Biggest drop in income inequality in 30 years

[uncleglen]

An example of what is happening in East London came my way recently. An East European and his wife and baby got a 2 -bedroomed council flat. The husband went off to live with his builder mates and the wife then claimed benefits. She let the other bedroom to a working couple and she divided the sitting room with a curtain and let that to two working people. Meanwhile the husband visits regularly for conjugal reasons.....how long before she gets pregnant again and gets a 3 bedroomed council flat or house....we are being taken for a ride people and since there is not enough property to go round, the local councils will turn a blind eye like they did in the 1970s after we had an influx of refugees. Those refugees were living many to a house in poor areas, they more or less set up a parallel society and collected money together and bought property which they are now renting out room by room in our big cities- many to Europeans. I have personally seen examples of this in east London, and in Nottingham.

In Nottingham friend joked that when the night shift got home, they got into the bed of the day shift....

[DaveR]

Rather than editing my post above yet again, and having now read the summary of the JRF report cited, it also acknowledges that their results show the opposite trend to other measures of relative poverty, based on %ages of median income. The authors' explanation is that those measures don't capture the true picture. Natch.

[jaywalker]

unclegen, what has "East European" got to do with your post?

You do not provide any evidence that people from Eastern Europe are a net cost to the economy. I suggest that is because they are not.

Try this report: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit05.pdf from the LSE (hardly a hotbed of left-wing thought these days).

To quote from the summary:

"The big increase in EU immigration occurred after the ?A8? East European countries joined in 2004. In 2015 29% of EU immigrants were Polish. EU immigrants are more educated, younger, more likely to be in work and less likely to claim benefits than the UK-born. About 44% have some form of higher education compared with only 23% of the UK-born. About a third of EU immigrants live in London, compared with only 11% of the UK-born."

But you have chosen instead to mention "Eastern Europeans" in your post as naming a cost to us all. I think this is appalling.

[Loz]

DaveR Wrote:

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> For example, the MIS for a lone parent with a baby, a toddler and a primary age

> child is apparently ?73,000/year, which seems a lot. It may be explained by the 'outgoings'

> including ?440/week for childcare.

That's pretty absurd. Curiously, throw a second adult into that household and they need less money to live on (?67,594) but they still need to spend ?440 a week on childcare.

Mind you, I stuck my details in (two person household, no kids, not pensioners) and the calculator seems to think we can survive on ?23,405 a year (after tax) between us. Whether or not that is reasonable depends on a whole host of factors, mainly around housing costs.

So, I think the figures are, at best, an interesting basis for a pub chat.

[Earl Aelfheah]

the reports pretty clear about what it's measuring and provides a fair bit of narrative around it. The measure they're using for those 'at high risk of overty' is 75% if MIS (which of course one might still legitimately question). What's perhaps most interesting is their analysis for what is likely to happen to the incomes of those being described in the report over the next few years (a further, significant drop). Anyway, read the report, it's pretty nuanced https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/households-below-minimum-income-standard-200809-201415