Category Archives: Inequality

‘The posh areas get cleared’: bin strikes illustrate Birmingham’s wealth gap

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People in poorer areas feel frustrated rubbish piles up during strikes, while wealthy households pay for removal

“It’s very frustrating that the posh areas get cleared and we’re just left, very frustrating but we expect it,” said Peter Thomas, outside his home in Ladywood, against a backdrop of overflowing bins.

Across neighbouring postcodes in Birmingham, the gap between wealthy and deprived parts of the city has been noticeable for residents ever since the bin strikes began last month.

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One in four women in England have serious reproductive health issue, survey finds

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Exclusive: Racial disparities highlighted as researchers estimate 10 million women have conditions such as fibroids or endometriosis

More than a quarter of women in England are living with a serious reproductive health issue, according to the largest survey of its kind, and experts say “systemic, operational, structural and cultural issues” prevent women from accessing care.

The survey of 60,000 women across England in 2023, funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and analysed by academics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, found that 28% of respondents were living with a reproductive morbidity, such as pelvic organ prolapse, uterine fibroids, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, or cervical, uterine, ovarian or breast cancer.

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Doctors urge government to fight poverty after rise in patients with Victorian diseases

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Survey finds vast majority of doctors are concerned at impact of health inequalities on their patients

Doctors have reported a rise in the number of patients with Victorian diseases such as scabies, as the Royal College of Physicians urged the government to do more to fight poverty.

The survey of 882 doctors found 89% were concerned about the impact of health inequalities on their patients, while 72% had seen more patients in the past three months with illnesses related to poor-quality housing, air pollution and access to transport.

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Proposal to automatically give babies mother’s surname ignites row in Italy

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Politician says idea would be ‘compensation for centuries-old injustice’ of children being assigned father’s name

An Italian politician has proposed a law that would make it automatic for babies to be assigned their mother’s surname at birth, a step that would mark a rupture with a centuries-old tradition and has sparked a fiery debate.

Dario Franceschini, a former culture minister from the centre-left Democratic party, argues that such legislation would “right a historic wrong”.

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More than 10,000 jobseeker payments may have been wrongfully reduced or cancelled, government says

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Australia employment department announces more payment system pauses due to it not ‘operating in alignment with the law’

Thousands of people may have had their social security payments wrongly reduced or cancelled because the mutual obligations system was not “operating in alignment with the law”.

On Friday, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) announced it had paused more payment reductions and cancellations, with more than 10,000 people understood to be affected.

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Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows

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Sutton Trust says underrepresentation of poorer students is ‘outrageous’ but number has doubled in 10 years to 2022

Students from working class backgrounds still only make up 5% of entrants to medical schools across the UK, a proportion that has doubled over the past decade, analysis has found.

The research, conducted by the Sutton Trust and University College London (UCL), looked at almost 94,000 applicants to UK medical schools between 2012 and 2022, which represent almost half of all UK medical applicants.

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‘Wilful acts of bastardry’: former Treasury secretary says young Australian workers ‘robbed’ by tax system

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Ken Henry made comments at a tax summit in Melbourne, arguing fiscal drag is seeing taxes go up while real incomes fall

Recent governments have carried out “wilful acts of bastardry” and created intergenerational inequality and environmental destruction that will leave younger voters worse off, the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has said, urging tweaks to Australia’s tax system to bridge the growing divide.

Henry, who worked under both the Howard and Rudd governments, used a speech at the Per Capita tax summit in Melbourne on Thursday morning to argue the country’s tax settings since the Howard government have fuelled inequality and left further generations and young workers “to pick up the tab”.

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Poorest UK households pay rising share of income on council tax, study finds

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Resolution Foundation report says failure to reform has ‘slowly recreated the issues that undid the poll tax’

Britain’s poorest households are paying an increasing share of their income on council tax, according to new analysis that likened it to the poll tax that contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

The poorest fifth of households paid 4.8% of their income on council tax in England, Wales and Scotland and on domestic rates in Northern Ireland in the 2020-21 financial year, up from 2.9% in 2002-3, according to research by the Resolution Foundation.

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Share of wealth held by Australia’s poorest falls by almost 30% since 2004 – report

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Study by Monash University recommends spending increase to fix inequalities in housing, health and education

The wealth held by Australia’s bottom 40% has declined by almost a third in two decades while 3.3m live below the poverty line, a damning report into Australia’s track record on quality of life shows.

Monash University’s third Transforming Australia report, released Thursday, shows progress on more than half of the 80 indicators has stalled or is in freefall, painting a deteriorating picture of the country’s social, economic and environmental wellbeing.

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Unpaid internships ‘locking out’ young working-class people from careers

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UK charity calls for positions of four weeks or longer to be banned to help close social mobility gap

Young people from working-class or disadvantaged backgrounds are being “locked out” of careers by unpaid or low-paid internships that benefit middle-class graduates, according to a social mobility charity.

Research by the Sutton Trust found that middle-class graduates made more use of internships as stepping stones into sectors such as finance or IT, even in cases where the internships paid nothing or below the minimum wage as required by legislation.

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Services Australia chasing billions in unpaid debt – including some which may have been unlawfully calculated

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Agency pursuing $4.9bn in unpaid debts, including some potentially calculated with controversial method, question to parliament reveals

Services Australia is chasing billions of dollars in decades-old debt, it has been revealed, some of which may have been incorrectly calculated.

Data released under questions on notice shows that, as at the end of October last year, Services Australia was pursuing $4.9bn in unpaid debts from 829,266 customers. The oldest debt dates back to 1979, with thousands from the 1990s.

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Melbourne woman’s fight to keep NDIS support raises legal questions about agency’s ‘troubling’ processes

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Tribunal decision for 54-year-old Veronica Stephan-Miller suggests onus of proof should be on NDIA, not recipient, before revoking benefits

A tribunal has questioned whether it is lawful for the National Disability Insurance Agency to require that participants provide renewed evidence of their eligibility before revoking their access, describing the approach as “troubling”.

The Administrative Review Tribunal on Wednesday granted a 54-year-old Melbourne woman with disability, Veronica Stephan-Miller, the right to continue accessing the National Disability Insurance Scheme while she appealed against the agency’s decision last year to remove her from it.

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‘So immoral’: gig economy workers forced to pay fee to receive their wages

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Retail assistants on low pay using YoungOnes platform docked cash or told to wait up to 30 days for earnings

Retail assistants have accused a gig economy firm of “holding them to ransom” by making them pay a fee if they want to receive their wages within a month.

A new payment system brought in by YoungOnes, which supplies “freelance” retail assistants to many well-known high street stores, charges gig workers 4.8% of their earnings to be paid in one minute or 2.9% to be paid in three days. If they decline, they typically have to wait 30 days. Previously the workers were paid in three days, without a charge.

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Australia’s housing market ‘buckling’ under widening gap between income and home values, report finds

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Housing prices fell by 0.1% in December but dip likely to be ‘shallow and short-lived’, according to CoreLogic

Australia’s housing downturn is being driven by a widening gap between income, borrowing capacity and home values, but the dip is likely to be “shallow and short-lived”, a new report has found.

In December, Australia’s property market eased with home values falling 0.1% after a flat result in November and a gradual slowdown over last year, according to CoreLogic.

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Why Scottish students at Edinburgh University want more support to counter classism

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Only 25% of institution’s students are from Scotland, and they are more likely to be from working-class backgrounds

From the first day Shanley Breese started her law degree at the University of Edinburgh, she encountered demeaning comments about her accent. She was told she was hard to understand and was asked to repeat herself in tutorials when she used words from the Scots language.

“It was just a little thing to differentiate us and point it out … It meant that I didn’t participate in my tutorials,” she says.

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Perverse incentives leave young Australians locked out of community housing, study finds

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Researchers find providers stand to lose 46% of possible income if they rent to young people compared with those on higher welfare payments

Thousands of young people are missing out on a safe place to live each year because community housing providers get more rent from older adults, research has revealed.

The lead author of the University of New South Wals research, Dr Ryan van den Nouwelant, said providers stood to lose 46% of the possible rental income if they chose a young person over an adult on a higher social security payment.

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Many NHS staff would use conscience clause if assisted dying is legalised, say doctors

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Christian and Muslim groups say medics who refuse to help patients die not protected in England and Wales bill

A significant proportion of NHS medical staff are likely to exercise a conscience clause if assisted dying is legalised by parliament.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill stipulates that no doctor would be under any obligation to participate in assisted dying.

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Revealed: the growing income gap between Europe’s biggest and smallest farms

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Big farms rake in record profits when food prices soar, while small farms struggle on razor-thin margins

‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes

The income gap between the biggest and smallest farms in Europe has doubled in the past 15 years and hit record levels at the same time as the number of small farms has collapsed, a Guardian analysis of agricultural income data has found.

Figures from the European Commission’s Farming Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and Eurostat suggest farmers across the continent raked in record profits when the war in Ukraine sent food prices soaring, boosting a long-running trend of rising average incomes that has outstripped inflation.

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Alarm at first fall in disadvantaged students in England reaching university

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Proportion of students eligible for free school meals at 15 who progress to higher education falls from 29.2% to 29%

The proportion of disadvantaged teenagers in England going on to study at university has fallen for the first time on record, leading to accusations that the country is moving backwards in terms of social mobility.

Figures released by the Department for Education show that 29% of students eligible for free school meals at 15 had progressed to university by the age of 19 in 2022-23, compared with 29.2% the previous year – the first time the rate has fallen since it was first measured in 2005-06.

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More Australians being ‘priced out’ of homes by big rent hikes, advocates fear

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Renters in some cities forced to spend on average nearly $15,000 more a year on rent since the Covid pandemic, analysis reveals

Renters in Australian capital cities are on average spending nearly $15,000 more a year to rent a house since the pandemic, analysis has revealed.

Research from the advocacy organisation Everybody’s Home showed on average renters in capitals are paying $14,700 more annually to rent a house, and $9,600 more to rent a unit compared with 2020.

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