Today’s Commons debates, why measuring relative poverty doesn’t work – and what Ministers should do instead
by Frank Young, Conservative Home:
Today’s Opposition Day debates in the Commons on Universal Credit and free school meals would commit the Government to spending an additional £9 billion a year on Universal Credit: whatever the welfare plan, its costs are always huge.
The Government should be given credit for stepping in quickly at a time of crisis. It acted fast to provide an uplift for recipients of Universal Credit. Nonetheless, the debates will bring into painful focus the lack of a coherent approach to tackling poverty.
The absence of such a strategy has left ministers haplessly exposed, and gifted their opponents a moral high ground. A government in want of a thought-through approach to poverty is also a government that will find itself constantly accused of being uncaring – and vulnerable to excitable campaigns to expose this supposed malice.
It is always tempting to try and answer the question ‘how many people are poor’ by drawing a line in the sand. Some sophisticated attempts have been made to identify much deeper poverty, isolating groups of people from the ebbs and flows of average wealth. This absolutist approach takes us much closer to what most people would recognise as ‘poverty’.
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