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Editor's note
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In a recent BBC interview with Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson claimed that “there are 400,000 fewer children in poverty than there were in 2010”. But was the prime minister right?
We turned to John McKendrick, an expert in child poverty statistics, to examine the figures. His verdict? It is a very partial truth that completely misrepresents wider realities.
While there was a drop in the absolute low income measure of child poverty – from 3.9 million to 3.5 million children – between 2010-11 and 2016-17, this figure rose again by 200,000 the following year. And McKendrick writes that there are serious shortcomings in focusing on one particular measure, while ignoring two other official sets of figures used together by experts to completely understand what has happened to child poverty over time. He delves into the data to show that Johnson’s claim was a misleading account that implied that child poverty was becoming less of a problem in the UK. It is not.
This is part of a series of articles we’ve been running checking claims made by politicians during the 2019 election. Do get in touch on checkingthefacts@theconversation.com if you see a claim you’d like checking as the election campaign enters its last week.
Meanwhile, we’ve got an explainer on how election polls are made and how to read them, and a linguistics expert imagines a happier world without apostrophes.
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Gemma Ware
Global Affairs Editor
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Top stories
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Boris Johnson claimed child poverty has reduced – has it?
Slava Samusevich/Shutterstock
John H McKendrick, Glasgow Caledonian University
Boris Johnson claimed in a BBC interview that child poverty was going down. An expert on child poverty looked at the data.
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