Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK: Vol. 2

Volume 2 - The Dimensions of Disadvantage

Bramley, Glen, Bailey, Nick

• Éditeur: Policy Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447334286
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Armut in der Soziologie

How many people live in poverty in the UK, and how has this changed over recent decades? Are those in poverty more likely to suffer other forms of disadvantage or social exclusion? Is exclusion multi-dimensional, taking different forms for different groups or places? Based on the largest UK study of its kind ever commissioned, this fascinating book provides the most detailed national picture of these problems. Chapters consider a range of dimensions of disadvantage as well as poverty - access to local services or employment, social relations or civic participation, health and well-being. The book also explores relationships between these in the first truly multi-dimensional analysis of exclusion. Written by leading academics, this is an authoritative account of welfare outcomes achieved across the UK. A companion volume Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK: Volume 1 focuses on specific groups such as children or older people, and different geographical areas.

Part 1:

Resources

ONE

Fifty years of poverty in the UK

Joanna Mack

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.¹

This was an ambitious undertaking. Four qualitative pilot studies were carried out of groups at risk of poverty to crystallise which issues in people’s lives might be used as indicators of deprivation. The resultant questionnaire, over 40 pages long, included 60 indicators of living standards – ranging from diet and clothing to home amenities and recreation – as well as in-depth questions on household resources. It resulted in a mass of data to analyse in the days when computers were laboriously programmed using pre-defined holes on ‘punch cards’ and took all night to run.

The project was beset by delays and, in mid-1968, Abel-Smith left to become a senior advisor at the Department of Health and Social Security. Townsend’s book, Poverty in the UK, eventually came out in 1979. It became an authoritative statement of the need to think about poverty in relative terms. In his much-quoted definition, Townsend saw people falling into poverty when:

… their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary patterns, customs and activities. (Townsend, 1979: p 31)

To operationalise this norms-based approach, Townsend devised a ’deprivation index’, based on twelve of the living standards indicators, and identified a ‘poverty line’ by using a statistical technique that related household incomes to the degree to which households lacked these items.

However, not doing or not having something that most others do or have does not in itself necessarily mean that people’s lives are being diminished or limited. David Piachaud, one of Townsend’s most influential critics, identified two key reasons for this (Piachaud, 1981). First, the lack of an item may have been out of choice. And second, the fact that something is commonly done or possessed does not on its own make it important. Conversely, just because something is not widespread or common within a particular society does not make it unimportant. This lies behind the argument, put forward most strongly by Amartya Sen, that a relativist view struggles to take adequate account of absolute conceptions of poverty. There was ‘an irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty’, argued Sen. ‘If there is starvation and hunger, then – no matter what the relative picture looks like – there is clearly poverty’ (Sen, 1983). Townsend rejected this criticism and disputed the tenability of the concept of absolute needs.

Yet, a problem remains with a definition of relative poverty based on norms derived from what is commonly done. If a society is in the depth of a famine where malnutrition is widespread, this approach, definitionally, would not identify those suffering as in poverty. This is clearly untenable. More generally, there is a problem in that basing your measure on what is average, or commonly done, in each country embeds into the concept of poverty an acceptance of deep international inequalities.

Townsend had aimed to exclude value judgements from the selection of indicators but in doing so failed to take account of, or relate to, any generally accepted view of ‘need’. As Piachaud argued, it leaves the term ‘poverty’ devoid of any ‘moral imperative that something should be done about it’ (Piachaud, 1981). Or as Amartya Sen put it: ‘material objects cannot be evaluated in this context without reference to how people view them’ (Sen, 1981).

The concept of socially perceived necessities

The next development in this debate about poverty measurement came in 1983 with the Breadline Britain survey (sometimes known as the Poor Britain survey). The origins of this survey are quite different from the academic background of what had come before: it stemmed from a television series.

In the early 1980s, I was working as a producer/director at London Weekend Television (LWT), one of the companies that formed part of the ITV network, and was asked to make a series of four one-hour programmes for one of the network’s ‘adult education’ slots. It was the first term of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, brought to power with a radical agenda to roll back the state and promote market forces. By the early 1980s, the UK was in the depths of recession, while unemployment was reaching record levels with more than a million having been unemployed for over a year. We decided that the focus should be on ‘poverty’.

When this was mooted, there were some worried murmurs: was not the subject of ‘poverty’ too political? It was certainly not in the same category as the general run of ‘adult education’ programming which was more likely to look at English literature or Art or how to sail a boat. The senior executives at LWT stood by the decision, arguing that it was important to place the question of living standards firmly on the public agenda in a way that asked viewers to think about the kind of society they lived in and wanted to live in (Browne and Coueslant, 1984).

At that time, government statistics took those who fell below the Supplementary Benefit level – the amount paid to those who were not entitled to other benefits such as Unemployment Benefit – as a measure of poverty. But this was entirely arbitrary; the Supplementary Benefit rates were not based on any assessment of need but had simply stemmed from the 1945 Labour government’s National Assistance rates. The Townsend survey had looked at people’s actual living standards and the ways in which the poor missed out – but, by then, it was fifteen years out of date.

We decided to conduct a new survey.² Aware of Piachaud and Sen’s criticisms, we felt that a new approach directly addressing the question of judgment and evaluation was needed. The survey organisation MORI was commissioned with the brief to establish ‘whether there was a public consensus on what is an unacceptable standard of living’ and if so ‘who, if anyone, falls below that standard’. For television, this approach had the additional advantage that the understanding of poverty underlying the series would be widely shared by the audience.

Focus groups were held in different parts of the country to develop indicators of deprivation in tune with people’s perceptions of what was necessary for living in Britain in the early 1980s. The final questionnaire asked about a wide range of items and activities, covering not just basic items but also consumer goods, leisure activities and social participation – and included a number of more discretionary items to ensure distinctions were being made. For each item and activity, the interviewees were asked (in face-to-face interviews) to distinguish between those they thought were ‘necessary, and which all adults should be able to afford and which they should not have to go without’ and those ‘which may be desirable but are not necessary’. Items and activities classed as a necessity by 50 per cent or more of respondents were taken as part of a minimum standard.

The survey went on to ask people about their own living standard. For each of the items and activities, interviewees were asked whether they had them or not; and for those that they did not have, to distinguish between those they ‘didn’t have and didn’t want’ and those that they ‘didn’t have and couldn’t afford’. In this way, the question of choice, which Piachaud had raised, was dealt with.

In this approach, poverty was defined in terms of ‘an enforced lack of socially-perceived necessities’ (Mack and Lansley, 1985, p 45). While maintaining Townsend’s conception of poverty as deprivation stemming from a lack of command over resources, what counted as deprivation was determined not by average behaviours but by people’s perceptions of need.

The Breadline Britain survey established, for the first time ever, that in Britain there was widespread agreement on what constitutes a minimum standard and that it was a standard that reflected contemporary ways of living. A majority saw the necessities of life as wide-ranging, including consumer goods and various social activities as well as more basic items such as food and heating. The survey also found very similar views on the relative importance of different items and activities across gender, occupation, income level, age and, notably, political preference (Mack and Lansley, 1985, pp 73-82). This consensus is important as, otherwise, the interests of minorities could be overlooked.

The Breadline Britain television series, setting out these minimum standards and the numbers falling below them, was broadcast in the summer of 1983, accompanied by a range of activities at a local level organised by the ITV regional company network. From the response from the viewing public and the press coverage (both extensive), the concept of necessities as determined by public opinion seemed to have been received favourably (Browne and Coueslant, 1984). The Conservative government dismissed the findings. In the House of Commons, Rhodes Boyson, the Social Security Minister, argued that the items in the list of necessities were such that ‘50 years ago, or even 25 years ago, people merely aspired to have such things’ (Hansard, 1983a) while Margaret Thatcher asserted that ‘people who are living in need are fully and properly provided for’ (Hansard, 1983b). There was, however, a much more favourable reaction from the Labour Party, including the then newly elected MP Tony Blair who took a particular interest in the majoritarian basis of the measure, seeing it as having political leverage.³

Changing standards

In 1990, against a background of sharply rising inequality, a second series Breadline Britain in the 1990s was commissioned and a second survey undertaken. This survey confirmed that there was widespread agreement on a relatively based minimum standard of living and found that the percentage falling below this minimum standard had ris...

Table des matières

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Glossary
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Nick Bailey and Glen Bramley
• Part 1: Resources
• Part 2: Participation
• Part 3: Quality of life
• Part 4: Bringing it together