'No room for negligence' | UK's top firms failing to tackle staff poverty despite big social pledges

The UK’s biggest companies are failing to address in-work poverty, despite promising to boost their ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) commitments, a think tank has warned.

A new white paper from the Social Market Foundation (SMF) has drawn attention to the scale of in-work poverty in the UK and London today, what drives it, and the impact it has. It is a part of a wider project – created in partnership with Trust for London – to develop a new benchmark that helps businesses tackle in-work poverty.

The paper found that, out of all the FTSE 100 firm’s end-of-year financial reviews for 2019-20, the word ‘poverty’ was mentioned just 101 times overall – an average of little more than one mention per company.

More than half (53%) of the companies completely failed to mention the word poverty at all in their annual reports. This is despite the most recent data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showing that around 8.5million working-age adults currently live below the poverty line – a figure which reportedly grew by more than 600,000 since the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to the SMF.