The government is playing politics with poverty

Few would argue that growing up in poverty is anything but a bad thing: it robs children of the pleasures of childhood and damages their life chances to boot. But what we mean by poverty is currently being challenged through a public consultation on child poverty measurement. In truth, what looks like a technical exercise is much more political than it might, at first glance, seem.

In June 2012, when the government published the latest child poverty figures, it announced at the same time that it would revisit the question of how we measure child poverty. Measures that focus primarily on family incomes, it argued, do not fully capture the lived experience of children growing up in poverty.

So far, so good. Very few people would assert that the lives of children growing up in poverty are only characterised by low incomes. They are also marked by problems such as limited access to (often poor) services; by inadequate housing; and by their parents being ill, unhappy or in precarious, low paid jobs. But these other features of life on a low income are not the same as poverty; instead, as social scientists would put it, they are risk factors, correlates or consequences.

Adequate income
Poverty is widely understood as a lack of adequate resources, and in a developed country like the UK, the key resource required to live a decent life is an adequate income. As a result, most of the UK’s core measures of child poverty focus on family income. We track, for example, incomes held constant over time (absolute poverty) as well as how incomes change against the average (relative poverty). Both these measures provide us with critical, but different, information: the first tells us whether the living standards of some are dropping in real terms and the second, whether the fortunes of part of the population are drifting away from the majority over time.

Alongside this, we also measure material deprivation. We record whether children are going without key items such as a winter coat or fresh fruit, or if they are missing out on activities such as birthday parties or school trips. This information complements the income measures, illustrating the way that a lack of disposable income affects children’s lives as well as telling us more about the entrenched nature of poverty. Finally, a persistent poverty measure also provides information about the number of children who live below the poverty line for long periods.

We also collect extensive data on child wellbeing in the UK. We know a lot about the health and educational outcomes of children, the environments in which they grow up, and their own subjective assessment of their lives through datasets such as the Office for National Statistics Wellbeing series. Consequently, we do not lack measures in the UK; in fact, we are cited as a world leader in the collection and analysis of child data.

However, for the government, all this appears to be irrelevant. Instead, as part of its consultation, it is proposing to develop a new multi-dimensional indicator of child poverty. This would bring together a range of characteristics in a truly incoherent way. Factors that increase the risk of poverty (unemployment and poor parental health) would be brought together with those that correlate with poverty (poor schools and inadequate housing) along with others that are the consequence of low income (not being able to service one’s debt). By some statistical trick, all these different characteristics would be blended together and from this, the government would produce a single number that is supposed to tell us how many children live in poverty in the UK today.

Except, of course, that it will not. What it will tell us is how many children growing up in low-income households also experience multiple disadvantages: not in itself a bad thing to know, perhaps, but it is dishonest to pretend that to live in poverty children must also have parents who are workless, indebted, ill and poorly skilled as well as having a low income. We know that 60 per cent of children living in poverty today have at least one working parent; that 69 per cent live in families where no-one has a disability; and that 71 per cent live in couple families. A new definition of poverty that, to varying degrees, is contingent on worklessness, parental ill health or family stability would simply airbrush these children out of the picture.

In fact, this is exactly what we fear may happen. We know that the coalition’s austerity programme will dramatically increase child poverty as it is currently measured. Swingeing cuts to out-of-work benefits, restrictions on tax credits, the erosion of housing support, and now the delinking of benefit rates from inflation will all conspire to drive up child poverty over the next few years at a rate we have not seen in the UK since the 1980s.

It makes sense, then, that the government would want to develop a measure that is less sensitive to social security cuts in order to obscure the effect that these are having on the lives of vulnerable children. But what makes this consultation even more disingenuous is the way in which the government looks set to employ its new measure to evade its legal duties under the Child Poverty Act 2010.

The act obliges the government to make progress against four child poverty targets, each of which uses a slightly different measure but all of which are strongly linked to income. Because of this, the government’s programme of cuts cannot be reconciled with the act: it has had to admit, for example, that the recent decision to break the link between benefit