The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has recently done research to find what the typical family with two children needs at the moment to live a decent lifestyle. Their conclusions show that, in only the last four years, the figure has gone up by almost a third. Today, they found a typical family needs £37,000 a year for a typical lifestyle.
The report was a compilation of deliberations of 21 focus groups that came together at the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University.
The Rowntree report, for instance, showed that a family needs to pay significantly more today for daycare than they were paying four years ago. There have also been cuts to tax credits that have left families needing to find more funds from elsewhere. The largest expense, however, contributing to these numbers is the need for a car. The survey found that the typical family can no longer get by with bus fares, as the fare rates have risen and the routes have been reduced.
Four years ago, the guestimate was that the typical family needed £29,918 a year for a decent standard of living; this is £6,882 lower than the current estimate.
They found that a single person needed a minimum of £16,400 ayear; that a single mother with one child would need £23,900 and that a pensioner couple would need £231.48 a week.
Rowntree’s chief executive Julia Unwin said,
“Families have a monumental task trying to earn enough to get by. Parents facing low wages and pressure on their working time have little prospect of finding the extra money they need to meet growing household expenses. This year’s research shows that a dangerous cocktail of service cuts and stagnating incomes are being keenly felt by parents.
She continued, “Many working people face the risk of sliding into poverty. It illustrates how anti-poverty measures are needed to address not just people’s incomes but also the costs that they face.”
The report said, “In 2012, for the first time, families with children, but not households without children, living in urban areas outside London defined a car as essential. Parents agreed that public transport is expensive and not sufficiently flexible and reliable to meet the needs of families with children.”