About this app

The Child Poverty Dashboard is a new tool designed to be a partner to the Centre for Civic Innovation's Child Poverty Report. This version is a prototype with further development coming shortly. There will be bugs and missing features. Your feedback will be valuable in shaping the direction of this.

Our aim is to provide Council Officers, and groups with an interest in reducing Child Poverty, with the knowledge to make decisions, design services and drive policy. The data in this tool related to people known to the council only.

Below are more detailed definitions and explanations of the terms used in the app.

Poverty

Usually when we talk about poverty we are talking about relative poverty. Households in relative poverty have a household income less than 60% of the UK median household income. This threshold is called the poverty line. The threshold varies depending on the composition of the household. The poverty threshold for a household with more adults and children will be higher than a household with fewer adults and children as the larger household requires more money to make ends meet.

When we refer to deep poverty we use a lower poverty line, 40% of the UK median household income, with the same caveats around household composition. Just coping is a new measure we have calculated to identify those just above and below the poverty line. These households have a household income from 10% below the poverty line to 20% above the poverty line.

How we calculate poverty

Councils are responsible for administering housing benefit and council tax reduction to citizens who qualify for these benefits. Glasgow City Council holds information on these citizens, their households and incomes. From this we calculate the total household income from a variety of sources including employment, benefits and pensions. We then compare these incomes with the poverty threshold, factoring in the composition of the household, to establish if a household is living in poverty. Thresholds are updated each year as incomes naturally rise due to inflation.

Our estimates of poverty only include households who are in receipt of housing benefit or council tax reduction. There may be other households that are in poverty but do not receive these benefits for a variety of reasons.

The Child Poverty Report

This tool is a partner to the Centre for Civic Innovation's Child Poverty Report. The report was first produced in 2020 and again in 2021 and 2022 using housing benefit and council tax reduction data from February of that year. This year the report, and this tool, will be produced with data from July 2023 due to delays in negotiating data access. In the future, we intend to refresh the data in this dashboard more frequently.