Perfectly sets the context in which we now operate and shows the hopeless inadequacy of the various one off payment schemes rapidly becoming the new normal.
Also, not a surprise at all. When government gets data it doesn’t like, the inclination to improve the situation tends to be tempered by the political instinct to turn the data off. Don’t like poverty? Turn off the poverty line. Don’t like the poor standard of DWP decision making. Stop collecting and publishing the data.
We abolished any reference to poverty in 2015 so that benefit rates could be set by what was politically attractive rather than by need and this is inevitably where that lands.
