Poverty can affect a person’s health when they lack the resources to meet life’s basic needs, such as adequate heating, proper clothing, and good nutrition.
This graph shows the proportion of people living in poverty in the UK in 2021/22, broken down by a range of characteristics including household composition, disability and ethnicity. Housing costs have a big impact on the proportion of people living in poverty, so the figures shown below are for poverty taking housing costs into account.
Poverty rates vary by family type. Single parents have the highest poverty rate and childless couples have the lowest at 43%. People with disabilities have a poverty rate of 26% and non-disabled people have a poverty rate of 20%. Poverty rates are higher for all ethnic minority groups than for whites (19%), but levels vary widely. People of Indian origin have a poverty rate of 23%. Pakistanis (49%) and Bangladeshis (53%) have poverty rates more than twice that of whites. Black ethnicities have a poverty rate of 40%.
The differences by household structure reflect two important trends. First, households with children tend to have higher poverty rates because they have more people in the household relative to the household’s potential income. Second, married couples may have similar housing costs as single people, but earn twice as much.
Poverty rates across all people with disabilities may mask large variations in poverty that are partly linked to the type of disability. Furthermore, standard measures of poverty may overestimate income and therefore underestimate the extent of poverty for many people with disabilities. This is because income measures include income from benefits designed to cover the extra costs of disability, such as specialised equipment or expensive heating bills, and do not take into account the costs of such support.
Ethnic differences primarily reflect differences in employment, income and home ownership. For example, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have employment rates around 17 percentage points lower than average, lower hourly wages and fewer homeowners among these groups, leading to higher housing costs. Poverty rates for most ethnic minority groups increase significantly when housing costs are taken into account. Poor employment, income and housing outcomes reflect a range of factors, including discrimination in employment and services. In the case of immigrants, the nature of migration can be an additional detrimental factor; for example, whether they migrated through a route that makes it harder to find work, such as asylum seekers, and how recently they arrived in the UK.
Poverty is defined as an individual living in a household whose net household income is below 60% of the median income for that year. Income is equalised and adjusted for household size to reflect economies of scale. For example, a household of four people needs more income to maintain the same standard of living as a one-person household, but not four times as much. Disability is defined as reporting a physical or mental health condition or illness that lasts or is expected to last for more than 12 months and limits the ability to carry out daily activities some or much. Data for 2020/21 is not included in line with Department for Work and Pensions guidance on data quality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data for 2021/22 has been affected by the pandemic and is subject to further uncertainty. These should be viewed with caution in line with wider trends.
Source: Health Foundation analysis for the Department for Work and Pensions, Households on Below Average Income, England, 2021/22