This paper is concerned with the likely impact of the Spending Review on living standards in Northern Ireland and especially the living standards of those with the lowest incomes. The cuts in Treasury funding for Northern Ireland are greater than many assume. By 2014-15 all Departments will have substantially lower current budgets in real terms than in 2010-11. The cuts in public spending are occurring in a context of a stagnant employment rate, rising unemployment and restricted opportunities for younger people.
This conceptual note examines ways to operationalise and analyse living standards in the UK for the whole population, not just the poor, using PSE: UK survey data. It asks how the term ‘living standards’ should be defined, which components and aspects should be covered, and how this relates to concepts of ‘welfare’, subjective and objective.
It suggests that a definition of living standards should include ‘what people have, what they do and where they live’, and that they are determined ‘not only by choices and personal preferences but also by the degree of command they have over resources which restrict or do not restrict them in having or doing or participating in things they have reason to value including not only items and activities seen as essential but also those seen as desirable.’
The Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE: UK) survey will re-interview respondents to the 2010/11 Family Resources Survey (FRS) who have provided permission to be contacted again. A sampling frame is required to select a minimum achieved sample of 4,000 households and 6,000 individuals in Britain and a minimum achieved sample of 1,000 households and 1,500 individuals in Northern Ireland. This paper sets out details of the sampling frame to be used.
How poverty and/or low income are mediated and affected by family considerations are considered. These could be through practices, exigencies or condition, resources, processes and relations. Five main sets of ideas or concepts are considered as ways of framing key aspects of the approach: family practices and the way that family members organise their lives; capital (social and cultural) and how it is utilised through connections and networks; culture, including values, meaning, rules and the like; capacities in the sense of the resources and dispositions available to people to take action; and family solidarity looking at practices of reciprocity and mutual assistance among family members over and above personal interest.
Intra-household poverty has generally been conceptualised as a matter of gender inequality, with differential access to resources within the family/household leading to underestimation of the extent of poverty generally, and hidden or invisible levels of poverty within the family/household. Household-level surveys struggle to capture the unequal (and in many cases unfair) distribution of income within the household or family; the money management within the households; and the known willingness of mothers to forego their own material needs in favour of others, especially of their children. This conceptual note considers how the PSE: UK research can investigate this issue through questions directed at exploring systems of money management and partner responsibilities, time expenditure and economising behaviour.
Support for most local services, in the sense of seeing them as being essential, remains very high and has in some cases increased since 1999. This is despite several decades of the promotion of ideas about privatisation of services and the current Coalition government’s austerity measures that have resulted in major reductions in spending on local public services, which will have a significant impact on both the level and quality of provision. In this context, this note explores the impact local services have on poverty, the quality and availability of services in poorer areas and the role local services play in anti-poverty strategies.
This conceptual note considers the measures specifically for older people that could be used in the PSE: UK survey. It covers: the question of whether to include specific items and activities aimed at measuring deprivation in older people; the extent of social networks and social and financial support; specific health problems associated with older people that cause difficulties with activities in daily life; and the extent and provision of unpaid informal care.
There is a great deal of academic debate around the measurement of child poverty. The PSE: UK research provides the opportunity to gain a more nuanced picture of child poverty, drawing on three measurement approaches that can be investigated individually and/or combined to form composite measures. These approaches include income poverty, deprivation and social exclusion.
Improved parenting is currently often advocated as the best route to improve outcomes for children and, explicitly, as a better alternative than reducing poverty. Past academic research has found strong links between poverty and children’s achievement and, operating both separately and relatedly, links between parenting and outcomes. By including elements of parenting and family relationships in the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, the PSE: UK team aims to provide evidence about the relationship between poverty and aspects of parenting that have received significant recent political attention but which, as yet, have been the subject of limited empirical research.
In this consultation response, Professor David Gordon and the PSE: UK research team recommend that a national ‘service deprivation’ measure is produced based on a social survey question module. Subsequently, the value of this measure can be estimated for Local Authorities (and other areas) by combining relevant census/administrative statistics and micro-survey data using small area estimation models.