Responding to the government’s consultation on Measuring Child Poverty, Professor of Economics Mike Brewer questions the proposal to measure children’s risk of poverty by eight dimensions.
The government proposes that the eight dimensions of poverty measurement might include income and material deprivation, worklessness, unmanageable debt, poor housing, parental skill levels, access to quality education, family stability and parental health. ISER has responded questioning whether the multi-dimensional measure makes conceptual sense. Professor Brewer states:
“We strongly support the idea that the government publish more information about the living standards, wellbeing and life chances of children and on the nature and extent of inequalities in these dimensions. But we do not see the value at all in combining all of these different concepts into a single measure called “child poverty.” We think that a measure combining the eight proposed dimensions would be conceptually unsound, as some of the dimensions do not measure poverty. It would certainly not be transparent, and it may be hard to explain to the public.”
ISER proposes four new indicators as an alternative which would effectively measure child poverty.
These are: drivers or cause of family poverty; lack of material resources; low contemporary child well-being; and barriers to children’s life chances.
The government consultation also asks experts for their views of methods to measure the dimensions of child poverty. ISER believes that Understanding Society, the study of 40,000 UK households funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will be a crucial resource for the measuring the economic and social situations facing families today.
Professor Nick Buck, Director of Understanding Society, states that the unique design of the survey, the biggest of its kind, would provide data on many aspects of living conditions for children, which could create the multi-dimensional measure of child poverty proposed by the government.
Professor Buck explains:
“Understanding Society, like the British Household Panel Survey which preceded it, has been designed to measure persistence of income-based poverty to work alongside the Family Resources Survey which works best for cross-sectional measures. Equally, if the government moves to a multi-dimensional definition of poverty then, in principle, each of the dimensions can be measured cross-sectionally and in terms of their persistence (or frequency of repetition) of the states. As a longitudinal study with annual data collection, Understanding Society has a unique role in measuring persistence of the different dimensions.”