Child poverty down under National and up under Labour

There are nine different measures of poverty, but in reality most of them don’t measure poverty – they just measure income inequality which is not the same thing (but still of some importance).

The figure which measures actual poverty is the one called material hardship. It measures if families can afford actual things such as more than one pair of shoes for their kids etc. That is the most important measure, in my opinion.

In 2013 when measurement started 18.1% of children lived in material hardship. In 2017 that had dropped to 12.7%. That is a huge drop – almost one third.

Since 2017 it has increased from 12.7% to 13.4% in 2019.

So National saw child poverty rates decline by a third and Labour has seen then increase.

Inconvenient facts.