In my local area, over a quarter of the children are living in poverty. The way the economy completely fails them and compounds their problems was illustrated by a glossy catalogue delivered through letterboxes in the area.
In my local area, over a quarter of the children are living in poverty. The way the economy completely fails them and compounds their problems was illustrated by a glossy catalogue delivered through letterboxes in the area.
The catalogue offers furniture and kitchen appliances on credit, with weekly payments. The payments are all quite low: perhaps a few pounds a week for a fridge or around six pounds per week for a cooker. For a family with no savings whose fridge or cooker has just broken down, it might seem the answer to their prayers.
But the item of furniture that particularly caught my attention was a set of bunk beds. I imagine the bedroom tax, which decrees that children from poor families are not entitled to their own bedroom, may have caused a rise in the demand for bunk beds.
Houses rented by families in receipt of Housing Benefit won’t usually have very spacious bedrooms, so to get two beds into one small room may be difficult. Bunk beds would seem to be the answer, and from this catalogue they can be yours (with ‘free’ mattresses) for just £6.98 per week.
But the weekly payments continue for three years, and in very faint, tiny print, presumably to comply with legal requirements, the company reveals what a customer will eventually pay in total. For this set of children’s bunk beds, the eventual price paid by the cash-strapped customer will be £1,088.88.
In seconds on the internet I found a similar product for around £100, and something that looked identical for £180. Take into account the ‘free’ mattresses and it would seem that anybody prosperous enough to have ready cash would be able to buy a roughly equivalent product for little more than a few hundred pounds.
The company is not doing anything illegal. It can be said that people know what they are getting into. But for families with no cash available, who need a bed or a cooker, there may seem little option but to receive goods worth a few hundred pounds and incur a debt of £1,000.
Essentially those bunk beds seem to epitomise our current economy. The richest people created massive amounts of debt, and the poorest people are being bled dry to pay for it.
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© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden