Consultation: Measuring child poverty

What is it all about? The government wants to adopt a new “multi-dimensional” way to measure child poverty, to provide a better picture of the scale of the issue. It is concerned that existing measures of family income do not accurately portray the circumstances in which children are living.

Under current measures, a child living in a household with an income of less than 60 per cent of average wages is considered to be in poverty. The government points to the fact that the most recent child poverty statistics revealed a large reduction in the number of children living below the relative poverty threshold, although in reality, the children who “moved out” of poverty were no better off than before. Rather, the drop in child poverty figures was due largely to a fall in the median income nationally, which pushed the poverty line down, with absolute poverty remaining unchanged.

What are the main points? The government wants to introduce a measure that will help calculate the total number of children in the UK experiencing “multiple dimensions” of poverty. It wants the new measure to show the severity of a child’s poverty, to help identify which groups of children are in greatest need. Such a measure would also show how poverty affects different groups of children, for example ethnic minorities or disabled children. It would be “widely accepted” by the public and experts as being a fair representation of child poverty.