Poverty- the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/poverty

What poverty are you talking about? The UK state provides food, shelter and money if you have none.

You seem to be referring to income redistribution using the word “poverty” as leverage for your view that it should be greater than it currently is.

That’s dishonest.

” is certainly fair to say that Labour’s approach to tackling child and pensioner poverty was led and designed by well-meaning technocrats, rather than by people who had direct experience of the problem and therefore some of the best ideas on how to solve it.”

Why would people living in poverty have some of the best ideas on how to solve it? You seem to make this leap without justifying it. If anything, logic suggests that the opposite should be true. Obviously people living in poverty would be best-placed to describe the experience of living in poverty, but that’s hardly the same thing.

@ 1 pagar

“What poverty are you talking about? The UK state provides food, shelter and money if you have none.

You seem to be referring to income redistribution using the word “poverty” as leverage for your view that it should be greater than it currently is.

That’s dishonest.”

No, what’s dishonest is picking one definition of a word that the OP used, full in the knowledge that that wasn’t the definition he was using, pretending he was using that definition anyway, and then hypocritically accusing HIM of dishonesty on that basis.

The technical term is “equivocation”.

@ Chaise

what’s dishonest is picking one definition of a word that the OP used

So what alternative definition would you suggest?

Hint – if you use the word relative you make my point about income distribution for me.

I don’t agree that income transfers reduced people’s agency (quite the opposite)

Income transfers don’t reduce agency, but 100% (and sometimes greater) marginal tax rates on people coming off benefits certainly do. In their 13 yewars in power, Labour didn’t end this, so I can only assume they were either stupid or evil. (As for the Tories and Clegg, being evil goes without saying).

but it is certainly fair to say that Labour’s approach to tackling child and pensioner poverty was led and designed by well-meaning technocrats, rather than by people who had direct experience of the problem and therefore some of the best ideas on how to solve it

Solving it is, in principle, simple. You decide what the minimum level of income someone ought to have and then set benefits at that level. You then say that the first £50 quid or so a week people earn doesn’t reduce their benefits and that after that that, benfits are withdrawn at the standard income tax rate, until people get none, at which they start paying taxes.

(Or you could have a citizens income at the same rate, and give people a tax allowance of £50*52 a year; it amounts to the same thing).

At the same time you could reduce the cost of housing — and the expense of housing benefits — by requiring councils to give everyone who wants one a council house. The rents would cover the cost of providing the housing, so this wouldn’t cost councils anything. Then you could abolish housing benefit altogether and make it part of the mimimum income level / citizens income.

Building all these houses would also employ lots of people and lead to a construction-led recovery.

“The UK state provides food, shelter and money if you have none.”

Actually it doesn’t. It provides financial assistance of various amounts to people who meet the criteria for recieving such assistance. Some of these people may receive enough money to cover food and shelter, others will not. Due to increasingly tighter controls on this criteria, an increasing number of people have ‘fallen through the net’ and are destitute, receive no money from the state and rely on charities to provide food and shelter.

And of course, you are of the opinion that the UK state should not provide food, shelter or money to people.

@ 4 pagar

“So what alternative definition would you suggest?”

I’m not saying there’s one true definition. My whole point is that YOU shouldn’t pretend there’s one true definition and then use that to straw-man the OP.

“Hint – if you use the word relative you make my point about income distribution for me.”

The point about it being relative is a reasonable one. There are questions to be asked about whether poverty becomes a less important issue once society as a whole is so rich that even the poorest have everything they need and plenty of luxuries too. Not that we’re there yet, of course. But that’s not what I’m picking up on in your comment. Equivocation, remember?

Hi pagar,

Here’s a good discussion of different definitions of poverty – http://www.poverty.org.uk/summary/social%20exclusion.shtml

One interesting thing is that the relative way of calculating poverty (60% of median income) works out to be similar as the more absolute approach of calculating a minimum income standard, based on what people said is needed to achieve an acceptable standard of living in Britain today.

http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/minimum-income-standard-britain-what-people-think

relative way of calculating poverty (60% of median income)

If you’re going to do that, then it’s actually a measure of inequality and it might be better to use gini coefficient instead.

“Why would people living in poverty have some of the best ideas on how to solve it?”

This was a piece of learning from international development, where the principle that anti-poverty policies only work if they are based on the knowledge of people living in poverty is now widely accepted.

http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/participatory-approaches-research-poverty

“Obviously people living in poverty would be best-placed to describe the experience of living in poverty, but that’s hardly the same thing.”

Having the experience of what the key problems are, how all these different services actually interact in practice, where there are gaps where things don’t work as intended…these are all absolutely vital pieces of information to develop any kind of sensible solutions.

Hi Don

From your first link

“Some people criticise the concept of relative poverty on the grounds that it is to do with ‘inequality’ rather than ‘poverty’.”

It is, so let’s be honest and admit it.

I have no problem with a discussion on wealth redistribution or welfare provision but there’s no need to muddy the waters by using the “P” word (it’s not actually helpful to your side of the argument because everybody knows that it refers to the first rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, not the percentage own brand supermarket products you buy.

As you know, I would be perfectly happy with a CBI of say £250pw (to include housing but with additional childcare payments) but cannot agree that everyone should receive the median income.

With that system, we could find ourselves with real poverty again.

“I have no problem with a discussion on wealth redistribution or welfare provision but there’s no need to muddy the waters by using the “P” word”

These are all different concepts, though. e.g. Welfare provision or wealth redistribution could be used to reduce absolute poverty (for example through reforms to the welfare state to provide more support for people who are destitute, as Planeshift notes).

On the other side, reducing relative poverty could be done by things like living wages, removing barriers which prevent small businesses from creating jobs, and a range of other measures which aren’t examples of either wealth redistribution or welfare provision.

@ 10 Don

Apologies – Internet Explorer went weird halfway through my first attempt to respond, damn its black heart, so you might have a half-formed answer above.

“This was a piece of learning from international development, where the principle that anti-poverty policies only work if they are based on the knowledge of people living in poverty is now widely accepted.”

The link doesn’t seem to have any actual data, and its focus on poor people’s “right” to participate (is that in dispute?) suggests to me that it’s in the “sounds-nice” camp.

“Having the experience of what the key problems are, how all these different services actually interact in practice, where there are gaps where things don’t work as intended…these are all absolutely vital pieces of information to develop any kind of sensible solutions.”

Sure. But now you’re jumping from “have vital information” to “have to design and be in charge of the whole process”, with the presumed corollary that, should the person currently in charge NOT be poverty-stricken, they should be booted out immediately, regardless of how competent they are. And, along with that, the presumption that what non-poor people can contribute is limited, again regardless of their expertise or talents.

Which strikes me somewhat as putting idealism before solutions.

@ Don

On the other side, reducing relative poverty could be done by things like living wages, removing barriers which prevent small businesses from creating jobs, and a range of other measures

Oh dear. I’m all for removing barriers preventing small businesses creating jobs.

Threatening them with compulsion to pay what some left leaning think tank has decided is a “living wage” is not the removal of such a barrier……..

“But now you’re jumping from “have vital information” to “have to design and be in charge of the whole process”, with the presumed corollary that, should the person currently in charge NOT be poverty-stricken, they should be booted out immediately, regardless of how competent they are”

This is the peril of brief summaries – that’s not at all what I intended to mean.

At present, the decisions about anti-poverty policies is 95%+ taken/designed/developed by people who aren’t living in poverty, and I think that some of the limitations of the effectiveness of anti-poverty initiatives (e.g. the initial design of tax credits, the differences between how services are ‘meant to work’ on a Whitehall spreadsheet vs how they do in practice etc etc) can be traced back to this.

Instead, I’d like to see a much more open process – similar but on a larger scale to the work that Sue Marsh and Broken of Britain do, with the experience of people at the sharp end complementing the knowledge of researchers and practitioners.

@Pagar

By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in publick without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, no body can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.

The price of clothes (shirts linen or otherwise – shoes etc) has fallen over the last 20 years relative to average incomes.

I don’t see anyone arguing that there is anyone in the UK under clothed.

Lots of what I wear comes from charity shops, and no one has ever commented.

Don

Good timing here somewhere – did you know IDS was about to talk about the issue?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/9332005/Only-through-work-will-we-beat-the-poverty-trap.html

The number of children living in poverty in Britain fell by almost a third of a million last year. A cause for celebration? Not really – for the fall represents no more than a statistical quirk. The official measure of poverty is an arbitrary 60 per cent of median incomes. If incomes drop, as they did last year because of the economic downturn, then the number of people in poverty also falls because their incomes will have increased in purely relative terms. Not one of those 300,000 families will be feeling any less impoverished. As Iain Duncan Smith observed yesterday, it is thoroughly perverse that the “simplest way of reducing child poverty is to collapse the economy”.

A more sophisticated measure of poverty is long overdue and that is what the Work and Pensions Secretary is proposing as part of his welfare reforms. He wants poverty data to take account of factors such as whether the child lives in a workless household, an indebted household, whether its parents are drug or alcohol-addicted, whether there is a solid family unit. Mr Duncan Smith argues that by assessing the scope for “life changes” within families, it will be easier to tackle the root causes of poverty.

4 priorities for reducing poverty

Don’t let families have more than 1 child if they cant support them and need to live off the taxpayer

Cut all benefits to ensure people have an incentive to work

Don’t import poor immigrants that put poor British people out of work and housing.

When self serving Labour politicians and public servants let poor immigrants in, don’t give them taxpayer paid benefits ( Housing, education, health, family etc ) until they have worked and paid tax for 10 years.

4 Priorities for reducing poverty.

Decent paid jobs.
Decent housing with fair rents, no slum landlords.
Affordable childcare, essential for parents who have to work.
Benefits for the sick who cannot work and are never likely to despite what IDS says. So the sick can maintain a reasonable standard of living.

Too much to expect i think.

@ 15 don

Fair enough – I’m sure history is littered with wasteful or damaging programmes created by well-meaning people who didn’t have enough experience of the issue.

@ 19 a smith

“Don’t let families have more than 1 child if they cant support them and need to live off the taxpayer ”

How do you plan to acheive this, exactly?

“Cut all benefits to ensure people have an incentive to work”

I suppose killing the poor and disabled is one way of reducing poverty, technically speaking.

“I suppose killing the poor and disabled is one way of reducing poverty, technically speaking.”

Killing the rich would also lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty, technically speaking, by reducing the median income!

I think you’ve found a rich seam of ideas here…

@ 23 cjcj

Indeed, I should publish them under the title Missing The Point: 101 Ways to Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater.

“As you know, I would be perfectly happy with a CBI of say £250pw ”

I’d be happy with that!!

But I’d be extremely sceptical about whether such a thing was affordable….

But I’d be extremely sceptical about whether such a thing was affordable…

250pw * 52 weeks * ~60 million citizens = £780,000 million or around 56% of GDP.

At 2.5% trend real GDP growth, that would probably be a more plausible fraction of GDP within 30-40 years.

@ 26

UK GDP at the moment is around 2.26 trillion. So 780 billion of that would be about 34.5%.

Albert: 2.26 trillion US dollars, though. Only 1.4 trillion pounds.

we also have to account for the fact that CBI is generally for adults, so the population recieving will be lower. But then we have pagar’s unspecified childcare payments to add on…..

250pw * 52 weeks * ~60 million citizens = £780,000 million or around 56% of GDP.

Hardly.

Because much of the money paid out in CBI would be recovered from those earning above the base CBI figure would be recovered in progressive taxation. Broadly speaking, I would like to see this taxation begin at approximately double the CBI rate.

The £250 is really a substitute for the plethora of means tested benefits currently being claimed- JSA, housing benefit, tax credits, income support etc. It has the merit of being cheap and simple to administer and has two further advantages.

1) It is not a need based handout but is a “right” of citizenship. Psychologically very important.

2) It compels the recipient to take responsibility for managing their own affairs rather than being “cared for” by the state, ensuring a less infantilised population than currently.

But then we have pagar’s unspecified childcare payments to add on…..

Actually, I would like to see some form of CBI being awarded from birth, but with the bulk of the “payment” being awarded in the form of vouchers given to parents to pay for education.

“The £250 is really a substitute for the plethora of means tested benefits currently being claimed- JSA, housing benefit, tax credits, income support etc”

But the difference between that and the above is that everyone gets it. So we move from a situation where only a small number of people get the above (not everyone claiming JSA gets housing benefit, tax credits etc and vice versa – the figure you need is essentially the amount of people who get more than 13k a year in benefits – which I’d suggest is extremely unlikely to be above half a million) to a situation where every adult gets it.

Chris dillow did the maths on this before and came up with a figure of £100 a week based on what we currently spend on welfare – although this was a few years ago.The question is if we add the spend on education to the welfare spend (representing your childcare component), then divide by 60 million, what do we get?

Interesting though that you advocate progressive taxation…..

@ Planeshift

Cost of CBI

Children 12m at, say, half full payment= 78 bn (close to current education budget).

Those earning less than £15 per annum- 13.5m at full payment= 175.5bn

Current benefit claimants 6m at full payment= 78bn

Pensioners 12m at, say, half full payment= 78bn.

Very broad brush but this comes to around £410bn against current budgets for welfare, education and pensions of 338bn. A bit of a shortfall but I can easily come up with other cuts in general government spending that will make up the difference.

Or else our citizens will have to get by on a couple of hundred a week minimum instead……..

10. Don Paskini

This was a piece of learning from international development, where the principle that anti-poverty policies only work if they are based on the knowledge of people living in poverty is now widely accepted.

A meaningless piece of fluff that misses the point – people in poverty know a lot about being in poverty. But people who are middle class know a hell of a lot about being middle class. We want poor people to become middle class people. You know, to stop being poor. Which means poor people need to behave more like middle class people. Which means that the poor have nothing to offer but an extended lesson in dysfunction while the middle classes, especially the newly rich middle classes, are role models the poor should follow.

We need to ignore the poor and listen to the rich.

Having the experience of what the key problems are, how all these different services actually interact in practice, where there are gaps where things don’t work as intended…these are all absolutely vital pieces of information to develop any kind of sensible solutions.

If we want to make the system work better, sure. But if we want to end poverty it is pointless. The goal should not be to make the dysfunctional more comfortable with their dysfunction, but to make then functional human beings. You have to work hard at fucking up your life to be poor in the UK. Those people should be listening to people who have not fucked up their lives.

The stats are pretty unequivocal. During Labour’s time in office, child poverty fell by 900,000, pensioner poverty fell by 1.3 million (!), but poverty amongst working age adults who don’t have children rose by 1.1 million.

Well no sh!t. The measure you are using is a relative one. So if you take money from people with jobs and give it to people who have children, then obviously more people with jobs but no children are going to be in poverty. Even more so if you take money via VAT which people without jobs pay. Then even more people without children are going to be in poverty. It is what you want to do isn’t it? That is the point. How can you complain when your policy works exactly as the label on the box says it will?

Reducing poverty amongst working age adults seems to me to be an intrinsically good thing to do in any case.

And how are you going to do that? Tax the elderly?

But even for child poverty, it is common sense that taking early action – ensuring that people aren’t living in poverty when they start a family, is going to have advantages over letting poverty rise amongst childless adults and then frantically trying to reduce poverty once they have a child. Poverty in working age means poverty for children and poverty in old age.

Great. How do you plan to make sure people don’t have children before they are financially secure? If they were middle class, they would be middle class. If they were not feckless irresponsible idiots, they would not be single mothers on the dole would they? Starting a family is a choice. If we give more money to people who want to start a family without being financially secure, more people are going to choose to start a family without being financially secure.

Focus on adequate incomes, better quality public services, decent work and reducing discrimination

And why not focus on making little pink unicorns that piss rainbows? Adequate incomes? You have this thing called a VAT which takes money from people. All people. You want to spend more on services, decent work and discrimination. Which means incomes are going to be lower. How is that going to work?

There are hundreds of good ideas to reduce poverty, from living wages to universal childcare, delivering services in different ways to achieve better results with less funding, rooting out discrimination and prejudice.

Blair poured billions into the NHS. Nothing useful was produced. We have no idea how to reduce poverty, or at least none that is viable. We could shoot the rich and sterilise the poor. But apart from that, nothing will work. We can be sure that living wages means more youth unemployment and hence more poverty. We have tried this. We know. Child care is probably the same – but with more sexual abuse thrown in for free. The only way to deliver services more efficiently is by some sort of market and that won’t fly here. Discrimination is not a problem at all.

Not everyone will be able to work, so people without work also need access to an adequate income, as well as freedom from being discriminated against.

So we are to make sitting in front of the TV all day smoking dope more financially attractive, despite the millions of able bodied people choosing to do just that when they could be working, and we won’t even be allowed to call them worthless bums? An interesting proposal. I have a better alternative – we say often, loudly, and clearly, that it is the responsibility of men to work to support their families. No ifs. No buts. No “real jobs”. No “it’s too hard” whining. All men must work. And anyone who does not do so is a parasite. That might motivate some people.

Crucially, this is the direct opposite of the bullying approach which transfers risk and blame to people in poverty which has been the hallmark of every failed anti-poverty programme for decades.

America’s limited experiment with welfare reform has not failed. And it transferred costs to the poor. That is a policy that works. We should copy it. Six months and you’re off benefits.

But you’re wasting your time. Welfare is only possible in countries that are ethnically homogeneous and share a common culture. People won’t pay to support people who hate them. We have let in a lot of people who hate us and whose only point in common with most of us is when we meet for a mugging. The welfare state is doomed. All over Europe, even in Sweden, immigrants are not a sizeable group and public support for welfare is collapsing. The future for the British is the Brazilian model – slums where the police don’t go for the mainly non-White underclass, guarded walled estates for the mainly White middle class while the entirely White super-rich fly from their country estates to their offices by helicopter.

@Chaise Guevara
either means test families, and if they take more in benefits than they pay in tax, then they don’t get any increased benefits – housing, health, education, child etc for further children
or cap their benefits if they’re not earning enough to support more than 1 child.

So taxpayers don’t have to pay for more than 1 child

A 1 child policy like China’s has worked for them.

I do understand increasing inequality and keeping people poor keeps liberals in public sector jobs and their politicians in power.

@cjcj
your close to the solution.
Liberals are disingenuous in blaming the coalition for inequality increases. The last labour government substantially increase the gap between rich and poor, by increased immigration of rich oligarchs etc and encouraging mass immigration of poor people

You could quickly increase so called “fairness” and reduce that inequality disparity by encouraging both very rich and very poor non-uk citizens and their children to leave the UK.

Fine as far as it goes.

But in terms of a practical strategy facing here and now, the following specifics should be given some thought:

(1) The scrapping of housing benefit (£21 billion) and the re-introduction of the rent controls for tenancies created after January 15th 1989 which were removed from rent protection by the Housing Act 1988; reform of the means tested benefits created between 1987 and 1995 and tax credits

(2) The abolition of shorthold tenancies introduced by the Housing Act 1988 – they were designed and were fine for yuppie couples but can never give security to anyone with children or people in need of care, since you can be evicted with 60 days notice

(3) The abolition of private bailiffs to recover fines and council tax – a top debt collector collecting under private contracts for fines and local taxes is now paid more than Britain’s top judge but for some reason record amounts of fines and council tax are now going uncollected or to be found somewhere other than the coffers of the Treasury or local authorities.

(4) The abolition of council tax – historically reform of the local taxation system is due and three million people are being taken to court this year inspite of council tax benefit in theory being available but not in practice as the system is too complex and crumbling. Furthermore, CTB will go next year to be replaced with discretionary discounts – that is likely to trigger a poll-tax style rebellion at some point.

(5) Increase in JSA and the ending of sanctions introduced under the Welfare Reform Act 2009 (which have the knock on effect of cutting off all other means tested benefits – a structural factor all the rent and council tax arrears accruing in the UK)

(6) Establishing a system of taxing non-EU absentee landlords who are milking the welfare state via housing benefit both illegally and by way of fraud

(7)A coherent energy policy with controls imposed on fuel prices imposed by ‘the big six’ energy companies to tackle fuel poverty which has quadrupled in the last decade.

Many people outside Parliament and political parties see the logic in many of the above. One wonders how long the politically committed and party politicians will take to reach the same conclusions.