Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR
After the Second World War, social scientists began to look more closely at defining poverty. In the 1960s, Peter Townsend conducted the first national survey of poverty in the UK. His view was that poverty was relative, not absolute.
JOHN VEIT-WILSON
The idea was to find out what were the points at which deprivation pressures started so that one could get an idea of what people expected and what they suffered deprivation from. This was qualitative. I tell you that the median length of my interviews was three and 3/4 hours, and conducted often over more than one day. You can understand we were really, very intensively asking about these things. This was not tick box stuff.
Jonathan Bradshaw
Well, in the immediate post-war period, I think everybody thought with the establishment of the welfare state that poverty had more or less been abolished. And using the definitions that Seebohm Rowntree had used, which were based on the nutritional adequacy of the diet that people could afford, and poverty had more or less been abolished.
But Townsend's contribution was to dismiss the methods of Rowntree and to argue that you could only understand poverty as relative. He was a sociologist, and he argued that poverty should be understood as not just the lack of basic necessities for survival, but the inability to participate in society and to enjoy the normal things that people at the time we're enjoying.
RUTH LEVITAS
Definitions of poverty matter because they embed in them a notion of what poverty entails. If you think poverty is just the lack of income, you do not get at what the fabric of that experience actually is. You do not get at what the impact of that is on people's lives.
Concepts and theories of poverty are about deepening our understanding both of the experience and of the causal processes that produce it.
NARRATOR
Townsend's research was controversial, as it was published in 1979 when a new conservative government had just taken office.
DAVID GORDON
You have to understand at the time the government was trying to eradicate poverty by removing the word from the dictionaries, that they denied that poverty existed, that poverty was something that occurred in Africa or had occurred in Victorian Britain, but didn't exist in modern day Britain.
NARRATOR
Although Townsend's findings were rejected by the government of the day, his research had long lasting effects.
JOANNA MACK
Townsend was an extremely influential and seminal figure in poverty research. He did a number of things, but I think the most important ones what were to do with this widening of the definitions of poverty, to focus more widely on things like participation or being part of the society which you live in. And to do that, he developed a whole range of indicators of deprivation, and these would include not just things like food and clothing, but also leisure activities and social activities.
JONATHAN BRADSHAW
Peter Townsend's work and the introduction of the relative concept of poverty transformed the way we thought about poverty in the post-war period, introduced new ways of measuring it, and led to a whole raft of new policies for the civilian disabled, for families with children, in employment, who were not being part of the post-war Beveridge plan.