On Wednesday the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside asked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a question about child poverty. Of course her question was an opportunity to make a political point. She claimed that “… your government’s austerity measures have plunged 4.2 million children into poverty …”.
In response the PM said: “… there are in fact 400,000 fewer children in absolute poverty than in 2010”.
You can watch the exchange here at 17:05 minutes in.
This exchange was brought to my attention by Ava-Santina, PoliticsJoe journalist and ex-producer of James O’Brien’s LBC talk radio show. She questioned the veracity of Sunak’s rebuttal.
Sunak is quoting DWP HBAI children in absolute low income households after housing costs. This has gone down by 400K. From 3.7m in 2009/10 to 3.3m in 2021/2.
These are the gold standard stats for poverty in the UK and for child poverty. There are 4 series – relative and absolute child poverty before and after housing costs. He was clear he was quoting absolute numbers although it is a somewhat synthetic measure. He did not explicitly say after housing costs but not many people actually lead a before housing costs lifestyle so most commentators pretty much always use after housing costs unless they are playing games – which we will come back to.
So Santina is impugning Sunak who was making a reasonable rebuttal using statistics that he identified pretty transparently. Santina seems to want to let Kim Johnson get away with blue murder though. Relative child poverty after housing costs rose from 3.9 million at the end of 2009/10 to 4.2 million a the end of 2021/22 (the latest figures available). So a rise of 300,000. Johnson is attempting to blame Sunak for the whole 4.2 million, not just the 300,000 rise in the 12 years in question. Also Johnson fails to give any clue as to where her numbers come from and fails to mention they are relative child poverty numbers. Johnson gets away with a whopper.
There is more to this story though than Santina throwing shade at Sunak and giving Johnson a pass. Both Santina and Johnson tell very large lies themselves. The second sentence of Santina’s tweet said:
But according to Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that number has gone from 2.6 million in 2009/10 to 4.1 million children in 2021/2
Also Johnson tweeted:
I think Santina’s 4.1 million number is just a typo. It should be 4.2 million. It is the number of children in relative poverty after housing costs in 2021/22. What is the 2.6 million number? It is the number of children in relative poverty BEFORE housing costs in 2009/10. Coincidentally both of these number rose 300,000 in the period. By swapping from one measure to the other both Johnson and Santina are telling a lie. Santina attributes this to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation but I suspect that is not the source of Santina’s “confusion”.
The graphic below illustrates what Johnson and Santina have done.
Sunak was pretty transparent, he said “absolute”, he quoted the latest official statistics.
Johnson and Santina are lying by mixing data from two different data series. No-one would do this unless they were actively trying to deceive. These are grown-ups, an MP with staff and an experienced political journalist. There is no excuse for just peddling nonsense. I have asked them to delete all three tweets.
Update: Johnson deleted her misleading tweet.
Phil Taylor 