Poverty

(asked on 22nd May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what criteria her Department uses to assess whether people are (a) destitute and (b) living in destitution.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 5th June 2019

There is no official definition of destitution. The Department for Work and Pensions annually publishes Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics, based on the Family Resources Survey, which sets out four official measures of relative and absolute low income before and after housing costs. The closest measure in HBAI to a measure of destitution is the number of children in “severe low income” (50% of median before housing costs). HBAI also provides measures of material deprivation based on questions to parents and pensioners about their ability to afford the basics in life such as heating homes and paying bills. In addition, new questions have been added to the Family Resources Survey to develop a food insecurity measure from 2021.

New experimental statistics to measure poverty will be developed, and published by DWP in 2020. The new analysis will be based on the work undertaken by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) which was presented in the SMC’s ‘A New Measure of Poverty’ report last year.

Reticulating Splines