Poverty breakdown
Peter Kenway says the recession can’t be blamed for the poverty of working people. It has been getting worse for thirty years
With the next general election set to be the first in which poverty and what to do about it is a matter of open disagreement between the political parties, the New Policy Institute’s new annual Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report offers both detailed evidence and an interpretation of that evidence against which the politicians’ claims and counter-claims can be judged. The Labour Party made much of the importance of dealing with poverty in both its 2001, and especially its 2005, election manifestos. But it was not until David Cameron became leader later that year that the Conservative Party took up the challenge. Labour’s now thirteen year record on poverty and social exclusion can be expected to come under close scrutiny.
What the report – the twelfth in a series stretching back to 1998, published throughout by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – shows is how difficult it is to sum up that record in a simple phrase or two.
For example, taking the single most important headline statistic relating to children living in low income households (‘child poverty’), the record back to 1997 is certainly one of improvement, the child poverty rate (when poverty is measured after housing costs) having fallen from thirty-four per cent in 1996/97 to thirty-one per cent in 2007/08, the latest year for which data is available. That ‘child poverty is down’, and that ‘several hundred thousand children have been taken out of poverty’ since 1997, are incontestable.
On the other hand, with some four million children in the UK in poverty on this measure, a reduction of this size is achingly small. Against its original ambition of halving child poverty by 2010, a claim of ‘government way off target’ could not honestly be disputed.
Worse still, a more detailed year-by-year assessment shows that up until 2004/05, progress had been stronger (a child poverty rate that year of twenty-eight per cent). The implication? ‘Child poverty up (in recent years)’ is also correct.
The lengthy delay in publishing up-to-date figures on child poverty could confuse things yet further. Rises in the value of child benefit and child tax credit in April 2008 raise the possibility that the 2008/09 statistics could show ‘child poverty down (in the latest year)’. Because of the effects of the recession, we think that it is unlikely – but others disagree.
If even the interpretation of just one indicator can cause so much confusion, what can be done? The way the report addresses this is by looking for the broader patterns across a range of indicators. Necessarily more judgemental, the results are often seemingly easier to grasp. Looked at like this, four things stand out.
First, the record up to about 2004 across a broad range of indicators was much stronger than what it has been subsequently. One possible explanation for the loss of momentum is that the very success of the earlier years led to an over-estimation of the capacity of the original policies to carry on working, not just for a year or two but year after year.
Second, problems of low income, unemployment, debt and rising home repossessions did not start to worsen only when the recession began but in fact turned for the worse as long ago as 2005. Although related to the above, this underlines a vital point that it is not just a matter of recovering from the recession but from what went before it too.
Third, if there is one single factor behind the disappointing record on child poverty, it is the failure to recognise the ever-worsening extent of poverty among working households. ‘In work’ poverty has been on an upward trend for at least thirty years and, prior to the recession, had come to account for more than half of all children in poverty. Until this complex and difficult matter is grasped, promises of future progress must be treated sceptically.
Finally, and despite all the qualifications, the report demonstrates unequivocally that there are very few, if any, aspects of this subject where nothing can be done. Whatever the disappointments, there are no grounds for despair.
Peter is the director of the New Policy Institute and co-author of Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2009.
See the New Policy Institute website for more information.
