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Morning Briefing: expensive housing helps fuel jump in working poor

Nearly three in five people below the poverty line now live in a household with at least one working person, as a result of weak pay rises and high rents, an influential thinktank has found.

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Picture: Getty
Picture: Getty
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Morning Briefing: Expensive housing helps fuel jump in working poor #ukhousing

In the news

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said Britain has seen the share of poverty accounted for by working households jump from 37% in 1994 to 58% in 2017, The Guardian reports today. There are now eight million working households living in poverty.

In other news, a group of more than 80 benefits charities has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about government adverts for Universal Credit, arguing that they are “deliberately misleading”, The Independent reports.

The Department for Work and Pensions has been running weekly articles in the Metro badged “Universal Credit uncovered” that are designed to look like news.

The complaint from the Disability Benefits Consortium follows a similar submission by poverty charity Z2K Trust.

The Guardian reports on calls by homelessness charity Crisis, the police and MPs to scrap the 195-year-old Vagrancy Act, which criminalises rough sleeping and begging. It also carries a feature about how the law works in practice in Birmingham.

It comes as more than 1,000 people in Northampton sign a petition calling for a campsite to be set up in the city for rough sleepers, per the BBC.

Meanwhile, in an interesting development in Europe, Berlin’s senate has approved a plan to freeze private rents in the city for the next five years, after concerns over sharp rises, the BBC reports.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has previously expressed support for rent controls, but does not have the power to implement them.

Closer to home, ITV News runs a story on a report by the Housing Quality Network that argues that “significant changes” are needed in the way social housing is allocated on Jersey.

Elsewhere, the Derry Journal has uploaded a clip of Kate McCauley, policy manager at Housing Rights, warning MPs that if bedroom tax mitigation payments end in 2020 in Northern Ireland, people will be left destitute.

And the region’s chief inspector of criminal justice has criticised long delays in introducing support measures for victims of domestic abuse, according to the BBC.

In Scotland, the Edinburgh Evening News reports that the Labour-SNP council has rejected a Conservative MSP’s claims that it will miss its 20,000 affordable homes target for this decade.

And in Wales, Coastal Housing Group has launched a project that will see 360 young people and adults in vulnerable circumstances help to build homes at one of its developments in South Gower, per Business News Wales.

The Guardian runs a comment piece comparing different approaches to tackling homelessness in the US and Finland.

And finally, City AM carries an opinion piece arguing that the Conservative leadership candidates should be bolder on housing policy and champion council and modular housebuilding.

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