What’s really happening to poverty during the coronavirus outbreak?

Peter Matejic
Inside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
3 min readMay 14, 2020
Photo of a child splashing in a puddle with text that reads ‘UK Poverty 2019/20: the leading independent report’.

At JRF, we’re monitoring the impact of COVID-19 on poverty. But as well as the massive wider effects, the coronavirus has also affected the monitoring systems we usually rely on to get an accurate picture of poverty levels. Like everyone, we’re changing the way we work to get around these issues, and I am hopeful that, as a result of this, our monitoring in the future will be even stronger and more informative than what we have to date.

The backbone of most of our poverty analysis and that of others are large social surveys that ask thousands of households a range of questions about their sources and amounts of income. These surveys include who’s in the household, their ages, their employment status and a whole host of other information. These surveys are big beasts that involve interviewers going to people’s homes to get the information, and then months of processing to get final cleaned data that can be used for publications that come out about a year after the survey year ends.

The implicit assumption is that the latest data gives good information about the current situation, and in the past it has. Even during the last recession, we were able to use the data to track a changing picture that evolved over the course of three or four years. The changes due to the coronavirus outbreak are very different. Our latest data covers April 2018 to March 2019, but even if we had perfect income data for February 2020, less than three months ago, it would not tell us about the current situation, with millions of extra Universal Credit claims and millions of workers furloughed. Data for 2018/19 tells us about a very different world.

That is not to say we can’t use it at all. We know that even before the coronavirus, millions of households were under pressure, already in poverty or at risk of being swept into poverty. We know that many people were already struggling to get by, leading insecure and precarious lives, held back from improving their living standards. We can use the survey data to tell us what the situation was before coronavirus and who was most vulnerable to its financial impacts.

The critical part that we’re missing is what’s happening now, who needs immediate help, what are the urgent issues? To find this out we need to look beyond our usual sources at other data, as well as commissioning our own work to fill in gaps, making sure the voices of people already in poverty or who are at risk of poverty are heard. Our analysts have been allocated key areas and potential data sources, and are now scanning what is being produced by a range of organisations to piece together a picture of the current situation, ably assisted by our policy experts.

This may not be as coherent as if we were using a single source, but it will be more comprehensive. For instance, we are already looking at different data sources ranging from DWP Universal Credit claims data, vacancy data from Adzuna, polling on public attitudes as it comes out, to survey data from ONS, as well as thinking about how we can amend our destitution and Minimum Income Standards projects to give a qualitative idea of the impact of coronavirus on people on low incomes.

We plan to build up various one-off products commenting on the effects on different groups, and then combine all our insights into new style reports on poverty. Follow me @StatsPeter and @jrf_uk to keep abreast of our monitoring, as well as to let us know of any work you are carrying out that can help us gain insight so we can understand and #solveukpoverty.

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Peter Matejic
Inside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Head of Evidence at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, expert poverty analysis