Poverty Stricken

from The Times Online

Second-rate analysis of the poor inevitably produces third-rate proposals

Deep down, Gordon Brown may be more discouraged by the disparaging observations made today about child poverty than the astonishing, but arguably more ephemeral, revelations about donations to Labour Party. The eradication of child poverty is one of the Prime Minister’s enduring concerns: measures designed to reduce it featured prominently in his decade-long tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Both the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Treasury Select Committee suggest too little is being done to fight child poverty, and too little is being achieved. There was, says the select committee, scant reference in October’s Comprehensive Spending Review. Rowntree is more cutting. It says the Government has missed its own targets, to the detriment of half a million impoverished young people; that unemployment is rising among the under25s; and that earnings are becoming more unequal. Most cutting of all, Rowntree suggests that the Government is to blame for leaving many people on unacceptably low incomes. It says that families of about one third of the 3.8 million British children classified as poor pay council tax at the full rate. Moreover, public sector jobs occupy a quarter of those who are said to be on poverty-level wages.

Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. Of itself it is unpleasant. It is also impedes educational and health development. Children from poor families are most likely to fail at school and be denied the opportunity to secure places at universities or in worthwhile employment. Poor people are most likely to smoke, drink excessively and eat fatty and sugary foods. Ultimately, some poor people habitually make poor choices and have more money with which to indulge those choices, at their long-term expense.

Yet the problem of poverty, and the problems it causes, will not be helped by selective use of data and sloppy analysis. Poverty is “measured”, by the Rowntree foundations and others, by counting the number of people who earn less than 60 per cent of median earnings. (That is, £108 per week for a single person, after taxes and housing costs, and £301 for a couple with two dependent children.) This is an interesting number, but it is a far cry from an absolute or even meaningful definition of poverty. Poverty, surely, is properly defined in terms of a lack of food, clothing, shelter and access to common amenities.

More attention might be paid, too, if politicians, and foundations like Rowntree could be trusted not to present information to suit themselves or their increasingly political wishes. Meanwhile, relative measures of child poverty such as the 60 per cent rule can, quite perversely, suggest things are getting worse even if lower order income and living standards improve. They will if median earnings increase a lot. Preoccupation with equality, meanwhile, is more likely to encourage the search for lowest common denominators.

Government should dedicate itself to creating and preserving the economic prosperity that will serve to improve most lives, most rapidly. By determinedly following low-tax policies, it should leave wealth in the hands of its creators and particularly in the hands of the working poor determined to improve themselves. Absurdly, the Government’s most recent tax changes have punished those most keen to lift themselves higher. Their reward has been a higher tax bracket.