A more ambitious approach to fighting poverty

‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between his approach to combating poverty and Gordon Brown’s. As Fraser has put it, Brown saw poverty as ‘a statistical game… his great spreadsheet puzzler’. The aim of the game? To reduce the number of people living in households below the ‘poverty line’ — set at 60 per cent of median income.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

The easiest way to achieve this is to move people from just below the line to just above it by giving them a bit of extra cash (in the form of tax credits). Brown called this ‘lifting people out of poverty’. Indeed, sometimes you don’t even need to make them better off at all to get them over that line.