LETTER: Poverty surely means poverty?

With the opposing reports recently published on social mobility and poverty and the Government reports of low unemployment and high levels of employment, one wonders where the truth really lies.
Police are asking recipients to hand in the envelope.Police are asking recipients to hand in the envelope.
Police are asking recipients to hand in the envelope.

With high employment and high benefits paid to people in work, the question must be asked: who benefits from this subsidy, the employed or the employer?

Put another way, should businesses which are unable to pay the required wage levels without taxpayers subsidy be allowed to continue?

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Not enough is given the light of day to the levels of subsidy given to the private recipients of these handouts to the house rental sector and low-pay, zero-hour employers.

Plenty is said of taxpayer funds which the public sector receives and the unfortunates in receipt of the well trailed but badly administered Universal Credit payment system.

If someone coming off the unemployment figures counts as minus one and then does say three jobs because of low pay is that plus three on the employed list?

Truth is the truth, no matter what smoke screens are used to hide it by using semantics.

Poverty is poverty and is only visited on the poor.

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In the midst of the deindustrialisation as suffered by this and many likewise working class areas, the use of national averages to measure the affects of both social mobility and poverty is impossible.

Many extenuating circumstances like age, family ties lack of job opportunities etc stopped mobility.

How can you compare the loss of a coal mine employing 2,000 miners, plus local ancillary industry suppliers, with a distribution centre warehouse employing 170 zero-hour low-wage eastern European workers?

How can a productivity comparison be made?

The decline in this area is matched by the improvement down south. The unequal society is starkly visible when the whole of society is in focus, not just inside the Westminster bubble. If Brexit means Brexit is true, then poverty means poverty is true.

Noel Beresford

Bolsover