Society: Julia Unwin wants to talk about evil. �Tabloids talk about people being evil all the time, but they are not so keen to talk about social evils,� she says.

Julia Unwin wants to talk about evil. "Tabloids talk about people being evil all the time, but they are not so keen to talk about social evils," she says.

With apparent prescience, she was speaking shortly before a police chief last week controversially branded Karen Matthews, who effectively kidnapped her own daughter, Shannon, as "pure evil".

"We want to have a different kind of conversation," Unwin said. She has been accused of wallowing in pessimism in some quarters, as part of the response to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's new Social Evils project. But the chief executive of the JRF gives the idea short shrift.

This spring, the think tank's latest abitious project will be launched north of the border. The Social Evils forum is a deliberate attempt to go back to JRF's roots, to when it was set up by Joseph Rowntree to help lead and inform social policy.

Rowntree set out the key social evils of his day, which included slavery, opium, war and private ownership. Now Unwin wants an update for the present day.

Tomorrow sees the publication of two new papers on inequality, which has been identified as one of the key evils of the present day, over the course of research involving more than 3500 people through a series of public meetings and the internet.

Among the other modern evils identified for debate by the public are drugs and alcohol, crime and violence, and the decline of the family. Underlying trends identified by JRF include a "distrusting and fearful society", and a lack of community.

Some of the problems raised by the public are conflicting. Religion for instance, as sizeable portions identify it as the cause of much evil, but another faction is keen to blame social decline on the wane of religion. Likewise, immigration is highlighted as a problem by many, while racism is chosen as a social evil by others.

For Unwin, who will describe the progress of the project at the annual conference of the Urban Forum in Manchester today, the contradictions aren't immediately important. What matters, she says, is that JRF has engaged thousands of people and they have agreed that change is needed.

"Our main role has been to produce very strong outcome-based research for the past 50 years, and we'll do it for 50 more", she says.

"We don't think this is wallowing in pessimism'. I think it is profoundly optimistic. People have a feeling of unease. There is a sense that we have so much now, but still that something is not right here. For not much money, we found out a lot.

"Our focus groups included people from all sorts of backgrounds, but they all said much the same things. It's not right that we have massive inequality, or that kids are growing up in economic and emotional poverty. And there is a problem with our failure to absorb newcomers."

Coming up with answers isn't simply an intellectual exercise: JRF has the ear of government. Most obviously, that includes the UK Labour Government, although Unwin is quick to identify the foundation as completely independent in a party political sense.

"Our purpose is to find out why there are problems, spotlight the really difficult ones and demonstrate different ways of intervening. It makes us a fantastically influential organisation and through the decades you can see examples where we have changed the terms of debate and changed the way public policy works."

She would like to spotlight progress in Scotland, praising developments since devolution. Figures on levels of poverty and social exclusion produced by the foundation show child poverty in Scotland to be among the lowest in the UK at 25%.

"It's ironic that people from Scotland and other countries in the UK trundle off around the world to see how it's done over there. But we aren't so good at looking at what is happening here," she says, adding that she was impressed by the "huge rush of energy" that accompanied devolution.

Poverty is a key target for JRF, hence Unwin's admiration for Scotland's achievements. The Scottish Government's framework for tackling child poverty, she claims, has come up with significant measures, including more flexible working and childcare. But alone these will never tackle child poverty while in-work poverty remains so high, she argues. "The framework needs to do more where parents are working and still poor. Our research shows 50% of children in poverty have a working parent."

National and local government have a vested interest in dealing with child poverty because the long-term costs of doing nothing are enormous, she insists - all the more so in the current context of recession and increasing unemployment.

Unwin has little truck with the idea prevalent in the media that this will be a "white collar" recession, with the middle-class taking the brunt. "Every time a banker lose his job, a whole lot of other people lose theirs too: the person who makes his sandwich, or cleans his loo."

As the figures for home- ownership have pushed up - encouraged by Government - to something like 70%, Unwin believes many have been stretched too far and may lose their homes. Research by the foundation - dating from seven years ago - showed that children lose a year's education every time they move school. "That can easily happen two or three times if they become homeless," she adds.

There are other social costs. Unemployment affects the way couples get along, affecting marital and perhaps mental health. "The costs are dreadful for the individual and the whole of society," Unwin says.

She suggests families unable to keep up with mortgage payments should be allowed to convert to renting for a period in order to avoid repossession.

There may be one positive outcome, from JRF's point of view, to a widespread recession. Public attitudes to those out of work may change. More people in the UK than in comparable countries simply don't believe there is poverty here. "They have been quite protected from it and don't understand it," Unwin says. "By and large if people are out of work, the public think it's because they are lazy or feckless. Previous recessions suggest they may change people's attitudes, as we will all know someone who has lost their job."

It will be a challenging time for those engaged in getting people back to work - arguably a mini-industry in the central belt.

Unwin warns against welfare-to-work providers switching too readily to help the newly unemployed back into work. "They may end up focusing on people who they can get into work more quickly. Where will that leave those people who have been told that getting a job is the best way to improve their health?" she asks.

For the public sector, there is also the challenge ahead of holding it's nerve in a worsening economic climate, according to Unwin. As employers, councils and other public-sector bodies can resist some of the economic pressures she argues, and, for example, continue to build while the private sector is calling a halt to capital programmes. "The role of the public sector as an employer is going to be fantastically important,"

she says. "It is not bound by a duty to shareholders and has to recognise that making savage cuts very quickly creates more problems for the public sector in the long term.

"For example, the expense of helping children raised in poverty is so high that failing to meet government targets on child poverty costs the economy an estimated £25bn."

Public sector organisations, she argues, should do everything they can to get and keep people in work, including offering employees greater flexibility.

"Keeping people working is the best way of keeping them out of poverty," she says. "We know what the last recession did to communities, and we know it was profoundly damaging to families."

Unequal Britain
In a context where poverty is often dismissed if people have widescreen TVs, DVD players or mobile phones, JRF asked what the average person believes is necessary for modern life.

The charity asked people who do not live in poverty what would be necessary for a lifestyle that was "modest, but not austere".

Most said pensioners need enough money to buy two presents a year for grandchildren, adults need a basic mobile phone and children of school age need home access to the internet. The foundation concluded that 25% of people in Britain are living below minimum standards.

Julia Unwin doesn't believe the findings mean benefit levels should be raised immediately. "That would be crazy," she says.

"But we need to recognise that if we are saying people can lead a perfectly good life on that income, most of their peers simply don't think so.

"How much inequality are we prepared to put up with?"