Britain is set for another dodgy data scandal. In last Friday’s Reality Check newsletter I picked up on reporting from the Times which called into question the income data used to calculate Britain’s child poverty metrics. Now, the BBC reports that those figures are going to be revised. The result: half a million children who the government previously claimed were in poverty were in fact not.

This is obviously good news. But let’s be clear: it’s also a total and utter scandal.

The way we measure child poverty has always been a bit of nonsense. It uses ‘relative poverty’, which sets a breadline of 60 per cent of median income. The problems with using relative income measures are obvious. If median earnings were to drop slightly, then hundreds of thousands would apparently be lifted out of poverty despite their material........

© The Spectator