Poverty: Metrics

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and the Legatum Institute on establishing the Social Metrics Commission and on her leadership. Whatever our political differences, if we agree that it is a primary responsibility of government to reduce poverty, we must welcome the establishment of a better database and an extensively agreed definition and description of poverty. I hope that all the parties will be able to accept that the account of poverty so far provided by the SMC is an improved basis for understanding, for debate and for the development of policy.

Confronted by the statistics in the SMC report—some of them highlighted just now by the noble Baroness— we should be dismayed. It is a collective failure that 4.5 million children are living in poverty, that 6.9 million people who are in poverty live in families with a disabled person, and that 7.7 million people are living in persistent poverty. The challenge, presented anew by the SMC, is to put the reduction of poverty front and centre in our politics.

The SMC has admirably sought not only to understand material poverty but to take account of the lived experience of poverty: for instance, social isolation and mental and physical ill health. As it develops its methodology, I hope that the SMC will consider adding an indicator of cultural poverty, which has a profound effect on well-being, thence health, thence material poverty.

The massive and cumbrous social security system cannot move fast and takes time to get things right, as we see with universal credit. But policy must take account of social change, rapid as it is, the fragmentation of class, immigration, changing economic geography, the impact of technology: the actual experience of people’s lives. The UK Government, which at the moment—extraordinarily—has no official measure of poverty, should surely adopt the model offered by the SMC.

The SMC’s data and method can help us understand and address with new seriousness and effectiveness the problem, so glaringly exposed by the Brexit referendum, of the “left behind” and their alienation. Informed by the SMC, we shall be better able, if we will, to redress burning injustices, rekindle hope, heal divisions and, I would add, rehabilitate politics.