Government policy

The idea that if poverty is relative it will always be with us is a common misconception, argues John Veit-Wilson. 'Relative poverty' can be abolished if no one has fewer resources than needed to achieve that society’s minimum standards.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, is to be called in front of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June over the misuse by the department of government statistics. This follows the rebuke from the official statistics watchdog for claiming that the benefits cap is pushing people to find paid work.

The select committee’s decision to ‘examine the way the DWP releases benefit statistics to the media’ follows a petition to the committee, signed by 96,666 people, calling for the committee to ‘hold IDS to account for his use of statistics on welfare’. Jayne Linney, who set up the petition on Change.org commented: ‘By starting this petition we’ve shown that everyone has the tools to call politicians out if they try to make things up. They can’t get away with spinning statistics any longer.

The paper welcomes proposals in the Hills Fuel Poverty Review to measure incomes for fuel poverty purposes after housing costs and adjusted for household size and composition and the call for substantial additional data collection in order to better understand contemporary energy use behaviours and dwelling temperatures.  However, the paper argues for a wider range of measures than is proposed in the Hills review and is concerned that the measurement framework will result in low income households living in energy efficient dwellings being classified as not fuel poor. 

There has been 'substantial progress' over the past year in promoting social justice, according to the coalition government's first annual progress report on its social justice strategy.

The strategy, published in March 2012, defines social justice in terms of transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged individuals and families. A set of seven 'key indicators' covers issues such as family breakdown, educational inequality, reoffending (by both young people and adults), worklessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and 'social investment'. The indicators do not cover low income.