There is an interestting but flawed report in today's Times - look it up yourself, posting on the run.
'How Labour failed on its pledge to make poverty a thing of the past,' p18.
I've got no particular quibble with the statistics being tracked. What is wrong is to have an arbitrary break point in a timescale so that a new slant can be drawn. The piece in the Times looks at a timescale of 1997-2003 and 2003-2008. This enables the journalist to claim that certain indicators have got worse during the second period and ignore any improvement over the whole of the period of a Labour goverenment.
Even the periods chosen make no sense. They don't look at different Labour governments or Blair v Brown. One can only assume they have been picked in an arbitrary way to illustrate a conclusion already written.
It would be interesting to see how many of the 56 indicators would support the conclusions of the article when analysed over the whole period. I may try to find out.
Update - I have found out
A quick count of the indicators over at poverty.org.uk does indeed show that 32 of the 56 indicators are showing improvement over the 10 year period and 14 have remained unchanged.
The 10 that are worse are:
- Low-income households who are paying full council tax
- Children in working families needing tax credits to avoid low income
- Young adults in low-income households
- 16- to 19-year-olds not in education, training or work
- Working-age adults in low-income working families
- Value of out-of-work benefits for working-age adults without dependent children, relative to earnings
- Pay gap between high-paid men and women and male median earnings
- Pensioners not taking up benefits to which they are entitled
- People aged 75 and over helped by social services to live at home
- Homeless households in temporary accommodation
It difficult to see how these 10 (six of which do not necessarily reflect on the poverty or otherwise of the people concerned) justify the headline in the Times. Hey ho.
