APPENDIX A
RESPONSE TO THE DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS
CONSULTATION ON CHILD POVERTY MEASUREMENT, JULY 2002
Note: The answers follow the numbers
in the printed response form.
(IV) EXPERIENCE
OF CHILD
POVERTY AND
MEASUREMENT
My experience of child poverty is both personal
(in childhood) and academic. I have been engaged in research since
1964 into poverty concepts, definitions and measures, and into
government responses to them in their income maintenance systems,
particularly social assistance. I have studied the UK Government's
policies on these matters from the 1930s onwards, based on primary
sources in departmental files and interviews with senior officials,
and have published the only account so far of the unique official
study of the adequacy of the benefit rates (1999a). Following
the suggestion of the Social Security Advisory Committee in 1991,
I have also reported on how the Governments of 10 other countries
around the world consider the adequacy of their income maintenance
benefits and set governmental minimum income standards (1998).
My work emphasises the distinction between political and scientific
objectives, methods and measures, a distinction which is not mentioned
in the consultation document but which is especially relevant
to it.
INTRODUCTION: GENERAL
ISSUES
Two Different Interpretations of the Consultation
Question must be Distinguished Before the Issues in the Document
can be Addressed, (a) and (b).
1. (a) The question, "how should child
poverty be measured?" evokes two disparate kinds of answers.
One is the answer to the question, "by what measure can you
capture all the multifarious qualities of child poverty?"
The other is "by what measure can you count how many people
are in poverty?" These are completely different questions,
but if the Government is to make effective policy it is essential
that it can distinguish between the answers.
2. The Prime Minister promised to abolish
child poverty by 2019. This requires an answer to the second question.
The implications of this distinction between what are essentially
issues for social science and what are essentially political issues
are discussed below. Many people respond to the question in this
very welcome consultation by addressing issues around a better
understanding of the wide variety of concepts, definitions and
approaches to child poverty, and the variety of qualitative and
quantitative measures to which each approach gives rise. By contrast,
my response focuses chiefly on the second question. I am just
as interested in the first question, but I do not believe it is
the salient issue in this consultation.
3. (b) Many consultants and respondents
advise that the Government retains the HBAI measure of the distributive
inequality of household incomes as the chief (or significant)
measure of child poverty. This confuses the political importance
of inequality in the UK (and the demands for greater redistribution
to reduce it) with the need to establish what are minimally adequate
household income levels at which the many qualities of poverty
can be overcome. These are two entirely distinct concepts and
measures which should not be confused with each other.
4. The Government should continue to collect
data on income inequality, but if it does no more than this it
risks never being able to abolish child poverty, because it has
no means of knowing what level of incomes and other essential
resources are needed to overcome it, or of taking steps to ensure
that all children have access to them. If the Government aims
to achieve its poverty abolition target, income inequality statistics
can never be a substitute for the indispensable collection of
reliable statistics on the adequacy of incomes and their distribution.
This issue is discussed further below.
(1) WHAT ASPECTS
SHOULD BE
CAPTURED IN
A LONG-TERM
MEASURE?
5. There are as many aspects as the definition
of child poverty chosen. The Government must decide how broad
its definition is to be and measure all aspects of it. The broader
the definition, the more aspects have to be measured; the narrower
the definition, the fewer. Note that all authorities agree that
child poverty cannot be measured independently of the situation
of the family or household in which they are living. The poverty
of a child can be understood separately from that of its family
or household, but for practical measurement purposes (under the
present conditions of household resource dynamics and data collection)
the poverty of children has to be subsumed under that of its household.
CONDITION OR
RESOURCES?
6. The usual meaning of poverty is a lack
of sufficient resources to "buy" oneself and one's dependants
out of a host of deprivations and exclusions and into full social
participation. For the Government's counting purposes, it may
be enough to measure those resources—chiefly cash flows
and other assets which can be converted into cash flows.
7. On the other hand, if the Government's
preferred definition means the social condition of being poor,
including a broad sweep of deprivations and exclusions and not
only power over fungible resources such as cash incomes, then
they must all be precisely delineated and measured. The Government
is concerned about a wide range of social evils described in Opportunity
for All and should work to abolish them as well. But they
are not all aspects of poverty in any of the usual meanings of
the word. Credibility will be lost if the target is so diffuse,
and it will be much harder to achieve.
8. In either case it is essential to have
empirically well-founded measures of how much is needed, whether
of resources to achieve a satisfactory condition, or of the qualities
of that condition. For example, if the Government believes that
parents without employment, low levels of children's school attainment
or health inequalities should be included as conditions of child
poverty, then in order to set its targets and measure achievement
it must be able to answer such questions as, how little worklessness
is enough, what educational attainment is not poverty, what health
inequalities are tolerable and to whom?
9. Similarly, the document states that "Low
income is a key aspect of child poverty" (para 14), and the
Government minister and officials at the consultation workshop
in London on 20 June reiterated that low income is the single
most important aspect of poverty and is seen as a key issue. This
view was supported and reinforced by Professor John Hills and
others there. However, it must be noted that `low income' as such
need not be a deprivation or the cause of deprivations, provided
that at its lowest it is still enough for what society defines
as adequacy for decent performance and participation. Income is
the indispensable mediating resource for avoiding the bad conditions
of deprivations and social evils and getting out of poverty, but
a measurement of income level tells us nothing if we do not know
if it is adequate for social inclusion and thus its purpose of
measuring poverty (at income levels below it).
10. The document states that "Action
to tackle child poverty must therefore raise the incomes of the
poorest families" (para 18), but to what level? Only social
science, not politics, can answer this question. In every field
the UK Government sets quantified measurable targets, except for
income. Since low income is ineradicable (there must always be
some level of income which is lower than some other), measuring
income distribution cannot be a measure of poverty. The Government
must therefore discover what level of low income is sufficient
to abolish child poverty.
POLITICAL OR
SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES?
11. Which aspects of poverty should be measured
also depends on whether one has political or scientific objectives.
A social science approach would suggest that research must discover
empirically how UK society defines and experiences poverty and
the associated forms of deprivation and social exclusion. It would
also study such questions as human rights and other relevant value
systems which might shed another light on UK society's approach
to poverty, as well as reviewing expert evidence on physiological
and psychological needs and the resources and environments which
supply them adequately within the parameters set by UK social
convention and current scientific knowledge of human development
in time and place. Examination of this collected qualitative and
quantitative data would allow the development of indicators and
measures relevant to the forms of child poverty which international
values and UK society recognise.
12. In the UK these would include measures
of the quality of family life and of its social, psychological
and physical security, of housing and its environment, of socialisation
and education from birth, of the conditions of life and work of
parents or carers. The measures would include not only the "output"
measures of achievement of the variety of norms of conventional
experience and performance which society sets, but also of power
over the resources available to the families, both collective
and individual, tangible and intangible, which allow those norms
to be achieved. Among the most important individual and tangible
resources in a marketised economy such as that of the UK is income—the
family's or household's discretionary purchasing power. Other
measures (such as expenditure) may capture what the family has
achieved, but only the purchasing power at its disposal measures
what it can do, and what choices it has the power to make, in
those aspects of life where money is relevant.
13. A satisfactory scientific measure of
poverty is one where empirical research would be able to show
how far the deprivations and social evils it embraces are being
experienced, and by whom and where. From a scientific perspective,
poverty is not abolished until the evidence shows that no one
is poor by this empirically derived social definition, irrespective
of the political or financial implications. Similarly, the resources
found by such intensive research methods to be needed to abolish
this poverty are matters entirely for scientific determination,
even if government is unwilling or unable to supply them. Previous
governments' claims that implementing policies to deal with scientific
findings about poverty levels was "too expensive" is
not an objection to their integrity but is a confusion between
scientific and political objectives.
14. The political objective is quite different.
What that objective is may vary, but its specific form relates
very directly to the aims of any specified government. In this
case, the New Labour Government has promised to halve child poverty
by 2010 and to abolish it by 2019. As Baroness Hollis has recently
stated:
"We need . . . to arrive at a measurement
of poverty that is transparent, robust and holds government to
account, and, in turn, gives government proper policy levers in
order to take action." (House of Lords, 3 July 2002, col
218)
15. The answer to the first consultation
question is, then, that if the Government's objective as stated
here is to be met, it must capture each aspect of poverty at issue
in a discrete measure (transparent and robust, and meeting the
document's requirement that "if policies are working, there
should be an improvement in the indicator"). These measures,
and the standards on which they are based, must be drawn from
the scientific research and not from political prescription, since
the latter lacks public credibility based on human experience.
16. In addition, the choice of measures
and indicators needs to be based on an analytical understanding
of the chain of necessary resources and intermediate goals towards
the final objective. Which of these are inputs and which are outputs?
That can be answered only by analysis of the whole chain—no
single factor is an input or output, a resource or a condition
alone.
(2) THE CRITERIA
OF A
GOOD INDICATOR
17. Because of the confusion between scientific
and political objectives, the document discusses indicators as
if this were a scientific matter, when what in fact became clear
in the consultation workshop on 20 June was that the Government
objective is the search for a political measure, amenable to policy
(as Baroness Hollis reiterated, quoted above) which can literally
be headlined in the media.
18. The consultation document quotes Professor
Sir Tony Atkinson's report to the EU on social indicators. The
nine principles and four recommendations in his chapter 2 were
written to offer diagnostic tools for EU comparative and indicative
purposes. This is not the same objective as the DWP desire for
measures which will show if the UK Government has managed to reduce
or abolish what it defines as child poverty. Naturally, the UK
Government should measure everything needed to generate internationally
comparable data, with long term series, disaggregable and so on,
including income inequalities. This is a both/and question, not
an either/or. The real issue here is what are good indicators
of child poverty which are both publicly credible and unambiguous
as well as scientifically robust, for use in the UK over two decades?
19. The document also considers that a good
indicator will reflect child outcomes rather than processes, giving
as an example children in workless households rather than DWP
policy achievements in employment placements. But to be workless
is not necessarily to be poor, and lacking work is not synonymous
with poverty. Examination of the range of households shows that
there are rich households in which no adult is in employment,
but the children are not in poverty as a result. The real issue
is of course not the employment status of parents if they have
adequate incomes from assets, but that in the absence of assets
unemployment is likely to cause loss of adequate income. Similarly,
there are many households in which adults have employment but
do not earn adequate incomes. How are they to be measured? The
idea that employment (not work, which everyone does, unpaid if
not paid) is the salient poverty issue when in fact it is adequate
income, is a conceptual confusion (unemployment is of course both
a social and a political issue for other reasons). The outcomes
for children certainly should be measured, but the policy implications
of deprivations and shortfalls are that the inputs are insufficient
to achieve the Government's output goals—and that means,
among other things, measuring the adequacy of incomes, in employment
as well as out of it.
20. To say that a good indicator "should
be readily summarised" does not require that a multi-faceted
set of indicators should be collapsible into a single score or
headline. As Sir Tony Atkinson and his colleagues wisely remark,
"We have also to be aware of the temptation to aggregate
indicators. Journalists writing about trends will tend to count
pluses and minuses" (2002 p 25). Conversely, a measure or
indicator which—perhaps because of its technical intricacy
and robustness—manages to persuade the media and public
figures that it reflects child poverty might therefore meet the
political objective, but might be totally unsatisfactory for the
scientific purposes of monitoring whether government policy achieves
its objectives.
21. A current example in the income field
is the use of statistical measures of income inequality as substitutes
for measures of income adequacy. There is no evidence that 60%
of equivalised median household incomes is enough, too much or
too little for families to buy themselves out of poverty. There
is some dated evidence that it is too little. Research could be
carried out to find the current point on the income distribution
scale at which (equivalised) households do, on average, manage
to avoid the deprivations and social evils. Other research could
discover, using budget methods, what level of living was affordable
at 60% of median incomes, to see if that level of living avoided
or reinforced the deprivations and social evils. But such research
has not yet been done.
22. Like low income or worklessness, some
of the other indicators the Government mentions, such as education,
are not in themselves indicators of poverty. What the Government
implicitly means is that, for instance, better educational qualifications
may lead to—but do not guarantee—higher paid jobs
in the labour market. Once again the subject is money as the means
in the chain of resources to meet ends, which themselves become
resources for a further objective (a better condition of life),
not about education as such.
PUBLIC CREDIBILITY?
23. Measures and their indicators must be
(the document states) "credible with the public". It
does not state which salient public this is, but it clearly must
include the media and politicians. It is not clear how far either
of these articulate but often uninformed groups of the public
outweigh the opinions of the often inarticulate but well-informed
sections of the public who experience deprivations, exclusions
and social evils at first hand.
24. Professor Hills is quoted as demanding
four kinds of credibility for indicators—political, policy,
public and technical—and Fran Bennett (at the consultation
workshop, London, 20 June 2001) added credibility with people
in poverty. This set is similar to the US National Academy of
Sciences' recommendation that the US Governmental minimum income
standard (MIS) should be publicly acceptable, statistically defensible
and operationally feasible (Citro and Michael 1995). The US measure
is quoted in the document as "the official poverty line",
but this is a misnomer since it does not measure poverty empirically
but instead prescribes a MIS, a political measure of income alleged
to be sufficient for a prescribed minimum level of living.
25. The credibility of measures and indicators
with two much larger sections of the public, apart from politicians
and the media, is indispensable. One is the views of the public
as a whole about what deprived conditions or lack of resources
would not be acceptable to them if they had to experience them.
The other is the views of the large minority of the public who
actually experience the bad conditions and lack of resources.
Only they know from experience what the salient conditions or
key resource lacks are. A credible long term measure or indicator
of child poverty must satisfy both of these publics. In both cases
the crucial issue is not what anyone thinks is poverty for someone
else, but what it actually is, or would be, for oneself.
26. My view of the criteria for indicators
on page 19 is that the technical ones are acceptable, but the
policy and achievement indicators need far more careful thought
about the objectives to be achieved, and by which policies, than
they seem to have had.
(3) SUMMARY OR
HEADLINE MEASURE
OF CHILD
POVERTY
27. There are many very sophisticated technical
fixes which may satisfy the technical methodological experts and
some of the technical criteria but, because of the widespread
confusion between scientific and political objectives, may be
politically useless. Even the current usage of income inequality
statistics always evokes from journalists the question, "yes,
but what does `an equivalised household income at 60% of the median'
actually mean in pounds per week?" This is the hard and unavoidable
question which the Government has got to be able to answer as
long as it wants to use this kind of inequality low income statistic
as a proxy headline indicator for poverty.
28. The question is, how can the UK Government
achieve public acceptability and credibility for any headline
indicator of child poverty which is not based on a measure of
adequate family income? The mass of sophisticated data the document
refers to will not have credibility with the public if they do
not include what the public sees as the key indicator. The British
Social Attitudes 18th Report (Sage, 2001) shows that this is a
money measure and not a host of multi-dimensional statistics (see
Professor Hills's chapter 1 on "Poverty and Social Security:
What rights? Whose responsibilities?"). And how can these
criteria of good indicators be achieved to ensure the technical
requirement that the indicator measures what it purports to measure,
if the only income measure on offer is unequal income?
29. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has
himself made it clear that he believes that the real issue is
not income inequality alone but whether the lowest incomes are
enough to enable people to get out of poverty. Repeatedly asked
by Jeremy Paxman "is it acceptable for the gap between the
rich and poor to get bigger?" (BBC Newsnight, 4 June 2001),
Tony Blair repeatedly replied:
It is acceptable for those people on lower incomes
to have their incomes raised. It is unacceptable that they are
not given the chances . . . What I am saying is the issue isn't
in fact whether the very richest person ends up becoming richer.
The issue is whether the poorest person is given the chance that
they don't otherwise have. Reducing inequality is an important
objective in the fight against poverty, but by concentrating on
measuring only income inequality, the DWP is failing to act upon
the Prime Minister's assertion that incomes adequate "to
give people chances" also have to be targeted. Clearly this
cannot be at a level inadequate for a decent life. [Postscript
September 2003: the Chancellor of the Exchequer told an IPPR conference
that "equality of opportunity is not enough, fairness of
outcome matters just as much". (Polly Toynbee, The Guardian,
10.9.03, p 22). An outcome leaving people in poverty cannot be
considered to be fair.]
30. It really does not matter what I or
any of the many technical and methodological experts think would
make a good headline measure, as long as the UK public, and all
the journalists who feed them, think of the summary of poverty
as being too little money to live on decently. And as long as
they all do, the Government cannot meet its target without a household
disposable income measure which (a) tells us what science shows
is enough to live on in the UK to avoid all the deprivations and
social evils the public as well as the Government are concerned
about, and (b) what proportion of the population are actually
(not just statistically modelled) living below that level. That
and that alone is the summary measure, the headline, which will
be credible to the publics the Government cares about.
31. While the Government is right to be
concerned about many dimensions of poverty, deprivation and exclusion,
and it should measure them all, separately, so that it can analyse
and target policy effectively, if it wants a single headline summary
of child poverty, there is—in the public view—no substitute
for a measure of adequate family income.
(4) THE OPTIONS
ON OFFER
Option One
32. The challenge of the criteria for an effective
indicator would be met by the use of the governmental minimum
income standard (MIS) as the headline measure, as in USA, showing
(if it can be done) that the Government had ensured that all families
with children had permanent incomes from earnings and child benefits
(including tax credits), or temporarily from augmented social
security at a lower level, which were consistent with its MIS.
33. The many other dimensions of poverty
are each separate experience's for the poor, and as such cannot
be offset against each other. Experts such as John Micklewright
and Professor Hills (in their papers to the DSS/CASE 19 July 2000
discussion of indicators, CASE Report 13) advise that clear and
separate indicators should be used in the first place, and I agree
with this opinion.
34. Each issue about which the Government
is concerned and which it sees as an aspect of child poverty should
be clearly identified, and measured and reported on separately.
That might be more than the five issues mentioned in the document,
and it might be other issues. Further, the low income measure
should not be an arbitrary percentile on a statistical income
distribution but an empirically-derived measure of adequate income.
Any judgements about aggregating the findings of empirical evidence
should be made only by an independent commission of experts, for
example triangulating data to set a governmental minimum income
standard, not by politicians or officials.
Option Two
35. The compositing of statistical scores
from disparate dimensions of poverty would create endless controversy
among experts and be publicly incomprehensible, because it leads
to and reflects confusion between scientific and political objectives.
36. Whatever may be useful as a development
index in UN comparison circles, this has nothing to do in political
terms with satisfying the UK media or public that poverty is being
or has been abolished, if people still feel that their incomes
are insufficient and the Government cannot show that each of the
income-related deprivations or social evils has been abolished.
Option Three
37. Option three is another confusion between
technical fix and social realities—and a diversion from
the political objective. Having a relatively unequal income and
suffering from socially-defined deprivations are doubtlessly bad
and worth reporting, but the Government will not be believed if
it tries to convince the public that people are not poor because
they do not have both characteristics in this measure even while
they still suffer many deprivations.
38. The Irish Government's Final Report
of the Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Group (Dublin
2001) examined this (Irish) proposal at length to evaluate its
usefulness. It reported the criticisms that the validity of the
measure was highly dependent on the topicality of the deprivation
indicators included (the Irish indicators had been unchanged for
14 years); that it identified "a specific group of people
with a particular experience of poverty, (but) does not identify
all those who are poor; (and) it simply distinguishes between
the very poor and the poor, a distinction that tends to lead in
practice to a situation where the poor receive far less priority
than is required if their situation is to be tackled" (p70).
Such criticism needs to be taken seriously.
39. The UK Government did not promise to
abolish a poverty based on such an incomplete and misleading artificial
construct, but to abolish child poverty as measured across a range
of aspects. This option does not begin to address that problem
and it will have no political credibility.
Option Four
40. Professor Hills is quoted as offering a
set of statistical indicators which measure income inequalities
over time, together with the Irish measure (above). This option
may help the Government to see how far it has come, and will be
of interest to historians, but it is questionable if stationary
"absolute" statistical measures of income dispersion
will help the Government to achieve its goals. No government would
dare to claim that it had abolished poverty by a 20-year-old outdated
standard rather than by the current standard.
41. The credibility question is not whether
economists or historians can see government progress using an
unchanged real measure, but whether the electorate and the media
think that child poverty, the poverty of families with dependent
children, has been abolished in 2019 or not, using the standards
appropriate to 2019.
42. Even the so-called "relative"
measure (actually, all conceivable measures are relative) of 60%
HBAI remains merely a measure of income inequality, and compositing
it together with measures of employment, education, health and
housing will not answer the eternal public questions of "is
that enough to live on?" and "has everyone got an income
up to that level?". The dangers of using inappropriate standards
for making political claims about poverty reduction have already
been revealed in recent months, and government credibility risks
being undermined by a repetition such as this option offers.
(5) FAVOURED
FACTORS AND
CRITERIA FOR
A CHILD
POVERTY MEASURE
43. The approach I favour for measuring
child poverty to meet political objectives and criteria is a modified
form of option 1 (distinct and separate empirically-based measures
for each salient deprivation issue), with the income adequacy
measure based on the construction and use of governmental minimum
income standards (MIS) for the UK, as is done in at least 10 other
countries including USA (see Veit-Wilson 1998) as the headline
summary indicator.
44. The Government needs (but currently
lacks) independent advice at arms-length to ensure the public
credibility of any child poverty measure it wants to use. It needs
experts to evaluate the scientific evidence and set standards
to enable well-founded child poverty measurements to be carried
out. It also needs them for better and effective policy making.
The Social Security Committee recommended last year that the Government
should fund a range of research into "the levels of income
which are sufficient to keep families with children out of poverty",
and set up an "ongoing working party" of experts to
help the Government "devise publicly acceptable measures
of the levels of income needed to avoid poverty" (HC72, 2001,
paras 24 and 25). Such work would be done on the basis of examining
the many disparate sources of information about the adequacy of
incomes to meet a variety of needs and avoid a range of deprivations
and social evils, such as those the Government is concerned to
abolish. Since the information collected will not "agree"
on any one income level, the method of evaluation to be used should
include "triangulating" the various findings, so that
a range of conclusions becomes apparent—a tiered set of
incomes at which various deprivations and social evils are shown
to be avoided.
45. The political fear that any such triangulated
and synthesised findings about family income adequacy levels might
show up the inadequacy of current UK income maintenance systems—not
only pensions and Income Support but also minimum wage rates—need
no longer be operative, now that the battery of tax credit benefits
to be brought into operation will taper so high up the income
scale. Governments who feel vulnerable to criticism may better
be able to calculate and point out, if they have to, that (for
instance) while an earner's full time minimum wage on its own
may be below some household adequacy level, taken together with
tax credits and other benefits a measure of family income adequacy
may be achieved. A major political objection to the recommendations
made by the Social Security Committee can thus be removed. It
is also worth noting that the US Government's MIS is well above
the incomes offered by many Federal and State agencies, but this
does not create political problems there of the kind feared here.
46. Political and public credibility are
indispensable criteria of MIS, and the countries which have them
therefore usually make use of some form of empirical evidence
on adequacy for a desired level of living, depending on the national
political culture. In the UK this culture demands scientific support
for such assertions (in some others, widespread political participative
consensus may be sufficient, but that does not apply in the UK).
The MIS are then used as a basis for evaluating the income maintenance
tiers, from minimum wages at the top, via tax thresholds to long-term
social security benefits and short term social assistance. The
MIS are not universally set at the level of any one of these four
tiers—in some countries the minimum wage is the MIS and
other benefits are set (usually) below this level, while in others
the standard is lower and other parts of the system may be above
or below it. Deciding on benefit levels is a different activity.
47. What the Government needs in order to
set a MIS for families with children for use as a measure of child
poverty abolition is therefore the best data and the means to
evaluate it. In a vast range of scientific and specialised fields
of government interest and activity it has always made use of
expert advisers, working parties and advisory committees to evaluate
the findings of scientific research, to come to conclusions about
it and to advise government on action. The scientific evaluation,
judgement and synthesis of conclusions are matters for the experts,
while the political implications of the conclusions are matters
for government. If even HM Treasury can hand over critical interest
rate decisions to the Monetary Policy Committee (an action unthinkable
until this government did it), the longstanding idea that the
setting of MIS could not be given to a similarly independent committee
can no longer carry any weight.
48. All UK Governments have argued against
using empirical findings about income inadequacy in policy making
"because the findings of the various scientific studies do
not agree with each other". This oft-repeated ministerial
statement is based on a confusion. The factors which may arguably
be political issues in setting benefit levels, such as relationships
with other parts of the income maintenance system or the Treasury
costs, are not relevant to the process of evaluating such empirical
findings about poverty and establishing a MIS.
49. The often overlooked point is that a
standard is simply a yardstick and not a determinant, and a MIS
refers to an income level or levels which are believed to give
access to a desired level of living which is being taken as the
criterion for comparison of other levels of living. This MIS might
be set higher than the lowest acceptable incomes because it may,
for example, be based on the higher minimum needs of some sections
of the population such as families with children, or at long-term
rather than short term levels of living.
(6) GEOGRAPHICAL
COVERAGE
50. The question of regional or other spatial
variation in standards for poverty measures is extremely complicated.
What does the Government want to know about measurement for policy
purposes? There are several distinct questions here. Is it whether
the poverty measure should vary from one area to another because
of differences in the costs of maintaining the same minimum standard
of living? Or is it how many children are poor in one area or
another using a common measure? And if a common measure is used,
is it a common income level (at which different levels of living
can be afforded) or a common outcome level of living (which need
varying income levels to achieve them)?
51. Since the 1930s, some studies have found
at some times that rural life is cheaper than urban, and some
that the reverse holds. Other studies have found that the currently
poor are more mixed into the currently non-poor population in
all areas than differentiated between them (the Plowden paradox
augmented by the findings of dynamic poverty research). The debate
has often been confused between these different issues.
52. The empirical evidence may well be that
there is a spatially differentiated range of scientific poverty
lines (incomes needed to meet a minimum participation level of
living in different places and under varying conditions). However,
the policy implications are again a separate matter: it does not
follow that a UK Government must adopt each or any of them as
spatially differentiated political MIS, nor as differentiated
income maintenance benefits. Whether specific income maintenance
provisions should vary was faced and considered by previous governments
or officials in 1935 (Unemployment Assistance) and 1942 (Beveridge
Report), and both finally came out against differentiation. Governments
need to distinguish precisely what the income maintenance policy
issues are with which they aim to deal, but these are not the
focus of this consultation on child poverty measurement.
CONCLUSION
53. Option 1, amended as suggested above,
offers the best chance of reflecting the realities of the variety
of dimensions of poverty including spatial variation, since each
of the outcome measures chosen will be shown separately. Within
it, the income resource measure can best be dealt with pragmatically
by the recommended expert advisory committee taking each of the
sources of empirical evidence which it will be triangulating in
order to set a MIS and also examining it in the light of spatial
differentiation, and if it varies, how, over what areas and to
what extent. It could in theory be possible that this would provide
a basis for a spatially variable MIS to maintain a common minimally
adequate level of living across the UK (especially if the MIS
were to include widely variable housing costs), or a single MIS
with local variable additional allowances. The headline poverty
abolition target to aim for would be "all children live in
households with the same minimally acceptable participatory level
of living, and all households with children have the incomes needed
to achieve that target of poverty abolition".
54. In this way, the Government's objectives
can be met—of seeing poverty more broadly than income alone,
but of recognising income's key importance in achieving desired
outcomes and being accepted as a headline indicator. Further,
the total picture available to the Government of child poverty,
including income and outcome variation, would be richer and more
informative using this version of option 1 than through the use
of any of the composited proposals in the other three options,
all of which risk obscuring the complex variations either of aspects
of life or of area.
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