Social Metrics Commission

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the report A new measure of poverty for the UK, published by the Social Metrics Commission in September 2018.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Buscombe) (Con)]

The Government welcome the work that the Social Metrics Commission has done. Measuring poverty is complex, and this report offers further insight into the nature of that complexity. The Social Metrics Commission report acknowledges that further work needs to be done, particularly around data availability and quality. We want to carefully consider the detail that underpins the methodology that the Social Metrics Commission has employed when this has been made available to us.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the commission, so ably led by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, on achieving such wide support for its innovative relative poverty measure. David Cameron pledged that the Conservative Party would recognise, measure and act on relative poverty, yet now Ministers repeatedly cite only the so-called absolute poverty statistics when challenged. What has changed to negate that pledge, other than the worrying increase in relative poverty since 2011-12, especially among children, and the Government’s regressive social security and other austerity policies that have taken their toll?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, the Government accept that the current suite of measures is not without limitations. However, the relative poverty line, for example, moves across with average income, which is useful when looking at whether groups are or are not keeping up with the middle of the income distribution over time, but it does not show whether the average income of those on the lowest incomes is improving in real terms. Therefore, if everyone’s income were to double tomorrow, the number of people in relative poverty would be unchanged. The absolute poverty line, on the other hand, moves with inflation, providing a better measure of how the income of those on low incomes compares with the cost of living.