Poverty: Metrics

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, on securing this debate and I pay tribute to her for the way she has led the work of the Social Metrics Commission. I declare an interest as chair of the Making Every Adult Matter coalition of charities, whose director served as a commissioner.

In the very short time available, I am tempted simply to say, “What gets measured, gets done” and sit down again, but throughout my professional career and as a member of your Lordships’ House I have been struck by how central the experience of poverty is to so many of the big social issues we debate. The direct impact of poverty is felt by one in five of the population and the indirect impacts ripple further still. Furthermore, the link between poverty and multiple disadvantage is deeply entrenched. This is brought home to me regularly through my work with the Making Every Adult Matter coalition, which focuses on the multiple and complex needs of 60,000 adults experiencing a combination of homelessness, substance misuse, mental health problems and contact with the criminal justice system. For these reasons I have followed the work of the Social Metrics Commission with keen interest.

The goal of the commission was to provide a new consensus around poverty measurement that enables government to take action and improve the lives of people in poverty. In my opinion, the absence of robust and clear measures, particularly the abandonment in 2016 of the child poverty targets, has contributed to the rising tide of poverty. Indeed, the IFS predicts a continuing rise in child poverty up to 2022. The measurement of poverty has for too long been a hot potato, with too much time being given to arguing about how and whether to measure poverty and not enough time devoted to taking action to reduce it. It was therefore vital that the commission was an independent and rigorously non-partisan entity, bringing together people of all political persuasions and none. The fact that the commission has produced a measure that is backed in its entirety by all its commissioners is testament indeed to the consensual way in which it has been led by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud.

As we have heard, the commission has produced a new measure of poverty, which for the first time takes account of the total resources available to an individual, not just income. I am very pleased also to see links made between poverty and multiple disadvantage. I conclude by saying how strongly I hope that this measure is adopted by political parties and campaigners, but above all by the Government as their official measure of poverty, so that they can put in place meaningful policies to reduce poverty and address the plight of those who suffer from it. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.