Is poverty at an all time low?
Updated on 26 September 2006
Are more pensioners walking off into a golden poverty-less sunset under Labour?
The Claim
"The longest sustained fall in child poverty and pensioner poverty since records ever began."
Gordon Brown speaking at the Labour party conference, Manchester, 25 September 2006.
Background
Labour is keen to trumpet its achievements in reducing poverty. But poverty is an extremely difficult thing to define or to measure, and most measurements tend to reflect the political agenda of those doing the measuring.
For some, the poverty line is defined as having a low enough income to qualify for state benefits. Another measure is based on the amount of income spent on buying food. Some people may qualify as poor by one measure, but not others.
The underlying story is that, bar the occasional blip, people have been getting richer for decades, if not centuries. But proving that statistically is difficult.
So how far back do records go? And has there been a longer sustained fall in poverty before?
Analysis
As it happens, the only consistent set of records - from the Family Resources Survey and the Family Expenditure Survey - stretches back to 1979. Here the standard index of poverty is 'relative' poverty, and the baseline is set as households living below 60 per cent of the median average income - figures that haven been quoted (and FactChecked) a good deal recently.
Here the trend is a sustained increase in poverty among all groups during the Thatcher years, levelling off and starting to fall during the Major years and continuing the fall under Tony Blair.
Like many of the economic achievements which Blair and Brown trumpet, the first seeds were sown under the previous Conservative government.
Prior to that, the government also measured the number of people living below the level needed to claim benefits. But this was a questionable measure, given the arbitrary nature of the benefit level: put benefits up, and suddenly thousands more people are defined as 'poor'. In any case, this data can't really be compared with other measures for poverty.
An eminent professor who spoke to Channel 4 News (but preferred not to quoted) said there was a sustained fall in poverty from the end of the second world war through to the mid sixties - though again, this would be difficult to conclusively prove with statistics.
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Verdict
On one very basic level, using the Households Below Average Income statistics, this claim checks out. But these numbers only go back to 1979, not quite as impressive as 'since records began' makes it sound.
Had those numbers been around for the period from the second world war to the mid sixties, they would probably have shown an even more impressive fall.
Nonetheless, to produce any kind of sustained fall in poverty over a decade is an impressive achievement.
Sources
Living Standards Under Labour, Institute for Fiscal Studies (PDF)
The Department for Work and Pensions: Households Below Average Income report
FactCheck, 13 Sep 2006: has Labour reduced poverty?
Institute of Fiscal Studies research paper, see pg 8 (PDF)
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