The annual report from the UK’s Joseph Rown­tree foun­da­tion has just been released. This year, the Foun­da­tion says that poverty in the UK con­tin­ues to rise.

Poverty lev­els in the UK are now at the same level as back in 2000. The report says that after a few years trend­ing down, poverty has increased every year since 2004. The Rown­tree Foun­da­tion points to 2004 as the year that unem­ploy­ment and prop­erty repos­ses­sions began to rise in the UK.

From the BBC, we read this fur­ther break­down of the new report.

The report — which is the Foundation’s annual assess­ment of poverty in the UK — said that 2004-05 was a key turn­ing point as that was when poverty, unem­ploy­ment and prop­erty repos­ses­sions all started to rise.

“The report high­lights the scale of the chal­lenge the gov­ern­ment faces if it is to reduce poverty sig­nif­i­cantly in the UK,” said Julia Unwin, chief exec­u­tive of the Foundation.

“Although there was suc­cess in revers­ing long-term adverse trends in the first half of the last decade, the re-emergence of these prob­lems indi­cates that poverty can­not be solved with short-term, reac­tive solutions.”

The report, pro­duced by the New Pol­icy Insti­tute, found that two mil­lion chil­dren lived in low-income, work­ing house­holds. This was the high­est fig­ure since the Foun­da­tion started col­lect­ing records.

Peter Ken­way, co-author of the report, said that the tax cred­its sys­tem was tack­ling the symp­toms, not the root cause, of the issue that many peo­ple were not get­ting enough income despite doing many hours of work each week.

He said that the solu­tions were “not obvi­ous” but required a debate over sub­jects that some politi­cians con­sid­ered taboo.

They included the fact that some peo­ple had been “taxed into poverty”, as well as the effect of more women in the work­force and the impact of migra­tion lev­els into the UK.