Measuring poverty: then and now

The first memorable experience I recall was a persistent beggar who approached my mother on a street in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked her

“He is asking for money to pay for food.”

“Why hasn’t he got any food?”

“Probably he doesn’t have any job, so he has no money”

Beg. Money. Food. Job needed. That was my first notion of poverty.

Some 10 years later, back in England, I was out leafleting with my mother in our village in Kent and we came to a dilapidated cottage. The woman who came to the door was barefoot, poorly dressed for the cold spring weather. I was shocked to see such evidence of poverty in an affluent area. My mother pointed out that she probably had several other problems too. This led to a probing discussion of what these might be, broadening my teenage mind.

Urban poverty up close

A year or so later, we went by car on an ancestry trip to Liverpool, where my mother spent her childhood. This was in the early 1960s, before much of central Liverpool was re-developed. Like in London, some overgrown bomb sites were still evident. But what shocked me was that the route we took went through a long street of terraced houses, with women (many barefooted) standing around in front of houses, some with cracked windows and peeling paint. This was visible evidence of what I had read in the newspapers – that some cities in Britain had a poverty problem. Furthermore, there was a shocking statistic about how many houses still used only outside toilets!

But some poor people lacked even houses, as Shakespeare voices in King Lear:

“Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as this.”

Measuring poverty: from Tudor times to Dickens

Historians point out that the numbers of migrant poor wandering the English countryside increased greatly during the sixteenth century. After the monasteries were destroyed in the 1530s, there was a lack of accommodation for the infirm, the mentally ill, and those displaced from the village economy by enclosures.

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Then the Poor Law of 1601 introduced a system, which was to last until the nineteenth century, of the parish taxing residents a poor rate which would then be disbursed to anyone born in the area who fell into poverty. For instance, my ancestor in a Suffolk village was given help from the poor rate when she had given birth out of wedlock (though the father was identified and had to pay up too).

There has always been a tendency to classify the poor into the innocent ones who deserve compassion and charity, and the idle poor who are merely feckless (avoiding work) or worse: criminals and rogues. By the nineteenth century, politicians (many of whom were local lords and squires who administered the poor rates in their areas) were alert to how grants could affect wages and willingness to work.

Workhouses were set up to ensure the idle poor were put to labour, in jobs that were often rough and unpleasant to perform. Families were separated too. Children were given the minimum (as Dickens described in Oliver Twist when Oliver asked for more food) and then sent to work in factories or domestic service in early teenage.

Colour-coding poverty in Victorian Britain

By the late nineteenth century, studies of poverty became more systematic. Charles Booth, from Liverpool, did street-by-street research into urban poverty in London, employing researchers who classified poverty into these categories to colour a street map:

Black: “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal”
Dark Blue: “Very poor, casual. Chronic want”
Light Blue: “Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family”
Purple: “Mixed. Some comfortable others poor”
Pink: “Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings”
Red: “Middle class. Well-to-do”
Yellow: “Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy”

It is noteworthy that although crime is explicitly associated with the “lowest class” category, there is no mention of health factors – specifically mental health or addictions like alcoholism.

Mapping poverty in 2025: the IMD

It is interesting to compare this categorisation with how the British Government measures poverty these days. On the most recent 2025 Deprivation Indices map, one can see which are the poorest neighbourhoods in England. A ‘neighbourhood’ consists of 650 households, or about 1,500 individuals. There are 33,755 of them on the map of England

MHCLG explains that Poverty is assessed using the “Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). IMD25 combines information from seven domains to produce an overall relative measure of deprivation. The domains are combined using the following weights: Income Deprivation (22.5%), Employment Deprivation (22.5%), Education, Skills and Training Deprivation (13.5%), Health Deprivation and Disability (13.5%), Crime (9.3%), Barriers to Housing and Services (9.3%), Living Environment Deprivation (9.3%). The weights have been derived from consideration of the academic literature on poverty and deprivation.

Note the weighting of these: money and jobs are weighted highest, then education and health, then crime and housing, and lasting the intriguing ‘living environment deprivation’ (which could be overcrowded housing or lack of play space outside etc).

Incidentally, although most poverty indices are higher in the poorer urban areas, rural poverty has been specially measured. The only index which is worse for the rural poor is the quality of housing. Presumably this refers to how some of the rural population (which is only 9.7m , 17% of the English population) have to live in ancient buildings, whether old cottages or farm-houses, with poor insulation, heating and plumbing.

Joining up government to prevent poverty

Traditionally, in twentieth century government at least, social needs were worked on in different public departments, for education, health, police, social housing etc.

The more recent trend is ‘joined-up thinking’. One rationale behind the huge local government reform is to bring together the different departments under strategic authorities: health care, education, transport planning, industry and business strategies all within the same geographic boundaries.

People discharged from prison will be interviewed by a health practitioner as well as their probation officer. Young people emerging from care will have more help with housing and jobs. A key aim of this joined up government is to prevent people dropping into poverty.

Poverty in Kent’s coastal communities

While looking at the IMD maps, we should note where the poverty spots are in the south east. In Kent, they are in coastal areas as pointed out by Richard Styles in an earlier article.

A district of Hastings actually appears in the list of the ten poorest neighbourhoods of England. One of the poorest in the same list is near Clacton, the constituency of Nigel Farage, but he does not seem to engage with the possible causes of this. The poverty of former seaside holiday towns is the flip side of all the overseas cheap flight sunshine seeking holidays that many British families now expect yearly.

What the IMD doesn’t measure

Pondering further on the indices of poverty, I wonder why there is nothing on family cohesion. How is the poverty of deserted mothers and wives classified? Does it just dissolve into the other indices of health, or housing, or even crime? I would also like to see the ‘living environment’ index enlarged to take account of community cohesion. Do the families who move into the new housing that is springing up all around us in the south east find they can connect well into community facilities like toddler playgroups?

The study of poverty is still a work-in-progress.