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The government has been aiming to shift the debate on poverty from relative poverty to life chances. So is it aiming to downgrade the goal of abolishing financial poverty?

Marc is 19 and lives in Redcar in north-east England, a town where there are twelve times as many people claiming job seeker’s allowance as there are job vacancies.

Privately educated people put a greater value on the financial worth of top jobs than others, finds the latest British Attitudes Survey, 2011.

In January 2011 the PSE: UK research project ran the Second Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, 'Measuring Poverty: The State of the Art'.

Measures of poverty should be decoupled from average earnings, argues Kristian Niemietz in a new monograph, A New Understanding of Poverty, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

The impact of the government’s 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review will fall disproportionately on women, finds two independent reports on the gender impact of the changes.

Middle and low income households have missed out on increases in prosperity in the last three decades with the gains going to the rich. As a result the numbers vulnerable to poverty are rising.

The spending power of the poorest has fallen by 10 per cent over the last decade and will continue to fall as the basic cost of living continues to rise, according to research commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and reported in The Guardian.

The government has consistently argued that under the government spending review those with the broadest backs would take the heaviest burden – that the package would conform to the principle of 'progressive austerity'.

The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults, the final report of the UK Government Independent Review on Poverty and Life

Child and working-age poverty in the UK is set to rise in the next three years, according to projections from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies in Child and Working-Age Poverty from 2010 to 2013.  

Here are some examples of comments sent to us by various users. You might find ideas here on possible use of the website. Please write your own testimonies here.

In 2012, the PSE UK research team undertook two major surveys, one on attitudes to necessities and services and one on living standards. Together, the surveys provide a detailed picture of deprivation, social exclusion and inequality in the UK.

This series of statistical briefings sets out the statistical methods used to analyse the PSE data, including the reasons behind the choice of tests used, the detail checks made on the reliability of the data and the harmonisation of the datasets from the surveys conducted by NatCen in Grea

Under pressure, more insecure, more marginalised. Find out about people's experiences of living on a low income today in four videos based on an extensive range of video testimonies collected during the PSE research.

The PSE: UK research team produced a detailed series of working papers to review developments in methods for measuring poverty and social exclusion, which can be found in methods development in the left hand menu.

The PSE Northern Ireland team have presented the research results at a large number of conferences and forums. In addition to the written publications, a short play based on the combined findings of the quantitative and qualitative PSE findings was put on by Grace Kelly.

In this section you will find the PSE UK 2012 research project reports.

The PSE research team has organised three major conferences:

The 2012 PSE UK 'Living Standards' survey was carried out between March and December 2012 by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) in Britain and by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) in Northern Ireland.

What's in this section?

The PSE income measure uses net income – that is, total income minus direct taxes (income tax, national insurance and council tax) and plus the value of any social security benefits received. This is the income that people have available to buy goods and services.

The PSE method measures deprivation in terms of those who, because of lack of money, fall below society’s minimum standards.

All of the survey questionnaires from the Townsend ‘Poverty in the UK 1968/69 survey that had been archived, 2,516 questionnaires in total, can be accessed below.

The table below shows the percentage of adults in each income quintile who cannot afford various levels of necessities, from one or more to ten or more.

Which adults and children are most at risk of deprivation?

How does the enforced lack of a necessity relate to people’s chance of having poor health and their own perceptions of their living standards?

This table shows the percentage of children in Britain in 1999 and 2012 who lacked, because their household could not afford, each of the items and activities seen as necessities for children and, for 2012, the numbers of children affected.

This table shows the percentage of households, or for those marked with a (1) the percentage of adults, who cannot afford each of the items and activities seen as necessities for adults.

The following tables examine, for adults and children, items and activities seen as a necessity by the majority of the population by, in the first column, the percentages of the adult population who see it as a necessity and then, in the next columns, by the percentages who have it, who don't hav

Cumulative count of deprivation by income*