Category: Child poverty gymnastics

Categories
Child poverty gymnastics

Child poverty lower “under the Tories”

This week there has been a certain amount of hopping around about child poverty. UNICEF, the UN body for children, came out with a report that placed the UK at the bottom of a table of 43 wealthy countries, showing the biggest rise in child poverty – 20%. It is misleading. Or at least it is in terms of the UK debate.

For the whole length of time that the Conservatives have been in power there have been predictions of growing child poverty. These never come true, or at least not at any scale. The reason they never quite come true is that the favourite measure of child poverty is the largest. That metric is percentage of children living in households with less than 60% of median income after housing costs. Relative CP AFC for short. Part of the DWP’s Households Below Average Income dataset. The percentages can be found at Table 1.4a.

Relative child poverty (after housing costs) has wandered around 30% for the whole of this century so far. This is a big number, but most of its change can be attributed to movements in the overall economy. So, after the global financial crisis child poverty fell, strangely, in the face of austerity. Why? Because government workers fell in number (and they are often highly paid) and private wages fell, but benefits kept their real terms value, hence relative child poverty fell. Or at least the median household income moved down relatively making fewer children “poor”. Since then as public sector employment has risen with Covid and wages have started to rise, child poverty has risen again slightly. Notably though, it has only got back to where it was when New Labour left power.

The UNICEF report does look bad as it shows the UK increasing child poverty by 20%. This is a source of dismay. There are two caveats though. Firstly, the measure they used was the before housing costs one. No-one uses this in the UK. If I was being cynical it is because this number is typically 20% so it doesn’t sound quite so harrowing when you say 1/5th of children in poverty rather than 1/3rd. But mainly it isn’t used because we all live after housing cost lives. The after housing costs measure only rose by 6.8% in the seven year window UNICEF used. This is a much smaller rise and very similar to other very wealthy countries like ourselves.

It is dishonest and misleading to consistently cite 30% child poverty then switch metric to steal the rise in another metric that you never use because it is always smaller.

The other caveat is that this metric fell by 20% in the previous 7 year period so it has merely returned to its starting point. As is so often the case, we are served bad news but not the good. When did you hear about the 20% fall in child poverty “under the Tories”?

At the end of the New Labour period relative CP BHC was 19.98% in 2009/10. The latest figure available for 2021/22 is 20.01%.

At the end of the New Labour period relative CP AHC was 29.38% in 2009/10. The latest figure available for 2021/22 is 29.17%.

So, after 12 years of Conservative government the BHC measure is a tiny fraction worse (higher), 0.03 percentage points. The AHC measure is a bit better (lower), 0.21 percentage points.

For the 13 years of New Labour these measures were worse on average than the years since. There was only one New Labour year when the BFC measure was better than the last available data point. There were only 2 years when the AFC measure was better than the last available data point. Even if you take out Labour’s first 5 years on the basis that they were a hangover from the previous government New Labour still underperforms. In spite of dealing with austerity and Covid the Conservatives have a better record on child poverty than New Labour.

Categories
Child poverty gymnastics

Child poverty numbers being misused as ever

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.

Categories
Child poverty gymnastics

Gordon Brown knowingly misleading on child poverty

You might think that an ex-prime minister, with a track record for concern for social issues and eye to his reputation and legacy, would keep comments he made on an issue as important as child poverty strictly in the realms of the factually accurate.  Child poverty is real for too many children and creating a distorted picture cannot help them.  Unfortunately Gordon Brown is happy to spread complete untruths about this important subject.  

Earlier this month Gordon Brown said: “Child poverty figures have risen from three million to four million and will rise beyond five million.” This is so mathematically nonsensical as to be a lie.

Brown and his staff know the main source of child poverty data in the UK is the DWP’s Households Below Average Income (HBAI) dataset which has the official status of a National Statistic. Within this dataset there are four main measures of child poverty – relative child poverty before and after housing costs and absolute child poverty before and after housing costs. The absolute numbers are not widely used or quoted and are slightly confected. Poverty before housing costs doesn’t mean that much as we all, on the whole, live our lives after housing costs. So the main number that everyone uses is relative child poverty after housing costs (AFC).


Relative poverty is a useful idea as we don’t really want to measure ourselves against historical standards but it is worth understanding what it is. It is people who live in households with less than 60% of median household income. Many people will be above this line, maybe paying a lot for child care and feeling really quite poor. Others will be below it, maybe with one income, a stay at home partner and a mortgage, but feeling their children do better that way. It is an entirely arbitrary measure and does not help us to identify and eliminate material burdens from children’s lives. That is another challenge altogether. The Labour party, the child poverty advocacy industry and the Left in general like this number because it is large and dramatic.

Which brings us back to Brown and his bent advocacy.

He says “Child poverty figures have risen from three million to four million and will rise beyond five million.” Below I have listed 13 years of New Labour child poverty numbers and 9 subsequent years of Conservative ones so you can judge for yourself.  Note these numbers are slow to emerge and the 2019/20 data won’t come out until March next year so the latest numbers we have is for 2018/19. 

The numbers haven’t dropped below the 3.6 million achieved in the first couple of years of the Coalition government.  And they haven’t risen above the 4.3 million they hit in the early New Labour days.  A mathematician rounding these numbers numbers down would say the number has been 4 million throughout.  A mathematician averaging across the 13 years of New Labour would come up with an average number of 3.95 million.  Across the 9 subsequent Conservative years the average is slightly lower at 3.88 million.  Yes, the numbers do fluctuate typically falling in recessions and rising thereafter.  

Note the rise in the child population.  The relevant population rose 500,000 in the 13 New Labour years.  And by 800,000 in the next 9 years.  In fact the rise in population accounts for most of the rise is child poverty numbers from 2009/10 to 2018/19, 240,000 out of the 300,000 rise.  Note also that the Labour party, the child poverty advocacy industry and the Left in general keep trying to steal the 2010/2011 datapoint as the end of New Labour to make the jump in the numbers seem larger, 600K, not 300K.  

This point is underlined when you look at the percentages – which is a more sensible way of looking at relative numbers in any case.  The most recent peak in relative child poverty AHC was in 2006-8 at 31%.  It was 30% for two years at the end at the end of the New Labour era, it slumped as middle earnings were hit by the effects of the financial crash and returned to 30% for the last 4 years.  You can complain that relative child poverty is fairly static if you want.  You cannot argue that it is increasing (as Gordon Brown does misleadingly).  

Brown’s assertion that child poverty “will rise beyond five million” is almost certainly nonsense.  First of all it is a guess.  There is no research or analysis to back up this assertion.  Indeed the way the relative poverty numbers work relative poverty is likely to fall as it is almost always does in hard times.  If middle incomes are depressed in a recession then lower incomes comprising a larger share of social security payments look more generous.