By Burak Bir
LONDON (AA) – The UK’s 13 million low-to-middle-income families are older and more vulnerable to suffering from poor health or disability in comparison to 30 years ago, a think tank said in a report published on Wednesday.
The report titled Unsung Britain prepared by the Resolution Foundation, an independent think tank dedicated to raising living standards for people with low to middle incomes, said that low-to-middle-income families are older and at risk of facing poor health or disability.
"This means more lower-income families are caring for adults, with 1-in-8 people in this group caring for an ill, disabled or elderly adult," said the report, which is based on a one-year research program designed to understand the economic circumstances of today’s low-to-middle income families and how these have changed in recent decades.
The research suggested that people in low-to-middle-income families are now over three times more likely to be economically inactive due to ill health than "because they are looking after children, a significant change from 1994-95 when the rates were the same."
The report pointed out that, although lower-income families are far more likely to be in work today than they were in the mid-1990s, there has been a fall in homeownership among low-to-middle-income families – declining from a peak of 40% in 2000-01 to around 30% in 2022-23.
It added that this situation, coupled with a lack of social housing, has pushed a "record share of poorer families" into the high-cost private-rented sector.
"These high housing costs, coupled with a slowdown in wage growth, have contributed to a worrying long-term living-standards stagnation across the poorer half of Britain."
Also, 3-in-10 working-age adults in low-to-middle-income families reported having a disability in 2022-2023, up from less than 2-in-10 (19%) in the mid-1990s.
However, the report mentioned that, while the lower-income UK has "got older and sicker," overall levels of worklessness have fallen over the past 30 years.
"The share of low-to-middle income households that are workless has almost halved since the mid-1990s, from 24% in 1996-97 to 13% in 2022-23.”
The study, citing "significant and often negative changes" in the economic circumstances of the poorer half of the population in recent decades, recommended that the challenges faced by low-to-middle-income families should be "at the forefront of the minds of policymakers."