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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/21/to-end-poverty-we-must-do-more-than-just-move-the-goalposts
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| To end poverty we must do more than just move the goalposts | To end poverty we must do more than just move the goalposts |
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| Anti-poverty campaigners will welcome the Social Metrics Commission’s (SMC) realisation that the essence of people’s poverty is the lack of power over individual or collective resources needed to allow them freedom of choice in the market “to engage adequately in life regarded as the ‘norm’ in society” (New UK poverty measure puts 14m below breadline, with many stuck for years, 17 September). Anything less than this would not meet the requirement of the normal life which those who are not identified as poor can choose to live. | Anti-poverty campaigners will welcome the Social Metrics Commission’s (SMC) realisation that the essence of people’s poverty is the lack of power over individual or collective resources needed to allow them freedom of choice in the market “to engage adequately in life regarded as the ‘norm’ in society” (New UK poverty measure puts 14m below breadline, with many stuck for years, 17 September). Anything less than this would not meet the requirement of the normal life which those who are not identified as poor can choose to live. |
| Two important questions follow the SMC’s formulation. First, what is the reliable evidence that the SMC’s proposed reduction of the crude measure used so far (the cross-national poverty comparison indicator of 60% of median household incomes) to 55% of the three-year median household resources reflects the real boundary between adequate resources and poverty, when the existing minimum income standards research carried out by Loughborough University for a decade suggests that it is between 70% and 80% of median household incomes? Second, why in such a rich country as the UK are there any children at all whose household resources have been allowed by government to fall below the level needed for their families to avoid poverty? | Two important questions follow the SMC’s formulation. First, what is the reliable evidence that the SMC’s proposed reduction of the crude measure used so far (the cross-national poverty comparison indicator of 60% of median household incomes) to 55% of the three-year median household resources reflects the real boundary between adequate resources and poverty, when the existing minimum income standards research carried out by Loughborough University for a decade suggests that it is between 70% and 80% of median household incomes? Second, why in such a rich country as the UK are there any children at all whose household resources have been allowed by government to fall below the level needed for their families to avoid poverty? |
| HMRC’s report that some £29bn of (covert) tax expenditures went on social policies for higher income earners in 2017-18, taken with the inequalities of benefit and service cuts compared with tax reductions, justifies Professor Sinfield’s recent submission to the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights’s investigation of the UK government, that it has failed to use its “maximum available resources” to combat poverty. Rather than reducing the poverty measure, the government must restore adequate benefits and credits and the collective resources of services, education, housing and so on to abolish and not merely reduce poverty.Professor John Veit-WilsonNewcastle University | HMRC’s report that some £29bn of (covert) tax expenditures went on social policies for higher income earners in 2017-18, taken with the inequalities of benefit and service cuts compared with tax reductions, justifies Professor Sinfield’s recent submission to the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights’s investigation of the UK government, that it has failed to use its “maximum available resources” to combat poverty. Rather than reducing the poverty measure, the government must restore adequate benefits and credits and the collective resources of services, education, housing and so on to abolish and not merely reduce poverty.Professor John Veit-WilsonNewcastle University |
| • Philippa Stroud and Campbell Robb (To fight poverty, we must first understand more about those in its grip, 17 September) are right to list a “range of inescapable costs that reduce people’s spending power” and the inescapable costs of living with a disability and rent or mortgage payments, which help to lock people in poverty. But wrong to suggest it is the first time. A start was made in 1998 when the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust commissioned the Family Budget Unit to research the minimum incomes needed for healthy living for a couple and a single parent with two young children. That backed Unison’s and London Citizens’ campaign for the first London living wage. Since then all governments, while claiming to want to implement evidence-based policies, have ignored minimum incomes standards research undertaken by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation since 2008, to which disability benefits must be added. | • Philippa Stroud and Campbell Robb (To fight poverty, we must first understand more about those in its grip, 17 September) are right to list a “range of inescapable costs that reduce people’s spending power” and the inescapable costs of living with a disability and rent or mortgage payments, which help to lock people in poverty. But wrong to suggest it is the first time. A start was made in 1998 when the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust commissioned the Family Budget Unit to research the minimum incomes needed for healthy living for a couple and a single parent with two young children. That backed Unison’s and London Citizens’ campaign for the first London living wage. Since then all governments, while claiming to want to implement evidence-based policies, have ignored minimum incomes standards research undertaken by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation since 2008, to which disability benefits must be added. |
| The Social Metrics Commission measure of the positive impact of people’s liquid assets on alleviating immediate poverty is new and welcome; but why not include the positive impact of fixed assets such as land to contrast with the circumstances of impoverished renters who have neither fixed nor liquid assets? Until government policy implements evidence-based adequate minimum incomes coupled with truly affordable housing on public land, we can all go on measuring poverty to no effect till the cows come home.Rev Paul NicolsonTaxpayers Against Poverty | The Social Metrics Commission measure of the positive impact of people’s liquid assets on alleviating immediate poverty is new and welcome; but why not include the positive impact of fixed assets such as land to contrast with the circumstances of impoverished renters who have neither fixed nor liquid assets? Until government policy implements evidence-based adequate minimum incomes coupled with truly affordable housing on public land, we can all go on measuring poverty to no effect till the cows come home.Rev Paul NicolsonTaxpayers Against Poverty |
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