A single person with no children needs £158 a week to meet a minimum income standard covering a basic standard of living but excluding housing costs, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found. In a July 2 report, the think-tank estimates that a single person would need at least £13,400 a year before tax to meet the minimum standard, derived from what members of the public considered basic needs. The annual figure assumes a council flat rent of £52.30 a week. A minimum income standard for Britain: what people think is based on interviews with 39 groups of people from different types of household.State benefits provide less than half of the minimum budget needed by single people and only two-thirds of the money needed by two adults with children, the report says.Jonathan Bradshaw, professor of social policy at the University of York and co-author of the report, said: Until now, poverty assessments have been largely based on rather arbitrary measures of relative income, which are helpful for monitoring trends but leave unanswered the question of how much income is enough.Based on these public assessments, almost everyone defined as living below the official poverty line falls short of what people judge to be adequate for their fellow citizens sometimes by quite a long way.
