A new report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation gives a recognisably faithful picture of the situation of workless people in deprived communities. It shows, yet again, that the myth about “three generations who have never worked” is drivel. The researchers searched “doggedly” in areas of high unemployment for anyone to fit the criteria, and there wasn’t anyone. I’m not surprised, because that’s exactly what the previous longitudinal studies, going back to 1950s, have found: see e.g. Atkinson et al (1983) Parents and children, or Kolvin et al (1990) Continuities of deprivation.
Category: Poverty
Cutting the minimum
An article in today’s Observer argues:
“Make no mistake. The 1% uprating means that for the first time since 1931, the income of the poorest will fall as a deliberate act of government policy.”
That’s only half true. This is the first general cut since 1931, but there have been other, less wide-ranging cuts, and many have been deeper.
The minimum income standards that apply in the UK have never been complete, and they have not been maintained very faithfully. The rates of the system in 1948 were represented as being based on Rowntree’s 1936 standards, but they were actually less, and known to be inadequate at the time. (I have amended this from the first posted draft, in recognition of a comment from John Veit Wilson, whose authoritative study I can’t do justice to here.) In the 1980s, there were changes in the structure of the basic rates, leaving some people markedly worse off – for example, householders under the age of 25. And various provisions have been made for money to be taken off benefits, for example deductions that apply to people who fail to take up work – the suspension of benefits through sanctions is currently affecting very large numbers of people (3 million claimants have had varied length sanctions, and 1.3 million fixed length sanctions, since 2000). There has never been a true national minimum. Perhaps there should be.
"Poverty in perspective"
A new report from Demos offers a distinctive way of looking at the experience of poverty in Britain. The report identifies fifteen different household types, in three main cohorts or categories: families with children, working age people without children and pensioners. The report is strongest in relation to child poverty, where the statistical material is backed by qualitative descriptions of the circumstances.
It’s a very good, serious report, and it’s convincing in parts. It should certainly make the government hesitate about its recent proposals to “measure” child poverty in much cruder terms. I have two main reservations, however. The first concerns the principle of segmentation, which tends to imply that the categories (several are given jokey names) are predictable and stable. One of the central messages about the dynamics of poverty in other studies has been that poverty is multi-faceted and complex, that people move in and out of different patterns of deprivation, and that there is often a “web” of deprivation where people struggle to redefine their circumstances, only to find that they are trapped by another problem. People’s lives are complex, and attempts to simplify and classify inevitably tend to stereotype.
The second problem lies in the recommendations for policy, some of which are based unavoidably in the characteristics of people who are poor. One has to ask whether the problems considered – low wages, insecure employment, poor pensions – are really something that should be addressed at the level of the individual.
Freud on risk
Lord Freud, criticising the “dreadful” welfare system, thinks that poor people don’t take enough risks. There’s a basic distinction to make here between risk and vulnerability. Risk is about the chance that something will go wrong; vulnerability is about the harm that happens when it does. Bankers like Lord Freud can take risks, because they can recover from them if they go bad. Poor people can’t take the risks that bankers do because they’re vulnerable when things go wrong. The point of social protection is to make people less vulnerable; the problem with the personalisation and conditionality he advocates is that it’s making them more so.
Freud dismisses the argument that he hasn’t tried to live on a low income himself: “you don’t have to be the corpse”, he says, “to go to a funeral.” Maybe not, but it’s an awkward place to be if you don’t know who you’re burying.
The consultation on child poverty
The DWP and Department for Education are consulting on “better measures” of child poverty that will include a range of considerations – deprivation, parenting skills, worklessness, debt, housing, education, parental health, and family stability.
There are three fundamental muddles here. The first is the confusion between definition and correlation. We know that some people are more likely than others to be poor, such as families headed by women or people in lower social classes, which are not on the list. Even if all the things in the consultation were associated with poverty, it would not mean that they defined poverty.
Second, an association – an increased likelihood – is not the same thing as a characteristic. Poor families are more likely to have children at risk – but that does not mean that most, or even many children are at risk because they are in poor families. Poor families where children are at risk are a very small minority.
Third, the model in the consultation is based in an unjustifiable, stereotypical identification here of poverty and family problems. Many people – on low income figures, most – have been poor at some point in their lives, and all of us are vulnerable to poverty. Family problems are something quite different.
Can Europe act on poverty?
The European Commission has proposed the development of a new fund to give European aid to the ‘most deprived’, mainly homeless people and children in poverty. The money would be directed through Member States or ‘partner organisations’ – that is, through NGOs.
I’ve written in the past about the Commission’s attempts to establish competence by developing programmes that create a precedent (see The principle of subsidiarity and the social policy of the European Community, Journal of European Social Policy, 1991 1(1), pp 3-14; Social policy in a federal Europe, Social Policy and Administration 1996 30(4) 293-304). When the Lingua programme allowed the EU to fund language teaching in schools, the responsible commissioner claimed: “we now have competence in education”. It’s been a long time since the EU did much to pursue that agenda; but if this fund is approved, the EU will have competence in poverty relief.
Official statistics and the 'neighbours from hell'
I have written today to the UK Statistics Authority to raise some questions about the government’s figures on “troubled families”. In December the Prime Minister explained:
Today, I want to talk about troubled families. Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. … We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money, but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families – that is around £75,000 per family.
The same figures have been repeated in a series of government statements, including material from the Department of Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the DWP.
The UK Statistics Authority exists to guarantee the integrity of official statistics in the UK. They have established a range of criteria for integrity, transparency and quality, but among other requirements they state that departments should
- “Ensure that official statistics are produced according to scientific principles”
- “Publish details of the methods adopted, including explanations of why particular choices were made.”
- “Issue statistical reports separately from any other statement or comment about the figures and ensure that no statement or comment – based on prior knowledge – is issued to the press or published ahead of the publication of the statistics.”
That is not what’s happened here. “We’ve come up with the actual figures”, the PM’s statement says, and policy has been rolled out from that starting point. Some explanation of where the figure of 120,000 families come from appeared in a note from the Department of Education, though it was not publicized; there have been trenchant criticisms from Jonathan Portes and Ruth Levitas, on the basis that there is no connection between the indicators used to identify troubled families and the problems of crime and anti-social behaviour. The basis of the costings is still not publicly available. I’ve asked the Statistics Authority to consider whether there has been a breach of their Code of Practice.
Multiple disadvantage in Scotland
The Think Tank Demos has published a report about multiply disadvantaged families in Scotland. Families are described as “multiply disadvantaged” if they meet four or more of seven criteria:
- low income
- worklessness
- no educational qualifications
- overcrowding
- ill health
- mental health problems
- poor neighbourhood.
There are 131,000 households who are multiply disadvantaged by this definition. Of those, 52,000 are pensioners, and 55,000 are households without children; 24,000 are households with children. The category of pensioners is based on 3 criteria of 6, because it excludes worklessness; overcrowding is not really a useful indicator either.
This is not the same test as the Westminster government uses for its definition of “troubled families”. That test is based on them meeting five of the following seven criteria:
- having a low income,
- no one in the family who is working
- poor housing,
- parents who have no qualifications,
- where the mother has a mental health problem
- one parent has a long-standing illness or disability, and
- where the family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes.
The overlap between the criteria does make it plausible to suggest, though, that someone who is “multiply disadvantaged” in the Demos report will probably also score four or more on the “troubled families” score. As the Demos authors note, there is no implication that families who are disadvantaged in these terms present problems for other people – but there is no reason to suppose that from the criteria for “troubled families” either. And there has to be some suspicion about the tenor of a report which goes on to tie the characteristics of poverty to alcohol, drug use and child neglect – none of which applies to most, or even to many, of the families identified through these statistics.
The finding that there are only 24,000 families with children in Scotland who are multiply disadvantaged even on as few as four indicators does raise some questions about the direction of policy, which has tended to focus on the characteristics and culture of poor people as something set apart. There are some points to draw from the figures:
- Scotland is a society where more than one person in six of working age receives an ‘out of work’ benefit, and a quarter of Scotland’s children are in low income households – but the vast majority of people in this position are not ‘multiply disadvantaged’ by the definitions in this report
- showing that social problems are more prevalent than elsewhere does not mean that they are actually likely – most people who are ‘multiply disadvantaged’ do not have them
- if the number of families who might be said to be multiply disadvantaged by these criteria is small, the numbers who might after that be said to suffer ‘intergenerational deprivation’ in these terms is, necessarily, smaller still
- while multiple disadvantage is a legitimate cause of concern in itself, it is neither typical of poor families or commonplace.
It makes sense to design policies that can effectively reach people who are most disadvantaged. Poverty in Scotland is much more widespread, however, and it makes no sense to make such policies the basis for anti-poverty strategy more generally.
Using median income as a measure of poverty
Earlier this year I had a paper published about the use of 60% of the median income as a measure of poverty (Why refer to poverty as a proportion of median income?, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Volume 20, Number 2, June 2012 , pp. 163-175.) I suggested it would be simpler, and easier to justify, if the reference figure was 50% of median earnings instead. According to recent figures in the HBAI series, 60% of median income fell from £259 in 2010 to £251 pw in 2011. By contrast, 50% of median earnings fell from £250pw to £249 pw.
Why refer to poverty as a proportion of median income?
This is the abstract of a paper I’ve just had published in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, vol 20(2) pp 163-176 – the paper is not online yet but I have received a paper copy, so it will appear shortly.
“The most widely used indicator of poverty refers to a threshold set at 60% of median income. This paper reviews the implications of this approach and the conceptual problems it raises. The threshold relates to inequality and ‘economic distance’ rather than need. Though it was initially intended to be simple and comprehensible, the indicator causes considerable confusion, and successive refinements, including adjustments for disposable income, housing costs and equivalence, have limited the accessibility and use of the figures. Referring to median earnings would be a simpler, more practical approach.”