A mountain to climb

1st August 2006
By Kitty Stewart

The story of relative poverty in the UK over the last half century is one of dramatic change, as illustrated in Figure 1 above. After twenty years of broad stability, the 1980s radically shifted the landscape. In the late 1970s 6% of the population lived below half mean income. By 1991 this figure had more than tripled: one in five people were poor on this measure, well above the level in most other European countries.

Labour government efforts to fight poverty among particular grou…