History > 2003-2005 > UK

poverty, housing, justice, racism, unemployment, health, education

Credit where it's due?

Blair's balance sheet :

In the first of a three-part serialisation of their new book,

Polly Toynbee and David Walker assess whether

Labour has delivered on its second-term promises.

Today they examine the economy and social justice

The Guardian        p. 11        31.1.2005

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1402167,00.html

Unused food: What a waste

Britain throws away £20bn
worth of unused food every year
- equal to five times
our spending on international aid
and enough to lift 150 million people
out of starvation

15 April 2005
The Independent
By Cahal Milmo

From entire crops of barely blemished potatoes, to shelves of supermarket sandwiches on their sell-by dates, it is a roll call of waste created by one nation that could lift 150 million people from starvation in one year.

The ability of Britons to throw away food deemed imperfect, out-of-date or surplus to requirements was put into sharp relief yesterday with the revelation that 30 to 40 per cent of all produce is simply binned.

Research based on government statistics has found that, every year, food worth £20bn is discarded on its journey from the farmyard to the fridge.

The study puts a figure for the first time on the profligacy of a supply chain where producers are forced to leave fruit rotting on trees because it does not meet supermarket standards and millions are throwing away food for the sake of a "best before" sticker.

Environmentalists and politicians described the statistics as a wake-up call for the Government and consumers to take urgent action to curtail the "monumental and offensive" waste of food.

That £20bn of discarded foodis equivalent to almost five times what Britain spent last year on international aid, including the ammount of debt relief to the world's poorest countries.

With Britain struggling to meet its obligation to cut by almost half the 22.5 million tons of domestic rubbish, including 3.4 million tons of waste food, it sends to landfill sites in the next five years, a senior adviser to Tony Blair said the figures highlighted the iniquities of affluent Britain.

Lord Haskins, the former chairman of Northern Foods and a Labour adviser on rural affairs, said: "This reflects the worst side of us as consumers. We have built a society where we think food is cheap and can be thrown away.

"We have eyes bigger than our stomachs and buy too much. We eat too much and are too lazy or ignorant to do anything with the leftovers. Food is thrown away because we are obsessed with sell-by dates.

"Just think of the energy that goes into producing, distributing this food. There will be two to three billion more people to feed on the planet in the next 30 years without the land or water to produce their food. If the rest of the world adopts our behaviour, then the world will have real problems."

The research, conducted for BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth, catalogues the levels of waste on the journey from the farm gate through wholesalers, food processors and retailers to the consumer, using figures produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the National Farmers' Union.

Campaigners said the £20bn figure, which follows a separate report last year showing the average British adult throws away £420 of food a year, provided a stark contrast between the consumption of the developed world and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

A study published this month in America after a 10-year survey by the University of Arizona put the figure for food waste in the United States at 40 to 50 per cent.

Patrick Nicholson, of the Catholic aid organisation Cafod, said: "We spend nearly five times more as country on food we throw away than on helping the poorest countries."

According to United Nations estimates, £20bn is the amount needed per year until 2015 to stop the 150 million people in Africa suffering from starvation.

The level of UK waste will give added urgency to efforts across the food industry to cut surpluses before new European Union rules, which will ban the disposal of food products in landfill sites by 1 January 2006.

At least three million tons of produce is thrown away by the retail sector, including supermarkets, and food manufacturers. Instead, companies must explore new disposal methods such as bio-fertilisers and ultra-fast composting.

The availability of surplus food has given rise to the phenomenon of "freegans", people who live on food ejected into industrial-sized supermarket dustbins.

A charity, Fare Share, now supplies 12,000 meals a day to homeless and vulnerable people using surplus food provided by supermarkets. The sandwich chain, Pret A Manger, also gives away its unused food to the needy at the end of the working day.

Despite such schemes, critics of the supply system criticised the "obsession" of retailers with unblemished produce. One arable farmer who, until last year, supplied Tesco with potatoes, told The Independent: "Two years ago, I was forced to discard a whole crop because the potatoes failed a blemish test. They were all perfectly good to eat but they rotted in the ground because they did not live up to our twisted idea of perfect food. We have our priorities wrong."

Campaigners said that it ultimately falls to individual households to cut down on the waste to meet an EU target already achieved by most Scandinavian countries of recycling 45 per cent of waste by 2020.

The current level of domestic waste sent to landfill sites, 22.5 million tons, must be reduced to 6.4 million tons by 2020, requiring a dramatic increase in the use of composting bins supplied by local authorities alongside recycling of packaging and glass. Paddy Tipping, the sitting MP for Nottingham Sherwood and chairman of Labour's environment committee, said: "Food waste has not been tackled well by any of us. The responsibility lies with both the Government and consumers to use this most valuable of commodities more effectively.

"These figures are a wake-up call which none of us can ignore."

Tide of rubbish that is creeping closer to our front doors

There's a nasty, smelly problem out there, and it's not getting any smaller. With the economy booming, we just keep buying things. And then throwing things away. And all the time a tide of rubbish is creeping closer to our front doors.

It stems from the boxes your trainers and your PC come packaged in, and the bottles holding your wine and the carton holding your pizza, and then from the trainers and the PC themselves when you get rid of them, as you soon and surely will, seeking newer and better ones to go with the newer and better decorations and furniture your sitting room requires.

Britain's throwaway society is consuming more than ever; it is also, as a consequence, creating waste faster than it has ever done before. Never mind industrial and commercial waste, there is a mushrooming mountain of domestic waste, the stuff that you and I produce at home.

Fifty years ago, the main contents of our dustbins was indeed dust, or in fact, ashes from domestic coal fires, upon which much household was burnt, thereby shrinking its volume enormously. Now we burn nothing at home. We load our bins with a steadily-growing pile of pizza cartons, drink cans, fast-food remnants, packaging of all kinds and mammoth piles of paper.

Figures now show that a fifth of the food we buy in supermarkets goes straight into the bin.

The throwaway society shows no signs of changing course: consumerism has us too firmly in its grip. But the waste mountain that leaves behind is now starting to spill out of its landfill sites and into politics as those in power wrestle with how to contain it. It will be a canny politician indeed who can cope when the irresistible force of our waste growth finally meets the immovable object of Brussels legislation.

Unused food: What a waste: Britain throws away £20bn worth of unused food every year - equal to five times our spending on international aid and enough to lift 150 million people out of starvation, I, Mike McCarthy, 15.4.2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=629543

Forgotten man lay dead

in flat for six years

Society failed 63-year-old who fell through the net,
says coroner

Wednesday April 6, 2005
The Guardian
Vikram Dodd and Ali Hussain

A man lay dead in his council flat for almost six years before being discovered, an inquest heard yesterday.

The fully clothed skeletal remains of Kenneth Mann, 63, were found last June on his bed in Walsall, West Midlands. He had last been seen in 1998 after being admitted to hospital.

Richard Balmain, the coroner, said the former soldier seemed to have fallen through the net: "Society needs to ask how such a situation could arise in the 21st century."

A succession of official agencies had gone to the door of the first-floor flat as Mann lay already dead. The inquest heard that a police officer had called, and so had bailiffs for the water company after bills went unpaid. Likewise there were attempted visits by his doctor, the Benefits Agency, and housing officials chasing unpaid rent.

His brother had tried to visit. His neighbour across the hallway had not noticed anything wrong, the inquest heard.

Housing officials from Walsall council served an eviction notice, but when he failed to reply they assumed he had moved.

The Guardian has learned that the council had declared the home empty in May 1999.

Mann was to remain undiscovered for a further five years.

He was found by chance. In June last year the grandson of a neighbour entered the flat in Carless Street, Caldmore, an area just over half a mile south of the centre of Walsall, and found the remains.

The coroner recorded a verdict of death by natural causes with the probable date of death being on or about September 23 1998.

The previous day was set as the last time Mann had been seen alive. On September 23 he was treated in the casualty department of Manor hospital, in Walsall, after being found slumped in the street smelling of alcohol. He was given tablets for low blood pressure and his heart was checked with an electro-cardiogram. When his body was eventually found an ECG pad was found inside his sock.

Mann was unmarried. His surviving family live nearby; an older sister who is ill, and a brother, Terrence Mann.

Yesterday Terrence Mann said his brother had been a loner, whom he would see at most twice a year for a Sunday lunch: "He was happy-go-lucky, he liked a drink. He didn't look after himself, he didn't eat properly.

"We didn't see him that often. He was out drinking or walking, he never caught buses if he could help it, to save cash for beer."

Mann had a job as a drop forger in a factory, but had not worked in more than 10 years and is believed to have been living on state benefits. He had been in the army, serving as a private in the South Staffordshire Regiment in Germany and Egypt. "It's a bit shocking," Mr Mann said. "Somebody let him down, somebody should have checked or kicked the door down."

Mr Mann said that after his brother's release from hospital he had called round at 9pm one evening but had found him "out". He assumed he was in the pub. He added that he had heard rumours that his brother had gone to a home, but says he was limited in what he could do because he cared for a child with disabilities and worked full-time.

Officials who called at the flat, one of four in the block, were told by neighbours that he either must have moved or was dead. No one decided to find out for sure.

In May 2003 the council transferred most of its properties to a housing association, the Walsall Housing Group. Its spokeswoman, Sarah Thomas, said it had taken over 22,800 properties of which 2,000 were empty. Mann's flat had not been inspected when the property changed hands. "At the time there was no need to enter the property," she said.

Annie Shepperd, the chief executive of Walsall council, said in a statement that lessons had been learned: "Kenneth Mann died alone - friendless and isolated from his family. This is the sad and shocking story of the lonely death of a man whose life was disintegrating."

She said without family, friends, church, neighbours or landlords keeping in touch, Mann had been failed by society. "The authorities also did not pick up his death and we are deeply sorry that this did not happen."

Tom Owen of Help the Aged said: "It's absolutely extraordinary that he wasn't discovered for six years. The problem is not just with the council but with the neighbouring community. There should be as much responsibility from the community as from the state making sure that people living on their own aren't excluded."

Mr Owen said councils were encouraged to monitor old people living on their own, but that they had no legal obligation to do so.

Gordon Lishman, the director general of Age Concern England, said: "The appalling case of Ken Mann is extreme, distressing and shocking to us all. It is deeply concerning that many older people are isolated and excluded from society.

"Over 3.5 million older people live alone and many do not have regular visitors or any opportunity to get out of the house. Many vulnerable older people are at risk of simply being forgotten."

Forgotten man lay dead in flat for six years:
Society failed 63-year-old who fell through the net, says coroner, G, 6.4.2005,
    http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialcare/news/0,8372,1453075,00.html


 

David Simonds        The Guardian        13.9.2004

Child poverty defies government targets

Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian
John Carvel and Larry Elliott

The government is about to fail to meet its key anti-poverty target, according to figures released yesterday showing that 3.5 million children were still living below the breadline towards the end of Tony Blair's seventh year in office.

In spite of its investing billions of pounds in tax credits and incentives to get lone parents into work, the number of children in households below the official poverty line fell by only 100,000 in 2003-4 after housing costs were taken into account, the Department for Work and Pensions said.

Mr Blair promised to cut child poverty by a quarter by 2004-5 and by half by 2010, on the way to eradicating it altogether within a generation. The figures left him well short of the first target. To achieve it another 500,000 children would have to have been lifted out of poverty by today.

Although the outcome will not be known until official statistics are assembled in a year's time, the prospects looked poor.

Alan Johnson, the work and pensions secretary, said the government was "broadly on track" to hit the target. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies said there was "a serious danger" of missing it.

Using the most commonly accepted definition of relative poverty - based on household income after payment of housing costs - hitting the target was unlikely, the IFS said.

It was also gloomy about progress towards a fairer society. Small dents had been made in inequality in the past three years, but not enough to compensate for the widening gap between rich and poor in Labour's first term.

Inequality was marginally higher than the level inherited. "The net effect of seven years of Labour government is to leave inequality effectively unchanged and at historically high levels," it said.

"In the absence of an obvious political momentum, it seems unlikely that inequality will return to the levels experienced prior to the huge rise seen in the 1980s."

The figures brought ministers some comfort. About 1.9 million pensioners have been lifted out of absolute poverty since 1997, thanks to an £11bn investment in higher pensions and a pension credit.

Pensioners are now less likely to be poor than the average member of the population: poverty is having a household income below 60% of the national average.

The number of children below this poverty line fell from just over 4 million in 1998-99 to 3.5 million in 2003-4.

The IFS said it had expected the introduction of a tax credit of £1,445 for each child in April 2003 to take 500,000 children out of poverty during the following 12 months, but the fall was only 100,000. It was possible that administrative problems, problems with take-up, and an unexpected increase in the number of children in workless households had affected the figures. There was, however, "a serious danger of the government missing its child poverty target".

Meeting the target set for the next parliament would be challenging, even if a late spurt took the government to its goal for this parliament. An extra £1.4bn would be needed to put child poverty back on track by 2007-8, and even higher investment if the 2004-5 target was missed.

David Willetts, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, said: "Labour promised to reduce the number of children living in poverty by a quarter over six years. After five of those six years, they are stuck at the halfway point."

Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on work and pensions, said: "There are 6.4 million people of working age living in poverty. This is by far the biggest group suffering deprivation."

    Child poverty defies government targets, G, 31.3.2005, http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,11499,1448764,00.html

Third of children in north-west

live in poverty


Saturday March 12, 2005

The Guardian

Helen Carter

Almost one in three children in the north-west of England is living in poverty, according to figures released yesterday.

The latest statistics from the End Child Poverty coalition show that 450,000 of 1.5 million children in the region are living below the breadline.

Research for the coalition, which brings together more than 75 organisations such as Barnardo's, the Children's Society and the Royal College of Nurses, found that in 215 wards at least 30% of children were living on benefits.

Of these poorest wards, 75 were in Greater Manchester, 66 in Merseyside, 46 in Lancashire, 15 in Cumbria and 13 in Cheshire. Among the worst-affected areas were Blackfriars in Salford, where 60.8% of children live on benefits, Hulme in Manchester, where the figure is 68.5%, Princess in Knowsley (69%) and Granby in Liverpool (71.9%).

The coalition says that overall, 3.6 million children (28% of the UK child population) are living in poverty. The proportion of children living below the breadline rose from one in 10 in 1979 to one in three in 1998.

The UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialised world; a third of poor children do not eat three meals a day.

The effect of poverty reduces life expectancy. A boy living in Manchester can expect to live seven years less than a boy in Barnet. A girl from Manchester can expect to live six years less than a girl in Kensington and Chelsea.

Jonathan Stearn, the director of End Child Poverty, said: "The fact that 450,000 children in the north-west are living in poverty - the highest number in any part of England outside London - is a blight on the region.

"Such high levels of poverty shame a prosperous country like ours. We are talking about children who often don't have warm winter coats, weatherproof shoes, and don't have three square meals a day.

"We know it's all about material deprivation as well. But we also know that these children get bullied at school, get isolated and don't fulfil their full potential."

The charity wants the government to increase the minimum wage to alleviate the problem of low-paid seasonal jobs, which form a large part of Cumbria's economy.

Figures from the charity in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire showed that the worst-affected areas were the Manor estate in Sheffield, where 53% of families live on benefits, and Hull's Myton ward, where the figure was 54%. A third of the 1.1 million children in the region are living in poverty.

End Child Poverty is calling on political parties to commit to 10 policies to take a million children in the UK out of poverty, meeting the government's pledge to halve child poverty by 2010.

The measures include extending child benefit to pregnant women and providing grants for items such as school uniforms.

    Third of children in north-west live in poverty, G, 12.3.2005, http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,11499,1435977,00.html

Young male suicide rate falls

Suicides among young men have fallen to their lowest level in almost 20 years, the Government has said.

The suicide rate in the 20-34 male age group has dropped since a peak in 1998 - from 23.2 suicides per 100,000 of the population in 1996-98 to 19.16 deaths in 2001-03.

But these figures are still much higher than for the general population, which had a rate of 8.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2001-03 - down 6% from 9.2 deaths in 1995-97.

    Source : PA, 21.1.2005, http://www.pa.press.net/story.php?ID=A10847991106304673A0

Poverty and despair of Britain's lost generation

By Ian Herbert North of England Correspondent
The Independent
13 December 2004

Nearly three-quarters of Britain's poorest children are concentrated in just four cities, trapped in urban ghettos of acute deprivation that have seen little or no improvement for a generation.

Ground-breaking research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the country's leading social policy charity, has found that in the worst pockets of poverty, almost 60 per cent of families claim means-tested benefits - a figure three times the national average.

At its centenary conference today in York, where Rowntree founded his trusts in 1904, the foundation will today consider the first detailed geographical analysis of poverty by council wards. This shows that 70 per cent of the poorest children are concentrated within the conurbations of London, Glasgow, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

Despite a number of high-profile regeneration projects by Labour and Tory governments since the early Eighties, there appears little hope of breaking the cycle of family breakdown, drug abuse and crime in the blighted communities, according to the Rowntree report. It adds that this cycle of deprivation has continued while the wealth of the rest of society has increased by an average of 50 per cent in the past 20 years.

In March 1999, Tony Blair set the Government the "historic aim" of ending child poverty within a generation. "Poverty should not be a birthright. Being poor should not be a life sentence. We need to break the cycle of disadvantage so that children born into poverty are not condemned to social exclusion and deprivation," Mr Blair said. But the new data, developed in partnership with Oxford University's social policy unit, shows that in 100 local authority wards with the worst concentrations of poverty, almost six out of 10 children live in families relying on income support and other means-tested benefits.

In 180 wards, more than half the children are in families receiving out-of-work, means-tested benefits. Many cities have a handful of wards in this category - from Cardiff (two wards) to Nottingham and Middlesbrough (four wards).

But Glasgow has 28 - more than any other local authority area - followed by Tower Hamlets in east London (15 out of the 16 wards in the district), Liverpool (12) and Manchester and Hackney in east London (10 each).

Across Great Britain, 19.8 per cent of children are in families receiving means-tested help because they are not working. One in four adults - many from ethnic minority backgrounds - cannot afford at least three items thought essential by the majority, up from one in seven in the early 1980s. These people have poorer health and shorter lives, continue to have difficulties at school and to lack basic qualifications at age 19.

The report argues that the figures should be used with existing measures of household poverty to track whether the number of neighbourhoods with concentrated child poverty is being reduced over time - and whether levels of concentration in worst-affected areas are becoming less intense.

It provides other data at neighbourhood level which, the foundation believes, should make it possible to map geographical concentration of other aspects of deprivation: young people leaving school at 16, the percentage living in overcrowded houses and local burglary rates.

The report poignantly quotes Benjamin Disraeli's "Two nations" speech (about worlds within Britain between which "there is no intercourse and no sympathy") and states that only in the past few years has Britain woken up to the "huge damage caused by the persistence of poverty and disadvantage in a generally prosperous country".

It calls for a broad approach to poverty, rather than many disjointed or short-term initiatives. Emphasis is placed on the importance of tackling disadvantage over the long term and increasing the capacity of poorer households and communities to gain from the market economy, rather than just relieving it temporarily.

Social housing estates only for the most needy can "create ghettoes and feed social exclusion" and channelling the unemployed into unstable or low quality jobs does not provide "a permanent improvement in their lives".

    Poverty and despair of Britain's lost generation, I, 13.12.2004, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=592546

Boy, 11, confined to his own street

Martin Wainwright
Tuesday December 7, 2004

The Guardian

Aneeze Williamson is not yet a teenager but he was confirmed yesterday as one of the most heavily-restricted people in Britain, outside the country's prisons.
After a two-month trial period, magistrates agreed that the 11-year-old tearaway, who cannot read or write and has been excluded from every school he has attended, should continue to be barred from his local town centre and every road but his own on three large housing estates.

Standing under 5ft but already a criminal veteran, with 13 convictions on top of 10 offences when he was under 10 and could not be charged, Aneeze must stay indoors between 7pm and 8am unless accompanied by a legal guardian or social worker. He has to follow a specified, escorted route to and from his home to Bradford or anywhere else outside the restrictions.

The Draconian anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) also specifies that one exception to the limits - occasional visits to his granny on a neighbouring street - must be accompanied by his mother, grandparents or one of four uncles. This is a relaxation of the trial period's conditions, which allowed only his mother as escort; but another attempt at widening his punitive horizons failed.

The bench in Bingley, West Yorkshire, ruled that he would not be allowed to play out with other children in West Royd Close on the West Royd estate in Shipley, near Bradford. They agreed with solicitor Justin Crossley, prosecuting on behalf of Shipley Community Housing Trust, that even that would risk a return of Aneeze's reign of terror - part arson, part thieving and part racist abuse.

"This isn't your typical 11-year-old boy and you must have regard for his behaviour up to this date," said Mr Crossley, after defending solicitor Nigel Leadbeater appealed to the court to remember Aneeze's age.

The boy himself sat toying with his baseball cap, listening but saying only "No" when the chairman of the bench, Martin Nolan, asked him if he wanted to comment.

He also promised to abide by the Asbo conditions, and the court was told that the two months' confinement by invisible but real barriers appeared to have had an effect. After years of threatening elderly and ethnic minority neighbours, Aneeze had quietened down and accepted that he needed to change, according to his family.

The youngest person to receive an Asbo in Yorkshire, and one of the youngest in the country, he had also been shocked by national hate-mail sent to his home. Wide publicity over his court appearance in October, when the "virtual prison" was imposed, caused the sort of reaction which his frightened victims on Windhill had seldom managed.

"The day after the court case we started getting all these letters which said all these disgusting things about Aneeze and calling him scum and things," said his mother Debbie, 36, who lives with the boy and his sister, 17, and seven-year-old brother. Aneeze's father left soon after he was born.

"I was really upset. I cracked up," she said. "The letters came from all over the country for about two weeks after the court case. But I think this could be a fresh start for him."

Aneeze's uncle Marc Boocock said after yesterday's hearing: "He's not the terror he's made out to be. We know he can be a little so-and-so but we've had no trouble with him at all and he's followed the order up until now."

Ms Williamson said that the changes to the Asbo would help the family, along with the chance that Aneeze will get a place at a special boarding school in Cumbria. She said: "We never had a problem with Asbos in general and we knew Aneeze needed to have one. But it was complicated and difficult to understand. At least now we know exactly where we stand.

"He's going to have a much better life if we can get him off the estate and out of trouble. I'll be able to get a job and everyone benefits."

Mr Crossley said the housing trust and Bradford council were content with a two year term - the minimum for an Asbo - because of Aneeze's age and evidence that the interim order had had an effect. But he said the child had previously breached an acceptable behaviour contract and ignored written warnings to his mother. "The people who reside on the West Royd Estate are entitled to have some peace," he said.

    Source, G, 7.12.2004, http://society.guardian.co.uk/youthjustice/story/0,11982,1368024,00.html , SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Scandal of society's misfits dumped in jail

Up to 70% of inmates in Britain's jails have mental health disorders. In the first of a three-part series, Nick Davies hears their shocking stories


Read part two here

Nick Davies
Monday December 6, 2004

The Guardian

On the evening of Thursday August 19 this year, a prisoner was locked in his cell in the segregation unit of Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. This man had been sent to the seg to be held in solitary confinement as a punishment because he had threatened a cellmate. But that was three weeks earlier and, since then, he had settled down and been quite easy to manage. Everything was normal.
On the following morning, August 20, an officer called Dickie Hampson unlocked the door of the cell, and, without warning, the prisoner pounced on him and stabbed him in the back of the shoulder with a toothbrush which he had sharpened into a rigid blade.

Hampson was rushed to hospital where doctors found that the epaulette on his shirt had saved him from the worst of the wound.

Nobody could understand why this prisoner had suddenly turned violent. Immediately after the attack, a group of officers with a riot shield restrained him, handcuffed him and removed him to the "safe cell", designed to prevent self-harm, while they searched his possessions to make sure he had no other weapon concealed. That afternoon, the prisoner was calm again, remorseful and worried about Hampson's condition, and soon he was taken back to his normal cell.

The next morning, Saturday August 21, a second officer, John Leadley, unlocked the same prisoner to take him to the governor for an adjudication for the assault on Dickie Hampson. As Leadley approached him, the prisoner slipped another sharpened toothbrush out of his shirt sleeve - nobody ever found out where he had got it from - and clawed at Leadley's face: the spike cut down through his eyebrow and into his cheekbone, missing his eyeball by less than an inch.

With blood flowing from his face, Leadley too was taken to hospital. The prisoner was moved back to the safe cell. It was several days before the prisoner spoke to the senior officer on the seg, whom he trusted, and explained what had happened: soon after he was locked in his cell on that first night, he said, a black cat had slipped through his window and sat on the bed next to him. This cat had been following him for some time. Now, it handed him a card, the ace of spades, and then dropped down to the floor where it danced for him. There was music. The dance went on for hours, the prisoner watched, and then the cat turned to him to warn him that the next person who came into the cell would be his enemy: the prisoner must kill him. The cat had promised to stay with him to make sure he was all right. The prisoner had started sharpening the toothbrush.

This man was psychotic; he had already been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. None of the officers who work at Wormwood Scrubs is trained in psychiatry. Yet routinely, they deal with mentally disordered men. When John Leadley was stabbed in the face, it was the fifth time he had been attacked in three months; every one of his attackers was suffering from a severe mental illness.

There is nothing unusual about Wormwood Scrubs. Every prison in the country now warehouses the mentally disordered: the numbers have been spiralling upwards since the closure of the old asylums. This has reached a point which beggars the imagination: figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that, if we diverted to treatment all those prisoners who are mentally disordered and/or addicted to alcohol or drugs, 90% of inmates would no longer be held in jail.

There are now 75,000 men and women behind bars in this country. The findings of the ONS suggest that nearly 50,200 of them have personality disorders; 6,175 are psychotic; and more than 35,000 of them have neurotic disorders. Several tens of thousands of them suffer a combination of disorders. More than 75% of them are intellectually impaired, with IQs below the national average. And these are not figures that the government denies.

The prisons minister, Paul Goggins, describes these ONS statistics as "our principal source of knowledge about the extent of mental ill health in the prison population". Most mentally disordered people do not end up in prison; but overwhelmingly most prisoners are mentally disordered.

And every one of our prisons suffers from the "treatment gap" - the gulf between the care that is needed for the mass of mentally disordered men or women within its walls and the care that is provided. After years of neglect, when there was no effective mental healthcare in prisons, the government is finally tackling the crisis, but resources are short, there are real limits to what can be achieved in a prison regime and, worst of all, as the health minister, Dr Stephen Ladyman, told the parliamentary mental health group this year: "It is generally accepted that mental health will deteriorate in prison."

The results are deeply worrying. It is not simply that mentally disordered prisoners may be violent to staff or other inmates. Indeed, they are far more likely to be violent to themselves. On average: every week in prisons in England and Wales, two prisoners take their lives and two or three others are resuscitated after trying; and every day, around 40 prisoners cut or gouge themselves in their cells. Beyond this, the fact is that we are herding disordered men, women and children into our prisons, storing them there for months and years, and then processing them back into the community with every prospect that their disorder has not been addressed and so they will offend again. They suffer. Those around them in prison suffer. Everybody suffers.

Every afternoon at Wormwood Scrubs, the white prison vans queue up outside the gate, ferrying men back from the courts - the young and surly, the old and confused, the crackhead who was caught shoplifting yet again, the homeless man who set fire to an empty building, the man who thumped a stranger because he looked at him in a funny way, the old Rasta who screams at himself in the park. The reception officers process them and give them a bedroll, a nurse takes them through a health questionnaire: "Have you ever received treatment from a psychiatrist outside prison? Have you ever received medication for any mental health problems? Have you tried to harm yourself?"

Once, several tens of thousands of mentally disordered men and women were held behind the high walls of the old asylums, but they failed and, in the late 1980s, they were all closed down. Now, those who would have been their patients rely on a network of community care which is notoriously overstretched and, if they fall through its gaps, they are scooped up by police and sent back behind high walls. Those walls protect a crooked structure.

There are now 139 prisons. There are already plans to build five more. By the end of the decade, the Home Office plans to incarcerate at least 80,000 men and women. If the ONS is right, around 56,000 of them will suffer from at least two types of mental disorder. Yet we have only just over 4,000 secure psychiatric beds, which are already full, and no plans to increase them.

The whole structure is crooked, because it is built on a crooked foundation - the emotionally satisfying but deeply ineffective idea that if we hurt these people enough, they will obey the law. Hospitals are built with bricks of care, prisons with the plans of politicians.

The old Rastafarian who screams in the park was arrested for trying to steal a handbag and for exposing himself in a public place. He is soon processed and taken down to A wing. Nobody realises he has lied about his psychiatric history, nor that he has been arrested, charged and now remanded in custody under a false name. Lots of new prisoners conceal their psychiatric history: they don't want the stigma, they are afraid it will count against them, or they have forgotten. On the wing, the old Rasta is soon marking himself out as an oddball, muttering to himself, eating next to nothing, refusing to wash himself or to clean his cell. It gets so bad that one day the officers force him to take a shower: nobody can stand the smell any more.

By chance, a visiting nurse recognises him from the hospital where she works and remembers his real name. The prison doctors contact the hospital's community mental health team for his notes and persuade the old man to take some medication while they wait for them to arrive. Three weeks later, the notes reach Wormwood Scrubs, detailing his long history of schizophrenia, but by that time, he has been taken back to court where he is given bail or a non-custodial sentence - nobody bothers to tell the prison - and he is back on the streets again.

The number of mentally disordered men and women in our prisons has increased seven-fold since the asylums were closed. We have talked to staff at every level of the Prison Service who are alarmed and depressed to find themselves warehousing the sick. The former director general, Martin Narey, now in charge of probation as well as prisons, has publicly described the strain as "overwhelming". A senior manager told us it was "a bloody awful problem".

The cutting edge of the government's response has been to create Inreach teams, to deliver care-in-the-community on prison wings. In Wormwood Scrubs, the team consists of one consultant psychiatrist, one social worker and one community psychiatric nurse. They care for a prison holding 1,167 men at any one time, with 3,900 coming and going over an average year - 90% of whom they reckon to be mentally disordered. The simple reality is that the Scrubs team spend so much time assessing new patients that they rarely have time to deliver a care plan.

There is also a new day care centre which borrows money from the education budget to run courses in relaxation, art and acupuncture, but staff are so short that sessions sometimes have to be cancelled. An unpaid counsellor comes in once a week, but there is no psychotherapy at all. There are signs that the centre has helped some of the low-end patients, but the service is limited and helpless to deal with the most severely ill who need beds in outside hospitals, which are extremely hard to find.

In a special report on nursing in prisons, the Department of Health acknowledged that, while staff may do their best, there is a level of care which "prison healthcare does not and can not provide".

Even at the lowest end of the scale of mental disorder, this leaves the neurotics with their phobias and anxieties and panic attacks hiding quietly in their cells, not eating and/or not sleeping and/or being punished for low-level disobedience. In the outside world, they might end up on the general ward of a local hospital; here, their disorders frequently pass unnoticed in the muddle of daily life. Sometimes, they are prescribed something to help them; sometimes it is stolen by other prisoners. The parliamentary mental health group has taken evidence on the victimisation of mentally disordered prisoners who report being robbed, bullied and indecently assaulted.

Others with neurotic disorders are screamingly obvious. A man was shipped into the Scrubs from Highbury magistrates court in north London a few months ago. Suffering from depression after the break-up of a relationship, he had slapped a police officer. Within four hours of arriving, he had cut his throat from ear to ear, including his jugular, and slit both wrists. All the prison could do was to send him into Hammersmith hospital to tend his wounds for four days and then beg the Home Office to allow them to transfer him to a local psychiatric ward to treat his anxiety. They refused: the courts had ordered that the man be held in custody awaiting trial and they deemed the security in the local hospital to be inadequate.

Some of the psychotics too can be withdrawn - "quietly mad" in the language of doctors - and likely to remain undiagnosed and untreated. To untrained prison officers, they may seem irritating, asking the same question over and over again, or simply weird, like the man who was frightened of water.

He would sit on one of the wings at the Scrubs staring at a splash of water on the floor, worrying that it was evaporating too quickly. It was two weeks before he clumped a member of staff, triggering a process that diagnosed his paranoid schizophrenia and eventually transferred him to an outside hospital. (His worry about water was that it was poison and he would die if he drank it.)

Once they are spotted, the psychotics can often be stabilised. There is a young schizophrenic in the Scrubs at the moment: his father lives abroad; his mother has been evicted from her home and is sleeping rough somewhere; he ended up living on the streets, cold, hungry, hallucinating and finally trying to steal a woman's handbag.

He is on remand awaiting trial and he is now stable and relatively secure in a single cell with a television. His main worry is that the court may take pity on him and put him out. The big problem with psychotics is that, if they refuse medication, the prison - unlike a hospital - has no right to treat them against their will.

One of the staff at the Scrubs told us about a psychotic man who refused to be treated. The prison wanted to transfer him to an outside hospital, but there was no bed. Without medication, the man's condition started to deteriorate. Soon, he took to standing on the sink in his cell, holding his arms out sideways and swallow-diving head first on to the concrete floor. His face was soon broken and bleeding, and staff were then able to use their limited power under common law to tranquillise him by force for long enough to stitch his wounds. Then the law required them to stand back and let him carry on swallow-diving. At one point, they got special permission from the Home Office to hold him in a padded cell in a straitjacket (something which officially is no longer done in UK prisons). Finally, an outside hospital bed was found for him.

The most disruptive are those with personality disorders. Technically, they are not suffering from a mental illness, but their behaviour is distorted by traumatic experience, usually in childhood: one out of every three men who is remanded into custody by our courts has been in care as a child; one in three women has been sexually abused; one in 10 men has been sexually abused. They may be withdrawn, mistrustful, aggressive, antisocial. At the top end of the scale, they may be grossly callous and cruel. In prison cells, they cut themselves, they bang their heads against the wall, they manipulate, they protest, they swallow pills like sweets. But, from the doctors' point of view, although they may be mentally disordered, they are not "ill" and are often dismissed as untreatable. The daily strain of the treatment gap, dealing with so much mental disorder without the resources or skills to match the challenge, produces some real tensions in the prison.

Read part two here
 

· To protect medical confidentiality, names and some identifying details of prisoners have been changed.

· Additional research by Roxanne Escobales

Mental disorder includes:
· Mental illness such as psychosis or severe depression, often occurring as an episode in an otherwise healthy person and liable to respond to treatment
· Personality disorder, such as antisocial or paranoid, occurring as a continuing pattern of abnormal behaviour, sometimes the result of childhood experiences, generally difficult to reverse
· Neurotic disorder, such as anxiety and phobias, occurring at a level likely to interfere with normal activity, generally amenable to treatment
· Learning disabilities, usually involving significantly impaired intellectual functioning


· A special report on mental illness in British prisons, by Guardianfilms, will go out tonight on Channel 4 News at 7pm

    Source : G, 6.12.2004, http://society.guardian.co.uk/mentalhealth/story/0,8150,1367331,00.html , SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

House price boom fuels social divide

Housing charity says Britain

risks a return to Victorian times

as millions of people are caught out

by the unequal property market

Peter Hetherington, regional affairs editor
Friday November 26, 2004

The Guardian

Social divisions caused by rapidly rising house prices are forcing Britain back to the Victorian era with an unprecedented wealth gap trapping millions of people in poorer areas while rewarding those on the property ladder in the south, research published today shows.
Quantifying the impact of a boom which has seen the level of housing wealth rise 50-fold in 30 years to £2.3 trillion - double that of pension and life assurance funds combined - the study commissioned by the homeless charity Shelter warns greater inequalities risk marginalising a generation born on the wrong side of the housing divide.

It says children of less affluent families, mainly in Scotland, south Wales and the north of England, face a lottery by accident of their birth, denied the rewards of family property wealth in the south - and unable to raise the instant cash to fund either university or a move to a more prosperous area in search of work.

The study will be seized upon by Labour's election strategist, Alan Milburn, charged with overseeing the party's manifesto.

He said last month that the exclusion of large sections of the population from property wealth was the biggest obstacle to social mobility, threatening the economy itself. His team is drawing up proposals to widen home ownership and spread assets more equitably.

The study is certain to be used by the government as fresh ammunition to challenge the countryside lobby which is resisting John Prescott's plans for 200,000 houses in four growth areas in the south.

Mr Prescott, the deputy prime minister, says they are necessary to increase supply and bring prices down.

But the Shelter report will give Mr Milburn's crusade greater urgency. It reveals that the slice of national wealth held in housing has almost doubled to 42% in 30 years. It is five times higher than the amount locked into shares and securities.

Illustrating the wealth divide in the starkest terms, the researchers calculate that 10 years ago, the sale of the average house in Kensington, central London, the richest area, would have bought two houses in the Fife town of Leven, the poorest area. Today, the Kensington house would buy 24 properties in Leven.

At one end house prices have risen 20-fold in 20 years, whereas in the poorest areas they have barely doubled. Overall, England and Wales have 22 times the housing wealth of Scotland.

"It is not an exaggeration to claim that we are moving towards a situation in which the country's children will be divided more by wealth than has been the case at least since the Victorian times," says the study by a team from Sheffield University's department of geography.

"For the children of the poor, there will be large parts of the country to which they cannot consider moving in the future, even if they wish to."

Even in the early 80s, the report says, mobility was easier because a narrower house-price divide meant people had the cash to move from one part of the country to the other.

But now while those born into wealthier households can look forward to help with buying a home and a windfall when their parents die, others will inherit "almost nothing and be given no financial help throughout their lives".

At current prices, the housing wealth of the top tenth on the property ladder amounted to almost £85,000 per child by the end of 2003.

It could rise still further. Accepting that the current plateau in house prices is probably a blip, the study says over the medium and longer term the wealth gap will be much greater.

Adam Sampson, the director of Shelter, called for measures to reduce the property divide and bridge growing inequalities. "They are leading to a society increasingly divided by where people live," he said

"In a country increasingly obsessed by house prices, the growing inequality in housing is marginalising a whole section of society."

Despite the government's target on child poverty, and the measures that are beginning to make an impact, he said children born this century would be starting life "more financially unequal that at any time since the Victorian era".

The researchers say that without measures to soften the excesses of the market, the spectacle of families buying "two or three houses", alongside pension funds investing in property and pushing up prices further, would continue. To further complicate matters, in a "wealth parade beneath the elite", hundreds of thousands of highly-paid migratory workers were now also competing for living space in the south.

But at the other extreme, in many parts of the north significant amounts of housing were being abandoned as valueless.

    Source : G, 26.11.2004, http://money.guardian.co.uk/houseprices/story/0,1456,1360321,00.html , Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Concern as prison suicides hit record level

Press Association    >    The Guardian    Friday September 3, 2004

More prisoners took their own lives in English jails in August than in any other month since records began, prison reformers said today.

    Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5007780-108101,00.html

Poor children miss out

on grammar education

Polly Curtis        The Guardian        Tuesday August 31, 2004

Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are half as likely to go to a grammar school as their more privileged peers even when they score the same in entrance tests, according to new research.

90% of whites

have few or no black friends

Vikram Dodd        The Guardian    Monday July 19, 2004

More than nine out of 10 white Britons have no or hardly any ethnic minority friends, according to a poll that reveals the continuing gulf between races and religions more than 40 years after the UK became a multicultural society.

A divided nation

Homeless families figures reach record high

Matt Weaver        The Guardian        June 16, 2004       

The number of homeless families forced into emergency accommodation has reached a record high, according to official figures that underline Britain's housing crisis.

    Source : http://society.guardian.co.uk/homelessness/story/0,8150,1240168,00.html

Jails crisis

as Britain's prison population

reaches all-time high

Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent

The Independent

18 February 2004

The prison system was in crisis last night
after the number of people locked up in England and Wales
hit a record high of nearly 75,000.

The unprecedented pressure on the country's jails raises the prospect of convicts being held in police cells within weeks and could jeopardise security in already overcrowded prisons. The surging number of custodial sentences, which leaves the Prison Service with just 600 spare places, has startled ministers, who had hoped that the remorseless rise in prison numbers was beginning to level out.

But the population now stands at 74,543 - a rise of 2,167 so far this year and 2,674 higher than a year ago. The rise continues the steady upwards trend over a generation, with almost twice as many people in jail today as 25 years ago.

Another substantial increase over the next month would make the use of police cells inevitable in areas such as the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and London. More inmates could find themselves transported hundreds of miles from home and more may be placed in open prisons when more secure accommodation might be appropriate. It is also bound to lead to more convicts being forced to "double up" in cramped and insanitary conditions.

The increase in England and Wales mirrors the experience in Scotland, where the jail population also stands at an all-time high of 6,700. It reinforces the country's position as the jail capital of western Europe, with 141 per 100,000 of its citizens incar-cerated.

A Prison Service source placed the blame for the increase in the prison population on magistrates and judges, rejecting accusations that it had been driven by hardline government rhetoric.

One contributory problem is the rate of take-up of Home Detention Curfew, which uses electronic tags. About 3,500 are on the scheme; ministers had hoped for more than 4,000.

More than 80 of the 138 jails are officially overcrowded and 11 are judged by penal campaigners to have exceeded the maximum safe capacity. They are Ashwell in Rutland, Birmingham, Cardiff, Doncaster, Hull, Lancaster, Leicester, Lincoln, Stafford, Wandsworth in south London and Wormwood Scrubs in west London.

The number behind bars in England and Wales is 500 above projections and ministers are scrambling to keep pace. On some projections the population could reach 87,200 in 2006, 9,500 more than the beds expected to be available by that time.

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, last month called for a fresh direction in penal policy, with increased use of community sentences and tagging. The Government has already attempted to extend its electronic tagging scheme and is championing "weekend jails", allowing people to maintain jobs and family links while serving part of their week inside jail.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Prisons on the brink of safe overcrowded capacity should set alarm bells ringing for a government preoccupied with tough talk. To avoid a crisis, it must act now to divert petty offenders into effective community penalties, addicts into rehabilitation and the mentally ill into the health system as well as curbing excessive sentence lengths and any needless use of custodial remand."

Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "This is a national disgrace. Overcrowding means too often prison has no rehabilitative effect." But David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "The Government has failed to ensure the capacity of the Prison Service properly reflects the level of prison population. The sentence now fits how many rooms they have free rather than the crime committed."

* Since Labour came to power, prison population has risen 24% to 74,543

* Incarceration rate is 141 per 100,000, compared with 93 in France

* A first-time domestic burglar is twice as likely to go to jail as eight years ago

* The female prison population has risen 146% in 10 years to 4,463 today

* 7,700 inmates tried to injure themselves in the first half of 2003, a 30% rise

* The number of adults serving sentences under 12 months is up 160% since 1999

Source of statistics: Prison Reform Trust and official figures    

    Jails crisis as Britain's prison population reaches all-time high, I, 18.2.2004,
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=492441

    The global epidemic of HIV, the virus that causes Aids, is tightening its grip on Britain with a record number of new cases diagnosed last year. Soaring rates of all sexually transmitted infections are fuelling the rise, with an estimated 49,500 people living with HIV in 2002, an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year.

    HIV cases in Britain reach 49,500 after record rise, I, 25.11.2003,
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=467023  

    Britain's strong economic performance is still offset by poor productivity, persistent poverty, glaring social inequality, low investment in research and development and a collapse of trust in government, a candid survey by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit will acknowledge today.

    The survey, which partly covers trends over several decades and is intended to inform long-term decision making in the run-up to the next election, identifies deep inequalities between rich and poor that widened in the 1980s and are greater than in any other European Union country.

    It is the most comprehensive survey on Britain's international ratings to have been carried out since the early 1970s. The issues include ones on the economy, improving public services, reductions in crime and poverty and strengthening international influence "particularly in Europe".

    The document balances achievements - from above-average employment levels, reading standards that put England third in the international league table and a 25 percent fall in breast cancer deaths - with criteria by which Britain performs less well compared with its competitors.

    These range from productivity levels that lag behind those of France and Germany, as well as the United States, to levels of teenage pregnancy that are higher than any other EU country. And crime rates, which although falling appreciably, remain close to the top level of major industrialised countries. Disparities between regional economies, the so-called North-South divide, are greater than in other EU countries and getting wider.

    While showing employment at an internationally high level, the survey says the UK has a higher rate of relative family poverty than any EU country except Greece and Portugal. And it also questions how far "prison works", pointing out that a 30 per cent increase in the prison population since 1997 has reduced crime by about 5 per cent.

    On education, the document points out that the top 25 per cent of children are world class and trumpets the sharp rise in pupils in English schools reaching level four or above at Key Stage Two. But it shows that in science, English and maths this has levelled out since 1997 and that progress is now proving "more difficult" - against a background in which Britain already faces a "legacy of underachievement", with skill levels "very low in international terms".

    Underlying the critical importance to future economic growth, the survey also points out that there is a "long tale of underachievement" with performance notably worse for those in lower socio-economic groups. And in terms calculated to stimulate discussion on the schools curriculum, it warns that it is weak on "creativity, team working and communications" - all skills that will be in demand over the next 10 to 20 years.

    In a stark analysis of social inequalities that are bound to increase the pressure for radical steps to use public resources for child care and other means to equalise life chances for poorer children, the survey points out that the "social-class gap" between children's attainments is apparent at 22 months and "very wide" by the age of 5. The document concludes that "social background is a more powerful predictor of educational outcomes by age 10 than attainments at 22 months. Less able richer children overtake more able poorer children by the age of five."

    The government analysis, which has been supervised by the head of the Strategy Unit, Geoff Mulgan, has been partly used to inform a second discussion document to be produced on Friday and intended to start the party's public debate about a third-term Labour agenda promised by Tony Blair in his conference speech in October. The party document, written by Matthew Taylor, who is seconded from his directorship of the Institute of Public Policy Research and reports to Mr Mulgan, will pose several dozen questions on the direction of a third-term Labour government.

    In some ways it mirrors the wide-ranging attempt by the Central Policy Review Staff under Lord Rothschild in the second year of the 1970-74 Heath government to identify the main medium to long-term challenges facing the country. Officials revisiting the CPRS papers have been struck that some of the problems that then seemed most intractable - including inflation, strikes and severe pensioner poverty - have proved to be less so in the long run. One purpose of the new document is to focus ministerial minds on the idea that long-term strategic thinking is more valuable than "quick fixes" to deal with short issues dominating the headlines.

    Beside underlying serious social inequalities the document is also frank about the fall in trust in the political process, using up-to-date British Social Attitudes Survey data to make the point that while trust in the professions - doctors and teachers included - remains high, those believing that the Government will act in the national rather than a party interest fell to a record low of just over 15 per cent in 2000. It also shows that participation in local elections is among the lowest in any major country - fuelling a growing debate within the party about an increasing role for a possibly reformed and smaller scale local government.

    The document also poses central questions about how, in a climate of markedly growing voter concern about the quality of public services, individuals as well as the Government have to take responsibility for their health. Again, however, it shows that lower income groups are more likely to smoke and less likely to participate in a sport. The rise in obesity is faster than in any major country, including the US. On transport and the environment, the document shows that congestion is higher than in any other European country apart from Spain and suggests there is little grounds for optimism about reducing the level of CO₂ omissions.

    Tony Blair's Britain still blighted by social inequality, I, 24.11.2003,
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=466578 

Barnardo’s, the UK’s largest children’s charity, is today launching a brand new campaign to highlight the fact that despite having the fourth largest economy in the world the UK has one of the highest levels of child poverty of all industrialised countries*, with 3.8 million children (1 in 3) living in poverty**.

(...)

*In the league table of relative child poverty, the bottom four places are occupied by the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and Mexico) Source: The League Table of child poverty in rich nations UNICEF Innocenti report (card no 1) June 2000 - relative poverty is defined as households with less than 50 per cent of the national median income.

**One in 3 children (approximately 3.8 million) in the UK is currently living in families surviving on less than the poverty line of £242 a week (60% of median income). In some parts of the UK, child poverty is even higher, rising to 48% in inner London and over 90% in some of the country’s wards.

• Poverty Wrecks Futures report is available from www.barnardos.org.uk

• In October 2003, Barnardo’s commissioned NOP Research Group to carry out 2 surveys amongst 999 adults - 16th-21st October and 1041 adults – 2nd – 7th October asking about their awareness of and attitudes to poverty in the UK. Responses were categorised by sex, age, social class and region. The poll surveyed adults aged 15 years and over and the sample was designed to be representative of all adults in Great UK.

• What is the definition of poverty?
People living in poverty are defined as: those living on less than 60 per cent of the national median income (after housing costs) which is about £242 a week for a couple with two children.
(Source: Department for Work and Pensions (2003) Households below average income, 1994-5/2001-02. Corporate Document Services)

    Income support gives a family of 2 adults and 2 children £178 a week after housing costs (this is significantly below the poverty line figure of £242) (Source: Child Poverty Action Group 2003, Welfare benefits and Tax Credits Handbook 2003/4 Fifth Edition, CPAG.

    Nop poll / Barnardo's, 12.11.2003,
    http://www.barnardos.org.uk/newsandevents/media/press/release.jsp?id=1295

More than 11,000 households were living in B&Bs in the second quarter of this year, compared with 4,100 in 1997, figures released by the Government show. More than 10,000 people were resident in hostels and refuges, a 12 per cent rise on 2002. Local authorities are having to contend with rising rates of people officially declared homeless. At the end of June, a total of 93,480 households in England were living in accomodation arranged by local authorities under homelessness legislation -14 per cent more than in 2002. About 20 per cent of the households were homeless because of the breakdown of a relationship between partners.

    Big rise in homeless under Labour rule, I, p. 10, 11.9.2003.

    The latest estimate of rough sleeping in England shows 504 people sleeping on the streets, the lowest recorded level and a reduction of 73 per cent since 1998.

    Reductions over the last year have been most significant in London, although the capital remains the area with the largest concentration of rough sleeping in England.

    T, 11.9.2003, p. 12, brève sans titre.

There are around 50,000 children, some as young as six, on antidepressants in the UK, the Guardian has learned. Last year, doctors wrote 170,000 prescriptions of the drugs for children under 18, even though many experts say counselling and talking therapies work better.