Minimum income standard.

It's a sad fact of life that the poor you will always have with you.

My feeling is that however much you raise basic income, if income at the top keeps increasing the benefit of the increase at the lowest level will always be eroded. I think that what we need is some degree of levelling out of incomes.

notice they refer to pensioner couples as being at 95% of the minimum income
then there is a reference to working age single person needing 16K
where is the pensioner single person - to always equate pensioners income to couples (who get generous pensions/pension credit and add-on benefits) is ignoring the fact that LOTS of pensioners live alone and have disproportionate expense as a result (and only one personal allowance to set against income so that many are paying tax) l

Mollie if you go onto the Joseph Rowntree foundation website, there is a calculator that you can you use as a single pensioner. I found it very revealing, as it worked out that I am below the minimum standard income. You can adjust some of the values better to reflect your personal circumstances.

I agree Eloethan that the worrying trend is the growth in disparity between the rich and the poor. That is a gap that seems to be ever widening.

interesting calculator
if one lives in an urban area - minimum is about £7.5k BUT
when I changed to state I lived in a village - the minimum becomes about £15k and I am below the amount I require to live on
lies d**n lies and statistics.
why do working people (single no children) require £16k - true they have NI to pay and travel costs but that is a big discrepancy.

Could it be they think we are so past it all we want to do is knit in front of the TV and drink endless cups of tea?

I like the way they assume we spend less than £4 per week on alcohol.
Mind, as I do not pay rent or mortgage, that leaves me with a lot more to spend on it.
The difference could be transport costs, mollie, even for a pensioner with a bus pass.
Anyway, I'm not bothered about whether I can live comfortably, but why others are assumed to be able to live on less than the standard minimum income. At the moment, Frank Field is leading a commission to look into why there are so many people hungry in Britain. He asked Cameron to set one up, but he refused, so Field did it himself, along with three Tory MPs and another Labour MP. It also makes interesting reading, but I do not understand why it is taking so long.
"Something is happening in western societies so that people at the bottom are being kicked." Field said this.