“They are not really poor, they just don’t manage their money properly.”

Does this sound familiar?

A comfortable story which assigns blame to those living in poverty has become easy to believe as the rhetoric is reinforced daily in the media.

The typical family in poverty in the UK is not made up of feckless, workless scroungers of popular imagination but more typically is a person in a low paid job.

What are the facts? The national minimum wage is £6.50 per hour and the Living Wage £7.85 per hour. People on these rates often work 40 hours per week or alternatively have more than one job. Working families are increasingly having to turn to food banks and credit to make ends meet.

As the saying goes, “unless you walk in another person’s shoes, you cannot know their experience”. It is so easy to point the finger and class families as undeserving or on the fiddle. To quote another statistic, the number of people BELOW a living wage has increased by 400,000 in the last 12 months.

I applaud the employers who have signed up to paying a Living Wage. They report that absenteeism is down 25 per cent, 80 per cent confirmed that it enhanced the quality of work and the retention rate for staff has improved. This is a win-win situation. However, there is a downside as employers who pay the enhanced rate may add nationally 160,000 to the unemployment figure in order to make the books balance.

When exercising our right to vote in elections, can we not look at self-interest being hyped up by politicians of all parties but consider the type of society where all are given dignity for their work and where we can bring about a society where food banks and inequality become a thing of the past.

Should we then use our vote for ‘the common good’?

Pat Booth Bromsgrove