Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Drake

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, these amendments raise important issues about the impact of the Bill on poverty. I simply want to raise a point about the measure of poverty that should be used.

At Second Reading, in her response to the debate the Minister referred to a fall in pensioner poverty since 2009-10 as measured by the so-called absolute poverty measure, and she did so again earlier this evening. In fact, it is not a measure of absolute poverty as such but is better described as an anchored measure which measures any change by adjusting the 2010-11 poverty line for inflation. In contrast, the House of Commons Library briefing, using the relative poverty measure, recorded an increase in pensioner poverty from an historic low of 13% in 2011-12 to 18% in 2019-20, as my noble friend Lady Sherlock said. With reference to Amendment 8, single female poverty is higher than the overall figure—a point already made.

However, the Minister was dismissive of the use of a relative measure, stating:

“The Government believe that absolute poverty is a better measure of living standards than relative poverty, which can provide counterintuitive results”.—[Official Report, 13/10/21; col. 1885.]


Criticisms of the relative poverty measure as potentially counterintuitive have tended to focus on when it is used for short-term, year-on-year comparisons, but, in this case, we are talking about a rise in relative poverty over a period of eight years, which surely should have triggered some alarm bells in the department.

Relevant here is a recent Work and Pensions Committee report. Although its focus was on measuring child poverty, what it has to say is relevant also to pensioner poverty. It states:

“The Secretary of State is of course right to say that a relative measure can, in the short term, produce counter-intuitive results—but it has great value for assessing long term trends. We are concerned to see Ministers focusing on a single measure, rather than drawing on the rich information offered by DWP’s own set of income-based measures, which combines relative, ‘absolute’ and broader material deprivation statistics … Ministers should reaffirm their commitment to measuring poverty through all four measures”.


Similarly, I have a Written Answer from the Minister’s predecessor, dated May 2018, which states:

“No one measure of poverty is able to fully capture the concept of a low standard of living in all economic circumstances.”


Yet increasingly, Ministers use the so-called absolute measure, as if it is the only appropriate measure. Will the Minister reaffirm that commitment as called for by the Work and Pensions Committee? After all, I remind her that, when he was leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron explained:

“We need to think of poverty in relative terms—the fact that some people lack those things that others in society take for granted. So I want this message to go out loud and clear: the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty.”


Can the Minister explain why that is no longer the case? What has changed, other than that the Government’s record on poverty looks worse using the relative poverty measure that Mr Cameron championed?

[Baroness Drake (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 3. To quote from a publication by the Institute for Fiscal Studies,

“We’ll know we are on the way to levelling up when differences in health and life expectancy across the country start to drop. Sadly, that’s one measure of inequality that has clearly been moving in the wrong direction over the past decade.”


Associated with those growing inequalities is pensioner poverty, which, as we have heard, has risen from 13% to 18% and is likely to rise even further. For older pensioners, the rise is even higher. With the rising energy and food costs that we can all see coming down the track, there will be a lot of old people this winter with very little money, sitting in cold houses, fearing that they will not get any help when they fall ill. That will be the reality for many thousands of people in the coming winter months.

We know that there is a major problem generally of households on low incomes with rising debt who will not be able to weather the storm of the growing cost-of-living problems that we are beginning to see. Then again, looked at from a regional perspective, in the majority of regions in England pensioner couples have average weekly incomes below the pensioner couple average, and we are seeing this problem in particular regions: in the north-east, the north-west, east Midlands, West Midlands, Yorkshire and indeed in London, which now has the highest relative level of pensioner poverty. As Imperial College research now shows us, life expectancy is falling in urban areas in these regions—in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and other areas. Cuts to health and social spending will have contributed to that trend, and we have not yet experienced a winter with the backlog that the NHS is dealing with.

Pensioners with low incomes are more sensitive to indexation changes because they are more dependent for their income on those benefits. Yet we have seen no assessment of the impact of suspending the triple lock, or indeed what could be the implications of decisions the Government will take next year or the year after, given that through the Bill they have suspended both the triple lock and the legislative underpin of earnings. We know that projected levels of pensioner poverty will vary according to the uprating provisions applied to the state pension, given its dominance in pensioner income. If you play negatively with pensioner income, pensioner poverty will go up. That sensitivity to indexation will continue to increase, as fewer and fewer pensioners reach state pension age without the generous defined benefits or defined contribution pensions which, in the past, cushioned the fall in the state pension that occurred under successive Governments.

Pensioner poverty is not a legacy issue. State pension is and remains a dominant source of income for the majority of both current and future pensioners. Research by the Pensions Policy Institute—your Lordships can tell that I am a governor—reveals that the UK is currently on course for a quarter of people approaching retirement being unlikely to receive even a minimum income. Of the 11 million people in the UK between the age of 50 and state pension age, around 3 million will not receive a minimum income.