Poverty is being passed on: it is a child alarm. And in the North, destitute families have doubled

For minors, 'disadvantage,' the document states, 'is now endemic, given that for more than a decade poverty has tended to increase as age decreases. The younger one is, the greater the likelihood of experiencing conditions of need. Almost one in four of the destitute - 1.295 million - is under the age of 18. Families in absolute poverty where minors are present number almost 748,000, 34% of the total in this bracket. It is not surprising that households composed only of foreigners are the poorest and that children have expenditure levels far below the poverty threshold.

Poverty among those in employment continues to grow 'worryingly', the report notes. Work has ceased to act as a shield and now accounts for 8% of the employed (it was 7.7% in 2022). If one compares the incidence of poverty between blue-collar and white-collar workers and the unemployed, the gap is only 4 percentage points (16.5 versus 20.7 per cent), which is vanishingly small. One only has to look at the figure for annual gross wages to understand why: between 2013 and 2023 they increased by just 16 per cent, against a European average of 30.8 per cent. Worse still for real wages: Italy is the only European country where they have been declining since 2013 (-4.5 per cent decline in the purchasing power of annual gross wages, against +3 per cent for the EU average). The "reduced duration of contracts" and the "spread of less protected types of contract, especially among women, young people and foreigners" count. The conclusion is discouraging: 'It is as if employment in our country were polarising between a high and guaranteed band and a low and less protected band, characterised by low wages, precariousness and involuntary part-time work'.

In 2023, compared to 5.7 million absolute poor, the number of people supported by the Caritas network was 269,689 (see the June report), which corresponds to about 12% of the households in absolute poverty estimated in our country. Requests for help since 2015 have increased by 41.6%, in line with the growth of the absolute poor. And the territories registering the largest increase are those of the South and Islands (+53.3%) and, in line with the data mentioned above, Northern Italy (+52.1%). There are new poverties - the report notes - and return poverties. Intermittent', discontinuous, multidimensional poverty, "which can be said to be correlated, precisely, with intermittent employment careers, with fluid relationships, just as unstable as housing conditions and health status often appear to be".

Psychological and psychiatric distress is worrying on the rise among Caritas beneficiaries: from 2022 to 2023 the number of people suffering from depression or mental illness increased by 15.2 per cent. The homeless make up 19.2 per cent of the total number of people assisted: 34,554 assisted in 2023, up from 27,877 in 2022. The elderly grew from 12.1 per cent to 13.4 per cent: 35,875 over 65 supported, compared to 30,692 in 2022.

Besides devoting a chapter to the prison planet, where the application of community measures is encouraged, the report devotes ample space to the housing issue. Pointing out the absence of a national plan to relaunch housing policies, Caritas recalls that one and a half million families live in overcrowded, poorly-lit dwellings without services such as running water in the bathroom. Five per cent of the households struggle to pay their mortgage repayments or rent and utility bills. Of these, most do not own a house. At the Caritas Listening Centres, the housing dimension is the third among the problems reported, involving 22.7% of the users.

At the end of the report, Caritas analyses the new instruments that have replaced the citizenship income: the inclusion cheque and the support for job training. The number of households reached - the research highlights - has 'reduced by half, leaving 331,000 households without support, many of which are resident in the North, live in rented accommodation or are single-person households, categories excluded due to the new criteria in force'. There is an access clause for those in a 'disadvantaged condition' (such as the homeless or victims of trafficking), but the number of beneficiaries remains limited due to long and binding bureaucratic procedures. For this reason too, the suggestion is to improve coverage to guarantee support for the excluded poor, rebalance the amounts to compensate for the areas of the country where poverty is on the rise (Centre and North), simplify procedures, and restore a universal and continuous support system "for greater equity in the fight against poverty". The recommendation is always the same: measures to combat poverty must not be plunged from above, designed on the drawing board. They must 'start with the poor'.