Social exclusion

Poverty as measured by material deprivation through lack of economic resources remains absolutely central to understanding the causation of most aspects of social exclusion and a range of social outcomes, concludes the 2nd of the two-volume PSE-UK study.

Below you will find interviews with David Piachaud and Frank Field who, though not involved in the Townsend study, were closely involved in poverty research or campaigns at that time.

David Piachaud worked on child poverty at the Department of Health and Social Security at the time of the study. After the publication of Townsend's book in 1979, Piachaud raised a number of criticism of the method which influenced subsequent surveys, notably the Breadline Britain survey of 1983 and, in turn, the Poverty and Social Exclusion surveys. He is now Professor of Social Policy at the LSE. His interview is in three parts:

Are subjective measures of well being effective at identifying risk of material deprivation? What are they measuring? How should we take account of children's views when examining measures of child poverty? Read Grace Kelly and Gill Main's Phd theses drawing on the PSE research.

The final report from the PSE qualitative research on the reality of life on low income records how people's perpetual struggles to make meagre budgets stretch eventually this takes its toll on their lives.