UK is now facing a ‘cost of dying’ crisis
MORE than 90,000 people die in poverty in the UK every year, new estimates suggest, prompting campaigners to warn that society is facing a “cost-of-dying” crisis.
Working-age adults below the poverty line are twice as likely to die from any cause as pensioners, according to research from Loughborough University commissioned by the end-of-life charity Marie Curie.
The estimates suggest that in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, more than 90,000 people died having experienced poverty in the last year of their life – around one in seven of the total number who died. This comprises 68,000 pensioners and 25,000 working-age people.
More than a quarter (28%) of adults of working age who died were estimated to have been in poverty, compared with 13% of those who died having reached pension age.
The research also suggests that women, parents with dependent children, and people from ethnic minority groups are more vulnerable to poverty at the end of their life, while across the UK nations the risk is greatest in Wales. Researchers used a definition of poverty from the Social Metrics Commission that takes into account people’s “inescapable costs” such as childcare, and said poverty can both increase the risks and be a consequence of ill-health and subsequent mortality.
Marie Curie said the figures – the first of their kind – are “shocking” and “nothing short of a national indignity”.
The charity is calling for the state pension to be given to dying people of working age so they do not miss out. It welcomed recent Government steps enabling people with a year or less to live to be given fast-tracked access to benefits, but said the system is failing to keep working-age people out of poverty at the end of their lives.
People who are terminally ill and have jobs face having to reduce their hours or give up work altogether, as well as added costs such as higher energy bills, paying for home adaptations and funding care. Marie Curie’s report, Dying In Poverty, said: “This shows that the UK is also facing a ‘cost-of-dying crisis’, with many more people affected by terminal illness at risk of falling into poverty as a result of lost income, higher prices and a working-age benefits system that is increasingly failing to safeguard people from poverty at the end of life.”
Chief executive Matthew Reed said it “cannot be right” that terminally ill people of working age miss out on their desperately needed state pension “simply because they are not ‘old enough’ when they die”.
He said: “No one wants to imagine spending the last months of their life shivering in a cold home, struggling to feed themselves, their children, and burdened with the anxiety of falling into debt.
“But for 90,000 people a year that is their reality... We are staggered to see the scale of poverty among dying people. It is shocking.”
Juliet Stone, from Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy, added: “Our research, for the first time, not only tells us how many people die in poverty but shines a light on who these people are, where they live in the UK, and the triggers, such as terminal illness, which push them below the poverty line.”