Labour MPs are obviously going to panic when told their votes might plunge just one person into poverty – let alone 250,000. That was the original estimate for the fallout from Liz Kendall’s reforms to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit. Yesterday, the DWP released a revised figure after Starmer caved to a rebellion by 126 MPs. The new number? Some 150,000 pushed into poverty. A marginally better headline, at a £2.5 billion cost to the taxpayer, but still enough to spook Labour’s already jittery backbenches.

Frustratingly, these numbers, put out by the government, are completely meaningless. The government’s chosen metric, ‘relative poverty’, tells us far more about income inequality than it does about the number of people unable to meet their basic needs. Defined as a household income below 60 per cent of the median, it effectively labels more people poor whenever others get richer. So any reform short of a full-blown redistribution of wealth is doomed to fail this test. As the Times’s Tom Calver recently pointed out, this measure would have us believe child poverty is now three times worse than it was in the 1960s, when three million lived in actual........

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