While poverty in affluent nations like the UK is often seen as transient and amenable to short-term interventions, recent evidence from other countries highlights the emerging trend of early and long-term childhood poverty due to structural factors such as precarious employment and inadequate social safety nets. This project aims to determine the extent of this issue in the UK, develop measurement tools, and lay the theoretical groundwork for future projects.Â
The project has three key objectives. The first is establishing a theoretical framework for understanding early and long-term poverty from a life course perspective, and linking long-term experiences to current poverty rates. The second is developing and testing a straightforward counting approach to measure long-term poverty prevalence. The third is assessing the prevalence and characteristics of early and long-term childhood poverty in the UK over the last three decades.Â
