Dr Stephanie Petrie, University of Liverpool’s School of Law and Social Justice
“Iain Duncan Smith has proposed measuring poverty by including factors such as family breakdown, drug addiction, debt, joblessness and education results, rather than by income alone.
There are a number of worrying aspects to this proposal that must be addressed.
Family breakdown, drug addiction, debt, poor educational results, and idleness are social phenomena that occur among the affluent too.
The difference, of course, is that those with money have the means to buy solutions to these problems.
As has emerged frequently during the last few years individuals with access to personal or institutional wealth and status have escaped the consequences of crimes, such as child abuse and fraud.
They have the opportunity to purchase confidential treatment for drug addiction and family problems and buy educational privilege and advantage.
Surely our own family histories and common sense tell us that poverty is fundamentally linked to income.
In the words of Charles Dickens’ Mr Micawber: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ (David Copperfield, 1850)”