Causes of poverty

Poverty is caused by a multitude of different factors, however, over the past few decades, there have been four main driving forces causing poverty in the UK. Each factor on its own can impact the household income and therefore the cause of poverty. These are:

In addition to the factors described above other characteristics when combined together can result in poverty. The characteristic include:

Of the children living in poverty, 75% have at least one parent who works (Child Poverty Action Group, 2021c). Additionally, HM government (2014) implies that just because a family is poor one year this does not necessarily mean the following year their financial situation will be the same. In fact, they state "approximately half of the children who are poor in one year are not poor one year later" (HM Goverment, 2014, p. 13). However, Webber and Mann (2019) implies that 7% of the families living in poverty had in fact been living in poverty for at least two years. This is known as persistent poverty (Webber & Clark, 2017).