When does hardship become poverty? The left and right draw the line differently

Is someone in poverty if they can afford food, housing and the things they really need, but not other things most people take for granted? Answering this question requires a judgment about where an acceptable standard of living ends and poverty begins. Statistics can tell us how many people live in those circumstances, but not whether those circumstances should count as poverty. Even the categories themselves are not self-evident: deciding what is a need, and what is merely taken for granted, is itself part of drawing the poverty line. Debates about poverty usually focus on the headline figures: how many people are poor, whether poverty is rising or falling, or how changes to the benefits system affect it. This is complicated by the fact that the UK has no single, universally accepted definition of poverty. Its most widely used, official benchmark is relative low income: living in a household whose disposable income, adjusted for household size, falls below 60% of the median in that year. This is useful for showing whether lower-income households are keeping pace with typical living standards, but it does not directly reveal what they can afford. The threshold also moves as median income changes. Political disagreement occurs over whether poverty results from individual choices or wider social conditions. For example, whether benefit claimants are deserving or “scroungers”. My new research suggests that disagreement actually starts earlier – at the point where hardship is classified as poverty. And people with different political values draw the poverty line in different places. I analysed responses from 2,642 participants in the 2022 British Social Attitudes survey. They were asked whether someone in Britain should count as poor in three increasingly severe situations. The first described someone who could buy the things they really needed, but not the things most people take for granted. Around 41% called this poverty. The proportion rose to 68% when someone had enough to eat and live but not enough for other things they needed, and to 80% when they could not eat and live without getting into debt. Read more: Cost of living crisis: it’s not enough to know how many people are below the poverty line – we need to measure poverty depth The survey measured left-right political orientation through several questions about redistribution, big business and economic fairness. A separate “welfarism” scale captured attitudes towards welfare provision and recipients – including benefit spending, personal responsibility for unemployment, deservingness and suspected benefit abuse. Across all three situations, people with more right-leaning and welfare-sceptical views were less likely to apply the poverty label. The ideological divide was strongest for the broadest, socially comparative description and became weaker as hardship grew more severe. The pattern was not simply a reflection of party politics: it remained after accounting for which party respondents supported, felt closest to or were most likely to vote for. This suggests that the differences reflect broader ideological orientations, rather than merely party allegiance, party messaging or attitudes towards the government of the day. Different poverty lines, different views of Britain Respondents’ views on the definition of poverty also translated to how widespread they thought poverty was. People who subscribed to the broader, socially comparative definition of poverty, or the middle minimum-standard one, were more likely to say that there was “quite a lot” of real poverty in Britain. Of the three definitions, the minimum-standard one was most consistently associated with respondents believing that poverty had increased over the previous ten years and would increase over the next ten. By contrast, the most severe definition (subsistence and debt) attracted so much agreement that it did little to explain why people differed in their wider assessments of how much poverty existed or whether it was changing. Differences in where respondents drew the poverty boundary statistically accounted for about a quarter of the left-right association with perceptions of how much poverty existed in Britain. The findings show that definitions and evaluations are tightly connected. People can look at the same society and sincerely reach different conclusions, partly because they are classifying what they see differently. Rough sleeping: only one view of poverty in Britain. Jon C 303/Shutterstock Poverty statistics do not emerge from data alone. They are generated by applying a prior standard – relative living conditions, an agreed minimum or basic subsistence. Different standards can produce different accounts of the scale and direction of poverty. Every poverty measure reflects a judgment about what people need to live adequately and participate in society – and this is not politically neutral. For researchers, policymakers and journalists, the practical lesson is to make the poverty line visible. Claims that poverty is widespread, rising or falling should specify the threshold being used and the forms of hardship it recognises. Recent attempts to improve poverty measurement have moved beyond income alone. The government’s Below Average Resources measure includes savings and deducts unavoidable costs such as childcare and disability-related expenses. Its material-deprivation measures ask whether households can afford a contemporary set of necessities. These measures may capture living conditions more realistically, but they do not eliminate judgment. Political decisions about which resources, costs and necessities count still determine where the poverty boundary falls. Making the poverty line explicit will not make it politically neutral or universally accepted. It might, however, reveal whether disagreement concerns the evidence, the policy response, or the threshold at which hardship becomes recognised as poverty.