Working families who are "just about managing" are worse off than they were last year, despite Theresa May's pledge to focus her efforts on helping this group, new research has found.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an anti-poverty charity, has found that higher inflation – boosted by the falling pound after the Brexit vote – plus the benefit freeze and other reforms mean many families working in low-paid jobs are getting further away from a liveable income.

A family in which one adult works full-time on the National Living Wage and another stays at home looking after children is now £870 a year – £17 a week – further away from what the JRF refers to as a "decent living standard", while a working single parent has slipped a further £640 a year behind that line.

The report doesn't look at an official measure of poverty, but instead what it calls a "minimum income standard", which is worked out in conjunction with academics who ask a panel every four years what people regard as necessities to live a normal life.



A single person now needs to earn £17,900 a year to reach the minimum standard, a couple who both work and have two children need total earnings of £40,800, and the line for a lone parent with a preschool child is £25,900.

This is the group of people referred to as "ordinary working families" and those "just about managing" by Theresa May, who pledged help when she became prime minister last July.

"If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise," she said in a speech outside Number 10. "You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school.



"If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The government I lead will be driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours."

However, the research shows that the gap between many of these families and a minimum income standard has actually grown substantially in recent years, under both Cameron and May, as a detailed case study provided to BuzzFeed News shows.

Donald Hirsch, director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University and the JRF report's main author, calculated figures for a single parent with two young children and demonstrated how they'd changed over the last five years.

These figures showed that a family with one parent working full-time would be £33.02 a week short of the JRF's minimum standard in 2012, but by 2017 that had shot up to £67.50. The family is helped substantially by the introduction of the National Living Wage (the research assumes the parent is over 25), but is then hit slightly by tax and benefit changes, and much more substantially by the rising cost of living – ending up struggling to make ends meet.