 So welcome back. We're starting this afternoon with our keynote presentation from Peter Matigie from the Joseph Roundtree Foundation. So a bit of introduction for Peter. So Peter joined the Joseph Roundtree Foundation in July 2019 and is currently their chief analyst. Before joining JRFP to work for almost 20 years in the civil service where he led on a number of issues including poverty analysis and policies at the Department of Work and Pensions where we developed measures for persistent poverty and child poverty. Previously he worked on fuel poverty and energy price analysis at the Department of Trade and Industry and he's passionate about using data to have an impact on improving living standards and has been developing and using financial surveys for over 20 years. And today Peter will talk to us about key data infrastructure. So how the JRF uses survey data to understand and work out ways to reduce poverty. So Peter over to you. Thanks everyone. I'm just going to wait for my power points to load but lovely to see you. It's a real pleasure and honor to be speaking here at this event. So yeah thank you. Hopefully you'll see my slides. So I'm hoping to cover five things in various degrees of detail. So a bit of an introduction about JRF. What's our use of family finance surveys? What do they tell us about the state of the nation? What future work are we planning? And also a bit of a kind of cheeky session about what I would like to see from the surveys we're talking about today in terms of future developments. So that's the plan. So a bit about JRF. So hopefully some of you will have heard of us but we're basically an independent social change organization wanting to support and speed up the transition to a more equitable and just future free from poverty where the people on the planet can flourish. And we've been around for about 120 years established by Joseph Ranthry as you might have guessed from the title to help and understand the root causes of poverty. And actually some of our heritage includes some of the first social services surveys ever conducted. So Siebel and Ranthry, one of Joseph Ranthry's sons did a survey of York at the end of the 19th century and you'll see on the bottom right actually a slide in a presentation that he did about 100 years ago. So sitting around and one way it's nice to have the kind of heritage of 100 years of history of social surveys. In other way it's a bit depressing still to be talking about poverty you know 120 years after the organization was established but it's it's it's I'm really proud of some of the work that we've pioneered and hopefully are still pushing forward with. So how do we use the family finances surveys? Well basically they're the black backbone to lots of our work and we have an annual poverty report called UK Poverty and basically all of the data sources we're talking about today plus more are fundamental to that report. We try and make a kind of holistic kind of picture of poverty in the UK and we use the best data sources you can possibly find to try and bring as much information to bear as possible. And you'll see some of my future slides will include some of our UK poverty data. It came out in January and so at some points because I'm using the data from January there's another wave of surveys that I'll mention but aren't always in the charts just because we've taken them from that report so that's a bit of a caveat. So what about more specific pieces of use? So one of our big campaigns at the moment is to reform the benefits system to make sure people can actually afford essentials. So we've done lots of work mainly based on a living cost and food survey about how much the essentials cost and in that first session we saw the proportion of money being spent on essentials was higher for poorer households and richer households but basically when you look at the totals from that and add those up that are kind of you know hopefully universal accepted essentials like food, electricity, water you actually get an amount that's quite a lot higher than the universal credit amount. So basically if you're just on the standard rate of universal credit then you wouldn't be able to afford the essentials and we're able to use that living cost and food survey to establish that and we've got a big campaign that you'll see a picture of later in the presentation to try and bring up at least the standard allowance so at least meets that essentials and things like deductions don't take take you below that line. So that's a living cost and food survey but we also use something called the IPPR model which is built from the HPI, FRS and living cost and food survey to look at different policy options to see well how much do these policies cost and what are their impacts on poverty you know who gains and who pays for different policies so you know it's not just straight off survey information it's some things that are built off the back of the surveys that are really critical in terms of working out what's happening and what's the future options and you'll also see if you if you're reading the Guardian papers that are available over the weekend that the IFS is part of some work that we funded compared the increase to the £20 a week in universal credit with the subsequent increase of the taper and work allowance on poverty and found basically both health poverty but the £20 a week was about twice as effective as the the taper rate and work allowance changes because basically the work allowance and taper rates only affected people in work but again that's available using the IFS model in this instance but again based on HPI and FRS which is a fundamental building block and so here are a couple of products that actually JRF pay for and have built over the years so one is destitution in the UK so one of the the disadvantages of using these surveys is they're based on the household population so and quite often are sampled from the postcode address file so if you are homeless or in shared accommodation like halls of residence and so forth you're missed out from these surveys so JRF for about the last almost six seven years have come have produced destitution in the UK which is basically quite an innovative study that's surveying services and service users to get at the destitute population but what we do use is lots of the surveys I've mentioned before to actually build up that picture to gross up from the destitution services to a national picture to also compare and contrast and see what's happening on the surveys to kind of QA the data there so hopefully that's the way that JRF sort of filled in a bit of the gaps in the kind of data landscape but also we're only able to do so with the help of these surveys and on the right we have something called the minimum standard which is basically like a socially discussed basket of goods that is a sort of a minimum acceptable living standard so it's not a poverty line it's it's above a poverty line but basically through focus groups we establish what's a kind of you know a minimum sort of first socially and social participation budget and we update that each year we've got our next one out in September but basically we also compare that to FRS data in the same way as households below average income looks at sort of how many people are below 60 percent of median income this looks at how many people are below the minimum income standard and as you'd expect it's higher because the standard is is higher than the poverty line but again it's also been pretty flat over time which again is kind of disappointing when you'd want to make progress and we also use these surveys in less regular analyses so we've looked a lot at deepening poverty so one of the slides that you'll see later on is about what's happening to deaths of poverty and where we're using looking at poverty using a lower poverty line we also got a slide about anxiety and incomes and where we can look at mental health and other impacts of economic insecurity and the first one we're mainly using FRS for deepening poverty anxiety nation mainly uses understanding society and the cost of living tracker is another piece of data infrastructure that we we build ourselves using polling information but we also use the FRS and HPI data to gross up the results so again we can't do that work without the other surveys to help build the picture up and we've done work on health and labour market participation using WAZ and HPI data and also looked a bit about why people might be on a very low income but actually aren't claiming these benefits and we've used WAZ and HPI data there partly because part of the reason is assets can sometimes rule you out of being eligible for means tested benefits so that's how we've used the data sets but let's actually see how we've used them in reality and see some charts and stuff like that and see what's what do these data sets tell us about the state of the nation and you know in the latest period and so basically our picture is quite a bleak one so you'll see on the right hand side this is part of our campaign with the trust or trust on the essentials it's actually an interactive billboard where the tillboard actually comes out and so it's quite it's quite interesting but basically the bottom line is as I mentioned that universal credit is inefficient in sufficient to afford the essentials and it's off the back of with high inflation and nine years of 1% operating then benefit freezes and then basically benefits lagging behind inflation the basic rate of benefits being the least generous for at least 40 years we see in our three destitution reports particularly between the second and the third rising destitution with destitution up at 50% in in two years we see incredibly fast rises in in food bank use and we also see although it's sort of not a not a linear pattern but there's more of sleeping now than it was a decade ago why might that be well almost like a dragon shaped curve here which is inflation and you can see basically you know it's noticeable how fast the cost of living crisis accelerated we hopefully over the peak of inflation but we can see basically that you know we had inflation at 40 year highs and it's not all about Ukraine because part of the part of the acceleration of inflation was actually happening before the invasion of Ukraine and obviously the main story is energy prices but now that's starting to feed through to other commodities especially food and and you can see the blue dots are where the Bank of England are predicted in May inflation to be but you can see that the purple the last bits of the purple line are actually above the the the first two blue dots which means that basically inflation out turn has been higher than what the Bank of England predicted and obviously we'll wait with anticipation to see whether future inflation rates actually follow the Bank of England's predictions downwards but basically we also see through other work by the ONS and others that inflation is actually higher for lower income households because of the fact that they are spending more than money on essentials like food and energy which are some of the ones are driving driving at these high rates of inflation we also see high wage growth relative to previous years and so the private sector have seen wage growth at the moment around seven percent compared to about five and a half percent in the public sector however what you see on that chart is basically both of those rates are actually below inflation so the actual purchasing power of people's wages are actually still falling and yeah obviously you can add into the mix or the political turmoil and the impacts on the financial markets to see that it's been a really sort of uncertain economically insecure period of time for people and obviously what we are seeing as the consequence of that is increased interest rates which are having effect on mortgage holders and others as well so yes and so it is worrying basically the economic outlook is gloomy even though it looks like the recession might have been avoided and basically the OBR have said that they think this will be the worst two years on record for household incomes and its projection suggests that real household disposable income will be no higher in 2027 than they were in 2019 and barely higher than they were in 2017 so that means a lost decade of living standards and 20 years of income shocks and turmoil since the global financial crisis so that's sort of the economic context for the around these surveys and so interestingly with all that what has happened to overall poverty rates well you'll see the purple line in the middle has been basically flat over most of that kind of tumultuous 20 years which obviously is terrible in that you want poverty to be going down but it's quite interesting to see that actually poverty hasn't you know hasn't changed much over the period of time what poverty definition I'm using here is a relative poverty after housing costs so basically we take 60% of the median income adjusted for household size and composition and look at who's below that poverty line and the main data source we're using is household below average income series so you can see in terms of groups and children so there was a rising sort of trend in child poverty from about 2013-14 to just to the pan just before the pandemic again a rising pensioner poverty and just until just before the pandemic and then a big fall during the pandemic year partly because of falling medians partly because of the 20 pound a week benefit rise and what you see and this cuts off the last data point but basically you see quite a lot of that reduction reversed in the next data point because of the fact that the temporary benefit support had gone away and because median incomes had had started to rise again and so that's what we see in terms of poverty levels and a bit of a trailer for the IFS have a report out on Thursday that we fund on poverty living standards and inequality and so there's a similar seminar there so if you want to see the live update of this chart then come on on Thursday into that seminar. What we also see in terms of economic insecurity is that workers are more susceptible to poverty than in the past so the poverty rate for workers was around 9-10% in the mid 90s and is now sort of 13% even though there's been a bit of a fall in the last data point but you can see also a compositional effect with more and more of people in poverty being in working households. Now part of that is a good news story because unemployment has fallen over the period but how do you see from the left it's also a bit not just composition it's also risk with the risk of poverty for workers increasing as well and we think that's part of the picture of the last 20 years is an increasing prevalence of insecure work and we've seen some of that in some of the earlier presentations in terms of kind of pensions contribution and stuff like that. The poverty levels vary between and within regions and it's really exciting to hear about the ONS admin based income statistics which can go down to much smaller levels than what you see on the chart. It's also good to see other organisations actually taking the data and modelling themselves so the left the right hand map of England is from University of Lothborough and then child poverty coalitions and after housing costs small area income poverty estimates to children which is based off of DWP methodology but done after housing costs so again another organisation being able to take the data and work with it is really important. And you can see some of the drivers of poverty so some of the regions which have got the highest poverty rates so London mainly due to high housing costs so if you look at it on a before housing cost basis basically London's sort of in the park but when you look at it on after housing cost basis it's way out in the lead or it's amongst the highest rates of poverty with the northeast west midlands and wales where the picture is more about low earnings than high housing costs so you can see different drivers. And poverty rates vary enormously by ethnicity so you can see the white ethnic group broadly flat poverty rates but at the lowest levels around 20% really good progress into the reducer poverty for the Pakistani and Bangladesh ethnic groups but from sort of scandalously high to still really high poverty rates so still a lot more to be done whereas for the black ethnic groups really high and sort of not budging for 20 odd years again very worrying as well. So yeah that's also some compositional data as I said housing has a big effect so you can see the social renting and private renting have got highest poverty rates compared to buying of a mortgage and owned outright so quite a lot of the worries about mortgage rates actually it's affecting a group with relatively low poverty rates but ones that could could increase over time after we look at the housing costs. But you can see the effect of housing costs so basically about a third and about half a third of social renting poverty is due to housing costs and about half of private renting poverty is due to housing costs where people are pushed into poverty by their housing costs. Again a really persistent gap between people who are disabled and people who are not disabled in terms of their poverty rates. Obviously there's a bit of volatility over time but broadly speaking very little progress in kind of closing that gap and very little kind of progress in reducing either of those series over time. Yes so again worrying and disappointing and here's a chart where we do actually see a trend upwards so basically the red line is in very deep poverty so this is where someone has got so we've used a normal poverty line of 60% of median income. The deep poverty is 60% of median income, threshold and very deep poverty is 40% of median income, threshold and basically you can see that all of the changes over the last sort of 20 odd years are in the very deep poverty rate so it's all people who are further away from the poverty line and all of the kind of evidence suggests that the longer and the deeper you are in poverty the worst the worst outcomes you've got and this obviously ties in with lots and lots of other data sources in terms of the levels of destitution levels of food bank use all up so trust or trust distributed 2 million food parcels in 2021, twice the 1 million distributed in 2015, also got tripling in recorded diagnosis of malnutrition of people admitted to hospital between 2008 and 2021 and so lots and lots of really worrying statistics to kind of corroborate this information. So who's it, who's poverty been deepening for? Well basically quite a lot of the groups who are already more likely to be in poverty have seen their poverty deepening so lone parents, large families, disability, workless households who are already really high and then again ethnic minority backgrounds but it does vary by ethnic groups and you can see basically there are almost like a direct kind of policy one to one relationship because lots of these groups are more reliant on social security benefits and what's happened to social security benefits over the last decade or so actually they've been frozen or operated by 1% so in a way it shows the impact of policies can have on very deep poverty because that's that's one of the key drivers that you can see in the data. And what's the consequences? Well there's loads and loads of consequences and but this is kind of crowded slide but basically what you can see is that the in every any block of fire which is each different kind of mental health conditions it's worse it's worse there's more high prevalence the lower the income you've got and so that's that's what you see across all of those 12 dimensions of mental health sort of illnesses. So what's happened? So basically I heard from the ONS about trying to bring surveys up to date and obviously there will always be a big lag on surveys just because of the kind of field work and the kind of data processing and so forth but it's really important to us to actually try and bring things up to date so you can use administrative data and we can also do our polling data to try and bring things bang up to date. So this is sort of taking so the last survey year is 2021-22 so you can see sort of what happened in 2021-22 and then sort of 2022-23 and then right up to the date and so if you look at the benefits line for instance you can see the benefits were uprated at 3.1% in April 2022 and weren't uprated again until April 2023 when there was a 10% benefit uprating. We can see what happened while that was happening was basically inflation marched on earnings marched on but at a slower rate and benefits have only caught up with earnings from April but obviously you've had two years of rising inflation to actually cope with during that period where benefits have only increased by about 3% for the second of those two years so no wonder that we see lots of kind of some financial stress which you'll see on the next slide. You know all the things I've said record price rises for essentials, interest rates rising and also just very kind of lack of kind of resilience because of all the previous shocks that people have gone through over the period in terms of low savings, low credit availability and rising interest rates and so what we've done is with the help of Savanta we've done a poll of people going about essentials and you can see basically and so basically this is a poll of people in the bottom 40% of the distribution so it's not the whole of the distribution but what you can see is of that bottom 40% distribution massive rates of going without essentials so almost half of the people we surveyed were cut down on the sides of all skipped meals around a third had gone hungry and even sort of you know 10% have gone without their prescriptions which again is obviously you know then we can be kind of a vicious cycle of then things getting worse you have to get ill etc etc and this equates to 7.3 million low income low income households going about essentials and this is our fourth one of these surveys and basically it's it's gone up and stayed where it's where it's been since the first survey so I haven't seen much increase but equally it's at a sort of scandalously high level over time and so that's sort of a survey of like living living standards at the moment particularly for the poorest I want to talk a bit about future work by the JRF and so look out for and so we've done lots of work so we've looked at very deep poverty but we're now looking at persistent very deep poverty using understanding society so what are the reasons why people might be in very deep poverty for longer we're also looking at the care penalty again using understanding society so after somebody has a child or has starts becoming a informal carer for someone with a disability what's their kind of pay penalty we're looking a bit about the housing stock so private rents we've saw is a really bad impact on poverty status because it's expensive and insecure and there are options about increasing the social socials besides the social sector so by moving stock into the social sector and also we're going to do lots of work on the essentials guarantee and hopefully you'll see more campaigning on that basis we're actually paying for a new bit of social science infrastructure so a longitudinal survey of economic insecurity working at the University of Oxford on that and hopefully we'll be developing some new pieces of analysis infrastructure which is sort of a way of getting into the data more and so that's a bit about what the GERAP is up to what would we like from survey providers seeing that they're all on the call and well first of all I'd like to just thank all the people who work really hard on the surveys for what we have so we have an enviable set of surveys to use and with most information available on at least one and often more than one survey so that's really great and I do believe these embody the code of practice principles and that you can point to innovations in the data release tools and use the data over time and that you know including events like this you are responsive to users but there's always there's always more that we would want and so you know is there anything more that can be done on time in us and I think also on the micro data so we had the kind of timeline from our NS at the start which is really kind of orderly in terms of the actual publications but sometimes the actual micro data release is a lot less orderly and a bit kind of chaotic sometimes we're not knowing when things will come out so is there any more work that we can actually get almost like a release date for the micro data at the same time as we know what the release date of the survey is and is there anything we can do about sample size obviously and we know that there's issues with response rates and we also know there's issues with the field force so there's a surveys futures work that I went to an event on last week which is interesting there. It's a bit about like sharing developments of users in a more interactive way so I'm pleased by the expert user groups that was mentioned earlier but I think sometimes I feel like I'm brought in to steer something that's already decided to be done rather than sort of inputting on what needs to be done. More consistency between data sets between survey and admin data through benefit linking can hopefully mean that some of the sort of inconsistency between if you look at admin data benefit numbers and survey data it's a lot lower and then finally I think there's just a bit about kind of transparency about differences and also clarity on quality concerns but also kind of coherency so both the ONS and DWP have income distribution statistics so we saw income changes by quintile in an earlier presentation we may well see it for DWP later on in the afternoon and they are different and in different directions so I do feel like across government we could do it more guidance as to what is the best data sources and even if there is some necessary duplication guiding users to what what is actually happening what's the main data source and what's you know what what what should we be taking from them because otherwise people can kind of cherry pick but thank you and yeah it's been it's been brilliant hearing all the presentations and I'm looking forward to hearing hearing more this afternoon