I find it rather distasteful when I read reports with statistics about “poverty” and “low income families” when the real dramas are:

• overindebtedness
• home repossessions
• and rising bankruptcies.

Even more distasteful is finding out that the causes are

• white collar crimes of banks and official institutions.

A first graph was produced from data published on http://www.poverty.org.uk/ in the report An Anatomy of Economic Inequalilty in the UK:

Population living in poverty by millions

The Centre for Policy Evaluation produced the report Drivers of Over-indebtedness with data by the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) resulting in this graph:

Distribution of UK Household Debt by Age: 1995, 2000, 2005