UN poverty report slams 'harsh and uncaring' Government austerity after Newcastle foodbank visit

A UN investigator who visited Newcastle last year has slammed the "social calamity" of austerity and urged the government to urgently restore funding to cash-strapped local councils.

Special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, has issued a damning report on the drastic cuts to public services, saying "much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos".

It comes after he launched probe into poverty in the UK last year and visited struggling families at the West End Foodbank, which is the largest of its kind in the UK, in November as part of a fact-finding mission.

He added that Brexit has become a "tragic distraction" from the plight of the nation's poorest people, and likened the roll out of the Universal Credit benefits system - for which Newcastle was the pilot area - to an "impending natural disaster or health epidemic".

However, the Government has called his findings a "barely believable documentation of Britain".

Prof Alston said: "Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated.

"The social safety net has been badly damaged by drastic cuts to local authorities' budgets, which have eliminated many social services, reduced policing services, closed libraries in record numbers, shrunk community and youth centres and sold off public spaces and buildings.

"The bottom line is that much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos. A booming economy, high employment and a budget surplus have not reversed austerity, a policy pursued more as an ideological than an economic agenda."

Prof Alston's report states that 14 million people in the UK live in poverty and that close to 40 per cent of the country's children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021.

The investigator, who is also a law professor at New York University, concluded in his report that the government must restore council funding "needed to provide critical social protection and tackle poverty at the community level".

Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes, whose authority will have been forced to cut £327m from its budget in 12 years by 2022, said: "Today, a global voice echoes what people in Newcastle have made clear for years; Tory austerity is a political choice designed to hurt.

"When you cut council budgets you remove the local safety net which safeguarded dignity and health for millions.

"The UN special rapporteur team saw all that the Tories have refused to acknowledge, the rise in child poverty, the increase in homelessness, the pain of universal credit and the national shame that is the growth in foodbanks.

"As the UN makes clear, if the Government wants to tackle these issues it must reverse the cuts to local government. It is time to put respect for human dignity ahead of party politics."

John McCorry, chief executive at the West End Foodbank, said: "We are definitely seeing an ingrained core of people who are becoming further isolated and are not able to identify a way out of the poverty trap.

"There are a lot of things in this report that resonate very strongly with us. Food banks are becoming a part of the norm now, which they were never intended to be."

Mr McCorry added that his "biggest worry" was that the findings of the damning UN investigation would become lost in the ongoing Brexit debate.

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: "The UN's own data shows the UK is one of the happiest places in the world to live, and other countries have come here to find out more about how we support people to improve their lives.

"Therefore this is a barely believable documentation of Britain, based on a tiny period of time spent here. It paints a completely inaccurate picture of our approach to tackling poverty.

"We take tackling poverty extremely seriously which is why we spend £95 billion a year on welfare and maintain a State Pension system that supports people into retirement.

"All the evidence shows that full-time work is the best way to boost your income and quality of life, which is why our welfare reforms are focused on supporting people into employment and we introduced the National Living Wage, so people earn more in work."