Household poverty is complex, varied and often hidden from public view. Government policies need to be adapted accordingly
Today, Demos launches the results of a ground-breaking analysis of poverty. Poverty in Perspective applies 20 indicators - spanning health, education, housing, material deprivation and social networks – to households below the poverty line (classified according to the ISER's 'Understanding Society' dataset).
We identified which indicators clustered together most frequently, to create distinct 'types' of poverty, each characterised by a unique combination of indicators. Our model has identified fifteen types of poverty in all – five in each of three cohorts (households with children, without children, and pensioner households).
This generates a level of granularity never seen before. It recognises that low-income families are not a homogenous group requiring a one-size-fits-all response, but a diverse collection of people, needing different strategies to tackle the types of poverty they face.
The Demos findings, produced in partnership with NatCen, create the evidence on which to base more nuanced responses to poverty. This should prompt joint working and partnerships in agencies that might have not considered coming together before – a challenge for policy makers at national and local level.
The analysis shows, for example, how some types of poverty require social housing providers to be central to joining up support for health needs, improving employment outcomes and tackling material deprivation.
Bringing adult skills, health outreach and debt and budgeting advice services into social housing locations to help households tackle their problems on all fronts simultaneously requires considerable coordination and the will to work together for a joint outcome – not an easy feat in the current economic climate of payment by results, cost shunting and competing priorities.
Second, in households with children, the most prevelant type of poverty is to be found amongst those who - ironically - are in work, own a home and a car, are in good health, and do not report much financial hardship. These families could be classed as ‘invisible’ poor, and for many a policy maker, are unlikely to be seen as a priority.
Nonetheless, some of this group are recently redundant, and are coping by dint of having built up savings. Those who are in work clearly work hard (often having more than one job) to make ends meet, but spiralling costs of living could endanger the delicate financial balance they have struck. By not intervening now to build financial resilience in this group, these invisible poor could join the ranks of those suffering from debt, poor health and material deprivation associated with entrenched low income.
This points to the importance of predistribution to make work pay, and the need for lighter touch forms of welfare-to-work, to assist the recently redundant who already have the skills, experience and motivation to get back into the labour market quickly. But tighter budgets mitigate against investment in such preventative strategies.
Finally, a smaller group in poverty can be described as ‘vulnerable mothers’ – young single mothers who need simultaneous and coordinated delivery on all fronts – health, education, housing, childcare and debt advice. Substantial resources are already being directed at this group, but in reality, greater progress would be made not by spending on more of the same, but by bringing existing services together or in creating a new combined service; for example, bespoke employment support for those with poor skills and mental health needs, which also offers crèche services.
The type of joined-up health, adult education and childcare on offer from Children’s Centres would be very useful for this group – though these too are being cut back.
An effective, multi-dimensional poverty strategy, delivered in a coordinated and multi-agency way, is the best chance we have to tackle poverty in the long term. But a tight funding environment can clearly steer this off-course.
Hopefully, as the government consults on a new child poverty measure, the complexity of poverty as a lived experience will become clear, and policies will be aligned to facilitate – not undermine – attempts to tackle poverty at household level.
