Poverty: Metrics

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, for her key role in achieving a remarkable consensus on the vexed question of poverty measurement and for her willingness to shift her own previous position. I have three points. First, one of the report’s key principles is a restatement of a relative understanding of poverty,

“related to the extent to which people have the resources to engage adequately in a life regarded as the ‘norm’ in society”.

This stands in contrast to Ministers’ repeated reference to so-called absolute poverty statistics, in denial of the increase in relative poverty as their policies have begun to bite, and despite David Cameron’s promise that,

“the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty”.

Secondly, Ministers also tend to use the “before housing costs” stats, even though housing costs contribute to poverty. Where the report is truly innovative is in its measurement of total resources available, including also, as the noble Baroness said, a proxy measure of disability costs. As she said, this indicates that poverty among disabled people is seriously underestimated by conventional measures that take account of disability costs benefits but not of the disability costs these are supposed to meet. Will the Minister tell us the Government’s position on this very important point and also her response to the report’s evidence of even more extensive poverty among working-age families with children than shown in the Government’s own comparable stats?

Thirdly, the report rightly includes a measure of poverty depth—in other words, distance below the poverty line, sometimes called the poverty gap, and clearance above the line. This is really important. The experience of poverty is very different for the more than 4 million people the report estimates as living 50% or more below the poverty line and for the 1.3 million living within 5% of it. Professor Jonathan Bradshaw’s analysis of poverty gaps shows that children, on average, are living further below the poverty line than they did seven years ago. Will the Government undertake to publish regular poverty depth statistics?

In conclusion, I welcome this report and, while we may well continue to need the existing poverty measures for comparative purposes, I hope that the Government will respond positively to its recommendations.