Robert Joyce
Are the poor better or worse off than they used to be? It's a divisive question for the public and an even clearer fault line for British politicians. We take a look at three sets of numbers to find out
Whether they're saying the economy is coming out of recession or going into recovery, British politicians know how important it is to show that the benefits are getting spread around. That's why 'the poor' often come up in policy, finger pointing and the press.
There are basically two camps. In the (metaphorical) red corner, are those that claim the poor are getting poorer either because income is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few or because standards of living are getting worse for those with the least money - or both.
In total contradiction, there are those that say the poor are getting richer because we live in a country where income doesn't just go to the richest. One reader, Ed Woods, got in touch with Reality Check and asked "can you tell us who is telling fibs?"
Is there a right or wrong answer here or is the data just open to interpretation? We look at three different indicators of poverty to see what we find.
Chart 1: Real incomes
Most people have seen their incomes rise. But not everyone - some of the poorest people have seen them fall. This chart is a bit tricky to understand at first but use these quick tips and you should be able to see the trends for yourself.
First, imagine taking everyone in the UK, finding out how much they earn and then splitting them up into one hundred different groups. The group with the lowest income would be but in the first 'percentile', the group with the second lowest incomes would be in the second percentile and so on all the way up to the 99th percentile - they're the group that earns the most.
This chart shows how income for each of those 100 groups changed between 1980 and 2012. So, at the far left, you can see what has happened to incomes for the poorest 1% of the UK population (their incomes have fallen by about 1%) and at the far right, you can see that incomes for the richest 1% of the UK population have risen by about 3%.
But you can also see how circumstances matter. Even the poorest pensioners have seen their real incomes rise since 1978 - but the same isn't true for others who have seen the biggest drop in their incomes. Since pensioners as a group make up a far smaller fraction of the population than families or childless individuals, that drop in income for the poor is particularly important.
Conclusion 1: The poorest have got poorer
Chart 2: Standards of living
There is more to poverty than just income. But the UK is a developed country so it doesn't make sense to use things like hunger as a measure of how the lives of the poorest are changing.
The UK government (along with most others in the EU) monitors something called 'severe material deprivation' which is when someone can't afford at least four of the basics shown in the chart below - and as the chart shows, more people are unable to afford things like heating and mortgage payments.
Conclusion 2: Fewer poor people can afford the basics
Chart 3: Policy change
If this article is supposed to say anything about the impact of the coalition, it doesn't say much since some of the data stretches far back and it ends around 2011. So how are the changes to tax and benefit reforms likely to affect the poor?
Remember those one hundred groups mentioned above? Now put them back together again and split up the population into ten groups instead. Now you'll see that the poorest 10% of the UK stand to lose around 4.3% of their income as a direct consequence of the direct tax and benefit reforms either already introduced or planned between April 2012 and April 2015. The richest 20% of the UK will see their incomes rise by 1%.
Graph: The Institute for Fiscal Studies
Conclusion 3: The poor are likely to get poorer
An inconvenient truth?
When Charlie Elphicke MP wrote a passionate article in the Telegraph titled 'An inconvenient truth for Ed: the poor are getting richer' he used data too. And his evidence does point to the poorest individuals in society receiving the largest boost in income. Does that mean that our conclusions so far are wrong?
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