Monitoring poverty and social exclusion

Introduction

This programme tracks progress on a range of indicators of poverty and social exclusion, providing an independent assessment of the impact of policy across all the nations of the UK over time. The indicators themselves can be found on The Poverty Site:

• www.poverty.org.uk

For a fuller introduction please refer to our Investigations summary (PDF).

Key issues

The latest report for the UK provides a comprehensive of trends and differences between groups. It is the first such report to be written in an economic downturn and the recession is the focus for much of the analysis.

Some of the headlines from the report are:

• The number of people unemployed or otherwise wanting work is the highest since 1997. The unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-oldsis now higher than at any point since this series began in 1993.
• These increases did not begin with the onset of recession. Unemployment has been rising since 2005, and the young adult unemployment rate stopped falling as long ago as 2001.
• Even before the start of the recession, the number of people living in low-income households rose again in 2007/08. The number of people in low-income households is now as high as it was in 2000, having risen by 1.3m in the last three years.
• Despite all this, the overall picture is far from negative. The proportion of 11-year-olds not meeting basic standards in mathematics and English has fallen every year since at least the late 1990s. The number of 16-year-olds getting fewer than 5 GCSEs is now lower than at any point in the last ten years.

Forthcoming work

• A report for Scotland is due during 2010, and the 2010 UK report will be published in December.

To receive monthly updates of the latest changes to the indicators, sign up here.