Announcements from the Chancellor today centre airport expansion and football stadiums over engagement with devastating levels of poverty in the here and now. It’s time to challenge an economic approach stuck on cruise control.

For the millions across the UK with caring responsibilities, jetting off to a sun-soaked holiday is far from the experience of their day to day lives. Yet it is the announcement of a third runway at Heathrow, rather than urgent ideas to address the scale of our economic inequality and hardship, that dominated Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech today. In reality, whilst a third runway might dangle promises of economic growth it will do nothing to address the entrenched poverty across the UK.

In fact, few might be able to find the connection between the challenges they’re experiencing and the array of announcements today. For example, also announced was the expansion of Manchester United’s ground. Care Full co-founder Ruth lives right next door and she’s struggling to see the benefit, so how can we expect it nationally? Simply relying on the idea that “economic growth” will come and be the thing that makes our lives better is running out of steam.

At the same time Rachel Reeves’s speech was being trailed in the morning news, JRF released their latest Poverty in the UK report. Their research finds that it’s been over 20 years since there was a meaningful decrease in poverty levels in the UK, and that in the last year poverty has deepened. At Care Full we often quote evidence from this work that those with a relationship with care – unpaid carers, disabled people, single parents – disproportionately experience poverty and today’s update to the data shows that continues to be true. This isn’t by chance. Our economy devalues care and marginalises those who have a relationship with work and the economy that doesn’t fit neatly under a banner of employment.

Despite a recent change in government our economic policy remains on cruise control. A hyper-focus on growth relies on an outdated model (whisper trickle down) and is obscuring a more inclusive economy centred on fairness and equality. Interventions too often tend towards benefitting big business, developers and hedge funds over people. This leaves many of our lives shaped instead by under-resourced public services, wage stagnation, poor work and precarious working conditions. It also fosters dangerous narratives about what counts in the economy, enabling divisive language like ‘economic inactivity’ to other those whose lives don’t fit the mould.

And so it’s been a morning of two halves; a damning indictment of the need for radical change in how we manage our economy, and a series of announcements drawn from a dangerously outdated playbook.

These business pleasing announcements need to be married with improved working conditions (safer sick pay, improved sick leave, care leave etc), improved pay and recognition that our public services and social security system are worth investing in. It is attention on these changes that will ultimately enable to both citizens and the economy to thrive.

Years of expecting top-down growth to translate to a fairer society hasn’t worked. We need ideas that meet the urgency of widespread poverty and enable us to care for each other and the planet better.