There was an article in the Independent last week about child poverty in the UK. It begins:
The Government’s spending cuts will have a “catastrophic” effect on British children, a UN agency has warned, endangering their future health, education and employment….
Labour’s success in cutting the number of children growing up in poverty could be reversed, according to Unicef. Britain did better than many other rich countries in protecting children from deprivation after the financial crisis erupted in 2008, Unicef said in its annual “report card” on 35 developed nations.
The article goes on to say:
Today Nick Clegg will answer the Government’s critics by extending the provision of 15 hours of free childcare each week. Almost 1,000 two-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, who were due to start receiving free pre-school education from September next year, will now be eligible from this September. All three- and four-year-olds are already eligible for 15 hours of free early education a week between 8am and 6pm. The hours will now be extended to 7am-7pm and parents will be given the option to spread their nursery place over two days rather than three.
But what IS Child poverty? On these sorts of issues it’s always worth trying to find the source documents. In this case its the original UNICEF report which you can download here (1.7MB)
The report explains there are two approaches to measuring child poverty – and the report says quite clearly that both methods have problems.
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The first is simply in terms of relative poverty. . Relative poverty is defined as :
” living in a household whose income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median income for the country in which they live.”
The report poiints out some of the drawbacks of measuring poverty like this:
It is often argued that relative poverty isn?t ?real poverty?. Real poverty, it is said, means lacking basics – enough
food to eat, adequate clothing, a dry home, an indoor toilet, hot water, and a bed to sleep in. Once you leave such
basics behind and start drawing poverty lines based on statistical notions like median income, it is argued, you end up with results that fail to make intuitive sense and so fail to convince either politicians or public. Can the child poverty rate
really be said to be rising, for example, at a time when the incomes of the poor are also rising? And can there
really be more children in poverty in the United Kingdom or the United States than in Hungary or Lithuania?
?relative poverty? comes to mean very different living standards in different countries: a household with 50% of
median income in Bulgaria has an actual income of 1,400 euros a year; a household with 50% of median
income in Norway has an income of 17,000 euros a year.
Where do you set the poverty line> At 40% of median income, or 50% , or 60% ? UNICEF estimate that 12.1 percent fall below the poverty line if it is set at 50%, and 20.8 percent if it is set at 60%.
However one advantage of this method is that its easy to measure it. In fact we can get the figures on a ward-by-ward basis for our district:
Here children are classified as being in poverty if they live in families in receipt of out of work benefits or in receipt of in-work tax credits where their reported income is less than 60 per cent of median income, for mid-2011.
Local Authority and ward- Percentage of children in poverty
Rochford District Overall 11%
Ashingdon and Canewdon 11%
Barling and Sutton 8%
Downhall and Rawreth 8%
Foulness and Great Wakering 15%
Grange 9%
Hawkwell North 8%
Hawkwell South 11%
Hawkwell West 6%
Hockley Central 5%
Hockley North 6%
Hockley West 5%
Hullbridge 11%
Lodge 7%
Rayleigh Central 9%
Rochford 27%
Sweyne Park 17%
Trinity 5%
Wheatley 10%
Whitehouse 7%
So , in Downhall and Rawreth , 8% of children were living in households with less than 60% of the median national income.
In Southend, the figures are generally higher:
Local Authority and wards – Percentage of children in poverty
Southend-on-Sea overall – 24%
Belfairs 17%
Blenheim Park 25%
Chalkwell 14%
Eastwood Park 11%
Kursaal 38%
Leigh 11%
Milton 33%
Prittlewell 16%
Shoeburyness 29%
Southchurch 32%
St Laurence 23%
St. Luke’s 25%
Thorpe 12%
Victoria 39%
West Leigh 5%
West Shoebury 27%
Westborough 26%
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The second approach is to use a list of 14 items that are important for a child’s well-being, happiness and opportunities in life. If the child’s family can’t afford to provide two or more of these, the child is considered to be deprived:
1. Three meals a day
2. At least one meal a day with meat, chicken or fish (or a vegetarian equivalent)
3. Fresh fruit and vegetables every day
4. Books suitable for the child?s age and knowledge level (not including schoolbooks)
5. Outdoor leisure equipment (bicycle, roller-skates, etc.)
6. Regular leisure activities (swimming, playing an instrument, participating in youth organizations etc.)
7. Indoor games (at least one per child, including educational baby toys, building blocks, board games, computer games etc.)
8. Money to participate in school trips and events
9. A quiet place with enough room and light to do homework
10. An Internet connection
11. Some new clothes (i.e. not all second-hand)
12. Two pairs of properly fitting shoes (including at least one pair of all-weather shoes)
13. The opportunity, from time to time, to invite friends home to play and eat
14. The opportunity to celebrate special occasions such as birthdays, name days, religious events etc.
Unicef estimates that , according to surveys, in the UK , 5.5 percent of children lack 2 of these items. 1.3 percent lack 5 or more. Though one problem with surveys is that parents may be unwilling to admit they can’t afford these things.
In contrast Southend Labour blogger Jack Wilson Monroe writes about her own situation here very openly (and is very critical of the coalition):
I was shocked by how many of these criteria my own household didn?t meet. My child is clean, dressed, and fed; but according to Unicef, not well enough. I fail on eight of the fourteen criteria.
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What should local councillors make of this? Well, going back to the Independent again, their editorial thinks the government should concentrate on affordable childcare:
As things now stand, childcare is far from affordable. It costs an average of ?200 per week (and much more in pricier areas) and swallows more than a quarter of the average family income. No wonder, then, that so many women simply cannot afford to return to work. Indeed, the Resolution Foundation estimates as many as a million people are “missing” from the labour market, in part because of the cost of childcare.
_
The situation is bad for all concerned. Bad for the children missing out on vital early education; bad for the households going without an extra wage; bad for the women losing a slug of their earning potential for every year out of the workforce; and bad for the economy in wasted potential and a lower tax take.
_
It is also costing the state ?7bn every year. And with childcare costs ever rising, even that is not enough. In fairness, Nick Clegg will today announce plans to extend free childcare and make the system more flexible. But while his measures are, of course, welcome, they are but tinkering around the edges. In the current climate, it is not realistic to expect the state to pick up the tab, as in oft-quoted Scandinavian examples. But what money there is must be more cleverly spent…
As councillors in Rochford District , we are already keen to provide affordable housing (and that applies across party lines).
So it seems that we should also do what we can – for example through the planning process – to encourage affordable childcare in our district.
Thinking back to my own childhood, things were pretty tough financially after my father died. (I was on free school dinners). My Mum managed to get 2 or 3 part-time jobs.
Looking at the list of the 14 items, obviously the internet didn’t exist. Maybe the equivalent then was having BBC2 – well we couldn’t afford that for quite a while.
The only clear-cut thing I lacked was a bike after my Dad died – though I don’t think I wanted one. I had an aunt who bought me a telescope instead.
So I don’t I quite qualified as deprived, even on free school dinners. But even if I had done,I was in a loving supportive family, and benefited from a good school and good teachers.
Thanks for the link. Its nice to know someone reads my ramblings.
(Can I just point out it’s Jack Monroe not Wilson!)
Ta, JM.
Oops, sorry I’ll correct that! I can only assume I put Wilson because I was reminded of a female Labour-supporting friend of about 30 years ago called Joe Wilson!
It’s ok! I laughed- I dated a Wilson for a while, I very nearly was Jack Wilson. Blog could have then been Jackie Wilson Says…
At the risk of coming under attack from the parent police I have a couple of simple questions. Why do people have kids when they cannot afford them and then (1) expect other tax payers to subsidise them or (2) spend the next 20 years moaning about the cost of raising them. I don’t expect other people to fund my lifestyle so why do some people expect me to fund theirs.
I think most people think carefully before having children. But sometimes
1) People aren’t always equipped at every conceivable situation 😉 and have a child when they don’t expect one.
or
2) People don’t use contraception for religious reasons.
or
3) Sometimes people just don’t think things through. They don’t even bother to think about the cost of bringing up children.
or
4) People think things through, know it’s going to be difficult to have that extra child, but their yearning to have that child overcomes financial caution.
or
5) People do think things through, are confident they can afford that child, but 5 or 10 years down the line someone is made redundant, or seriously ill, or gets divorced.
or
6) Maybe some people think its worth trying to manipulate the system.
or
7) There are addiction issues.
In my experience of families in financial trouble the answer is usually no.5 – a change of circumstances a few years down the line.
But whatever the reason, it’s not the child’s fault! And in any case society benefits from happy well-educated children growing up into adults.
I’ve seen the tremendous work being done at places like the Hamstel Infants School in Southend in providing a better future for children, whatever their backgrounds.
That result for Rochford is an absolute disgrace. It has angered me quite a lot.
Rayleigh Resident:
When I had my son, I was working full time for the Fire Service, earning a salary comfortable enough to support him and myself. Eighteen months later my relationship with my partner broke down and I left my home, and then my job due to the impracticalities of finding childcare for two 15-hour night shifts a week.
I, like many others, didn’t have children under the assumption that ‘other people’ would finance them. i have been trying to get back to work since I left the Service in November, and have been failed by two different employers so far, but i’m still applying for jobs daily, and in the meantime work at the Volunteer Centre in Southend.
Life happens to all of us; I’d planned to be in the Service for thirty years or so and retire with a pension. Read my blog, you wouldn’t live my life out of choice.
JM.
Rob et al
Just as Jack Monroe’s case demonstrates, things are rarely as simple as they may first appear.
It always pays to look behind the numbers, in this case those adjusted for ESTIMATED change between 2009 and mid-2011 using an undisclosed means of estimation, and using NATIONAL median income figures not more regional/local median incomes. Given the relatively low levels of unemployment in RDC against national figures, it is plain that using a national rise in unemployment not fully reflected in this District to adjust the figures is wholly inappropriate, but there must also be other factors at work distorting the apparent numbers of children allegedly in poverty in the Rochford Ward using the assessment methodology applied.
To state the obvious, even requiring the lowest incomes to match or exceed a high percentage of a median of national incomes, almost as certainly as if a mean average were used, produces a totally futile and indeed counter-productive target, since however much the lower incomes rise, the effect is only to raise the chosen target further from reach.
We know that the attractions of this District have caused it to be one of the very few areas that have seen stable to strong property prices over the 2009-2011 period of ‘estimated adjustments’, and that too will have had an anomalous effect. The measures also appear to include deemed household expenditure requirements due to any non-dependent older children in the household but very strangely exclude from the income measure the contributions that they may make either from work or benefits!
However, what causes me most doubt concerning the statistics for Rochford Ward are the comparisons with the places listed below in the highest areas of child poverty extracted from the website link.
I have never observed in Rochford Ward anything like the far more obvious signs of even RELATIVE overall poverty that can easily be observed in some parts of inner London in recent years, where property prices and rents are often higher than those in Rochford. Given the fall in child poverty that Labour alleges it achieved nationally in 1997-2010 and due to lower housing costs in many Northern and Midlands areas, it is absolutely incredible that many of its strongholds in those inner cities would still have such high unadjusted levels of child poverty in 2009, and may indeed understate them using ‘post housing costs incomes’! Those figures resulted in estimates between the adjusted 51% and 39% shown for the worst 20 Parliamentary constituencies, which I believe were predominantly Labour held throughout. Those compare most unfavourably with 11% across this District; and the same applies to the worst 100 Wards elsewhere in the country, which allegedly have between 50% and 70% child poverty. Those are incredible numbers, putting in perspective the relatively low levels found anywhere in RDC, including the local 27% high in Rochford Ward.
When UK poverty is compared against yardsticks that many earlier generations brought up in the post WWII era could never have imagined in their wildest childhood dreams of affluence, there seems to be something wrong with the blithe assumption that the world owes all UK citizens (and of other major EU nations too) an ever rising standard of affluence compared with increasingly competitive developing nations seeking to raise their own.
Chris Black’s observation that UK child poverty does not bear any meaningful relationship to those appalling levels at which true poverty does exist in many eastern European nations is justifiably correct, and so perhaps Rayleigh Resident does have a point to make too, even if not supported in Jack Monroe’s particular situation and the families of children already born when misfortune strikes. Equally, we should also be a tad more suspicious of the figures apparently generated for Rochford Ward that do not stack up with the apparently much lower numbers of children in poverty for Foulness & Great Wakering Ward, which has historically been considered marginally the more deprived of the two wards overall.
THE FOLLOWING IS EXTRACTED FROM THE WEBSITE LINK
The Indicator
Official measures of child poverty are based on a national survey of family income, which shows poverty at national and regional level, but not in more local areas.
However, the figures shown here use tax credit data to give the percentage of children on low incomes in local authorities, parliamentary constituencies and wards across the United Kingdom. Based on how many families are out of work or on low working incomes, this is not a direct measure of exactly how many children are in poverty on the official definition, but is the closest measure we have of local levels of child poverty. The figures are estimates for mid-2011.
In the figures presented below, children are classified as being in poverty if they live in families in receipt of out of work benefits or in receipt of in-work tax credits where their reported income is less than 60 per cent of median income. The number of children in poverty on this measure is reported by HMRC for 2009. We have used survey data to estimate change between 2009 and 2011 – see Note on Method. On this measure, across England, 20.9% of children are in poverty. This represents 2.4 million children, similar to the number officially counted as being in poverty in England, before housing costs. (Note however that the “after housing cost” poverty measure, which takes into account the relatively large amounts that low income families spend on rent or mortgage payments, is much higher.)
Data analysis and presentation by Donald Hirsch and Jacqueline Beckhelling of the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University, for End Child Poverty.
Where child poverty is highest
On average throughout the UK, one in five (20.9%) children are classified as below the poverty line (before housing costs). In some areas of our large cities, this rises to over half. This is true in one whole local authority (Tower Hamlets), as well as in the parliamentary constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow. In Islington, in Manchester and in 19 parliamentary constituencies, at least four in ten children are in poverty.
At a more local level, there are even more serious concentrations of child poverty: in 100 local wards, between 50% and 70% of children face poverty (see the End Child Poverty website for full ward level data).
Table 2: Top 20 parliamentary constituencies with highest levels of child poverty across the UK:
Constituency
(pre-2010 boundaries) % of children
in poverty 2011
Bethnal Green and Bow 51%
Manchester Central 49%
Poplar and Canning Town 48%
Belfast West 46%
Birmingham, Ladywood 46%
Liverpool, Riverside 46%
Islington South and Finsbury 46%
Hackney South and Shoreditch 45%
Birmingham, Sparbrook and Small Heath 45%
Regent’s Park and North Kensington 44%
Glasgow North East 44%
Holborn and St.Pancreas 44%
Birmingham, Hodge Hill 41%
Tottenham 41%
Belfast North 41%
Manchester, Blackley 41%
Islington North 40%
Leeds Central 40%
Manchester Gorton 40%
Nottingham North 39%
Note on method
These data have been compiled using “National Indicator 116”, an official indicator of child poverty at local level. A full description of this indicator can be found at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/personal-tax-credits/ni116-tech-note.pdf.
The indicator tries as far as possible to use tax credit data to replicate the official national indicator for child poverty, which is based on the Family Resources Survey and reported in the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) survey as children in households with below 60% median income before housing costs. For children whose parents do not work, it counts poverty as being in a family claiming out of work benefits. This shows more children as being in poverty than the survey data, since about a quarter of children whose parents are out of work nevertheless have incomes above the poverty line. On the other hand, the local figures show considerably less in-work poverty than the HBAI data. This may partly be because the former only consider families claiming tax credits, and partly because they calculate incomes at the family rather than the household level. The family does not include, for example, non-dependent children. A family living in the same household as one or more non-dependents will have higher income needs for their whole household than just for the “family”, and if the non-dependents are not working, this can mean that the household income does not reach 60% median, adjusted for household size, even though the family income is enough to reach this threshold adjusted for family size only.
These two significant differences, however, balance out, showing a similar number of children in poverty overall in the local indicators as in the national figures.
The latest HMRC data reporting this indicator are for August 20091. However, the Centre for Research in Social Policy has estimated the change in the number of children in each area are in out of work households in mid-2011 than in these 2009 data, and added this number to the 2009 estimate. It has based this change on regional data on the percentage of children in workless families in the Labour Force Survey2. The percentage point change in this figure for the whole region is applied to the percentage of children assumed to be in families on out of work benefits in each local authority, constituency and ward in the region. The resulting increase in the number of children in out of work households is taken as an estimate of the rise in the number in out of work families, and added to the 2009 total, to calculate a new estimate of child poverty for 2011. While this method does not pick up differences in the change in levels of worklessness among different local areas within one region, it gives a more up-to-date estimate of child poverty than the 2009 figures.
The list of 14 items important for a child’s well-being, happiness and opportunities in life is all very well but what about those children who are not brought up in a loving, secure family environment?
How do we ‘classify’ children who may be materially rich but emotionally/relationally deprived?
It’s a very good question Linda.
Rayleigh Resident you wrote a lot, too much for a blog posts section. But I accept the methodology may not be perfect and I do not actually believe that 30% of the children in Rochford Ward are actually in poverty. However there are parts of Rochford Ward (and indeed F+GW and A+C) that are much more deprived than people realise, it is this that angers me most I think. The inequality between parts of Rochford and places near where I live in Hockley is an absolute disgrace, it is walking distance yet I expect nearly everyone in Hockley would be completely ignorant of the deprivation. Also as you say there are more deprived places in the country than Rochford as well. That is something that we should be ashamed of as a society.
It is statistics like this that motivates me to drive the Conservatives out of office.
Rob – have you got the right man here – only 2 lines from me old chap…
Jack Monroe,
I have just looked at your web site where you talk at length about there being no such thing as a society. If that was the case then you would not be able to claim benefits paid for by other people who are working. You would be left to fend for yourself.
Wow you are right, sorry RR. Aimed at Cllr Seagers obviously. Chirs Black even emailed me to ask if I got that right and I said yes without checking. I apologise.
So my namesake blames the Conservatives for the level of child poverty. Remind me please Rob of which Party was in power from 1997 until 2010!
Rob – no problem, thanks for getting back.
Rob Brown
Hilton Brown beat me to it! I notice that you have refuted neither the stated survey figures nor my critique of certain figures for Rochford and Foulness & Great Wakering, so presumably you accept them. Perhaps now you also appreciate the figures are exceptionally damning ones for Labour (1997-2010) rather than Coalition (2010-2011 period only covered), unless of course you are simply too blinkered to do anything except attempt to blame Conservatives rather than admit Labour’s own failings over 13 years.
Incidentally, the Coalition (including Conservatives I do believe!) increased welfare benefits by 5.2% last year, far more than did the average income of workers’ families increase, who also account for a significant 60% of children in poverty, BUT the application of universal credit will lift the vast majority out of poverty if even one parent works 35 hours a week or 24 hours if they are a lone parent.
New Labour hereafter to be known as the NASTY LABOUR Party!!!
Colin I didn’t even read the whole post, I don’t implicitly agree or disagree with any of it. I only ask you stop trying to blame Labour and start trying to solve the problem. But you will struggle trying to tarnish our brand with ‘nasty’, that is reserved for you lot.
Rob
And obviously you are still not bothering to read anything!
“…….the application of universal credit will lift the vast majority out of poverty if even one parent works 35 hours a week or 24 hours if they are a lone parent.
New Labour hereafter to be known as the NASTY LABOUR Party had 13 years to address it!!!
Cllr Seagers – the introduction of Universal Credit and, in particular, direct payment of Housing Benefit will cause more problems than it saves. I work with the social housing sector and from discussions with providers it is clear that there are massive concerns that arrears and bad debts will increase as tenants who have never had a bank account or been responsible for paying rent will now have to do so. In addition, the bedroom tax will actually put a considerable number of people into debt and poverty as they struggle with an extra £15/20 per week on their rent. It’s all very well to say that they can move to a smaller property but what if their landlord, whether private, council or housing association, doesn’t have the available stock? The majority of people living in social housing are there becasue of need rather that because they want to and it is clear that Conservative, sorry, Coalition policy on benefits is not going to make things any easier. As a final comment, and to pre-empt any (valid) response on stopping benefit culture being a life style choice, there is a need for reform of the system but I don’t believe this is a particularly well thought out piece of legislation.