What are the different kinds of poverty?
What is absolute poverty?
Absolute poverty refers to a level of poverty where people struggle to meet daily needs, such as food, shelter, sanitation and healthcare.
A report published in 2023, by the anti-poverty campaigning group the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found 13.4m people were living in poverty in 2020/21 (before housing costs). Of these, 7.9m were working-age adults, 3.9m were children and 1.7m were pensioners.
What is relative poverty?
In the UK, poverty is more often defined as relative poverty rather than absolute poverty. Relative poverty is used to describe when people who are living in poverty have (in the main) basics such as an adequate diet or somewhere to live. What these people lack is sufficient income to be able to participate fully in society. People in poverty are said to be 鈥榮ocially excluded鈥.
What is official poverty?
There is no one single definition of poverty. Most official definitions use relative income to measure the extent of poverty.
The key UK government measures take 60 per cent of median income as the poverty line. A family earning less than 60% of the median household income is said to be in relative poverty.
In 2022, the poverty and inequality research organisation 'Trust for London' worked out the following incomes (after housing costs) that different households living outside London required to avoid living in poverty:
- single person - 拢150 per week
- couple of working age - 拢259 per week
- lone parent with one child (aged one year) - 拢202 per week
- couple with two children (aged three and seven years) - 拢367 per week