Is someone in poverty if they can afford food, housing and the things they really need, but not other things most people take for granted? Answering this question requires a judgment about where an acceptable standard of living ends and poverty begins.

Statistics can tell us how many people live in those circumstances, but not whether those circumstances should count as poverty. Even the categories themselves are not self-evident: deciding what is a need, and what is merely taken for granted, is itself part of drawing the poverty line.

Debates about poverty usually focus on the headline figures: how many people are poor, whether poverty is rising or falling, or how changes to the benefits system affect it.

This is complicated by the fact that the UK has no single, universally accepted definition of poverty. Its most widely used, official benchmark is relative low income: living in a household whose disposable income, adjusted for household size, falls below 60% of the median in that year. This is useful for showing whether lower-income households are keeping pace with typical living standards, but it does not directly reveal what they can afford. The threshold also moves as median income changes.

Political disagreement occurs over whether poverty results from individual choices or wider social conditions. For example, whether benefit claimants are deserving or “scroungers”.

My new research suggests that disagreement actually starts earlier – at the........

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