Greenwich Supports strategy

Measuring poverty is difficult  

There is no reliable data available that gives us an accurate overall picture of the number of people in Greenwich who are living in poverty at any one time.  

At the same time, we know that the economic conditions mean that poverty is likely to get worse before it gets better.  

However, we do have national and local data available to us that is useful in several ways: 

We can use National measures of poverty to provide a necessary baseline to measure our borough’s progress over time and a way for us to benchmark Greenwich against other areas. 

In the UK, there are two main ways that poverty is measured: 

• The UK Poverty Line – measures absolute poverty which refers to people living in households with income below 60% of median income in a base year. This measurement is adjusted for inflation  

• The social Metric Commission’s poverty measure – takes into account the factors of unavoidable cost such as housing and costs faced by disabled people or childcare costs.  

• Persistent poverty is defined as being in poverty for the current year and at least two of the three preceding years.  

• Deep poverty is measured as the number of households living below 40% of the median income. Sometimes, life for people in deep poverty is described as destitution.

How we will measure the success of our actions 

When implementing the Greenwich Supports, it is important to define success. 

We will set the right outcomes to guide policy, support intervention and design.

We will use available national and local data to measure the impact and effectiveness of actions. For example, we can: 

• generate and analyse data from intervention to assess policy and service impact, informing service design. 

• monitor the volume of people accessing services like Council Tax Support and food banks to gauge current demand and needs. 

• use data on housing costs, pay, and debt advice to assess poverty risk and anticipate future needs.