Middle classes drink and take more drugs than poor
‘Very serious addictive level’
THE middle classes are more likely to drink and take drugs than the poor, a landmark report on poverty has found.
Two- thirds of better- off adults have drunk to excess in the past year compared with just 59 per cent of the poor, the report reveals.
It also found 22 per cent of young people in better-off families took illegal drugs in the same period, compared to just 13 per cent of those below the poverty line.
The paper, compiled by the cross-party Social Metrics Commission, sought to re-define poverty and reveals that family circumstances are as big a driver of poverty as low income.
Struggling families can be driven into poverty by ‘ inescapable costs’, such as childcare and looking after disabled family members, the report said.
Commission chairman Baroness Stroud, a Conservative peer and former adviser to Iain Duncan Smith, said yesterday: ‘Part of impoverished adults drinking less is they do not have the cash to spend on it. This is not in the report but my own experience is that where people are drinking or taking drugs in poverty, it is at a very serious addictive level.
‘For the middle classes, they are holding down a job and doing what’s expected of them.’
The report put a new definition of poverty in place to replace the official measure, scrapped by David Cameron’s government in 2015, which judged a family’s income relative to the national average. The commission’s measure takes household assets into account, as well as childcare and housing costs and disability.
The new measure suggests there are 14.2 million people in poverty, a similar number to the 2015 measure, but the composition has changed. About 2.7 million pensioners, mostly with assets, have dropped out of poverty, but a new group of 2.6 million are judged to have fallen below the line.
Many are disabled who have had their extra living costs factored in. Overall, the commission said nearly half of those in poverty live in families with at least one disabled person. Some 7.7 million people were in persistent poverty, lasting more than four years, which the report said was a ‘significant concern’. London is the most impoverished region with 28 per cent of households struggling – a figure ten percentage points higher than other regions.
The report said: ‘Nearly half of people in poverty live in a family with a disabled person.
‘Not all of the indicators suggest disadvantage for families in poverty. For example, people in families in poverty are less likely to report the use of illegal drugs.’
Ministers and the ONS are considering adopting the new metric as the official measure of poverty.
Baroness Stroud said: ‘We want to put poverty at the heart of government policy-making and ensure that decisions are genuinely made with the long-term interest of those in poverty in mind.’