“We must repair our social security system, which has been weakened to the point that it no longer performs its basic function of catching people before they fall into poverty.”
Nadia Whittome MP wrote a piece for the Socialist Campaign Group’s 2026 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’. You can read the pamphlet in full below.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including access to food, housing, and medical care, as well as the right to security against unemployment, sickness, disability, and old age.
The UK formally recognised this principle in ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1976.
Yet today, the number of people in very deep poverty has risen to a record 6.8 million in the UK – the highest number of people and the highest proportion since records began three decades ago. This is an inevitable result of the dismantling of systems that are supposed to guarantee decent wages, social security and housing. Our government’s task is to fundamentally fix these broken systems and offer a new path forward. With the far-right fast on the rise, the window to get this right is narrowing.
We must begin by repairing our social security system, which has been weakened to the point that it no longer performs its basic function of catching people before they fall into poverty
The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights defines three core elements of the right to social security: availability (protection against social risks), adequacy (schemes must ensure an adequate standard of living) and accessibility (the system must be accessible, transparent and non-discriminatory). In a recent report, Amnesty International outlined how the UK is failing on all three.
On availability: research shows a significant gap in social security uptake because eligible claimants do not receive enough information or support to understand what they are entitled to. Moreover, there is enormous stigma around claiming benefits in our political culture. The term “benefits” alone implies a gift from the state, rather than a foundational guarantee.
As a result, £23 billion in income-related benefits went unclaimed in 2024 alone. For years, instead of ensuring that people receive what they are entitled to, successive governments’ welfare strategies have focused on getting people off benefits by any means necessary, including punitive measures. The new Labour leadership must change the regressive culture around claiming benefits and rebuild trust in our social security system.
On adequacy: our benefit rates are also woefully insufficient, leaving people unable to afford the basics. Research shows that the UK has some of the least generous social security provision across the OECD, and that we rank third-lowest for welfare value (as a percentage of average wages). Many organisations have long called for a legally defined social protection floor (in line with the International Labour Organisation’s recommendation) that sets benefit payments, at a minimum, at the level needed to cover essential costs.
On accessibility: austerity measures, such as the two-child benefit cap, the bedroom tax, and cuts to disability benefits, have systematically denied support to people based on their circumstances rather than need. After much heel-dragging, we have rightly abolished the two-child benefit cap, but we must also reverse all such punitive measures and build a system based on need. We should also abolish the “No Recourse to Public Funds” condition for migrants, which bars many migrant households from accessing safety-net support, significantly worsening poverty and destitution in the UK.
However, a stronger social security system is not the sole solution we should be reaching for when addressing poverty. Another fundamental problem our society faces is the flattening of wage growth and the rising cost of living. Since union power was deliberately crushed in the 1980s through deregulation and deindustrialisation, employers kept a larger share of productivity gains from economic growth, rather than passing them on to workers, which led to growing inequality and a widening of the gap between top earners and everyone else.
Since then, we have also lived through multiple economic events that have allowed wealth to be transferred upward while working-class people ultimately paid the price. After the government bailed out the banks during the 2008 financial crisis, the public had to endure austerity and frozen wages for well over a decade under the Tories.
As a consequence, local authorities, our public services and infrastructure were starved of investment, leaving the economy with a weaker foundation and, in turn, lower productivity. The Covid pandemic saw corporations rake in record profits while key workers were exposed to the virus and severely underpaid. At the same time, energy companies continue to bank windfall profits from war-driven price spikes, while consumers are having to foot extortionate bills. Underpinning all of this is a clear imbalance of power.
This unfair set-up is forcing more people into poverty, while the state is effectively having to subsidise low pay with in-work benefits. In a functioning economy, this kind of support should not be necessary. It is shocking that the number of workers living in poverty increased from 2.5 million in 2000/01 to 3.8 million in 2023/24 – a rise of 51% in over two decades. Evidently, the wage floor is far too low to cope with the cost of living.
Rebuilding workers’ power will require stronger unions, stronger employment rights, collective bargaining arrangements and the adoption of a real living wage. We should also break up corporate control over essentials via stronger regulation, public investment in alternatives, and public ownership of services where markets have failed. We should tax concentrated wealth to help fund this, and implement an industrial strategy that creates well-paid, unionised jobs across the country, including through investment in new renewable energy projects, food production, healthcare, social care, and public transport infrastructure.
Beyond our failing social security system and suppressed wages, other structural problems, in particular the housing crisis, compound the pressure on household budgets. Due to a shortage of social housing – after Thatcher allowed it to be sold off at discount prices – and weak regulations on landlords, people are forced to pay vastly inflated sums just to keep a roof over their heads. We have ended up with a model where the state subsidises landlords by paying housing support, instead of building and maintaining council housing.
The Labour Government has taken welcome steps in addressing some of the issues in the private rental sector, but they are nowhere near enough to fix a broken housing system and the poverty it is fuelling. We need to invest in council housing at scale to give people on lower incomes affordable, secure homes and break the cycle whereby the state indefinitely subsidises private extraction. At the same time, we should introduce rent controls to bring down the cost of renting.
The new Labour leadership must ensure that it tackles deepening poverty rates holistically. We need a whole-society national strategy, with clear standards, timelines and accountability, ensuring social security finally meets all of our human rights obligations. This must happen concurrently with reforms and investments that help grow wages and improve working conditions. We cannot let the far-right further exploit decades of systemic failures. It is time to deliver the meaningful change people voted for.
- Nadia Whittome is the MP for Nottingham East. You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and Bluesky.
- You can read the SCG pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’ in full here. The foreword says that “We hope this contributes to a debate across the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider movement about the political programme needed to deliver the change people voted for, to build a better future for our communities and to prevent the rise of a Trump-style government here in Britain.“
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