BORIS Johnson has been rebuked by the UK’s statistics watchdog after repeatedly making misleading statements about child poverty.
Number 10 has received an official warning from the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), HuffPost UK reported.
The Tory leader was censured over a specific claim made during Prime Minister’s Questions. Yet concerns have been raised on several occasions previously, with stats bosses suggesting their complaints went unheeded.
Last month, Johnson insisted in the Commons that “we are also seeing fewer households now with children in poverty than 10 years ago”.
The comment prompted numerous complaints, with the OSR pointing out that according to some metrics child poverty has actually increased.
In a letter to Downing Street’s head of data science, the watchdog wrote: “It would help aid public understanding if statements concerning child poverty were clear about which measure is being referred to, particularly where other measures present a different trend.”
In its records, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) uses both relative poverty and absolute poverty measures, before and after housing costs.
Johnson used the absolute figure, which dropped in 2019-20 to just below the level recorded when the Tories took office in 2010. However, there is an important distinction between the two metrics.
Relative poverty applies to households which have “less than 60% of contemporary median income”.
Absolute poverty is defined as households which have less than 60% of the median income in 2010/11 “held constant in real terms”.
Relative child poverty after housing costs actually rose from 3.6m, when the Tories came to power in 2010, to 4.2m in 2018-19.
Anna Feuchtwang, chair of the End Child Poverty campaign and CEO of the National Children’s Bureau, told HuffPost UK: “The Prime Minister’s misuse of child poverty statistics is neither fair or accurate.
“It’s simply not right to play down the misery of families swept into poverty and hide behind different statistical measures when answering difficult questions. The simple fact is that even by the government’s own measures, child poverty is rising and we need urgent action rather than game-playing by policymakers.”
Ed Humpherson, in his letter to Downing Street, suggested that the Prime Minister was issued with an official warning because previous complaints had been ignored.
He wrote: “Over the last year, a number of concerns have been raised to us regarding the prime minister’s use of statistics on child poverty and in each case, we have brought this to the attention of the briefing team in No10.”
A Government spokesperson commented: “The Prime Minister was referring to absolute child poverty statistics between 2009-10 and 2019-20.
“These statistics show that the number of children in the UK living in poverty fell both before and after housing costs were taken into consideration.”
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