Disabled people or families with a disabled child. The additional costs of caring and limited access to the labour markets make this group of people particularly susceptible to poverty. Ethnic minorities who have much higher rates of unemployment and are disproportionately represented in low paid jobs. Pensioners, who are dependent on state benefits or small occupational benefits. The causes of poverty are hotly contested.
Recent trends cite individual weakness as the primary cause.
This approach owes more to the current fashion for 'market ideologies' than to fact. It gives individual actions enormous significance and ignores the technological and information revolution that has had a profound effect on industries and economies globally. Individual actions may, at times, be a contributory factor, but economic and social changes and demographic pressures are the main causes. In Scotland traditional industries have declined rapidly over the past 20 years, and any growth in employment has been within the service sector. Despite recent reductions in the rate of unemployment, large scale unemployment is now a fact of life for many thousands of Scottish families and their communities.