Poverty: Metrics

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it would take more than three minutes to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, adequately, but I will use my introduction to give a commercial for the seminar that she and I, as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Statistics, will be holding in Room G on 12 February at 11 o’clock to go into these matters in more depth than is possible tonight.

Poverty statistics matter, not just as a proxy for misery almost inconceivable to Members of this House but because they underline other policy. When asked about the BBC licence fee in Oral Questions this afternoon, could the Minister have stood up and said that the Government want free licence fees for over-75s to go on, having read the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and seen that only 12% of over-75s are in poverty? This policy is misdirected and does not survive contact with the facts.

Poverty is a Janus-faced statistic in the sense that, on the one hand, it is breakfast, lunch and tea for geeks like me and, on the other, it is controversial, even ideological. We have heard that there is a gap between the right, which tends to prefer what it considers objective measures of poverty based on absolute levels, and the left, which tends to prefer relative measures. Very wisely, the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, has gone for a relative measure—55% of the median income—but her statistics are vastly more sophisticated than anything we have had in the past. They take account of families’ liquid assets and deal properly with the housing situation, which is important in poverty. This is a huge leap forward.

Personally, not being a great ideologist, I would be quite happy if we gave up disputing for evermore whether absolute or relative measures are right and settled for Stroud. As the noble Baroness would be the first to admit, there is more work to be done on her report. For example, I am concerned about the way it treats disability, important though that is. It would be much better to concentrate on those concerns than to allow this to be sucked once again into the endless maelstrom of political toings and froings and ideologically motivated views. Instead, let us settle for Stroud—or Stroud-plus, as it might be in today’s jargon—and use it from now on to see if we are really making progress against poverty.