No one left behind? Monitoring the income floor in Great Britain 1991-2021

In our March Seminar Dr Selçuk Bedük, Lecturer in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford, presents research which aims to understand whether we are lifting the standards for everyone or leaving the poorest behind.

Over the past two decades, relative poverty rates in the UK have been remarkably stable despite significant economic downturns and regressive policy changes. While poverty rates have not been changed, recent evidence shows that poverty experiences are more intensified, and extreme forms of poverty have been on the rise. 'In our paper, we study the conditions of the poorest, who are not captured by standard poverty measures, but likely to suffer from recent austerity reforms in the UK’, explains Dr Selçuk Bedük.

‘Our aim is to understand whether we are lifting the standards for everyone or leaving the poorest behind. Using long-term longitudinal survey data, we build a measure of the income floor based on moving averages, and observe and explain the trends and changes in its level. Our findings show a secular increase in the income floor between 1990 and 2013, followed by a sharp decline coinciding with the implementation of austerity measures. The income floor in Great Britain is largely made of social protection benefits, in particular those related to children and housing, and as a result is very responsive to policy changes. Decomposition results based on counterfactual simulations suggest that the drop in the income floor between 2013 and 2019 is largely explained by changes in tax-benefit policies.’

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About the speaker

Selçuk is a Lecturer in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford. He previously worked as a Senior Research Officer at ISER, University of Essex. His research is centred around the main questions of poverty, inequality and social policy: How do we best measure and effectively respond to poverty? How does inequality accumulate over the life course and transmit across generations? Which policies and welfare systems best reduce poverty and inequality, and provide security for all?