What is poverty?
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When we think about poverty, many of us recall TV images from the developing world: of famine, of shanty towns, or of children dying from preventable diseases. Yet this is clearly not what we observe in the UK.
So is there any poverty in the UK?
Peter Townsend, the sociologist who did so much to advance our understanding of poverty and its relationship to wider society, and was also one of the founders of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), certainly thought so. In 1979 Townsend defined poverty as follows:
“Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack resources to obtain the type of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies in which they belong.”1
As this definition makes clear, in affluent societies such as the UK poverty can only properly be understood in relation to the typical living standards in society.
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