Introduction

Over the last fifty years, poverty in the UK has been researched extensively. There has been much debate about definitions. Should it be relative or absolute? Should it be judged by income or living standards? Or should poverty be a wider concept, focusing on overall well-being? This chapter examines the development of these different approaches to poverty measurement and their relationship to different understandings of deprivation – and how these impact, or otherwise, on the political and policy process.

The chapter goes on to examine what different measures say about trends over time. Examining both income-based and deprivation-based measures, it will show that there has been a rise in relative poverty. This chapter argues that the processes that create poverty stem from those that create inequality – and that more attention needs to be given to these underlying social and economic inequalities if poverty is to be tackled.

The ‘rediscovery’ of poverty

Poverty research, with a long pedigree in Britain going back to the pioneering work of Booth and Rowntree at the end of the nineteenth century, was re-energised in the mid-1960s. By that time, there was growing concern that, despite the social and economic progress of the post-war years towards greater affluence and greater equality, the problems experienced by some groups, notably older people and sick and disabled people, showed no signs of diminishing. Faced with a lack of information about the living conditions of such groups, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend set about re-examining existing data from National Income and Expenditure surveys to identify the numbers, and characteristics, of those they described as having ‘low levels of living’. The result was the publication of The poor and the poorest (Abel-Smith and Townsend, 1965) and the start of the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty.

The poor and the poorest used a simple threshold – based on a percentage of what was then the National Assistance scale – as a measure of ‘low living standards’. It did not, and did not set out to, re-conceptualise poverty. That was left to Abel-Smith and Townsend's next project – a detailed national survey of living standards and resources. Funded by the (now) Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this became the landmark 1968/69 ‘Poverty in the UK’ survey.