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<p>There is no official definition of destitution. The Department for Work and Pensions
annually publishes Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics, based on the
Family Resources Survey, which sets out four official measures of relative and absolute
low income before and after housing costs. The closest measure in HBAI to a measure
of destitution is the number of children in “severe low income” (50% of median before
housing costs). HBAI also provides measures of material deprivation based on questions
to parents and pensioners about their ability to afford the basics in life such as
heating homes and paying bills. In addition, new questions have been added to the
Family Resources Survey to develop a food insecurity measure from 2021.</p><p>New
experimental statistics to measure poverty will be developed, and published by DWP
in 2020. The new analysis will be based on the work undertaken by the Social Metrics
Commission (SMC) which was presented in the SMC’s ‘A New Measure of Poverty’ report
last year.</p>
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