Poverty is about money, to say otherwise is perverse

Ian Duncan Smith is speaking again today about how poverty should be defined using terms other than money. Future measures of “poverty” that could be measured include family breakdown, drug addiction and worklessness. Whilst these are all bad things, they are each distinctly different from poverty. Only 37% of children in poverty are in single parent families and only a tiny proportion of those in poverty suffer from drug or alcohol addiction. This is well documented stuff.

If you measure family breakdown then a large proportion of what you will find will be family breakdown that occurs in rich households. Similarly drug or alcohol addiction isn’t limited to poor people. If the government aims to fight poverty by fighting relationship breakdown and addiction then that is a valid strategy. These things do have a negative effect on people in poverty (as I said earlier they are bad things). But if they are successful then you will eventually see the regular rate of poverty (measured by income) fall as these people come out of poverty. If however you measure poverty by looking at family structure and addiction as well as introducing policies to fight them then your results will look better than reality for people in poverty.

Government schemes tend to be more effective at helping already better off people.  A King’s Fund report looking at unhealthy behaviours showed Labour’s public health measures were successful at reducing unhealthy behaviours but this was mainly within already well off families. Part of what justified spending money on public health initiatives is because poor health is a much bigger problem for people in poverty. If the government puts money into fighting family breakdown it’s reasonable to believe that the main beneficiaries will be well off families. If the rate of family breakdown is part of measuring poverty then that measurement of poverty would fall without anyone actually in poverty being affected. This is a much better example of a perverse effect than the one cited by IDS.

Problems with measuring worklessness aside, unemployment is already measured and is a politically important number by itself with or without being taken as part of the definition of poverty. The majority of children in poverty have at least one parent working. But that’s not the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that if you are employed and live a perfectly healthy lifestyle but simply can’t afford to pay your everyday living cost then the government do not have a policy to help you. The government’s social justice strategy is devoid of anything that would help people who have a job that doesn’t pay them enough to get by. This could be because they don’t actually believe them to be poor but if that is the case then the government should just say so. It would be interesting to see how low a standard of living they would set as acceptable because as I’ve discussed before most would define the current as below acceptable.