London’s Poverty Profile – Building an evidence base

Tom MacInnes

New Policy Institute

Why?

•Because London has high levels of poverty and high levels of wealth

•Story to tell locally/ regionally and nationally

•Reports convey the scale and texture of London’s poverty and disadvantage

•Can identify emerging areas, eg in work poverty

•Provides evidence for advocacy and lobbying

It compares London to the rest of England

We try to split Inner and Outer where possible

It compares within London

Grouping up the boroughs into sub regions is also useful – compare the Inner West…

…with the Inner East

And tries to cover a range of issues

Long term positive trends in health and education – not all bad news

How we choose the evidence

• Obviously we want to tell a story, but it has to be believable and reliable

• Use official statistics to reflect government’s progress or lack back at them

• We use statistics we can track over time – sources we can return to• Use the whole population covered where possible – not a sub

section• Be able to compare different places and time periods• Works well when things change slowly, less so in periods of

dramatic change• So we try and augment the findings with interviews and new

sources of data, eg FOI requests

This year’s report

• Will cover low income, unemployment, ill health, low pay…• Big focus on welfare reform and housing, as they were the

issues people talked about most when we interviewed them

• A very (very) short sneak preview follows

Official homelessness is up a little…

Rough sleeping is up a lot…

Big rise in people claiming housing benefit…

..mainly in private rented, where the average claim is higher

Conclusions• LPP does provide an evidence base – it’s there

for people to use• Compare your borough with other boroughs• Put things in a London and national context• Always looking to expand and improve – let us

know what’s missing