Low paid workers are not paid enough to live healthily, Marmot says

There are now more working households living in poverty than households where all of the adults are unemployed, because people with the lowest paid jobs are not being paid enough, said Michael Marmot, who led a government commissioned review into tackling health inequalities.1

Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, noted that although five of the six policy actions that the Marmot review had concluded were needed to tackle health inequalities had appeared in the government’s public health white paper, they did not include the requirement for a minimum income for healthy living.2

Speaking at a Westminster Social Policy Forum seminar on 3 March he presented a graph showing that, although poverty in workless households had gone down, it had increased in working households.

“By 2011-2012 more working households are living in poverty than workless households and in …