Chris Goulden
speaker
27 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2011
last heard May 2011
Chris Goulden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's essentially a democratic process, so it's based on what ordinary members of the public think we all need for a minimum acceptable standard of living.
It's quite a clever process, so it gets groups of ordinary people together to talk about the things we need for this minimum income standard.
So what the researchers do is they come up with a case study family and then take the group through their imaginary house and the group has to think about all the things that they would need as a minimum to kit out their house.
So things to sit on, food they need in their kitchen, a cooker, a fridge, things for their bedrooms, curtains, all the kind of basics for your home.
And the groups also decided that to play an acceptable part in society, you don't just need things in your home.
You also need to kind of take part in social activities.
So things like birthdays, a kind of very basic one-week self-catering holiday in this country, were included in the budget as well.
And then you get a final figure for what the budget costs different family types each week.
And then you can do some further calculations using the current tax and benefit system to work out how much money you would need to earn gross to reach that standard.
I think some of the areas where there was most debate amongst the groups were perhaps around some of the consumer electronics items.
In the budget, there is facility for a very basic TV and also a mobile phone, a pay-as-you-go with a very kind of limited amount of credit on it.
Do you regard this as a poverty line?
We don't call it a poverty line because I think it depends on how you think poverty should be conceptualised.
Some people would call this a poverty line.
There's a lot of room for different ways of looking at poverty.
I think there's no single measure that is the way you should measure poverty.
Each measure has its pros and cons and tells you different things about different aspects of poverty.
So I think this is something else that gives you a different angle.
So we have income standards for lots of different family types.
There's working age, single and couples, with and without children, and also single and couple pensioners.
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