NOTICE: METHODOLOGY UPDATE 2019 - A technical paper of the Social Metrics Commission

As such, rather than attempting to change the understanding of the number of people in poverty, the Commission decided to focus on improving the understanding of the different types of people beneath any given threshold and to explore the lived experience of poverty of these people. [...] With this in mind, the Commission took the view that it would not be appropriate for the changes to measurement approach undertaken by the Commission (which improve the understanding of who is in poverty) to lead to significant changes to the measured level of poverty. [...] Based on this, the Commission set a poverty threshold of 55% (of the three-year average of the median of total available resources) in order to match the level of poverty observed when using the after-housing costs version of the HBAI relative low- income measure. [...] This included: - The inclusion of debt repayments in the measurement of total resources available, which would be possible if questions were added to the Family Resources Survey; - The inclusion of the costs of social care as an “inescapable family-specific cost”, which would be possible if questions were added to the Family Resources Survey; 3 - Improvements on the approach to measuring the extra. [...] If all the data that the Commission required was available and all elements of its methodology were fully in place at the time when the original measure was developed, the Commission would still have benchmarked the number of people in poverty in the same way.