Episode #38: Poverty is expensive – Fair by Design

When you have less to spend, life costs more.

As perverse as this may sound, the fact that people with lower incomes pay more for everyday items and services is baked into the system. It’s also called the Poverty Premium: the higher price that people pay for anything from car insurance, electricity to grocery shopping due to having a smaller budget.

In this episode, we’re joined by Maria Booker, Head of Policy at Fair by Design. Fair by Design is a campaign that tries to tackle the poverty premium, both by engaging with politicians, policy makers and the private sector to argue for a fairer system and by trialling new way of doing business to show that alternatives are possible.

The poverty premium isn’t a small problem: almost one in four families in the UK are affected by it. It is estimated to cost the country more than 2 billion pounds. Sometimes people aren’t aware they’re paying more, other times they think that’s just the way things work. But, in working together with government and business, change is possible, as Maria explains.

In this episode, Maria refers to work that Fair by Design did together with the University of Bristol, which you can find here.

I make reference to an earlier episode with UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier de Schutter, which can be found here.

And for those unfamiliar with the UK context, direct debit means that payments are automatically taken from your account on a regular basis and the NHS refers to the National Health Service.

This episode is the first in a series to mark the forthcoming publication of my book The Empathy Fix. Why Poverty Persists and How to Change It. In it, I discuss the many ways in which our societies are currently working against people on low incomes, including the poverty premium. If you’d like to learn more, including how empathy can help fix poverty, pre-order your copy now!

Photo by Vitaly Gorbachev at Pexels.com