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Addressing the poverty premium: approaches to regulation

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posted on 2015-03-13, 15:04 authored by Donald Hirsch
Transforming responses to consumer vulnerability is a priority for Consumer Futures. This report, based on research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is about how people on low incomes pay more for essential goods and services and what can be done about it. It is widely believed that consumers will best be served by encouraging competition on the basis that this drives efficiency and delivers innovation. However, competition does not always work this way and it is consumers on low income that often lose out, but so do others who are vulnerable for reasons other than low income. The fact that ‘the poor pay more’ is not news. This report updates the picture and shows that paying higher prices for utilities and credit can raise the cost of a minimum household budget by around 10 per cent – a ‘poverty premium’. The cost of many essentials such as energy and water are likely to rise and while we hope for a tide of economic growth which will lift all, poverty and vulnerability is not going to go away and indeed many people who are not seen as ‘poor’ will struggle to meet household bills.

Funding

Consumer Futures supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Research Unit

  • Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP)

Citation

HIRSCH, D., 2013. Addressing the poverty premium: approaches to regulation. London: Consumer Futures, 61pp.

Publisher

Consumer Futures

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2013

Notes

This report is also available from Consumer Futures http://www.consumerfutures.org.uk/

ISBN

978-1-907125-75-1

Language

  • en

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