In an interview with Sky News this morning, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s head of policy, said “poverty” is often used by “left-wing politicians” as a “relative” term, which he claims means “you could increase everybody’s incomes ten-fold and that statistic would stay the same”.

Asked by Trevor Phillips if the metrics of poverty measured by reputable organisations like the ONS are “illusions”, he said:

It’s worse than that. Because real poverty does exist in this country Trevor. And asbolute poverty does exist in very, very small pockets.

If you actually want to do the right thing for as many people as possible in this country then you need to create social mobility. That has been crushed by the Tory government and now this Labour government.

If you take the relative poverty argument then there will always be a percentage of the population that is in poverty and what that does nothing for is to help the middle classes or the people who are actually living in absolute poverty.

In the UK, poverty is more often defined as relative poverty rather than absolute poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation makes the distinction between the two terms here:

Poverty is often measured in relative terms, comparing incomes to typical living standards in a country, or in absolute terms, based on whether incomes of poorer households are growing faster than inflation.

Broadly speaking, relative measures fall if people with lower incomes see their household income rise by more than people with average incomes, while absolute measures fall if people with lower incomes see their household income rise by more than inflation.

According to recent analysis by the JRF, the UK’s poorest families are getting poorer, with record numbers of people classed as in “very deep poverty” – meaning their annual household incomes fail to cover the cost of food, energy bills and clothing.