The Extent and Nature of Poverty in the UK

David Gordon

Director

Bristol Poverty Institute

University of Bristol, UK

The Fifth Peter Townsend Memorial Conference

Fifty Years of UK Poverty Research - What Have We Learned?

Reception Room, Wills Building

University of Bristol

5th November 2018

Poverty and Wealth

➔Cannot explain poverty in isolation of the distribution of all

resources in society.

➔There can be no understanding of poverty in a society

without studying the rich.

➔Townsend continually emphasised that poverty was

fundamentally ‘a problem of riches’ and argued for

profound changes in the structures of power and privilege:

“The institutions which create or disadvantage the poor at

the same time as they create or advantage the rich are

institutions which have to be reconstructed “(1988:59).

The richest 1% continue to own more wealth than the whole of the rest of humanityCredit Suisse. (2017). Global Wealth Databook 2017

Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two

days. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762bn in 12 months. This huge

increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. 82% of all

wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no

increase at all.

Alejo et al (2018) Reward Work Not Wealth. London: Oxfam

World Inequality Report 2018

If current trends continue then the richest 1% will own 64% of the worlds wealth by 2030

Source: UK House of Commons Library Research: Inclusive Growth, April 2018 https://www.inclusivegrowth.co.uk/house-commons-library-research/

Background

The 1968/69 Poverty in the UK project and survey launched a major 50 year research programme. Every decade since the late 1960s, UK social scientists have attempted to carry out an independent poverty survey to test out new ideas and incorporate current state of the art methods into UK poverty research.

•1968-69 Poverty in the UK survey (Peter Townsend et al, 1979),

•1983 Poor Britain survey (Mack & Lansley, 1985)

•1990 Breadline Britain survey (Gordon & Pantazis, 1997)

•1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey (Gordon et al, 2000) and its 2002 counterpart in Northern Ireland (Hillyard et al, 2003 )

•2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (Gordon et al, 2013)

• One in three people could not afford to adequately heat their homes in winter

and 29% had to turn the heating down or off or only heat part of their homes

The number of households unable to heat the living areas of their homes is at a

record high – now 9% compared to 3% in the 1990s and 5% in 1983.

• Overcrowding is as high as it was in 1983: today 9% of households cannot

afford enough bedrooms for every child aged 10 or over of a different sex to

have their own bedroom (back up from 3% in 1999).

• The number of households unable to afford damp-free homes has also risen

since 1983 – from 6% to 10%.

• One in five households can’t keep their home in an adequate state of decoration

– up from 15% in the 1990s.

• Overall, across all these aspects of housing, around 13 million people (aged 16

and over) in Britain cannot afford adequate housing conditions, up from 9.5

million in 1999

• The proportion of school age children unable to go on school trips at least once

a term has risen from 2% in 1999 to 8% today.

Since 2010 deprivation has increased in the UK

Townsend’s Deprivation Indicators, 1968-9Indicators % of

lacking

Has not had a cooked breakfast most days of the week 67

Did not have a party on the last birthday (under 15 only) 57

Has not had a week’s holiday away from home in last 12 months 54

Had not had an afternoon/evening out for entertainment in last 2 weeks 47

Had not been out in the last 4 weeks to a relative or friend for a snack or meal

(adults only)

45

Household does not have a refrigerator 45

Had not had a friend to play or a friend to tea in the last 4 weeks (under 15

only)

36

Has not had a relative or friend to the home for a meal or snack in the last 4

weeks (adults only)

33

Household does not usually gave a Sunday roast (3 in 4 times) 26

Household does have sole use of 4 amenities indoors (WC, sink, bath/shower,

cooker)

21

Does not have fresh meat (including meals out) at least four days a week 19

Has gone through one or more days in the past fortnight without cooked meal 7

Modal Deprivation by Logarithm of Income as a Percentage

of Supplementary Benefit Scale Rates (Townsend, 1979)

Piachaud (1981, 1987) raised three main objections;I. the indicators used—does having a cooked breakfast, for example,

indicate choices or constraints?;II. The existence of a threshold—is there a marked change in

deprivation below a certain level or is there a continuum ?;III. the attainability of the goal of an objective, scientific measurement

of poverty

Ashton (1984) and more recently McKay (2004) argues that deprived people may just have different consumption preferences to the majority of the population e.g. prefer to buy an “expensive hi-fi stereo unit” rather than have “carpets in the living room and bedroom”.

Research over the past 50 years has provided robust answers to all these criticisms.

Critiques of Townsend’s Poverty in the UK survey methodology

i) Choice Vs constraint: Mack & Lansley’s (1983) Consensual Deprivation methodology allowed choice to be separated from constraint

ii) No threshold: Use of the General Linear Model and Monte Carlo Simulation has shown the conditions under which a ‘Townsend’ break of slope threshold will exist. It will be present except under unusual circumstances. Item Response Theory has shown why the threshold will be present.

iii) Scientific measurement - Scientific measurement is not a claim of truth but a claim of methodology i.e. you can make a scientific measurement that is wrong/incorrect. Advances during the 20th Century in the philosophy of measurement (e.g. Representational Theory of Measurement (RTM)) and the practice of measurement (e.g. Classical Test Theory, Generalisability Theory, Item Response Theory) have shown that Townsend’s relative deprivation theory and PiUKmethodology can produce a robust, repeatable, reliable and valid measurement of deprivation.

iv) Unusual preferences: Reliability results have shown that the critiques of Ashton and McKay are simply incorrect i.e. people/households with high deprivation index scores are overwhelmingly deprived rather than consumers with unusual/non-standard consumption preferences.

Critiques of Townsend’s PiUK Methods – Research Findings

Child Poverty in the UK: 1961 to 2016/17

Child poverty targets

Source: Resolution Foundation (2018) Living Standards Audit. London

Living Standards: a possible future

Average pay is forecasted by the OBR not to return to pre-crisis levels until 2025

•Source: Resolution Foundation (2018) How to spend it: Autumn Budget 2018 response. London

Planned benefit cuts to family incomes up to 2022/23

Distribution of projected UK income changes by income decile 2015 to 2023

Source: Resolution Foundation (2018) Living Standards Outlook. London

What Have We Learned From Poverty Research?

Since the work of Charles Booth (1902-03), Seebohm

Rowntree (1901) and their Victorian and Edwardian

contemporaries (e.g. Webb & Webb, 1909) repeated studies

have shown that the primary cause of poverty is not the ‘bad’

behaviour of the poor.

Poverty in the UK is primarily caused by structural factors,

such as low wages, a lack of jobs, the lack of state provision to

adequately compensate those engaged in unpaid work –

particularly caring work, etc. Despite intensive research by

often highly partisan researchers, as far as I am aware there

are no credible scientific studies which show that any

significant group of people are poor as a result of indolent,

feckless, skiving or criminal behaviour.

Poverty is not a Behaviour

Poverty is not like syphilis a curse across the generations, you cannot catch

poverty from your parents nor pass it onto your friends, relatives or children.

Research has shown that poor adults and children in the UK do not have a

‘culture of poverty’ and tend to have similar aspirations to the rest of the

population (Lupton, 2003).

The UK welfare state is reasonably effective and there is virtually no one who is

born into poverty, grows up living in poverty and remains poor for their entire lives.

There are also virtually no families where members have not been in any paid

employment over two or more generations.

For example, Shildrick et al (2012) found that “Despite dogged searching in

localities with high rates of worklessness across decades we were unable to

locate any families in which there were three generations in which no-one had

ever worked.” Poor children are of course more likely, than their richer peers, to

become poor adults but this is largely due to structural reasons rather than any

‘cycle of poverty’ or ‘transmission’ of poverty (Townsend, 1974; Scoon et al, 2012)

Poverty is not a Disease

The fruitless search for the underclass has lasted more than a century. All these

years of searching has failed to discover any significant group which could be

identified as an underclass. The name attributed to this group has changed over time

from the Victorian residuum, the unemployables of the Edwardian era, the Social

Problem Groups of the 1930’s depression era, the Problem Families of the 1940s, the

culture of poverty and cycle of deprivation of the 1960s and 70s, the underclass of the

1980s and 1990s to the Troubled Families of the present day (Blacker, 1937, 1952;

Welshman, 2013). More research monies and effort have probably been wasted

searching for the underclass than in any other area of UK Social Science research.

However, no British study has ever found anything but a small number of individuals

whose poverty could be ascribed to fecklessness or a ‘culture/genetics of

poverty/dependency’ (Gordon and Pantazis, 1997).

The Underclass is a Persistent Myth

Troubled Families: the Results

However the evaluation of the £448 million Phase One Troubled Families Programme found

“The key finding from the analysis of administrative data is that across a wide range of outcomes, covering the key objectives of the programme - employment, benefit receipt, school attendance, safeguarding and child welfare - we were unable to find consistent evidence that the Troubled Families Programme had any significant or systematic impact…. the separate analysis using survey data, which also found no significant or systemic impact on outcomes related to employment, job seeking, school attendance, or anti-social behaviour”

Day et al (2016) National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme: Final Synthesis Report. London, DCLG.https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-evaluation-of-the-first-troubled-families-programme

The economics are very simple and are entirely concerned

with redistribution – where sufficient resources are

redistributed from adults to children there is no child poverty;

where insufficient resources are redistributed from adults to

children child poverty is inevitable (Gordon, 2004).

Children cannot and should not do paid work to generate

the resources they need to escape from poverty. This is the

job of adults – numerous laws since the 1833 Factory Act

have restricted and prevented child labour in the UK.

Children should be spending their time playing and learning

not working at paid labour (Gordon and Nandy, 2016).

Redistribution is the only Solution to Child Poverty

The Laws of Nature

If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.– Charles Darwin, 1845