The rising cost of the minimum standard of living

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published its annual report into Minimum Income Standard for the UK, reported here by the BBC, and showing how much money is needed for an acceptable standard of living. They look at the effects of tax and benefits on the budgets for different family types to show the wage you need to earn in order to have enough to afford what ordinary members of the public (their definition) agree is needed to survive and take part in today’s society.

The group which have taken the biggest hit are families with two working parents and two children, because of falling real wages, cuts to childcare assistance and the freeze on child benefit. The Foundation’s website has a brief introduction to the report here, with a graphic showing highlights of the findings and the shortfall likely to be suffered by families living on unemployment benefits. There is much more information about how the minimum standard is calculated here, which may make a good introduction to the topics of standards of living and relative poverty for students embarking on their A2 courses with some good up-to-date data to use as the vital evidence in A2 level essays. Meanwhile they could also look at The Independent’s report, firstly discussing the justification in the data for the headline which says that the real rise in families’ cost of living is 20%, and then looking at the end of the report which covers a Legal & General MoneyMood survey reporting that twelve million of the UK’s 21 million households now spend all their money on bills and debt payments - what will happen to those families when the base rate rises again?