Further to my tweet about the identification of poverty with worklessness, an idea that has become increasingly unrealistic over the last 25 years, here is the breakdown of kids in poverty by family type and employment after housing costs from Stat x-Plore (left column). 1/n
That's a lot of numbers so here's a quick table summarising just the employment data. Not only do children in households with someone in employment form the great majority of children in poverty, 52% are in households with one or more people working full-time. 2/n
The right hand column shows the risk of poverty by employment status of the household i.e. the % of kids in poverty. So 20% of kids in households with one or more adults working full-time (self-reported) are in poverty. That's a sizeable minority of a very big group. 3/n
Two groups are particularly important to full-time working poverty: couples with one or more adults in full-time self-employment and couples where one adult is working full-time and one is not working. Poverty risks for kids in these families are 34% and 38% respectively. 4/n
Finally on the subject of worklessness, the dimension that tends to get overlooked is disability. Here's the trend since 1996/7 splitting the series between kids in families with and without disabled members. Changes to the definition of disability in the survey are labelled. 5/n
Those definitional changes require caution in interpretation but their effect is not of a scale to undermine the message that there has been a huge fall in the number of kids in workless households without disability - from just under 1.8 million to just over 600K. 6/n
Compared to this shift, changes in numbers of kids in families with disability are smaller scale (note however the jump in 2012/13 - definitional changes is playing a role here). By 2018/19 worklessness among households with children is dominated by households with disability.7/n
What's the conclusion? That a great deal of political discourse on poverty & worklessness is essentially fantasy. Most child poverty is working poverty, more than half involving families with full-time work & most workless households with kids have disabled members. 8/8
