“Why do so many people believe that Rowntree created a poverty line measured in cash terms and set so low that it could only buy the minimum needed to keep someone alive, with no allowance for  money to be spent on social activities?  If this was true, it would make him responsible for much misery, because the benefits scales in Britain today are still indirectly based on this idea and they are not generous.  I believe his views on poverty have been misrepresented; because he was working in a different political environment from our own.  It is his primary poverty description that has been most criticised as very harsh.  But at the time, Rowntree had to defend his definition of primary poverty as being too generous.  He never maintained that it was an income level at which real people could live.  He called it an artificial line to show doubters that some people in poverty were in that condition because they had too little money, and for no other reason at all.  In his own political context it is clear that Rowntree was criticising the rich for their toleration of inhumanity, not the poor for their intolerable suffering.”

Adapted from ‘The Boundaries of the Tolerable’

John Veit Wilson

The Joseph Rowntree Lecture