Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to page 16 of the report, UK Poverty: Causes and Solutions, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 6 September 2016, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of the recommendation to measure and monitor destitution directly through surveys.

We are aware of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s September 2016 report ‘UK Poverty, Causes, Costs and Solution’ which aimed to set out a long-term strategy for a UK free of poverty.

The merits of the recommendation in this report to measure and monitor destitution directly through repeated surveys have been considered with the JRF. It is acknowledged that individuals and families living in non-private households, communal establishments and the homeless are not well captured on surveys currently used to measure household income and poverty. The ONS is currently commissioning, jointly with JRF, a research project to investigate the feasibility of including individuals and families not living in private households (who are currently not covered by traditional household surveys) in estimates of personal well-being, poverty and destitution. We will be interested in the results of this report when it is published (due in early 2018).

One of the key benefits of repeating a survey is to build a meaningful time series from the data, with the changes seen over time helping government to understand how policies impact on individuals and families. However, given the difficulty in generating a robust sampling frame for this group, we may not be sure that apparent movements in the destitution measure over time are genuine, rather than driven by random changes in the sample we happen to include between years.