People experience poverty when they don’t have enough money or resources to meet basic needs.
This means someone in poverty might not be able to afford enough food, or to pay for childcare, or to heat their home.
If you’re living in poverty, it can impact every part of your life and leave you feeling like you can’t do things that other people take for granted. It can mean going hungry, or without essentials.
But it can also mean not being able to take part in social or leisure activities. It is damaging to people’s health and wellbeing, and to children’s life chances.
Poverty means different things for different people
When we describe poverty statistics, it can be easy to see people in poverty as one group. But poverty has many different faces, and means many different things.
- Depth of poverty: Some people will earn just below the poverty line. Their experiences will be very different to those with the very lowest incomes, who may be unable to meet even the most basic of needs. We call this ‘depth of poverty’.
- Persistence of poverty: For some people, poverty is a temporary experience. A difficult period of time before a change in circumstances. For others, it can feel like a permanent state of existence. We call this ‘persistent poverty’.
- Individual experience: What poverty feels like will differ depending on someone’s circumstances. A single parent may struggle more to escape poverty, for example, because they have to make hard choices between expensive childcare and cutting back on working hours.
How is poverty measured?
Poverty is difficult to define, and there are different ways to measure it. Because of this you'll see different statistics giving different numbers for the amount of people in poverty.
In our statistics, we tend to use the official UK poverty line used by the government.
This defines someone as being poverty if they earn less than 60% of the median income of the UK.
So, if you lined up everybody in the UK based on their income, the median would be the person in the very middle. If you earn less than 60% of what this person does, you’re in poverty.
The chart shows what this means in practice for different households.
If you’re interested to learn more about the different ways of measuring poverty, and what the different measures tell us, read our full guide of How poverty is measured here.
A note on the word ‘poverty’
There is a lot of stigma attached to poverty, and to the word itself. Many people living in poverty won’t identify with the word, and for many people in the UK, it is something associated with other people – something that happens in the developing world, maybe, but not here.
And it’s true that what poverty looks like in other places will be very different to what it looks like in the UK.
Poverty is an imperfect word, because it creates a sense of disconnect and ‘other’ for a problem that is all too present in our society, that we all see the impacts of every day: not having enough money.
We use it because it is the best term to describe a complex social issue, and because it is the word used by policymakers, researchers and the media.
But we must never forget that when we talk about poverty in London, we are talking about individual people and families, living in the same city as us, who can’t afford to the standard of living we should all be able to expect.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation have explored this issue, and the ways that stigma around poverty entrenches deep levels of poverty, in this report.
Read the next section of Understanding poverty in London to explore the extent of poverty in London and how this has changed over time.