The Need for an International Centre Committed to Poverty Research

Most research into poverty measurement and alleviation has been carried out in industrialised countries yet most poor people live in developing countries. This has led to poverty being measured in different ways in different parts of the world. There is a great need for a consistent scientific method of measuring poverty that can be used internationally and allow the scale of the problem to be accurately accessed. Current international methods of estimating poverty are extremely crude.

At the 1995 Copenhagen World Social Summit, the governments of 117 countries agreed on two definitions of ‘absolute’ and ‘overall’ poverty. They committed themselves to operationalising these concepts and producing practical policies to eliminate absolute poverty and reduce overall poverty. In October 1997, Clare Short confirmed the UK Government’s commitment to attempting to reduce world poverty by half by 2015 and eliminating poverty entirely before the end of the next century. The Copenhagen Agreement provides a basis for the international study of poverty in both the industrialised and developing world within a consistent theoretical framework.

It has long been a dream of humanity to eradicate poverty from the face of the earth, however, it is only now that we have reached the 21st century that it looks possible to translate this dream into reality. In the UK, the Child Poverty Act (2010) placed in legislation the commitment of eradicating child poverty by 2020. This ambitious policy commitment was first announced by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair in 1999, who said:

“And I will set out our historic aim that ours is the first generation to end child poverty, forever, within a generation. It is a 20-year mission but I believe it can be done.”

The Child Poverty Act represents the first time that a UK Government has ever legally committed itself to ending child poverty with a specific timetable. Similarly, the governments of the world set out a very ambitious agenda to halve absolute poverty and reduce overall poverty by 2015 and to eradicate poverty entirely by the end of the 21st century. They have repeatedly made this commitment, first of all at the World Social Summit, then through the OECD development goals, and most recently as a part of the United Nations Millennium Declaration. The university sector can support this goal by providing high quality interdisciplinary research into effective anti-poverty studies.

→ Download Tony Blair's full speech on Child Poverty [DOC, 0.06MB]

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Launch of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research

The Centre was established in response to the United Nations First International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997—2006) and in recognition of the work of Professor Peter Townsend. The governments of the world have committed themselves, through the United Nations and the OECD, to the goal of eradicating poverty by the end of the 21st Century. The University sector can support this goal by providing high quality interdisciplinary research into effective anti-poverty policies.

Over 100 people, from eleven countries, attended the Townsend Centre launch meeting and the ESRC-sponsored conference “Defining and Measuring Poverty” at the University of Bristol. All the local MPs and senior councillors in Bristol either attended or sent congratulations. Messages of support were received from the Chancellor Gordon Brown MP, Baroness Barbara Castle, Lord Morris and from academics and professionals around the world.

Professor Jonathan Bradshaw (University of York) speaking at the launch of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research.

Over 100 people, from eleven countries, attended the Townsend Centre launch meeting and the ESRC-sponsored conference “Defining and Measuring Poverty” at the University of Bristol. All the local MPs and senior councillors in Bristol either attended or sent congratulations. Messages of support were received from the Chancellor Gordon Brown MP, Baroness Barbara Castle, Lord Morris and from academics and professionals around the world.

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Peter Townsend

This International Centre for Poverty Research is named after Peter Townsend, who died in 2009. Peter Townsend was one of the World’s foremost social scientists and he made a greater contribution to poverty research than anyone who has ever lived. As well as challenging the philosophical and theoretical constructs of poverty, he was also instrumental in the development of new methods of measuring and defining poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom and around the world. The Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research organises a regular Peter Townsend Memorial Conference and hosts the Peter Townsend Archive.

→ This link provides a summary of Peter Townsend’s work which resulted in paradigm shift in poverty research.

→ For a summary of Peter Townsend's life and his experiences as a researcher download this interview by Paul Thompson [PDF, 0.06MB].

→ To celebrate the launch the Poverty centre published a commemorative pamphlet listing Peter Townsend’s publications which was updated in 2008 for his 80th birthday celebrations [PDF, 0.35MB].

This extract from Poverty, the forgotten Englishman illustrates the impact of Peter Townsend's early work:

“It was not until the beginning of the sixties that the small group of people who had consistently maintained that there was still a serious problem of material poverty began to make a serious impact on public opinion. As early as 1952, Peter Townsend, the most distinguished and persistent student of contemporary Poverty, raised doubts about the validity of Rowntree and Lavers' conclusions. At the time Townsend was working for the independent research organization, Political and Economic Planning (P.E.P.), and in their bulletin Planning he challenged the validity of Rowntree's minutely calculated subsistence scales, from which he deduced his poverty Enc. Townsend argued that the list of items deemed to be a ‘necessary expenditure’ was too narrow, and urged a more realistic appraisal of ‘necessaries’. Two years later he returned to this theme in the British Journal of Sociology4, where he suggested that calculations of essential expenditure should not be based upon the prejudices of research workers or other experts who claim to know how other people's money should best be spent, but upon actual spending patterns of working-class groups. He recognizes here that spending habits are not ‘rational’ (in a strict economic sense), but take place in the context of a social system which applies certain pressure upon its members. Thus ‘due regard must be paid to the conventions sanctioning membership of the community, to the influence of economic and social measures currently adopted by society as a whole … and to the standards encouraged by advertisers the press, the B.B.C., and the Church’, to which list we would now, presumably, add the more potent and deliberate influence of I.T.V.
In 1958 Townsend attacked more directly the myth that poverty had been abolished. In an essay in the volume Conviction he drew attention to the existence of large groups of people, such as the old, the widowed, the disabled and sick, who were unable to play a full part in the productive life of the economy, and were consequently unable to take full advantage of improvements in living standards, to consume in the new levels which were becoming general. These vulnerable groups were not small in number and probably totalled about 7 million people.
In February 1960 a Fabian pamphlet by Audrey Harvey developed a powerful attack on the myths of the fifties. Based upon Mrs Harvey’s considerable experience as a social worker in London’s East End, ‘Casualties of the Welfare State’5 had two important themes. First, that many of the thousands of clients who sought help were suffering real economic hardship; even those with higher than average earnings did not normally have the institutional insurances against misfortune enjoyed by so many white-collar workers, so that sickness or some other interruption of earnings could quickly precipitate an economic crisis. Secondly, the network of welfare agencies and social service departments was so administratively complex, and so bureaucratically organized, that many of those people who were most in need were not getting the help they required.
This pamphlet initiated a prolonged discussion, which still continues, about the efficacy of the welfare services, which was a healthy corrective to the assumption that in, indeed because of, the Welfare State, all was for the best. Between 1962 and 1965 there were published a damning series of books and papers, each of which added further systematic evidence of the growing seriousness of the problem. The theory that the Welfare State had ensured a substantial redistribution of income to the benefit of the working class was shown to be very wide of the mark in Professor Titmuss’s book Income Distribution and Social Change published in 19626. In the same year Mrs Dorothy Wedderburn published two important essays. In the first, which she wrote with Mr J. Utting7, the hardship among retired people was discussed in detail, while in the second, Mrs Wedderburn used a variety of official sources on income and expenditure to demonstrate that a large proportion of the population (about 12 per cent) was living at or close to the subsistence levels maintained by the National Assistance Board8. The following year Tony Lynes published his occasional paper National Assistance and National Prosperity9. This paper argued that at its establishment in 1948 the National Assistance Board had adopted a subsistence scale that could not be described as generous even by the standards of the thirties; since then it had not been sufficiently revised to keep pace either with changes in the cost of living, or with the growth in national prosperity. In 1964 Royston Lambert's paper Nutrition in Britain 1950–60'10 showed how during these years the diet of families with three or more children had deteriorated to well below the levels recommended by nutrition experts. Finally and most significantly, in December 1965 came The Poor and the Poorest by Professor Brian Abel-Sinith and Peter Townsend11. This document, based upon a careful analysis of the Ministry of Labour’s Household Expenditure Surveys, compared household incomes in 1953 and 1960 with the scale of National Assistance operative at the time. The authors showed that, in 1953, 7.8 per cent of the population was living in and the proportion was growing, so that, by 1960, 14.2 per cent of the population was affected. Thus it was claimed that in 1960, 7 million people were living in poverty. The publication of these findings so impressed an adult education class in Nottingham, that it reconvened six months later as the St Ann’s Study Group to plan the local poverty research project that forms the basic subject of Part II of this volume.”

4. 'Measuring Poverty', British Journal of Sociology, 1954, pp. 130-37.
5. Fabian Tract No. 321.
6. AIIen & Unwin,1962.
7. Cole (Wedderbum) and Utting 'Tile Economic Circumstances of Old People',
Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No. 4, Bell, 1962.
8. Cole (Wedderburn), 'Poverty in Britain Today – The Evidence', Sociological Review,
1962, pp. 257-82.
9. Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No. 5, Bell.
10. Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No. 6.
11. ibid., No. 17.

Coates, K. and Silburn, S., 'Poverty: the forgotten Englishmen'. Penguin Books, 1973: 29-32.

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