Child poverty in Oxford
Just come across this, an analysis of child poverty by region and local authority wards in the UK. Joseph Rowntree use having one or more parent on workless benefits as a proxy for poverty, and by that measure there are eleven wards in Oxford with above-average child poverty:
Northfield Brook 36.7%
Churchill 36.3%
Carfax 35.7%
Blackbird Leys 35.4%
Barton and Sandhills 35.2%
Cowley Marsh 29.0%
Rose Hill and Iffley 28.7%
Littlemore 25.9%
St Mary’s 25.7%
Lye Valley 24.3%
Iffley Fields 22.2%
I’m sure that we all know that ward-level data can mask pockets of deprivation (which is the case in both Churchill and Rose Hill and Iffley) and provide anomalies (Carfax has very few children and lots of older people and students, but those families that do live there are disproportionately in temporary accommodation and social housing). These figures are not on the scale of those for some of the London boroughs, like Hackney, where in some wards more than half the children live in poverty, but they should still remind us that fighting child and family poverty in Oxford ought to be the priority of the city and county councils.
Very interesting. The figure is over 50% in the ward I live in, staggering given that quite a bit of the ward is street properties. The figure must be much higher on the estates.
That’s 11 wards out of 24 with above-average poverty, which implies that there are 13 wards out of 24 with below-average poverty. That shouldn’t be terribly surprising.
The wards with higher unemployment tend also to have more children, so we end up with 23% of Oxford children in families who receive unemployment benefits, as compared to a national average of 21%.
One would, of course, expect child poverty to cluster in the areas where cheap housing is available, whether one defines “poverty” in terms of household income or in terms of employment.
The figures show that Oxford is pretty close to the national average, and pretty close to other towns and cities in the South East.
What do you suggest that the city and county councils can do to increase employment?
My ward has the highest figures for Crawley at 31.4%, the ward next door is second highest at 28.2%
Both wards have turned Tory in the last 3 years…
You are right about the dangers of such figures. The lowest number in town is Maidenbower with 5.3% and the worry is that those 5.3% will be neglected as more resources come here in Broadfield.
Not that I am complaining about the resources coming to Broadfield of course.
Hi Antonia,
Stumbled on this…please can you send me the link. Not quite sure how you get your blog going…any info on this would be really appreciated as well.
Hope things going well for you and Jo.
This isn’t poverty you’re measuring.
Using “one or more parent on workless benefits as a proxy for poverty” means you’re more probably measuring Oxford’s underclass (approximately, of course - some of these people will be between jobs).
If we have these huge numbers of non-employed why do we apparently need huge levels of immigration ?
Not convinced that that’s a hugely helpful point, to be honest. Of course it’s not a measure of poverty - it’s perfectly (shamefully) possible to be working and still poor.
How do you measure poverty? This survey is quite upfront about what it is doing - it is measuring something which can be measured and which has a high statistical chance of being positively correlated with poverty.
If anything it could understate the problem. As Antonia rightly points out it is possible to be working and poor but it is also possible to be inelligible for benefits or not claiming for other reasons.
In many cases there is only one parent for whom the very presence of the children makes them unable to work.
[...] This makes for stark reading. [Thanks to Antonia for the link] [...]
I think that unemployment could be helped by a SIGNIFICANT reduction of the council tax - or scrapping it altogether - for those on minimum wage. The current reduction just doesn’t cut the mustard; my sister is on minimum wage, and she gets about £13 a week back from the whopping council tax she has to pay.
My husband is a manager of an Oxford business down Cowley Centre way, and he has had a few interested applicants ring up in response to job advertisements. When they find that the job only pays minimum wage, they are not interested - currently, one gets more cash in hand on benefits with council tax exemption than one does working minimum wage with minimal council tax exemption. It’s ridiculous - these are people who would like to work, for pity’s sake, but they don’t want to see a drop in their income if they do so.
I suppose one could argue that the minimum wage should go up - or that benefits should go down. I would prefer to argue that council taxes for the working classes should be realistically re-appraised given Oxford’s ridiculous property values.
Tam:
You (correctly) point out the huge effective marginal rates of tax (due to reduction of benefits) that one is faced with as a low-income earner are a strong disincentive to work.
You suggest the increase in the minimum wage, the reduction of benefits or the reduction of council tax as possible solutions.
The first isn’t necessary, and you give an example of this in your comment. You point out that your husband finds it hard to attract employees at the minimum wage. This tells him that he needs to offer more money if he wants to attract good staff. If it’s not worth his while to pay more money for the job, he wouldn’t offer the jobs at all if the minimum wage were higher. A minimum wage is a tool that (under the right conditions) can raise the income of those in work, but it won’t help at all in this case.
Your second suggestion (reduce benefits) would indeed make working at the minimum wage relatively more attractive. It’s not really an action that a party even pretending to be a bit socialist could take, though, is it?
Your third suggestion (extending council tax relief, so that the widthdrawl of council tax benefits was more gradual with increasing income) would decrease the effective marginal rate of taxation at the low end of the income scale a little, and so would act to incentivise work a little. I’m not sure whether or not it is within the power of the council to do this, though.
You are right that the large marginal rate of tax faced by the working poor is a problem (a problem that the Labour government doesn’t seem interested in solving). The difficulty is that all the good solutions require national legislation.
That’s odd. £13 a week is roughly what I pay in Council Tax total, and I live in Central London. Ho hum. It’d be nice to make the tax more income-progressive as well as wealth-progressive, though I fear rents at the lower end of the scale would just go up as the market compensated for a reduction in effective housing costs.
“I’m not sure whether or not it is within the power of the council to do this, though.”
Nobody is. There’s a right to give a discount for “class or classes of person” - soldiers serving overseas was a recent one. A legal test case nearly happened in 2003-4 when one Council considered a class discount for pensioners, but it backed down in the face of a human rights challenge from other taxpayers. It may have won, actually - the problem is that the Government wouldn’t make up the shortfall, and it’s hard to see where the cash to maintain services would then come from, given that the increase in regular council tax is fairly tightly capped by the Government at present.
Horrifying statistics. how do they compare with 1997? Have things got better ?
To be honest, heph, I’m not sure that information exists. I’ll have a root around.
heph - poverty.org has comparisons from 2004/5 compared to 1996/7. It uses a slightly different measure for low income households, where household income is less than 60% of the average household income - this does include people who are in work but still living in poverty. In 1996/7 there were 4.2 million children living in low income households, in 2004/5 there were 3.4 million - a drop of 0.8 million.
[...] The other day Antonia wrote about some statistics released by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, with particular emphasis (obviously) on how they apply to Oxford. Just as obviously I could not resist looking them up to see how the JRF think we are doing in Crawley. [...]