Poverty

(asked on 5th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 5 June 2019 to Question 257500, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of formally adopting a definition for destitution.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 10th June 2019

This Government is committed to broadening our understanding of people’s living standards. New experimental statistics to measure poverty are being developed, 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. This development work includes consideration of groups of people previously omitted from poverty statistics, like rough sleepers and those just above the low income threshold but in overcrowded housing, as well as consideration of a wider measurement framework of poverty covering the depth, persistence and lived experience of poverty.

There is no agreed way of defining destitution. External organisations (most notably the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)) have attempted to define and measure destitution. The JRF’s definition of destitution, however, is complex, and challenging to measure with accuracy. The JRF admit that there is a wide margin of uncertainty about the numbers they identify as destitute. The government therefore has no plans to adopt this definition as any official definition of destitution should be measurable and accurate.

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