The United Nations has launched an investigation into poverty and human rights in the UK which will examine the impact of the austerity policies of Theresa May and David Cameron over the past eight years.



The inquiry will be led by Prof Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who angered the Donald Trump administration this month when he concluded after a similar visit to the US that the White House’s contempt for the poor was driving “cruel policies”.

The fact-finding trip is scheduled for this autumn and will be the first visit to a western European country by a representative of the UN’s rapporteur’s office since a trip to Ireland in 2011. Alston’s most recent inquiries into extreme poverty have taken him to the US, China, Saudi Arabia and Ghana.

“The UK has gone through a period of pretty deep budget cuts first under the coalition and then the Conservatives and I am interested to see what the outcome of that has been,” Alston told the Guardian. “I am also interested to look at what seems to be a renewed debate on all sides about the need to increase spending at least for some of the key programmes.”

He said the challenges facing the UK were different to the US, where he has concluded Trump’s policies were “tailor-made to maximise inequality and to plunge millions of working Americans, and those unable to work, into penury”.

Alston said: “In the UK, things are at a different place where there is no great budget surplus to be mobilised. Welfare cuts have taken place but there is now an interesting debate on whether they have gone too far and what measures need to be taken to shore up the NHS and other programmes.”

Alston has not yet determined exactly what he will focus on and will shortly invite submissions from groups who want to suggest matters for him to consider. They could include housing squalour, insecurity at work, in-work poverty, mental health and political disenfranchisement.

Alston will arrive as survivors and residents continue to give evidence to the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster. Many have said they felt their views and needs were ignored or marginalised by the local authority.

“Poverty is often characterised by a lack of political power, by a difficulty in enjoying even basic civil and political rights,” said Alston.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies this month found that people with longstanding mental health problems in the UK were more than twice as likely to be in poverty as those without a longstanding health problem.

Destitution, however, has fallen over the past two years, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, although there are fears that the universal credit scheme could reverse those gains.

The number of people unable to enjoy two or more essentials - shelter, food, heat, light, appropriate clothing and basic toiletries - fell by a quarter to 1.5 million from 2015-17 as benefit sanctions eased. Of those rated as destitute, 25% were born abroad.

Torsten Bell, the director of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, said Alston would see a changed picture of poverty in the UK. “Twenty years ago, poverty in Britain was concentrated among pensioners and workless households,” he said.

“Now poverty has moved into the workplace with more than half of the children growing up in poverty in working households.”

Meghan Campbell, the deputy director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, cited Brexit as a looming issue because employment protections were threatened by withdrawal from the European Union.

She said rising costs of child and elderly care would particularly affect the ability of women to be economically independent.

Alston said: “No one is suggesting the conditions in the UK are those of a poor developing country, but every rich country, as my mission to the US showed, has pockets of poverty everywhere.

“The government statistics and a diverse array of civil society organisations would suggest the UK does have important challenges dealing with poverty.”

The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, welcomed Alston’s plan to consider the impact of austerity.

“Austerity is a political choice made by Tory-led governments that cut spending on vital public services whilst, at the same time, handing out tax giveaways for giant corporations and the super-rich,” he said.

“Only last year, a separate UN investigation concluded that Tory spending cuts trampled on the human rights of disabled people, whilst the Institute for Fiscal Studies forecasts child poverty to hit record levels in the next few years.”

Previous UN missions to the UK have been highly controversial. In 2013, Raquel Rolnik, the UN rapporteur on housing, proposed the government suspend cuts to what it calls the spare room subsidy but is widely known as the bedroom tax and affects residents of social housing with spare rooms. Her report was dismissed as “a Marxist diatribe” by the then housing minister Kris Hopkins.

Alston is an Australian international human rights law expert currently based at New York University. When he toured the US, he studied homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles, poverty in African-American areas in Alabama and the stricken coal country of West Virginia. He has been a UN rapporteur since 2004 and has specialised in extreme poverty and human rights for the past four years.

A government spokesperson said: “The UK has a close working relationship with UN bodies and is committed to upholding the rule of law and rules-based international system. The UK has a standing invitation to all special rapporteurs, and it is UK government policy to accept and facilitate such visits, and to encourage other UN member states to do the same.

“Household incomes have never been higher and there are one million fewer people living in absolute poverty than in 2010, including 300,000 children. Poverty rates are falling while the employment rate is increasing which is really encouraging, and we’re committed to ensuring that every child gets the very best chances in life.”