Inequalities in poverty

Poverty can affect someone’s health when financial resources are insufficient to meet their basic living needs, such as adequate heating for the home, appropriate clothing or adequate nutrition. 

This chart shows the proportion of people living in poverty in the UK in 2023/24 and is broken down by different characteristics: household composition, disability and ethnicity. As housing costs have a big effect on the proportion of people who find themselves in poverty, the numbers presented below are for poverty after accounting for housing costs. 

• Poverty rates vary for different family types. The highest rate is 42% for single parents and the lowest is 11% for couples without children.
• The poverty rate for disabled people is 22%, compared with 21% for non-disabled people.
• The poverty rate is higher for every minority ethnic group than for people of white ethnicity (18%), but levels vary significantly:
• The poverty rate for people of Indian ethnicity is 26% and the poverty rate for people of black ethnicity is 39%.
• The poverty rate for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnicity is more than 2.5 times higher than the rate for people of white ethnicity (47% and 53% respectively). 

Differences by household composition reflect two key dynamics. The first is that households with children tend to have higher poverty rates because there are more people in the household relative to its potential income. The second is that housing costs for a couple can be similar to those of single people, but their income can be double.

The poverty rate for disabled people as a whole is likely to mask significant variation in poverty, partly related to the type of disability someone has. In addition, the standard measure of poverty potentially understates the extent of poverty for many disabled people because their income can be overstated. This is because the measure includes income from benefits designed to cover the additional costs of disability, such as special equipment or higher heating bills, without the costs of such support being accounted for.

Differences by ethnicity largely reflect differences in employment, earnings and housing tenure. For example, the employment rate for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnicity is around 15 percentage points lower than the average, hourly pay is lower and fewer people in these groups own their homes, so have higher housing costs. The poverty rate for most minority ethnic groups increases markedly when accounting for housing costs. Worse outcomes – in employment, earnings and housing – reflect a variety of factors, including discrimination in employment and services. For migrants, the nature of migration can be an additional detrimental factor. For example, whether migration was through channels that make employment harder, such as asylum, and how recently people arrived in the UK.