This report provides the latest insight into the levels and nature of poverty in the UK using the Social Metrics Commission’s (SMC) measure of poverty.
The report finds that the rate of poverty in the UK is now higher than at any point in the 21st Century.
- 16 million people in the UK are living in families in poverty.
- 5.2 million are children, 9.2 million are working-age adults and 1.5 million are pension-age adults.
- Nearly one in four (24%) people in the UK now judged to be in poverty.
The report also echoes last year’s findings which demonstrated that children have been particularly hard hit. More than a third of all children (36%) were in poverty in 2022/23 (the time period covered by the report), which is an almost five percentage-point increase since 2019/20 and the highest of any group. Overall, poverty rates have risen by two percentage points since 2019/20, which means that 2.1 million more people are now living in poverty than would have been the case if this rise had not happened.
The SMC data is published ahead of the Poverty Strategy Commission’s forthcoming final report, which is expected early in 2025. This will show how, by using the analysis laid out by the SMC’s approach, a strategic approach to tackling poverty can bring about a significant and sustainable reduction in poverty in the UK – for people of all ages.
Alongside this, last year, the Commission warmly welcomed the last Government’s renewed commitment to develop new measures of poverty based on the Commission’s worki and was delighted to see the publication of the Department for Work and Pension’s first set of official statistics in development and consultation on the new Below Average Resources measure. We look forward to future publications on this new measure. This report and the analysis of the data that underpins it has been coordinated with the work of analysts at the DWP to ensure that methodological improvements that have been made for this edition of our report will also be made in any future analysis of the Below Average Resources measure . Detail of the, typically minor, changes can be found in the main body of the report.
More generally, the Commission has been pleased to be able to support the work of the Department for Work and Pensions in developing its approach to the official statistics in development. As this work is taken forward, our focus will be on ensuring that the full breadth of the Commission’s measurement framework is available to policy makers, researchers and the public so that the new statistics can be used to effectively guide and prompt the action needed to reduce poverty in the UK.
