the Victorian or Edwardian surroundings: the corridor lined with cubicles, the coin slot (probably taking a thrupenny bit) in the heavy dark-wood panelled door, its brass doorknob, the vast cast iron enamelled 'slipper' bath, the hot water gushing out of the big brass taps, the steam and the noises of other users in the echoing surroundings. 

It was all rather overwhelming but how many poor families now might relish such an opportunity? Such wash house complexes were ubiquitous around the country and often included a communal laundry and sometimes a swimming baths too. This was the Victorian's enlightened civic response to the health risks posed by 'the great unwashed' - the dirty working classes - both to themselves and the wider community. When only middle- and upper-class households had bathrooms, the vast majority of the population (if they were lucky) might have a tin bath in front of the fire once a week. This continued to be the norm into the 1960s.

The issue for the poor now, when every house and flat has a bathroom and indoor flush lavatory, is not lack of facilities but, rather, the ability to afford to heat the water or buy soap and toiletries, leading to the phenomenon known as 'hygiene poverty'. And, of course, it's not just a matter of bodily hygiene but of clothes, towels and bedding too. Where families have washing machines the same problems of affording the energy and washing powder apply, and a launderette wash, spin and dry (where launderettes still exist) could easily cost £20 a week. 

I never imagined I would live to see the time when problems of destitution that beset Victorian and Edwardian Britain would come back to haunt us in 2023. Having just emerged from a once-in-a-century pandemic, when the virtues of hand-washing and scrupulous hygiene were actively promoted by the government, it is inconceivable that we should now find ourselves in the midst of another potential health crisis, that of disease spread by dirty bodies and clothing.

A fitting epitaph indeed to thirteen years of Tory government.