Inequality Knowledge: The Making of the Numbers about the Gap between Rich and Poor in Contemporary Britain 9783111317052, 9783111100142

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Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London Publications of the German Historical Institute London

Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London Publications of the German Historical Institute London Herausgegeben von Christina von Hodenberg Edited by Christina von Hodenberg

Band 89/Volume 89

Felix Römer

Inequality Knowledge The Making of the Numbers about the Gap between Rich and Poor in Contemporary Britain

ISBN 978-3-11-110014-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-131705-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-131727-4 ISSN 2192-0257 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940910 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Thatcher’s Social Security Secretary John Moore delivers his controversial speech on poverty in London, 11 May 1989. Drawing by London-based artist Sarah Beth Lundblad (2023), based on contemporary media footage. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface Economic inequality has returned to the political and academic agenda in recent years. From the financial crisis in 2008, via the austerity years of the 2010s, to the global pandemic in 2020–2, the gap between rich and poor has not only widened considerably but has also received more public attention than ever—a trend that has been underpinned by a growing body of academic and government research. In particular, statistical knowledge on poverty, income, and wealth distribution has played a key role in this process. Statistics have made social disparities in class, race, and gender more visible, and media audiences in Britain have become familiar with figures such as the top 1 per cent and measures such as the Gini coefficient, which have been used to monitor trends in economic inequality and to politicize the subject. Statistical indicators have been employed to gauge the degree of social justice in the capitalist system, and statistical languages, terms, and categories have influenced popular images of British society. Conversely, issues of economic inequality have occupied a more marginal place in public discourse at times when relevant knowledge was unavailable or deemed unreliable. For all these reasons, inequality knowledge is far from just a technical matter. It has acquired much political significance and has become a bone of contention in itself. This crucial knowledge was not only produced by famous economists such as Anthony B. Atkinson, the leading authority in the economics of inequality from the 1970s to the 2010s. A lesser-known key figure in this story was John Leonard Nicholson, a government statistician who pioneered the first regular household surveys and analyses of income distribution in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s. When I read his personal papers at the archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), it became apparent to me that the ways in which we speak and think about issues of poverty and inequality have depended not least on civil servants like him, even if their work has often remained hidden from view. This book tells the story of the people and practices that have shaped inequality knowledge in contemporary Britain. The book began life as a research project at the German Historical Institute London (GHIL). Working on this project and serving as a research fellow at the GHIL was an immense privilege and I am forever grateful, first of all, to Andreas Gestrich, then the institute’s director, for this wonderful opportunity. Being a member of staff at the GHIL amidst the scholarly community in Bloomsbury for almost seven years helped me develop new perspectives and taught me so much on so many levels. Not least, I have learned a lot and benefited greatly from Andreas Gestrich’s academic leadership, his deep insights and ideas about histories across epochs and fields, his intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness in academic discussions, and his encouraging and constructive advice on my own work. At the GHIL I also received much support and helpful feedback on my project from the institute’s deputy directors Benedikt Stuchtey and Michael Schaich, as well as from other friends and colleagues, in particular, Felix Brahm, Kerstin Brückweh, Mirjam Brusius, Valeska Huber, Peter Kramper, Markus https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-202

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Mößlang, Cornelia Linde, Angela Schattner, Jochen Schenk, Falko Schnicke, Indra Sengupta, Silke Strickrodt, and Hannes Ziegler. Alongside the research fellows, I am grateful to all the other colleagues who made the GHIL such a great place to work: our library and editorial staff, administrators, receptionists, and our caretaker, David Lodge. Furthermore, the members of our advisory board provided support and feedback over the years and accepted my work for publication in the institute’s book series. Last but not least, I would like to thank Christina von Hodenberg, the institute’s current director, with whom I had the pleasure to work during the final months of my time at the GHIL and on earlier occasions. In the academic world of Bloomsbury I was ideally placed to meet and learn from many other brilliant scholars in countless exchanges, stimulating discussions, and productive collaborations that have inspired me so much. For all the rewarding conversations and great collegiality I would like to thank, in particular, Martin Daunton, Mary Fulbrook, Dominik Geppert, Neil Gregor, Elizabeth Harvey, Mark Hewitson, Mary Morgan, Simone Lässig, Christoph Lorke, Kiran Patel, Poornima Paidipaty, Pedro Ramos Pinto, Lutz Raphael, Andreas Rödder, Michael Rowe, Mike Savage, Peter Sloman, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Pat Thane, Jim Tomlinson, Frank Trentmann, and Dorothee Wierling. Another important opportunity was presented to me by Sönke Neitzel when he introduced me to the LSE, where I learned much from teaching international students as a guest lecturer over three academic years. In my research, I benefited greatly from discussions with conference and seminar audiences at the GHIL, the Institute for Historical Research, and from events in Berlin, Konstanz, Lund, Potsdam, and Washington. I am also grateful to the archivists and librarians who helped me with my research in London, Coventry, Manchester, Oxford, and Paris. When my time at the GHIL came to a close in 2019, a Max Weber Fellowship gave me the opportunity to find a new academic home at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I cannot thank Alexander Nützenadel and the whole team at the Chair of Social and Economic History enough for welcoming me with open arms and for providing such a friendly and stimulating intellectual environment. Alexander Nützenadel also kindly agreed to oversee my habilitation thesis, and thankfully the board of the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften agreed to take me in. Eventually, I submitted my Habilitationsschrift in August 2020 and the thesis was subsequently examined by Alexander Nützenadel, Jim Tomlinson, and Nikolaus Wolf. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all three readers for their thorough assessments, very thoughtful comments, and constructive criticism that helped me to improve the manuscript. I am also indebted to Michael Schaich and Frank Trentmann, who read parts of my work and provided invaluable advice. The process of turning my Habilitationsschrift into the present book was expertly facilitated by the editors at the GHIL, Angela Davies, Markus Mößlang, and Jozef van der Voort, and I would like to thank Sarah Patey for her careful and meticulous copyediting. The index was prepared by Gianluca Mezari with efficiency. Furthermore, I am grateful to Bettina Neuhoff for managing the publication of the book at De Gruyter.

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Shortly before the book went to print, I received the news that it won the 2023 Carl Erdmann Award—I am very humbled and grateful to the board of the German Historical Association and the distinguished jury for considering my work. Finally, I would like to thank Sarah B. Lundblad for crafting the drawing on the front cover of this book. Sarah is a London-based artist who happened to live across the street from our place in Islington, and she and her family have become close friends of ours. The illustration on the front cover thus not only symbolizes key themes of this book, as will become apparent on the following pages, but I also look at it as an expression of transnational friendship, exchange, and collaboration—the kind of spirit that is fostered at the GHIL through the Max Weber Foundation together with our like-minded partners in the UK. Alongside my friends and colleagues, I owe, of course, much to my family, and I would like to thank my wife Setareh and our two little Londoners, Louis and Henry, for their support and love.

Contents Preface

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I

Introduction

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II

The Emergence of a Global Knowledge Regime 28 Research on Living Standards and the Evolution of Social Surveys The Levels of Living Programme 44 The Attempted Standardization of Statistics on Income Distribution The Social Indicators Movement 61 The European Anti-Poverty Programmes 82 The Breakthrough: The Luxembourg Income Study 90

34 51

III The Post-War Knowledge Regime, 1948–1972 98 The Production of Knowledge on Economic Inequality 103 Wealth Distribution 104 Income Inequality 112 Poverty and Deprivation 123 Redistribution 135 Intersectionality 146 The Circulation of Knowledge and the Politics of Statistics 155 IV The Social Democratic Knowledge Regime, 1973–1979 177 The Politics of Inequality Knowledge Under the Heath Government, 1970– 1974 180 Building a Social Democratic Knowledge Regime: 1974–76 189 Intersectional Inequalities: Gender and Race 206 Spatialized Inequalities: Local Knowledge in London and Islington 210 The Survey Gap 217 Government Propaganda: Statistics on the ‘Social Wage’ 220 Checks to the Transformation of the Knowledge Regime, 1976–79 226 Visions of Knowledge-based Policy-Making: The Joint Approach to Social Policy 238 V

The Rise and Fall of the Thatcherite Knowledge Regime, 1979–1991/ 99 252 Transforming the Knowledge Regime 256 The Attack on the Concept of Relative Poverty 289

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Constructing a New Statistical Series and the Narrative of the Trickle-Down Effect 297 Democratizing the Knowledge Regime: The Caesura of 1991 306 From Major to Blair to the Present: the Emergence of the Civil Society Knowledge Regime 316 VI Conclusion

329

List of Illustrations Index of Abbreviations Bibliography Index

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341 343

I Introduction The picture on the front cover encapsulates an important but largely forgotten controversy that was emblematic of Thatcher’s Britain. It captures the moment when John Moore, Thatcher’s Social Security Secretary, delivered a widely noted speech to an audience at the Conservative St Stephen’s Club in Westminster on 11 May 1989.1 Moore used the speech to respond to mounting criticism over the government’s social and economic policies. The social costs of the government’s market reforms had drawn condemnation from anti-poverty campaign groups, academic experts, and opposition politicians from the start. Throughout the decade, much of the debate boiled down to the issue of growing economic inequality – widening disparities of income and wealth as well as increasing rates of poverty and deprivation. Thatcher and her followers wholeheartedly embraced inequality as a necessary incentive and well-deserved reward for ‘wealth creation’ in the ‘enterprise economy’ they sought to engineer. While they accepted that the rich were getting richer, however, they disputed that the poor were getting poorer. After all, ministers claimed, even the poorest sections of society were benefiting from the government’s policies and the return to economic prosperity under Thatcher. To defend the government’s narrative of ‘better living standards for all’, Moore set out to rebut the frequently heard allegations ‘that one-third of the population in the UK is living in poverty or on the margins of poverty’ and that ‘the poor are getting poorer’. Whenever these claims appeared on television or in newspapers, they were often ‘bolstered by obscure, but impressive-looking charts claiming to “prove” that they are true’, Moore explained, but they were actually ‘false’ and based on ‘facts deliberately manipulated to fit these conclusions’. According to Moore, there was actually no such thing as poverty in Britain, merely inequality, and the poorest in society were not really getting poorer, but were in fact enjoying better living standards than ever before. To convince the public that the critics were wrong and the government was right, Moore bolstered his claims with his own set of attention-grabbing charts. As can be seen in our picture, Moore pointed to a battery of statistics that were mounted on a scaffold next to him in the lecture hall. The statistics as well as the speech itself had been meticulously prepared by civil servants in his department. Numbers and facts were carefully selected to show that living standards in post-war Britain had risen far beyond an acceptable minimum, measured, among others, by widespread ownership of consumer durables: even in the poorest fifth of families with children, it was pointed out, ‘virtually ALL had a television set’ and ‘nearly every household had a refrigerator’. The assemblage of numbers was not only designed to refute the critics’

 Moore, ‘The End of the Line for Poverty’. Media footage of the speech is available at [https://www.gettyi mages.de/detail/video/john-moore-poverty-speech-rushes-not-kept-england-london-News-footage/ 805318168?adppopup=true], accessed 19 August 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-001

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Fig. 1: John Moore pointing to statistics during his speech on 11 May 1989: drawing by London-based artist Sarah Beth Lundblad (2023), based on contemporary media footage.

statistical arguments about the rise in poverty in the UK, but also to undermine the very conceptual framework on which they relied. Moore was adamant that measuring poverty in relative terms based on a poverty line was ‘nonsense’. Moore saw the speech as an opportunity to attack the ‘slippery statistical concept’ of ‘relative poverty’ that was associated with ‘the origins of the modern debate on poverty’. Here, Moore referred to the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in the mid 1960s when social scientists Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith made headlines by producing new findings on alarming levels of deprivation in post-war Britain that disrupted the complacent narratives of the ‘affluent society’. In the process, they also transformed contemporary understandings of poverty as a threshold defined by a subsistence minimum. Instead, Townsend and Abel-Smith argued that poverty should be conceptualized and measured in relation to living standards in society as a whole; more concretely, they suggested that a poverty line should be drawn at 140 per cent of the current National Assistance level. Subsequently, the measure was widely adopted and used as an unofficial poverty benchmark, including by the state bureaucracy; alongside the new indicator, the underlying concept of relative poverty was built into the normative framework of the welfare state and became a key plank of progressive political thought. For all these reasons, the concept ran counter to the philosophy of inequality that was promoted by the New Right under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. As Thatcher explained in a programmatic

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speech in 1975, the welfare state and ‘the relentless pursuit of equality’ had done much to weaken Britain’s economy and had thus contributed to the decline of the nation during the post-war decades, a decline that she sought to reverse by championing ‘private enterprise’ and ‘the right to be unequal’.2 Thus, rejecting the concept of relative poverty was not only linked to fundamental beliefs about a better society among the New Right, but also to broader political narratives about the historical legacy of social democracy in post-war Britain and the Thatcherite agenda of dismantling it. Moore’s intervention in the controversy about the poverty figures showcased the significance attached to statistical arguments and big numbers in contemporary political culture. What was at stake in the debate was not just the government’s record in a specific policy area, but Thatcher’s social vision at large. The whole idea of the ‘enterprise economy’, where ambitious entrepreneurs created wealth trickling down to benefit the whole of society, seemed to hinge on the results from key statistical series. Accordingly, what the statistics showed was subject to heated political contestation. While Moore argued that the statistical material presented in his speech testified to the roaring success of British capitalism, the opposition took a very different view in light of the mounting evidence of mass unemployment and growing material deprivation in Britain. Hence, Moore’s denial of poverty drew widespread criticism, but while his statistical claims were challenged by the opposition, they could not be verified independently and were reproduced unquestioned in parts of the media, in particular, by the right-wing popular press. Unimpressed by the critique, Thatcher and her ministers upheld the narrative of rising living standards for all, a claim that was based on official statistics produced by government departments. When the statistics in question were eventually proven wrong, Thatcher had already left office. In the early and mid 1990s, a wave of new research established that the poorest sections of society had actually suffered substantial losses in income under Thatcher. The statistics of the 1990s settled the question of what happened during the 1980s: the decade saw a massive surge in economic inequality on every level and by all available measures.3 Measured by the Gini coefficient, overall inequality in the post-tax income distribution rose by 38 per cent between 1979 and the mid 1990s. Back in the 1970s, the poorest 5 to 10 per cent of the population had enjoyed above average increases in their real incomes, but after 1979 they fared the worst while other groups higher up in the income spectrum were able to pocket considerable gains – the gap was widening not only between the rich and the poor, but also between the poor and the middle. Poverty, in turn, increased from an average of 15.3 per cent during the 1970s to 24 per cent in 1990. Child poverty doubled under Thatcher: by the early 1990s, roughly a third of all children in the United Kingdom lived in households that were

 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let Our Children Grow Tall’, speech to the Institute of SocioEconomic Studies, New York, 15 Sept. 1975, at [https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102769], accessed 24 Mar. 2022.  Evans and Williams, A Generation of Change, 205–6.

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poor by contemporary standards. Despite some reductions in child poverty rates under the New Labour government and certain fluctuations over subsequent years, overall inequality has plateaued on these high levels ever since and never returned to the more moderate levels of the 1970s. These findings will probably not surprise many readers: in today’s world, the inequality boom and the profound transformation of Britain’s social fabric during the 1980s is a familiar story. The basic facts can be drawn from textbooks, newspapers, or electronic resources – they are readily available at our fingertips on websites such as the pages of the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has become one of the leading authorities in this field in present-day Britain. In recent years, commentators have also pointed to existing levels of inequality and deprivation across many parts of the United Kingdom to explain the deeper causes of the rise of right-wing populism and the Brexit vote, especially with regard to the Leave vote in many ‘leftbehind’ constituencies in the North and in Wales: it seemed to overlap with the social geographies of those regional areas that had been hit particularly hard by the combined effects of deindustrialization and Thatcherism during the 1980s and 1990s. Even if assumptions about these causal links have been complicated by more recent research, the discussions over the Brexit vote have reinforced the sense of a divided society, and the origins of these social and political divisions have often been traced back to the 1980s.4 Arguments about Thatcher’s legacy of sharply increased social inequalities rest on a plethora of studies in the social sciences, and, in particular, on detailed statistics that are widely regarded as reliable and indisputable. Hence, the inequality boom under Thatcher has become common knowledge. However, we have only obtained this knowledge in hindsight. At the time when the surge in inequality unfolded, there was very little undisputed knowledge or consensus about what was happening. Due to the uncertainty that clouded the debates, basic social trends and movements in income inequality and poverty remained hotly contested in Thatcher’s Britain. As this study will demonstrate, this was not a coincidence: the uncertainty was deliberately engineered by the government through interventions in the statistical system. The government’s management of official statistics was closely linked to its public relations efforts that were employed to defend the government’s narratives and policies. As this study will argue, the government transformed the existing knowledge regime in this specific field to fit its political agenda; this political practice can be described analytically as a form of knowledge politics. Thatcher’s ministers and officials employed knowledge politics to reinforce the government’s political message and to deflect criticism with a view to securing support for its policies and its larger social vision. Moore’s intervention in May 1989 was part and parcel of this strategy.

 Dorling and Tomlinson, Rule Britannia, ch. 4.

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The episode fleshes out Thomas Piketty’s recent observations about the significance of knowledge in the transformation of inequality regimes in recent decades. As Piketty notes, the transition to the current hyper-capitalist inequality regime has been accompanied by decreasing ‘democratic transparency regarding inequalities of income and wealth’ in many societies since the 1980s and 1990s; the increasing ‘economic and financial opacity’ has been of ‘paramount importance’ in facilitating the transformation of social and economic orders by stifling public debates about distributive effects and levels of inequality.5 In other words, knowledge or non-knowledge can be regarded as a significant contributing factor in shaping, sustaining or challenging inequality regimes; inequality regimes are not only configured through political discourse or tax laws, but also by epistemological practices and infrastructures that can influence perceptions, public discussions, and policy prescriptions. Indeed, Piketty acknowledges that any discussion of inequality relies on ‘facts’ that represent ‘constructs’ produced by an ‘observational apparatus’ in complex interactions with the society under study. However, the workings of the ‘observational apparatus’ should be regarded as an integral part of the inequality regime in its own right. According to Piketty’s definition, an inequality regime can be conceptualized as an assemblage of interacting sub-regimes – the political regime, the property regime, the educational regime, and the fiscal regime.6 This study proposes to expand Piketty’s analytical model by incorporating the knowledge regime as another constituent category, a concept that will be further explained below. This perspective sheds light on practices and institutions that have often remained out of view in this context; at the same time, it focuses attention on the historicity and malleability of inequality regimes. Historicizing knowledge can deepen our understanding of the workings and transformations that inequality regimes underwent not only in the era of hypercapitalism, but also in the preceding decades of the post-war era. The picture on the front cover thus symbolizes fundamental insights that will guide the analysis throughout this book. Knowledge is a social construct that shapes society, and vice versa. Statistical knowledge, in particular, produces descriptions of reality that can be taken for the thing itself; it generates images of society and can render social phenomena or groups visible or invisible in very peculiar ways depending on when, where, how, and by whom it is produced.7 As Moore’s speech demonstrates, the ‘co-construction of statistics and society’8 is not just an academic endeavour but is bound up with farreaching political implications. Those who control the production of knowledge are

 Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 648–9, 656–61. The significance of public scrutiny is also highlighted by Savage, Return of Inequality, 319.  Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 6.  Bartl et al., ‘Governing by Numbers’, 11–12.  Saetnan et al., Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society.

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invested with ‘classificatory power’ to define the contemporary social world.9 In other words, there are people and institutions who get to decide what kind of knowledge is being produced or not, and what will be made available to the public. Historically, the power implications of knowledge production only grew in importance in line with the increasing centrality and ubiquity of statistics in modern political culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. By the 1970s or 1980s at the latest, numbers gained a near ‘total hold’ of the public sphere in Britain and elsewhere in the world.10 Governments in Britain have used social and economic statistics for public relations purposes since the 1940s.11 In more recent decades, the politics of big numbers and the quantification of the social world have encroached on ever more domains.12 The 1980s, in particular, have been associated with the rise of a culture of performance evaluations, ratings, and league tables – to the point that the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was even criticized by some in her own party for turning the country into a ‘ratocracy’.13 The ‘ranking frenzy’ also extended to the global sphere. The proliferation of international rankings and rating agencies during the 1990s and the 2000s was underpinned by the new management theories of the 1980s. Rating became a ‘new technology of global governance’ that has also involved the creation and dissemination of new forms of comparative statistical knowledge.14 At the same time, civil society has become more statistics-savvy, too. Nongovernmental actors, academic experts, and the media have relied on statistical knowledge to challenge the government’s narratives or to substantiate calls for political action. To be sure, there is certainly no straightforward relationship between research and political interventions – the publication of a new academic study does not automatically lead to a change in policy. In some instances, though, this was exactly what happened. The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in the mid 1960s, for example, prompted social welfare reforms, and the introduction of the child poverty target under New Labour in 1999 led to subsequent reductions in child poverty rates.15 In any event, the political relevance of statistical knowledge seemed clear to contemporaries. During the post-war decades, both governments and non-governmental actors became fully aware of the important part that statistics could play in defining social issues, raising public awareness and creating political pressures.

 Adolf and Stehr, Knowledge, 54–63; Stehr and Adolf, Ist Wissen Macht?  Crook and O’Hara, ‘The “Torrent of Numbers”’.  Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People; Reinecke and Mergel, ‘Das Soziale vorstellen’; Becker, Telling about Society, 26–7.  Bruno et al., Social Sciences; Rottenburg et al., World of Indicators; Miller, ‘Governing by Numbers’.  Hickson, ‘Conservatism and the Poor’, 350; Bochel and Daly, ‘Research, Evidence, and Policy’, 94.  Cooley, ‘The Emerging Politics of International Rankings and Ratings’.  Sloman, Transfer State.

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Historicizing knowledge thus holds a key to unlocking contemporary perceptions, political thought, and public discussions on social trends and class divisions. As a product of their time, these bodies of knowledge can contrast sharply with retrospective analyses. From today’s perspective, the trajectories of economic inequality in post-war Britain are a familiar story that can be looked up in handbooks and general histories: there was far-reaching stability in income inequality during the 1950s, followed by reductions between 1964 and 1969 and slight increases in 1971/72, before the period of the lowest degree of inequality was reached during the mid 1970s; income inequality began to increase again in the late 1970s and surged during the 1980s, before plateauing in the early 1990s.16 During most of the post-war period, however, such conclusive knowledge was not yet available, or only partly; it was presented in different forms and not vested with the same authority as the retrospective analyses of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other bodies from the 1990s that established the trajectories identified above as facts. The differences between what is conventional wisdom today and what was taken as a fact in the past are a reminder of the historicity of all knowledge and the different temporalities associated with contemporary and retrospective states of knowledge. 38 36 34

Gini coefficient

32 30 28

Blue Book (old) Blue Book (new) Economic Trends IFS

26 24 22 20

Fig. 2: Contemporary and retrospective knowledge: trajectories of income inequality in the UK, 1949–99.

Yet historians have often brushed over these different temporalities. In historical accounts of post-war Britain, they have often been blurred or unwittingly merged into one. Many textbooks and studies refer to the latest figures to inform readers about

 Johnson, ‘Inequality, Redistribution and Living Standards in Britain since 1945ʹ; Gazeley, ‘Income and Living Standards, 1870–2010ʹ; Atkinson, ‘Distribution of Income in the UK’.

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trends in poverty and inequality in a particular period without reflecting what was known about these trends at the time.17 For example, a 2016 study on Margaret Thatcher’s premiership cited statistical figures from the 1990s to illustrate that ‘by the end of Thatcher’s second term, the gap between rich and poor, the haves and havenots, was widening’, but there was no mention of the deliberate paucity of reliable statistics and the resulting uncertainty about basic social trends under Thatcher.18 Historians often rely on data and analyses from the social sciences or official statistics as empirical source material to illustrate their own narratives.19 But they seldom subject this material to a rigorous critique or query its historical character. Instead of merely reproducing the terms and models of the social sciences, it has been pointed out in a recent scholarly debate, historians should look at them as social constructs that generate descriptions and perceptions of social realities of their own.20 This study sets out to dissect those constructs in an important area of social and economic history of contemporary Britain. The book is about the making and the politics of statistical knowledge on economic inequality in the United Kingdom from the post-war era to the 1990s. It is not about actual trends, let alone the causes of historical movements in poverty or in income and wealth distribution. Instead, it will historicize the knowledge that was available to contemporaries about these trends. Based on a methodological approach that is inspired by the history of knowledge as a young historical sub-discipline, the book will trace the genealogies of statistics on income and wealth distribution: what kind of statistical knowledge was accessible to the public about the gap between rich and poor and how socio-economic disparities evolved over time, and how was this knowledge produced and by whom? What did policymakers and civil servants know about the extent of poverty and inequality in British society and to what extent did they take the distributional impact of their social and fiscal policies into account in the policy-making process? These questions may seem technical but they had far-reaching implications for key debates and the wider political culture in contemporary Britain. Historicizing inequality knowledge speaks to a long tradition of historical research that has highlighted the political salience of social class divisions and economic disparities in twentieth-century Britain.21 Even during the so-called consensus years of the post-war period, these topics proved to be potentially divisive, with significant differences in social philosophies and approaches to welfare policies existing in the main

 E.g. Pugh, State and Society, 151–3.  Veldman, Margaret Thatcher, 134–6.  E.g. Marwick, British Society, 310–11.  Graf and Priemel, ‘Zeitgeschichte in der Welt der Sozialwissenschaften’; Pleinen and Raphael, ‘Zeithistoriker in den Archiven der Sozialwissenschaften’.  Marwick, British Society, 310–11, 382–90; Mergel, Großbritannien, 112–19; Cannadine, Thatcher; Morgan, Oxford History of Britain, epilogue; Leydier, ‘Dimensions of Inequality’; some other studies hardly mention the subject.

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political parties.22 While the Attlee government was strongly committed to reducing poverty under the banner of ‘fair shares’, successive Conservative governments sought to restrain collectivism and social expenditure in the 1950s and 1960s even if they shied away from more radical changes to the welfare state.23 Between 1964 and 1970, the Wilson government prioritized the goal of economic expansion through technological progress and appealed to populist visions of a classless society instead of pursuing a coherent agenda of equality and social justice.24 The Heath government of the early 1970s, in turn, sought to reform the tax-benefit system and came close to introducing a basic income scheme, but also expanded selectivity in social security to balance regressive tax and market reforms.25 When the Labour government under Wilson started out in 1974 with a more progressive agenda than ever, this further hardened the antiegalitarian stance of the emerging New Right under Thatcher.26 There was little consensus about political ideas or policy responses to economic inequality; moreover, politicians and commentators could not agree on the extent of poverty and inequality that existed in the country. Even within the Labour party, views differed starkly about the true effects of ‘affluence’ on Britain’s social fabric.27 While some pointed to persisting inequalities and class divisions, other party figures such as Anthony Crosland heralded the beginnings of an egalitarian society, a claim that was partly based on misleading statistics.28 Similar controversies continued in later decades. Thus, it was not just Labour’s social and economic analysis of British capitalism that was marred by weaknesses.29 The uncertainty over basic social trends was also rooted in the deficiencies of the statistical system that left important questions unanswered or open to contestation. In other words, what was sayable on issues of inequality, social justice, and the condition of Britain depended to a considerable extent on the figures and choices made by statisticians and their superiors in the civil service. Statistics played a crucial role in some of the most central political debates in post-war Britain, but it is only recently that historians have been paying them more attention. The political significance of statistical knowledge has been demonstrated by Jim Tomlinson, who has shown that the ‘search for equality’ in twentieth-century British history was based on an interplay of contemporary understandings and doctrinal views of income and wealth inequality that were shaped by statistics.30 Statistics not  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 373–7; Jones, ‘Counter-Revolution’.  Page, ‘Towards a “Red” and Pleasant Land?’; Bochel, ‘One Nation Conservatism and Social Policy’.  Tomlinson, ‘The 1964 Labour Government, Poverty and Social Justice’; Lawrence and SutcliffeBraithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’.  Sloman, Transfer State, 125–43.  Hickson, ‘Conservatism and the Poor’; Dorey, British Conservatism; Page, Clear Blue Water.  Middleton, ‘“Affluence” and the Left’; Thompson, ‘Socialist Political Economy in an Age of Affluence’; Fielding, The Labour Governments 1964–70, 61–6, 72.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 172.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 383–4.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 167.

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only informed intellectual ideas and public discussions on social policies; governments also made extensive use of statistical artefacts in public relations efforts to sell their narratives and policies to the public: ‘If the economy was imagined statistically, governments were concerned to shape that imagination in ways that would convince the public and persuade them to see the economic world in a particular way. Managing the people meant trying to construct compelling narratives, and numbers were often central to those narratives.’31 By historicizing the underlying statistical knowledge, the present book attempts to take this research further. Focusing on economic inequality does not mean that other dimensions of social inequality were less important, and neither was money always regarded as the sole or the most crucial measure of well-being and living standards. In the earlier parts of the twentieth century and in certain world regions, looking at levels of consumption seemed more relevant and practicable than measuring income.32 Consumption, in turn, could be measured in money terms or in caloric values. The latter became a crucial category in the long scientific quest for nutritional standards that could be used to capture disparities in diets and to establish a subsistence minimum during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33 Other non-financial measures of living standards included relative rates of infant mortality or hunger, measures that became common not only in developing countries but also in the Western world.34 In Britain and elsewhere, it was recognized that financial circumstances were not the only source and manifestation of social differences. During the post-war era, early poverty studies also looked at other disparities in living standards such as housing conditions, educational attainment, and access to health care – it began to dawn on social scientists that poverty did not only entail material hardship but also social exclusion.35 While some analysts placed more emphasis on non-financial dimensions or measures, others regarded these as mere proxy indicators for deeper-seated economic inequalities that could not be measured due to the lack of statistical infrastructures, or for other reasons. Even some of the early scientific searches for a vital minimum were implicitly about the distribution of income and wealth.36 The interpretations and importance attributed to economic inequality by contemporaries clearly fluctuated over time, and the same was true for larger visions of social inequality. The picture was further complicated by the activism of the global social movements in the 1970s, which raised awareness of categorical differences by race, class, and gender.37 Even before the notion of ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberle

      

Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 11. Paidipaty, ‘Testing Measures’. Simmons, Vital Minimum. Jachertz and Nützenadel, ‘Coping with Hunger’. Gazeley, Poverty, 174–6. Simmons, Vital Minimum, 9. Savage, Return of Inequality, ch. 6, 7.

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Crenshaw in the late 1980s, activists and researchers recognized the overlapping dimensions and categories of inequality that produced particular forms of disadvantages of their own.38 Despite the emphasis on a multiplicity of contributing factors, economic inequality still held a prominent place in these discussions. From early on, studies in Black feminism highlighted the economic disadvantages in wages, income and wealth experienced by Black women as a result of racial discrimination and the legacies of slavery and segregation.39 However, the epistemology of the changing inequality paradigm has not been studied in greater detail by historians yet. This study focuses on economic inequality as an important dimension and as a heuristic lens through which the changing concern with broader conceptions of social inequality can be observed. To be more precise, the book will focus on a specific concept of economic inequality, which has come to dominate perceptions of this issue in recent decades: in today’s world, the gap between rich and poor is usually discussed in terms of personal income and wealth distribution. This concept is concerned with the material living standards of individuals, families, and households on the micro level, which is regarded as ‘the core of economic inequality’ by present-day econometric experts.40 What constitutes personal income and wealth is based on definitions that were developed by economists over the twentieth century – and that have remained open for contestation.41 During the 1970s, for example, the British public witnessed debates over the question of whether pension entitlements should be included in the definition of personal wealth, a methodological choice that considerably lowered the degree of measurable inequality in the overall distribution of wealth.42 At the same time, other core elements of what constitutes personal income and wealth have remained largely unchanged.43 Post-war analyses and modern-day studies concur that personal income can be analysed before or after the payment of taxes and social security contributions. Earnings in the labour market from employment or self-employment are regarded as the most important element, but the definition of personal income also includes social welfare benefits such as unemployment benefit, and other cash flows such as investment income. Personal wealth, in turn, comprises accumulated savings in personal bank accounts as well as non-financial assets such as house ownership or consumer durables. The statistics of personal income and wealth distribution have inspired now familiar ways of seeing and understanding economic inequality. Popular discussions

 Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’; Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins’.  Hill Collins, ‘Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy’; Beal, ‘Double Jeopardy’.  Salverda, Nolan, and Smeeding, ‘Introduction’, 11.  Atkinson and Bourguignon, ‘Introduction: Income Distribution and Economics’.  Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 9–11.  Salverda, Nolan, and Smeeding, ‘Introduction’, 10–12.

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have been guided by microeconomic statistics that rank households or individuals according to their relative shares in income and wealth by quintiles, deciles, or percentiles. Breaking down the income and wealth distribution by quantiles has facilitated comparisons between different sections of society, for example, by looking at the shares taken by the top and bottom 10 per cent of the population and how they fare over time. This perspective has been supported by developments in presentational techniques that have introduced new visual languages in the form of graphs and tables that render key trends visible at a glance – such as Thomas Piketty’s iconic chart that has captured the steep rise of the top 1 per cent since the 1980s.44 The global concern with the rising shares of the top 1 per cent in recent years illustrates the pivotal role that easily comprehensible statistics of personal income and wealth distribution have played in popularizing and politicizing issues of economic inequality – not only in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 but also in earlier decades.45 The inception of the modern-day inequality paradigm can be traced back to the academic and political discussions of the early 1970s when personal income and wealth distribution was rediscovered by Anthony B. Atkinson and other economists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.46 Scholars engaging in this field were still few and far between, but in earlier decades, similar endeavours had been even more isolated in mainstream economics.47 One of the earliest and most forceful interventions came from British economist Hugh Dalton. In 1920, Dalton lamented that in contemporary discussions about the ‘inequality of incomes’ most economists were ‘almost wholly concerned’ with the distribution ‘between factors of production’, that is, wages, profits, and rents, while the ‘distribution as between persons, a problem of more direct and obvious interest, was either left out of the textbooks altogether, or treated so briefly, as to suggest that it raised no question’.48 Nonetheless, questions of personal income distribution remained on the margins of economic theory. The prevailing concern with the functional distribution by factor shares dominated academic and political discussions for many more decades to come, a constellation that was only reinforced through the inception of national accounting techniques during and after the Second World War. The predominance of these and other macroeconomic statistics even extended to the modern literature, where they have absorbed most attention.49 In the early post-war era and beyond, the System of National Accounts established new ways of seeing the world through a macroeconomic lens. As a global conceptual framework it guided mainstream discussions of ‘the economy’ and many important national and international debates of the time, from growth and modernization theories

     

Savage, Return of Inequality, 31–2. Ramos Pinto, ‘Inequality by Numbers’. Atkinson, ‘Factor Shares’. Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done?, 14–16. Dalton, Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes, preface. See e.g. Karabell, Leading Indicators, 199–200.

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to development ideas to considerations of global inequalities. For the first time, economic disparities between countries in the developed and the developing world could be compared on a global scale using the oft-cited measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which could be derived from the System of National Accounts.50 At the same time, the preoccupation with GDP per capita and other macroeconomic measures obscured the view of existing within-country inequalities. Possibilities for distributional analyses remained severely limited in the System of National Accounts. The highly aggregated macroeconomic statistics only allowed analysts to break down the distribution of national income by large social groups such as employees or the selfemployed. This technique enabled functional analyses by factor shares and established new macroeconomic key indicators, above all, the ‘wage share’, which expresses the percentage share of employees and workers in the national income. The wage share acquired considerable significance in political discussions and industrial disputes over distributional questions during the post-war era. It informed the economic analyses of Labour politicians and the arguments of trade unionists in collective wage bargaining.51 However, it allowed only sweeping analyses that were limited to the simplistic dualism of workers and employers. The blanket categories of the national accounts could not be subdivided into smaller analytical units that could have revealed a more fine-grained picture.52 Thus, any changes in relativities within these larger groups and trends in inequalities on the micro level between households or persons remained invisible. While a concern with personal income inequality had driven some of the early precursors of national accounting in the United States during the 1930s, this concern was marginalized by paradigmatic shifts in the 1940s that laid the ground for postwar political economies geared towards productivity and economic growth.53 Amid increasing affluence and rising average incomes during the post-war boom, economic growth was widely heralded as a panacea that would resolve all remaining social and economic problems, not only in the developing world but also in the ‘affluent societies’ of the Western world. The fixation with the growth paradigm was disrupted by a transnational intellectual critique in the 1960s and 1970s that inspired a drawn-out global search for alternative social metrics that could replace GDP as an indicator for well-being. However, the end of the post-war ‘golden era’ and the onset of the economic crisis in the 1970s reaffirmed the centrality of economic growth as a paramount goal of economic policy.54 As contemporary observers noted, the unbroken belief in economic growth and full employment even led to a declining interest in functional analyses of the national income; meanwhile, the continuing neglect of personal income

 Speich Chassé, Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 176–7.  Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, ch. 9.  Lepenies, ‘Products before People’; Lepenies, The Power of a Single Number; Speich Chassé, Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts.  Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth; Schmelzer, ‘The Crisis before the Crisis’.

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and wealth inequality in research and politics was also reflected in official statistics that were ‘of considerably lower quality than those in other fields’.55 The scant attention paid to personal income and wealth inequality in societies during the post-war era was rooted in contemporary economic thought and scholarship. Economists provided plenty of theories and ‘reasons not to talk about inequality’, from marginal productivity theory to the idea of Pareto efficiency to theories of economic growth.56 The conceptual ‘workhorse of inequality economics’ was developed by the American economist Simon Kuznets in the 1950s: according to the laws of the so-called Kuznets curve, inequality first increases and then decreases in societies that industrialize and experience economic growth.57 Such theories have helped to naturalize rises and high levels of inequality, although they were often found wanting or tautological. The growing prevalence of these ideas was not just a matter of scholarly persuasiveness; it was underpinned by the leading role that economics acquired as an academic discipline and the increasing presence and influence of economists and economic bodies in advisory roles to governments during the post-war era.58 The prevailing economic thought changed only slowly and in bursts. As contemporary observers noted, academic and public interest in personal income inequality remained ‘at a low ebb’ during the first two decades of the post-war era; it picked up in the mid 1960s and surged during the 1970s; subsequently, it waned in the ‘cold climate’ of the 1980s, before the 1990s saw a new wave of research and debates on the subject.59 Most recently, this spike has been surpassed by the booming worldwide interest in questions of economic inequality in the wake of the global financial crisis.60 The changing concern with issues of economic inequality has become an important theme in historical research in itself.61 As this study will demonstrate, it was closely linked to government research programmes and statistical policies. Practices of technocratic governance in Britain followed similar trajectories. For most of the post-war era, government planning centred on the national economy narrowly defined. Both Conservative and Labour governments increasingly looked to science and technology to overcome economic problems and foster growth. In light of slower growth rates compared to other Western countries, the fixation on GDP gave rise to declinist narratives amid a climate of soul-searching, despite strong performance

 Atkinson, Wealth, Income and Inequality, 9.  Aldred, Licence to be Bad, 216–24; Cook, ‘Historicizing Piketty’; Sandmo, ‘Principal Problem’; Morgan, History of Econometric Ideas.  Milanovic, Global Inequality, 4.  Nützenadel, Stunde der Ökonomen; O’Hara, Governing Post-War Britain.  Atkinson and Bourguignon, ‘Introduction: Income Distribution and Economics’; Atkinson, ‘The Commitment to Equality’.  Ramos Pinto, ‘Inequality by Numbers’; Jackson, ‘Equality, Rawls and Realism’.  Ramos Pinto, ‘Inequality by Numbers’; id. and Paidipaty, ‘Measuring Matters’; Jenkins and Micklewright, ‘New Directions in the Analysis of Inequality and Poverty’.

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in other economic indicators.62 In the search for solutions, governments relied on macroeconomic planning based on scientific expertise and economic knowledge as a tool of governance. Accordingly, economic statistics were high in demand and absorbed the lion’s share of resources and posts in the Government Statistical Service, while other statistical areas received considerably less attention and funding, including the work on income and wealth distribution. It was not until the late 1960s that it was decided to step up the work on social statistics.63 These developments can be interpreted as yet another manifestation of the ‘scientization of the social’ in the twentieth century.64 However, it is far from clear if and when the trend towards more knowledge-based policy-making also extended to questions of economic inequality. Few historical studies have investigated to what extent and in what ways social and economic statistics were used by governments to measure and monitor the distributional effects of social or fiscal policies.65 The main protagonists in the modern literature on the ‘scientization of the social’ have been academic experts from the social sciences. Scholars from the emerging discipline of sociology, in particular, have contributed much to contemporary understandings of social class divisions, the workings of the welfare state, and the persistence of deprivation in the midst of a self-styled ‘affluent society’. Some of the research unwittingly contributed to the myths of the 1950s, though. Due to conceptual flaws, Seebohm Rowntree’s widely publicized survey of York wrongly suggested in 1951 that poverty had been eradicated through the welfare state and the social policies of the Attlee government.66 The sociological enquiry into the incidence of poverty was not revived until the latter half of the 1950s, before Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith’s 1965 study delivered a major blow to the post-war narrative of the ‘affluent society’.67 The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ led to a flurry of political discussions and a wave of new research both in government departments and in the social sciences.68 In civil society, the political landscape was transformed through the establishment of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) as one of the first non-governmental organizations in the country.69 Mediasavvy and invested with expertise in statistics through their close co-operation with scholar-activists like Peter Townsend, campaign groups such as the CPAG rose to prominence as important political voices in public debates about poverty and social policy.  O’Hara, Governing Post-War Britain; Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 393; O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment, 12–16.  Ward and Doggett, Keeping Score, 71–2.  Ziemann et al., ‘Introduction: The Scientization of the Social’; Raphael, ‘Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen’; O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment; Fourcade, Economists and Societies; Leendertz, ‘Experten’; Lengwiler, ‘Konjunkturen und Krisen’.  Sloman, Transfer State; Daunton, Just Taxes; Harris, Economic Knowledge; Buggeln, Versprechen.  Hatton and Bailey, ‘Seebohm Rowntree and the Post-War Poverty Puzzle’; Gazeley, Poverty, 168–73.  Gazeley, Poverty, 168.  Sloman, Transfer State, 95–124; Veit-Wilson, ‘The National Assistance Board’.  Evans, ‘Poverty: Stopping the Poor getting Poorer’; Lowe, ‘Rediscovery of Poverty’.

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In Britain and elsewhere in the world, the dissemination and interpretation of ‘poverty knowledge’ acquired increasing political significance in the wake of the ‘second poverty enlightenment’.70 It was at the heart of political struggles over interpretations of definitions, incidences, and causes of poverty. Social scientists and activists in the emerging ‘poverty research industry’ played important roles as ‘label-makers’ or ‘counters’ in shaping public perceptions and understandings, for example, in the longrunning discussions about the notion of a ‘culture of poverty’, an influential narrative that gained ground in the 1960s and blamed persisting deprivation on individual behaviour rather than on structural causes.71 Research and activism also increased the visibility of poverty and deprivation on the local level.72 Beginning in the late 1960s, new initiatives for social mapping of urban spaces were advanced in collaborations between social activists, academic experts, local authorities, and central government.73 The so-called Urban Programme produced a new body of scientific knowledge and statistics on the social geographies of British cities down to the smallest geographical areas. Some of the newly established statistical series have informed public debates in the country to this day, in particular, the nationwide ‘Index of Multiple Deprivation’. These and other initiatives owed much to the work of social scientists, in particular, Peter Townsend, who further elaborated on the concept of multiple deprivation in his groundbreaking study Poverty in the United Kingdom. When the study appeared in 1979, it inspired renewed social investigations and surveys. The thriving sociological work on financial poverty as a central factor of multiple deprivation was not matched by much research on wider economic inequalities until more recent times. During the late 1950s and 1960s, much of the sociological class analysis focused on questions of working-class culture and class cohesion, and most local surveys only provided small-scale snapshots of material living conditions with limited scope for analyses of trends over time.74 Furthermore, the preference for analytical models based on occupation or culture entailed less sensitivity to economic disparities.75 Occupation and employment status also formed the main categories in the influential Nuffield Class model that was developed by John Goldthorpe in the late 1970s – and which was not tailored to capture the spiralling levels of economic inequality during the 1980s.76 Before the surge in inequality under Thatcher led to a revival of academic interest in class analysis, the influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous field theory further diminished the significance attributed to economic inequality as

 Ravallion, Economics of Poverty, 91–7; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Davie, Poverty Knowledge.  Welshman, Underclass; Macnicol, ‘Perspectives on the Idea of an “Underclass”’.  On France and West Germany: Reinecke, Ungleichheit der Städte.  Andrews, ‘Multiple Deprivation’.  Savage, ‘Fall and Rise of Class Analysis’.  Savage, Identities and Social Change; Lawrence, ‘Inventing the “Traditional Working Class”’; Todd, ‘Affluence, Class and Crown Street’.  Savage, ‘Fall and Rise of Class Analysis’, 63–4.

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an analytical category: focusing on the distribution of income and wealth seemed reductive to cultural sociologists who instead foregrounded social interactions, lifestyle choices, and the composition of different sorts of economic and cultural capital.77 The definition of social class as based on three distinctive sorts of economic, cultural, and social capital was also built into the ‘Great British Class Survey’ of 2011, the largest social survey of class divisions that was ever undertaken in Britain.78 The findings from the survey reflected that ‘new mountains of inequality’ had opened up in Britain ‘most notably in the economic domain’, an insight that has reinforced the intellectual critique of Bourdieu’s field theory. Most recently, Mike Savage has posited that steeply rising disparities in wealth in recent years have rendered the analytical emphasis on capital composition less convincing; instead, these trends have highlighted the significance of capital volume, alongside the historical processes of accumulation that define the volume of capital over time – and that escape the view of field theory with its ahistorical outlook.79 Insights into trends in income and wealth distribution have thus underpinned the ‘return of inequality’ in the social sciences. Sociologists were not the only influence on vocabularies, categories, and popular perceptions of social class in post-war Britain.80 Images of society were also guided by official statistics, most notably, the classification system developed by the Registrar General based on occupational groups for purposes of the Census of Population.81 It underpinned the conventional triadic model that subdivided society into the working, middle, and upper classes – and that co-existed alongside other models such as the dichotomous model of top and bottom as well as hierarchical models that suggested more gradual social differences.82 The credibility of such simple schemata of social stratification was increasingly undermined by social change in the post-war era, even after the Registrar General’s system was extended by a slightly more fine-grained classification of socio-economic groups in the 1950s.83 Beginning in the 1960s, processes of modernization, the rise of consumerism, permissiveness, and other cultural shifts on various levels went hand in hand with the rejection of traditional class identities and the dealignment of socio-economic groups from previously linked political constituencies. Alongside a decline in deference in social relations, British society in the 1970s was transformed by a rise in popular individualism, accompanied by new social

 Savage, Return of Inequality, ch. 2.  Savage, Social Class in the 21st Century, 4, 88, 392.  Savage, Return of Inequality, 67.  Savage, Identities and Social Change; id., ‘Fall and Rise of Class Analysis’.  Szreter, ‘Genesis of the Registrar-General’s Social Classification of Occupations’; id., ‘Official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France’.  Cannadine, Class in Britain, 164–5.  Brückweh, Menschen zählen, 149–52. Models developed by market researchers, in turn, did not offer a consistent alternative as methodologies were frequently changed: Brückweh, ‘Eigenleben der Methoden’.

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movements and the ‘expansion of a particular politics of equality’.84 The growth of individualism was both reflected and partly driven by changing vernacular languages of social class, as Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite has demonstrated.85 More and more Britons refused to accept class hierarchies and placed themselves neither in the working class nor in the middle class but in a large majority of ‘ordinary people’. Subsequently, the discourse of ‘ordinariness’ was not only exploited by Thatcher but also taken up by later governments, including New Labour. Appealing to ‘ordinary’ Britons not least rested on statistical arguments: Thatcher claimed that class divisions were blurred because the income groups had become all ‘muddled up’.86 This book complicates this narrative by unpacking the knowledge base of discourse on social class. It will argue that the decline and resurgence of class talk in post-war Britain was underpinned by knowledge or non-knowledge about trends in economic inequality. Previous historical studies have mostly stopped short of looking into the deeper layers of contemporary knowledge on inequality, despite the rising interest in the subject in recent years. Beginning in the 2010s, historians have rediscovered social inequality as a major theme of research, with most studies approaching the subject from a cultural history angle or from the perspective of the history of science.87 Accordingly, the majority of research has centred on historical discourses in politics, the media, and the social sciences – and on how these discourses shaped and were shaped by contemporary understandings and cultural images of poverty, wealth, and the overall fabric of society. Much attention has been paid to the work of social scientists who have remained the main protagonists in most of the historical literature.88 By contrast, the politics and genealogies of the underlying statistics are rarely investigated in depth, although their importance in this context has been recognized.89 Wherever the existing literature touches upon the work of statisticians and statistical offices, the analysis is usually based on published source material only, above all, on official reports and the numbers from key statistical series. Few historians have tapped into the vast archives of statistical offices and government bureaucracies to analyse how the relevant knowledge was produced. Existing

 Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories’, 272–4.  Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class.  Ibid. 152.  Gajek et al., Reichtum in Deutschland; Derix, Reichtumsgeschichte; Lenger and Lenger, ‘Soziale Ungleichheit’; Kaelble, Mehr Reichtum, mehr Armut; Mergel, ‘Gleichheit und Ungleichheit’; Süß, ‘Armut im Wohlfahrtsstaat’; Gajek and Lorke, ‘(An)Ordnungen des Sozialen’; Lorke, Armut im geteilten Deutschland; Torp, Gerechtigkeit im Wohlfahrtsstaat; Torp, ‘Ending of Poverty’; Raphael, ‘Ordnungsmuster’; Ziemann, ‘Metaphorik des Sozialen’; Welshman, Underclass; Barlösius, ‘Bilder’; Borchardt, ‘Einkommensverteilung’.  Reinecke, Ungleichheit der Städte; Reinecke and Mergel, Das Soziale ordnen; Speich Chassé, ‘Was zählt der Preis’; Hacking, Taming of Chance; Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking; Porter, Trust in Numbers; Porter, ‘Statistics and Statistical Methods’.  Raphael and Wagner, ‘Potential von Mikrodaten’.

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archive-based studies in the history of statistics have mostly concentrated on other domains such as economic and demographic statistics.90 Furthermore, the precursors and beginnings of government statistics in the early modern period and the nineteenth century have regularly attracted more historians than the expanding statistical apparatuses of the later twentieth century.91 Despite their growing importance as tools for governance in the post-war era and beyond, the more recent histories of statistical offices in Britain and other comparable countries have barely been researched.92 Similar limitations apply to the thriving research in the Sociology of Quantification, which has focused on the workings and uses of key indicators.93 With some exceptions, most of the research has concentrated on the present or the most recent past; accordingly, contributions almost exclusively rely on published source material.94 While it has been acknowledged that any key indicator is ‘typically backed by powerful institutionalized organizations’, these critical ‘institutional frameworks’ have ‘remain[ed] largely unexamined’.95 Despite the theoretical ambition to examine whole ‘statistical chains’ encompassing all stages in the development of key indicators from construction to data collection to publication and circulation, the analysis mostly concentrates on what happens outside of statistical offices.96 At this stage, however, as Alain Desrosières pointed out, published statistics are akin to ‘black boxes’ – neat and impenetrable end products that reveal little about the definitions, choices, and assumptions built into them.97 Furthermore, the ‘black boxes’ of statistics on economic inequality have featured in this literature as just one theme among many others.98 In recent years, however, academic interest in the historicity of inequality knowledge has grown – and scholars have rediscovered personal income and wealth distribution as a subject of historical research.99 A new field of research is emerging that

 O’Hara, ‘Towards a New Bradshaw?’; Anderson and Fienberg, Who Counts?; Brückweh, Menschen zählen.  Haas, Schneider, and Bilo, ‘Grundbegriffe und Konturen einer Kulturgeschichte der Statistik’.  Desrosières, Politics of Large Numbers, 14; for an official account of the history of the Central Statistical Office in the UK see Ward and Doggett, Keeping Score.  Bartl et al., ‘Governing by Numbers’; Desrosières, ‘How Real are Statistics?’; Diaz-Bone and Didier, ‘Introduction: The Sociology of Quantification’; Bruno et al., The Social Sciences of Quantification; Rottenburg et al., World of Indicators.  Bartl et al., ‘Governing by Numbers’, 27–31; Jany-Catrice, Political Economy.  Rottenburg and Merry, ‘World of Indicators’, 4.  Diaz-Bone and Didier, ‘Introduction: The Sociology of Quantification’, 16.  Desrosières, ‘Retroaction’, 334; Desrosières, ‘Economics of Convention’, 77.  Mennicken and Nelson Espeland, ‘What’s New with Numbers?’  Workshop ‘Measuring Inequality’ organised by Pedro Ramos Pinto and Poornima Paidipaty at Cambridge University as part of their collaborative research project on the history of inequality knowledge on 5–7 July 2017 with a keynote lecture by Alice O’Connor; international conference ‘The Global Knowledge of Economic Inequality’, organized by the author and held at the German Historical Institute London on 15–17 November 2018; Ramos Pinto, ‘The Inequality Debate: Why Now, Why like This?’; Zamora, ‘Should We Care about Inequality?’; Paidipaty, ‘Tracking Inequality in India’.

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focuses attention on statistical knowledge and measures that guide perceptions and discussions of economic disparities.100 Research questions address the genealogies of inequality measures and the ‘dialectics of visibility and invisibility’ associated with the choice of categories and measures; other strands of research have highlighted the retroactive potential and the politicization of statistics in connection with new forms of ‘statactivism’.101 Scholars have even begun to explore the archives of statistical offices and government institutions to shed light on economic ideas and statistical frameworks that shaped contemporary understandings of inequality.102 This book attempts to take that research further. It will show that the visibility or invisibility of economic disparities not only depended on scholarly experts but also on the state. It will explore the production of statistics on poverty, income, and wealth inequality at the source on the micro level of the state bureaucracy; it will trace decision-making processes and identify the actors who controlled the making of inequality knowledge in Britain. The book will provide a deep analysis of lesser-known aspects of the inequality debate in Britain. In present-day Britain, readers may well take the availability of detailed and authoritative statistics on income and wealth distribution for granted, and governments can no longer avoid scrutiny when it comes to questions about trends in economic inequality. When an incumbent Prime Minister lies to parliament about the extent of poverty in the country, the slightest untruth can be quickly exposed thanks to the existence of public watchdogs and the availability of official statistics produced by the government itself.103 Government statistics command authority and are widely used not only by government departments and public bodies but also by non-governmental organizations, campaign groups, journalists, and academic experts. Yet the statistical system in Britain as we know it today has come a long way. Many now familiar measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient or comparisons of top and bottom deciles, have only become more common in public discussions in recent decades.104 For example, when the Gini coefficient was mentioned in a debate in the House of Lords in March 1984, one of the peers intervened to ask his colleague to ‘enlighten those of us who are not fully informed what the Gini coefficient is? May we assume that it has nothing to do with Aladdin?’105 The statistical knowledge base that exists in the United Kingdom today contrasts starkly with the information that was available in the early post-war era, the starting  Römer, ‘Evolving Knowledge Regimes’.  Ramos Pinto and Paidipaty, ‘Introduction: Measuring Matters’, 418.  Paidipaty, ‘Testing Measures’; Hirschman, ‘Rediscovering the 1%’.  Peter Walker, ‘Boris Johnson Wrong on Child Poverty at PMQs, Public Body Says’, The Guardian, 22 June 2020, at [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/22/boris-johnson-wrong-on-child-pov erty-at-pmqs-public-body-says], accessed 24 Mar. 2022; Patrick Butler, ‘Boris Johnson Repeatedly Used Inaccurate Child Poverty Figures’, The Guardian, 30 July 2020, at [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ 2020/jul/30/boris-johnson-repeatedly-used-inaccurate-child-poverty-figures], accessed 24. Mar. 2022.  Saunders, ‘Inequality and Poverty’.  Hansard, House of Lords, 19 March 1984, vol. 449, col. 973.

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point of this study. Prior to the 1940s there were no official statistics on personal incomes and living standards in the United Kingdom, apart from fragmentary survey data on the expenditure of working-class households from 1938 and income tax statistics that were severely limited in coverage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, government officials at the Central Statistical Office eventually began to develop statistical series and regular surveys on household income, expenditure, and redistribution. The first published results from this work were hard to read for non-specialists, though, and more popular versions of this knowledge were not conceived until later decades. Nevertheless, British government statisticians took pride in their pioneering work that was clearly more advanced than was the case in comparable countries such as West Germany, where government statistics neglected the measurement of personal income distribution for decades.106 However, even British statistics suffered from so many deficiencies that key questions about trends in poverty and inequality remained hotly contested. In 1974, the incoming Labour government under Harold Wilson even set up a Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth to overhaul the statistical system in this field; the larger goal was to obtain more reliable estimates on basic trends in inequality and to enable a more informed public debate. Important gaps in official statistics on poverty and income distribution persisted for decades, and necessary innovations were put on halt under Thatcher. Analyses of income inequality by race, for example, were not introduced until the 1990s. The 1990s saw transformative changes to the statistical system both in the domestic context and on the international stage. In Britain, researchers gained access to previously classified government statistics on low incomes, and discussions about the measurement of poverty culminated in the introduction of the official child poverty target under the New Labour government in 1999. The statistical reforms in Britain coincided with breakthroughs on European and global levels. Intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, the OECD, and the EC/EU finally made progress in their decades-long quest to establish harmonized systems of comparative statistics on income inequality and living standards. In the 1990s, governments began to share national income data with intergovernmental bodies for purposes of international social reporting on a regular basis. This was a major turning point as previously existing barriers were lifted: up until this point, the compilation and dissemination of any such statistics had been tightly restricted to the nation state. Consequently, international comparisons of income distribution and poverty rates not only sparked new research and intellectual debates on global inequality but also changed the framing of national discussions in the media and the general public. In other words, many

 Interview by the author with Dr Markus Grabka, research officer at the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung since 1993, Berlin, 7 Dec. 2017; interview by the author with Professor Gert Wagner, economist at the MPI Berlin and former director of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), Berlin, 29 June 2018; Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl, 109–11, 141–42.

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important features of the present-day configuration began to take shape during the 1990s. That decade therefore forms the end point of this study. Undeniable advances have thus been made in official statistics and scholarly research on economic inequality both inside and outside the United Kingdom since the post-war era. However, this book makes no attempt to present an idealistic narrative of linear progress in this area, on the contrary. There was no straight path from the beginnings in the 1940s to the advanced state of knowledge in the 1990s and later decades, neither on the international stage nor in the domestic context. Instead, the picture painted in this book will look more like a winding road that was littered with the paper trails of failed, delayed, or underfunded reform efforts – and where steps leading towards improvements were sometimes halted or even reversed. Meanwhile, roadmaps for necessary improvements to the statistical system were frequently suggested by social activists or leading experts such as economist Anthony B. Atkinson and sociologist Peter Townsend. At times, impulses for reforms also came from discussions in intellectual circles and international bodies outside of the United Kingdom. However, advancing new ideas in scholarly papers and non-binding reports was one thing, implementing them in the state bureaucracy was quite another. Indeed, many government statisticians closely followed the academic literature and valued input from leading experts. However, at the end of the day it was up to ministers and civil servants to decide what kind of statistical knowledge was compiled and published. Changing the statistical system not only depended on the co-operation of statistical offices and government departments, but also required political will to prioritize relevant work programmes and invest financial and staff resources, a point that applied to discussions within Britain as well as to intergovernmental negotiations on the global stage. Thus, the interactions and unequal power relations between various governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental actors hold an important key to understanding the evolution of statistical apparatuses. The centrality of these statistical infrastructures seemed clear to contemporaries. Academic experts, activists, and journalists all depended on official statistics in their own work. Furthermore, despite many shortcomings and lacunae, certain statistical innovations that were introduced during the post-war era laid some major groundwork for later developments. Some of them morphed into long-lasting structures of knowledge with profound political effects. For example, the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which originated from initiatives in the late 1960s and 1970s, has acquired much significance as a well-known and oft-cited source of information in political debates about spatialized inequalities in contemporary Britain, not least during the recent coronavirus pandemic.107

 ‘Calls for Health Funding to be Prioritised as Poor Bear Brunt of Covid-19ʹ, The Guardian, 1 May 2020, at [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/covid-19-deaths-twice-as-high-in-poorest-areas-in-eng land-and-wales], accessed 24 Mar. 2022.

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This book will offer a historical account of these statistical infrastructures and how they evolved as a result of complex interactions between key stakeholders. Methodologically, the study combines perspectives from the sociology of knowledge with analytical approaches from the history of knowledge.108 This young historical sub-discipline has set out to analyse the production and circulation of knowledge as a broad societal process,109 yet studies under this label have all too often stuck to classic themes and methods that have rendered the approach all but indistinguishable from established fields such as the history of science or intellectual history.110 Instead of concentrating on highbrow discourse, eminent scholars, and their important books, the field had originally endeavoured to bring more profane and diverse forms of knowledge to the fore. However, relevant forms of knowledge that would fit this description, such as bureaucratic knowledge, have only recently received more attention, with most studies focusing on periods prior to the twentieth century.111 This book supports the methodological shift away from histories of science and intellectual ideas.112 It speaks to recent discussions about possible avenues of research that can help to develop the history of knowledge as a distinct field of research.113 In particular, it seeks to develop the analysis of infrastructures of knowledge, that is, basic institutions, systems, or designs, such as statistical offices or statistical series, that form essential foundations for communication in a given society; they are usually meant to be permanent and need to be managed and maintained.114 This perspective redirects attention to what was stable or immobile as opposed to the more conventional preoccupation with knowledge in motion. At the same time, this perspective is sensitive to deficient or missing infrastructures and contributes to an understanding of non-knowledge or ignorance.115 Finally, it highlights the agency of key actors in creating, shaping, and transforming relevant infrastructures of knowledge.116 By shedding light on the major roles played by ministers and civil servants in this context it also expands the range of ‘knowledge actors’ that are typically studied by historians of knowledge.117 This book will analyse the workings and dynamics of knowledge infrastructures as part of wider ‘knowledge regimes’. Knowledge regimes can be defined as stabilized

 Diaz-Bone and Didier, ‘Introduction: The Sociology of Knowledge’, 16.  Sarasin, ‘Was ist Wissensgeschichte?’; Speich Chassé and Gugerli, ‘Wissensgeschichte: Eine Standortbestimmung’; Landwehr, ‘Wissensgeschichte’; Lässig, ‘The History of Knowledge’; Östling et al. (eds.), Circulation of Knowledge.  Östling et al. (eds.), Circulation of Knowledge, 12.  Felten and von Oertzen, ‘Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge’.  Östling et al. (eds.), Forms of Knowledge, 9.  Östling, ‘Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge’.  Östling et al. (eds.), Forms of Knowledge, 16; Östling, ‘Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge’, 119, 125–6; Howlett and Morgan, How Well Do Facts Travel?  Verburgt, ‘The History of Knowledge and the Future of Ignorance’.  Östling et al. (eds.), Forms of Knowledge, 16.  Ibid.

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configurations of structured practices, norms, and hierarchies of authority in a specific field of knowledge.118 In contrast to overarching ‘knowledge orders’ that regulate larger epistemological principles, the concept relates to more concrete areas of knowledge, in this case: economic inequality.119 As far as boundaries are concerned, the concept also invites questions about the spatiality of existing knowledge regimes – and how far they extend to local, national, and transnational frameworks. Most importantly, it brings out the social organization of knowledge production. Inspired by Foucauldian thinking, it is premised on the assumption that knowledge regimes are shaped by power imbalances and interactions between unequal actors. The competition can involve any aspect of a given knowledge regime, and any such conflict has the potential to change the existing configuration. Any effort aimed at stabilizing, regulating, or transforming a given knowledge regime can be conceptualized analytically as a form of ‘knowledge politics’, a notion that again emphasizes the political implications of knowledge work. As in the case of the rollback of inequality statistics under Thatcher, knowledge politics can be regarded as an integral part of broader ideological agendas and the wider political culture. This analytical prism puts the spotlight on epistemological infrastructures and practices and not just on contents and ideas. In the specific field of economic inequality, the most authoritative knowledge infrastructures were controlled by the state for most of the twentieth century. State bureaucracy is therefore the analytical starting point of the book. It will investigate why government departments chose to produce and disseminate particular forms of inequality statistics or not. This research question requires a deep analysis of government statistical policies. This means tracing the evolution of statistical work programmes and decision-making processes over statistical priorities and resource allocation. Focusing on these apparently technical questions can often reveal more about the commitment of governments and state bureaucracies to wider issues of distributive justice than the mostly non-committal political rhetoric of leading political figures in public speeches about social justice. Investment in statistics can render issues of poverty and income inequality more visible and more open to state intervention. In other words, the directions of government research and the volume of resources accorded to measuring and monitoring economic inequality can be regarded as a meaningful test for the broader political concern with distributive issues in wider society. This book will delve deeper into the making of government knowledge in this specific area than any previous study. It is based on exhaustive research in the historical archives of government statistical offices, interdepartmental committees, and other government departments that were concerned with the construction, uses, and

 Wehling, ‘Wissensregime’; Wehling, ‘Wissenspolitik’; Böschen, Hybride Wissensregime. A rare empirical study has been provided by Kehrt, ‘“Dem Krill auf der Spur”’.  The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, e.g. by Pestre, ‘Regimes of Knowledge Production’.

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dissemination of knowledge about issues of economic inequality and redistribution. Government records have long been associated with traditional political history and may have become unfashionable with some historians, but, in fact, this material is packed with clues to many relevant themes of cultural history and new political history: contemporary understandings and perceptions of social issues among civil servants and ministers; political concepts, ideas, and languages; and the culture of decision-making processes and knowledge production. It is part of the ambition of this book to demonstrate the potential of government records as a source for historians of knowledge. Developing a deeper understanding of the making of government knowledge requires historians to look far below the surface of published government reports, official statements, and even the discussions in the Cabinet. In the words of Rodney Lowe, this means ‘plumbing new depths’, down to those levels of the civil service where departmental policies were prepared and discussed most openly. Records from the lower levels offer the widest range of information, the fullest and frankest discussions at official level, and frequently reveal departmental views on particular subjects, while much of the underlying assumptions, reasons, and considerations were often left out in the sanitized documentation of deliberations at higher levels.120 For all these reasons, the lower levels of the civil service in central government in Whitehall will form an important space of analysis in this book, with the new twist that the focus will not be on policy-making as in previous historical studies, but on the making and uses of knowledge.121 Finally, the lower levels of the state bureaucracy offer the only viable window into the ‘black boxes’ of official statistics that Alain Desrosières famously urged historians to unpack. However, historians should be under no illusions about the possibilities of reopening the black boxes of government statistics considering their technical complexities, the use of sophisticated computer programmes since the 1950s and 1960s, and many untraceable steps, layers, and choices built into the constructions – and to which only government statisticians were privy. This is illustrated by the following episode from the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) in the late 1980s. In 1988, an external research institute, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), enquired with the departmental statistics branch about the government’s main set of poverty statistics, the so-called Low Income Families Tables (LIFT). The IFS researchers asked technical questions about the computer-based calculations in the LIFT that they were trying to replicate in connection with an ongoing research project. When DHSS officials entered into discussions about the request, it turned out that not even the statisticians in the department were able to replicate the department’s very own statistics. As one of the departmental officials, Ian Williams, explained in an internal

 Lowe, ‘Plumbing New Depths’.  On the civil service: Lowe, ‘The State We Were In’; Lowe and Pemberton, Official History of the British Civil Service, p. ii; Lowe, Official History of the British Civil Service, p. i.

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note, the statistics appeared like a ‘black box’, a problem that could only be sorted out with recourse to secret manipulations:122 What’s more worrying is that IFS will find it much more difficult to replicate LIF for 1979; 81 & 83 were prepared using a ‘black-box’ computer programme. The 1985 figures, by contrast, & because of changes in the FES [Family Expenditure Survey], were based on a new, intelligible & verifiable programme. It produced different figures for 1983. To maintain trend continuity ‘fiddle-factors’ were applied to the 1985 results. Not many people know this & now, I suppose, you wish you didn’t know either!

In other words: the statistics for the earlier years had been calculated using an older version of computer software that proved incomprehensible to statisticians in later years; hence, they designed a new software, but when they recalculated the statistics for the earlier years using the new software, the results diverged from those calculated with the old software due to unknown parameters built into the software. To iron out the untraceable discrepancies and to make the results look coherent in the public eye, officials simply manipulated the figures. The deeper reasons for the problems lay in staffing arrangements and certain practices in the construction of the statistics in the department, as one of the departmental statisticians explained in the discussions: the ‘old-style LIF programme’ had been written about ten years earlier and was not only very complex but also largely undocumented so that it had ‘become a large and almost impenetrable black box for anyone except the person who actually wrote it (who has obviously long since left the Branch).’123 The episode offers a glimpse of the power of individual civil servants in shaping social knowledge that was of great importance for contemporary understandings and discussions. While not even the statisticians at the time were able to fully reopen the black box of the main poverty statistic, the episode exemplifies the richness and frankness of the internal discussions. Administrative records offer insights into practices of knowledge production that otherwise remain hidden from view. The selection of sources used here reflects the encompassing perspective of the book. It is based on a broad range of archival and published material that exhibits the views and roles of a multiplicity of actors, organizations, and institutions. Nonetheless, for the reasons given above, the administrative records of the state bureaucracy merit special attention. The study draws on key record series from the National Archives that have been systematically examined over long periods of time: the records of the Central Statistical Office; various departmental statistics branches and policy divisions in the DHSS; records of the Treasury and other departments; various interdepartmental committees and special bodies such as the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW). In addition, a wide range of archives and collections have been

 The National Archives (TNA), BN 149/92/2, Department of Social Security (DSS), R. J. Scott / SR3 to D. Allsop / B2, 31 Oct. 1988, with handwritten comments by I. Williams / B2, 1 Nov. 1988.  TNA, BN 149/57/1, DSS, R. J. Scott / SR3 to S. Hickey / B2, 15 Dec. 1988.

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included in the research: the archive of the CPAG as a window into the positions and activities of the poverty lobby; records of the research departments of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party as a test for the expertise of the main political parties in this field; archives of selected local authorities in London as a case study of social surveys and research on the local level; archives and records of trade unions, employer organizations, and church bodies. To cover the international discussions on the subject, published reports and online resources of various intergovernmental organizations have been consulted, alongside material gathered from the archive of the OECD in Paris. Furthermore, the study takes account of the relevant social science literature and has delved into the personal papers of leading economists and statisticians in this field. Finally, it relies on digital databases of historical newspapers and Hansard to trace media discourse and parliamentary debates on related subjects. The book begins with an account of the transnational discussions about the measurement of living standards and the global quest for harmonized international statistics on economic inequality since the interwar period. It contends that a global knowledge regime defined by international statistical standards and international reporting on global inequality did not emerge until the 1990s. This sets the scene for the remaining chapters that examine the evolution of the national knowledge regimes in the United Kingdom. Chapter 3 offers an analysis of the post-war knowledge regime that saw the inception of official statistics on personal income and wealth distribution and the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ amid popular narratives of the ‘affluent society’ and the ‘great transformation’. Chapter 4 contends that 1972/3 marked the transition to a social democratic knowledge regime as the focus shifted from narrower questions of poverty to a wider preoccupation with income and wealth inequality, alongside a surge in academic interest and statistical knowledge production. Chapter 5 analyses the neo-liberal knowledge regime that was ushered in by the change of government in 1979. Thatcher and her ministers set out to dismantle the existing statistical system and to reduce the output of official figures on economic inequality to a minimum, before civil society regained some control over the knowledge regime in this field during the early and mid 1990s. The events of the 2000s and 2010s are outside the scope of this book. The financial crisis, the politics of austerity and the rise of global inequality forces have led to ‘the return of inequality’ both in the structural sense of a widening gap between rich and poor and in terms of a resurgence of political and academic interest in issues of economic inequality.124 The demand for statistical knowledge about these issues is likely to remain high, and it is hoped that a historical account of the origins and politics of this knowledge can help to inform future debates.

 Savage, Return of Inequality.

II The Emergence of a Global Knowledge Regime In today’s world, detailed statistical knowledge about domestic and global inequalities in income and wealth is available at our fingertips: on the website of the OECD, users can compare degrees of interpersonal income inequality and poverty rates across member countries at the push of a button, and the website of the World Inequality Database showcases easily comprehensible graphs on past and present trajectories of both within-country inequalities and cross-country comparisons covering almost every country of the world. Readers in the present-day world may take the immediate availability of such an abundance of comparative statistical knowledge for granted. Only a generation ago, however, it would have been unthinkable. Before the 1990s, national statistics differed so much in conceptual terms, categories, and coverage that any international comparisons of personal inequalities – such as the tentative tables published by the World Bank in 1974 – were commonly regarded as ‘very hazardous’.1 Accordingly, whenever such comparisons conflicted with national narratives or political interests, the results could be easily dismissed by commentators and politicians. For most of the twentieth century, most discussions about disparities between richer and poorer countries instead relied on macroeconomic measures derived from the System of National Accounts (SNA), and especially GDP per capita, an indicator that obscured interpersonal inequalities between individuals or households on the micro level. Meanwhile, all statistical comparisons of economic resources of different social groups remained strictly confined to the nation state. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and it has become possible not only to compare interpersonal within-country or cross-country inequalities, but even to construct a global income distribution with the world’s population represented in a single graph, arranged by percentiles of real income regardless of nationalities.2 This chapter offers a historical account of how the present globalized knowledge regime in this field came about. The introduction of international comparisons in income inequality marked a significant step in the quantification of the world in the twentieth century, a secular process that transformed mental maps and techniques of global governance. After 1945, the United Nations and other international organizations led the world in developing comparative statistics as a tool to observe and order the world with significant political and cultural implications.3 International comparisons transgressed imaginary national boundaries and created new ‘cultural linkages’ between hitherto unconnected societies across the globe.4 In the process, comparisons opened up ‘equivalence spaces’ in which decolonizing countries appeared as equals, on a par with former empires who had

   

Chenery at al., ‘Redistribution with Growth’, 4–6. Milanovic, Global Inequality, 11. Ward, Quantifying the World; Mau, Das metrische Wir. Heintz, ‘Zeitalter der Vergleichung’.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-002

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traditionally regarded themselves as beyond the reach of comparison.5 More concretely, international statistics were regarded as a crucial instrument in the creation of a ‘world society’ and the pursuit of the United Nations’ social and economic goals.6 In economic statistics, in particular, cross-country comparisons became a familiar feature of international discussions. Based on the System of National Accounts, international league tables of economic growth and other macroeconomic indicators soon dominated perceptions, debates, and headlines.7 At the same time, all attempts to create a similar statistical system covering the social sphere made relatively little progress over decades. The failure to establish a social equivalent to the national accounts was often ascribed to the greater conceptual difficulties involved in defining and measuring social issues.8 However, such difficulties proved less problematic in other statistical areas. Interestingly, experts harboured similar technical concerns over comparability issues and flagged up flaws in the construction of the System of National Accounts, but in this case the criticism was quickly cast aside and did not hinder the rapid creation of a global macroeconomic system within a matter of years during the 1940s and 1950s.9 This was despite many important initiatives and advances in the quest for social metrics during the twentieth century. Monitoring the material well-being of populations across time and space had been on the agenda of international organizations and social researchers since the interwar era. Initial attempts to develop international statistics on social issues and living standards were led by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and went back to the 1920s; during the post-war era, various other bodies such as the UN and the OECD continued the efforts to devise systems of social indicators and other measures. The post-war decades saw increasing international collaboration in statistical matters on various levels. Regular international conferences and frequent personal exchanges connected government statisticians and academic experts across the world. The ongoing discussions undoubtedly helped statistical know-how to travel, and the efforts to establish international standards certainly led to some degree of convergence in methods and practices. This was reflected, for example, in the increasing use of household surveys across the world. However, engaging in discussions and sharing academic ideas about statistical issues at international conferences was one thing; establishing internationally binding standards and creating a worldwide statistical infrastructure that integrated member states in a permanent system of obligatory datasharing and reporting as in the case of the System of National Accounts was quite another. In the field of income inequality, international reporting was not introduced until the 1990s.

    

Heintz, ‘Welterzeugung durch Zahlen’, 30. Heintz, ‘Welterzeugung durch Zahlen’; Milanovic, Global Inequality, 9. Speich Chassé, Die Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts; Lepenies, The Power of a Single Number. Berten, ‘Failed Indicatorisation’, 179. Ward, Quantifying the World, 6–10, 37–45, 68–9; Speich Chassé, ‘Use of Global Abstractions’, 17–8.

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Tracing the evolution of international reporting opens up vistas on underlying knowledge infrastructures that allow deeper insights into the workings and politics of international statistics than are available through the published contents of statistical yearbooks.10 Statistical infrastructures occupied a central space in existing knowledge regimes that had to be adapted to international reporting, a process that transformed national knowledge regimes on various levels. In public discourse, international comparisons inserted new global reference points into national debates, even if these often continued to revolve around domestic issues.11 On the level of statistical relations, governments ceded control over national statistics and transferred some of their classificatory power to international bodies by providing them with access to country-level microdata. Leading international organizations moved into a position where they could inscribe their own norms, definitions of problems, and policy prescriptions implicitly or explicitly in published reports and international rankings.12 As a consequence, international organizations such as the OECD and the EU acquired new authority as the principal custodians of statistical knowledge on global income inequality in the world. Hence, international reporting was far from just a technical problem, and the challenging collaborative work required to harmonize diverging statistical standards among member states was not necessarily the biggest obstacle. Such a technical view would ignore the political implications inherent in processes of international standardization.13 As this study will contend, ‘doing comparisons’14 was, first of all, a problem of global governance. Member states were aware that any proposal for international standardization and reporting ultimately entailed changes to epistemic practices, norms, and hierarchies of authority. In other words, the international discussions on this subject affected the configurations of existing knowledge regimes and were approached as an exercise in knowledge politics. The politics of international statistics were not discovered by historians as a field of research until the 2010s.15 Much research has centred on the history of national accounting techniques and their political effects during the post-war era. In the complex global web of the Cold War, European integration, and decolonization, systems of national accounts and GDP became powerful political symbols of economic strength and nation-building.16 At the same time, the System of National Accounts provided a new

 Heintz, ‘Welterzeugung durch Zahlen’.  Milanovic, Global Inequality, 45.  Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth, 29, 37.  Heintz, ‘Welterzeugung durch Zahlen’, 13–14.  Epple, ‘Doing Comparisons’.  Speich Chassé, ‘Use of Global Abstractions’, 8–9; Speich Chassé, ‘Roots of the Millennium Development Goals’, 219–20; Bartl et al., ‘Governing by Numbers’, 23–7.  Lepenies, ‘Products before People’.

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comparative framework for political discussions about economic disparities across the world.17 While governments in the global North often approached the politics of development and foreign aid as a strategic competition about political and economic interests, a concern with questions of global poverty and inequality remained at the heart of development thinking in expert circles and international organizations.18 Demands for better economic knowledge about global inequalities arose not least from anti-colonial protests and national independence movements that were incited by stark disparities and the ‘drain of wealth’ resulting from imperial rule.19 In the framework of the United Nations as the main institution responsible for the progressing quantification of the world, delegations from the global South helped to keep issues of global inequality on the agenda, while Western governments manoeuvred to exclude such topics from the proceedings.20 Consequently, the efforts undertaken by the UN and other bodies to establish global statistics on social and economic conditions in colonies and developing countries during the early post-war era were beset by both technical and political problems. Imperial powers had shown little interest in establishing more than basic statistical infrastructures in their colonies, and newly independent and developing countries made only slow progress in building functioning statistical services that could deliver reliable data even for high priority purposes such as national accounting.21 Developing more wideranging statistics on living standards and social welfare in colonial territories was frequently resisted on technical grounds by imperial powers that were wary of ‘embarrassing reports’ and regarded international statistical enquiries as an intrusion into their affairs.22 Similarly, in international development politics, Western countries organized in the OECD deliberately delayed the development of statistics on foreign aid until they had to bow to pressure from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) during the 1960s.23 Statistics thus became a major bone of contention in the emerging North-South conflict and were at the heart of transnational debates about global inequality. As Alexander Nützenadel and Daniel Speich Chassé have observed, the historical debates and structures of global inequality are all but impossible to disentangle from the epistemic techniques, institutions, and knowledges that underpinned the discussions about this issue, an insight that places the leading international organizations in this field at the forefront of the research agenda.24 However, historians have

 Speich Chassé, Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts.  Unger, International Development, 18–19; Unger, ‘Postwar European Development Aid’.  Paidipaty, ‘Testing Measures’.  Jensen, ‘Inequality and Post-War International Organization’, 139.  Jerven, Poor Numbers, 5, 35, 106–7; Hongler, Den Süden erzählen, 53–4; Speich Chassé, Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts, 197–8.  Hongler, Den Süden erzählen, 43–6, 58–9, 60–1, 66–7, 71.  Ibid. 145–8, 164, 199–207.  Nützenadel and Speich Chassé, ‘Editorial: Global Inequality’, 4–5.

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rarely looked beyond the organizations’ published reports and the writings of experts,25 and there is almost no systematic research on international statistical policies regarding material living standards in terms of personal inequalities of income and wealth. This chapter will offer an archive-based account of the long series of initiatives that were undertaken by various international organizations in this field from the interwar era to the late twentieth century. In the modern literature, international organizations sometimes appear as allpowerful standard-setting machines that have single-handedly imposed new metrical orders on the world.26 Over the past decade, this view has been qualified by a growing body of historical research: studies have demonstrated that these organizations should not be seen as ‘fully-fledged international actors’ in their own right, but as member-state-driven social interfaces between national and international governments, bodies, officials, experts, groups, and networks.27 Decision-making processes over policies often pitted national governments and coalitions of member states against the organizations’ secretariats, and national interests frequently trumped internationalist goals: from the beginnings in the interwar era, attempts to develop international statistics were frustrated time and again by governments for political reasons.28 On the other hand, Secretariat staff were in a position to influence agenda-setting processes and work programmes.29 However, statistical policies and directions of research also depended on changing constellations and priorities within individual organizations, as was the case with the World Bank, where the poverty research agenda had remained at the margins of mainstream thinking and policy until the early 1970s.30 The picture was further complicated by competition between international organizations which often cooperated smoothly with each other but also contended for leadership in many areas.31 As this chapter will demonstrate, these complex dynamics also drove the development of international statistics on social matters. While much research has highlighted the processes of globalization and progressive agendas associated with international organizations, the present chapter disrupts this view: it follows a different strand of research that has focused on the politics, conflicts, and power strategies that were at play when delegates or coalitions of member countries tried to advance their special interests in the discussions at international conferences,

 A rare exception is Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth.  Mau, Das metrische Wir, 201–2.  Kott, ‘International Organizations’.  Berten, ‘Failed Indicatorisation’.  Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth, 56–7.  Alacevich, ‘World Bank and the Politics of Productivity’; Konkel, ‘Monetization of Global Poverty’.  Kaiser and Patel, ‘Multiple Connections’; Frey, Kunkel, and Unger, International Organizations and Development.

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committees, and working groups.32 With this focus, the study adopts recent methodological suggestions to employ international organizations as heuristic observation platforms with a view to analysing processes of globalization on two analytical levels.33 First, the analysis looks at international organizations as social spaces where all initiatives to establish new global metrics depended on complex and often hard-won intergovernmental negotiations. Second, the chapter mines the organizations’ contemporary reports and detailed surveys to chart the evolution of statistical practices in the field of living standards and income distribution across world regions and over time. For an understanding of contemporary thinking on these matters, the organizations’ published reports and conference proceedings alone are only of limited value, however, as recent research has demonstrated.34 For a deeper analysis, the published material needs to be complemented and cross-referenced with the internal records of member-state delegations. In the United Kingdom, delegations to international organizations were staffed by civil servants; in this particular area, most of them were government statisticians from the Central Statistical Office (CSO). The formulation of UK policy was not left to the specialists, however. The delegations reported back to senior civil servants and received instructions from parent departments or interdepartmental committees. The internal briefings and correspondence reveal in great detail the technical considerations and political interests that guided British negotiating positions in the discussions about the international statistical system. In other words, the material offers a unique window into contemporary knowledge politics at the global stage. Tracing these deliberations over the decades from the 1920s to the 1990s shows that global economic inequality did not ‘mysteriously disappear’ from the international agenda in the early post-war era, as isolated discussions on individual initiatives or phases might suggest.35 In fact, various international organizations continued to pursue the goal of creating comparative statistical knowledge about economic disparities throughout the century. This is demonstrated by the following longitudinal analysis which offers the first archive-based historical account of all major initiatives in this field. What emerges from this analysis is a long series of distinct but interconnected programmes with varying purposes and aims that partly overlapped and often influenced each other. Some of the programmes were carried out independently by individual bodies, while others were pursued in collaboration between different organizations or in competition with each other. The first initiative was launched by the ILO in the mid 1920s to promote the development of family budget enquiries for the measurement of living standards, a quest

 Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth, 28–9, 35, 57; Leimgruber and Schmelzer, ‘Introduction: Writing Histories of the OECD’, 5–7.  Herren, Internationale Organisationen; Kott, ‘International Organizations’.  Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth, 19.  Jensen, ‘Inequality and Post-War International Organization’, 134.

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that continued in this and other forms throughout the century. In the early post-war era it coincided with the levels of living programme of the United Nations, an early initiative to construct indicators of quality of life for cross-country comparisons. This idea was emulated by the OECD in a project initiated during the early 1960s, which can be seen as the precursor of the subsequent Social Indicators Programme of later in the decade. Furthermore, the levels of living research helped to spark the interest of the United Nations’ Statistical Office in personal income distribution: in the mid 1950s, the UN embarked on a programme to develop a framework for income statistics to complement the System of National Accounts, a programme that took almost two decades to complete. This complementary system was also planned to form part of the proposed System of Social and Demographic Statistics, a separate initiative which was discussed as a social equivalent to the System of National Accounts within the United Nations during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The work on the System of Social and Demographic Statistics (SSDS) was closely related to and was eventually superseded by the research on social indicators that was pursued not only by the UN, but also by the OECD and the EC during the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, in the mid 1970s, the EC embarked on a series of anti-poverty programmes that continued until the early 1990s; it included efforts to harmonize the measurement of poverty across Europe. In one form or another, all of these initiatives aimed to develop and harmonize international indicators of economic inequality. None of them managed to establish anything remotely resembling a system of international reporting in this field; however, even the less successful attempts contributed in different ways to the pursuit of this elusive long-term goal.

Research on Living Standards and the Evolution of Social Surveys The first chapter in this quest begins with the invention and evolution of social surveys: what began with local community investigations in the nineteenth century eventually morphed into a principal data source and indispensable prerequisite for knowledge production on questions of global economic inequality in the late twentieth century. The spread of increasingly advanced social survey techniques can be regarded as an important process of globalization in itself. It started out as a transatlantic movement in the late nineteenth century and, beginning in the early twentieth century, it expanded to more and more countries and world regions. By the end of the century, three quarters of the global population were covered by some form of household survey.36 This development has often been ascribed to the pioneering work of individual social researchers and the emerging social sciences. It has been traced back to early social research and expenditure studies on living conditions among the working classes in

 United Nations, World Development Report (1990), 28.

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France, Belgium, and other countries on the European continent.37 In Britain, Charles Booth’s unparalleled colour-coded poverty maps of London popularized the social survey far beyond the British Isles; Seebohm Rowntree delivered important conceptual groundwork by defining primary poverty and refining the concept of the poverty line; Arthur Bowley, in turn, helped to develop random sampling and mathematical statistics.38 Finally, the evolution from local investigations to modern sample surveys was also associated with innovations in the United States, where the interwar era saw the rise of survey-based market research, political polling, and academic social science.39 More recent research has turned attention to the role of international organizations in this process. Alongside the International Statistical Institute and the League of Nations, leadership in this field was provided, in particular, by the ILO. The commitment of the ILO was premised on the notion that the pursuit of social justice required knowledge and data on workers’ living standards. To this end, the ILO threw its weight behind the development of household surveys, a programme that was kicked off in the early interwar era and promoted through a series of publications, international conferences, and resolutions.40 The ILO’s diligent knowledge work and expertise earned the organization the reputation of a ‘social library’, and the ‘transformative power’ of the social standards that the ILO sought to establish has become a prominent theme in recent historical research.41 According to a recent study, the ILO’s research programme on living standards provided ‘a yardstick for social policies’, helped to create ‘the preconditions for social and economic planning’, and established ‘a solid empirical basis’ for development policies.42 This chapter will offer a more qualified view. While it will underscore the global reach and long-term impact of this programme, it will also highlight its limitations. Most of the early household surveys that resulted from the programme were not designed to enable more than very basic analyses of living standards. Furthermore, the recent literature has tended to overstate the degree of international collaboration and convergence that was achieved in the standardization of household surveys over many decades.43 The immediate purpose of what the recent literature has described as the ILO’s living standards research programme was the development of so-called family budget enquiries, the precursors of the modern household survey. This aim was formulated at the second International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 1925 when the conference recommended that family budget enquiries should be carried out in regular intervals in

      

Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, Social Survey, 10–11; Gorges, ‘The Social Survey in Germany before 1933ʹ. Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, Social Survey; Hennock, Concepts of Poverty. Bulmer, ‘Decline of Social Survey Movement’. Ward, Quantifying the World, 113–16; Clavin, ‘Living Standard’; Macekura, ‘Whither Growth?’. Maul, International Labour Organization, 29, 72; Kott and Droux, Globalizing Social Rights. Maul, International Labour Organization, 69. Gazeley, Holmes, and Newell, ‘The Household Budget Survey in Western Europe, 1795–1965ʹ.

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order to obtain data for up-to-date cost-of-living indices.44 In many member countries, the cost-of-living index had become one of the most widely discussed statistical measures of the time because it had a direct bearing on the real incomes of the working classes.45 From the start, it raised expectations that wage levels should follow movements in prices, and the index was linked to wage-setting mechanisms and welfare schemes. Given its political importance in interwar Britain, it remained hotly contested among employers, labour movements, and leading statisticians such as Arthur Bowley; all sides of the debate were in agreement that the existing index required revision to reflect changes in price levels more accurately. The principal problems lay in outdated information that guided the range and the weighting of consumer items included in the index, and household expenditure surveys offered an obvious solution as the main statistical source that could deliver the required information. Consequently, household surveys gained political significance in their own right. This was expressed by the leading German statistician, Ernst Wagemann, at the third ILO Conference of Labour Statisticians in 1926 when he pointed out that ‘in view of the discontent of the working classes the responsibility of those who conduct family budget enquiries is very great’.46 The ILO conferences offer a window into contemporary thinking about methods, purposes, and possible directions of future research for the development of family budget enquiries. Most statisticians agreed that major work was required on both national and international levels, and an important distinction was made between two main types of family budget enquiries.47 The first type was associated with the ‘social question’ of the nineteenth century. Investigations that followed in this tradition were usually concerned with the actual living standards of different social groups, distributional questions, and social trends over time. Most of these investigations had been carried out by private researchers until government statistical services began to engage in this field during the last decade of the nineteenth century; in some cases, government research even sought to establish subsistence standards or minimum wage rates. The second type of enquiry primarily served the purpose of calculating weights for cost-of-living indices, a necessary step that was required for the indices to reflect the relative importance of different consumer items for households. For this type of enquiry, a simplified analytical design sufficed that recorded data on household expenditure, but not on incomes. Given the increasing political importance of information on the cost of living, this purpose guided the majority of

 ILO Digital Repository, ILO, Second International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva, 20–25 Apr. 1925, Studies and Reports, Series N (Statistics) No. 18 (Geneva, 1925).  Searle, ‘Real Wages’.  ILO Digital Repository, ILO, Third International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva, 18–23 Oct. 1926, Studies and Reports, Series N (Statistics) No. 12 (Geneva, 1926), 16.  ILO Digital Repository, ILO, Methods of Conducting Family Budget Enquiries, Studies and Reports, Series N (Statistics) No. 9 (Geneva, 1926).

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family budget enquiries of the time. During the first quarter of the century, the ILO noted an increasing number of family budget enquiries that were carried out by government statisticians in nearly thirty countries, mostly in Europe. From Japan to Sweden to the United States, the enquiries relied on similar yet different techniques, which signalled that a transnational repertoire of methods and practices was gradually emerging. The majority of the enquiries collected both data on income and expenditure, and some of the published tables included information on average incomes in selected categories of social groups. Most enquiries, however, were geared to the purposes of cost-of-living indices. Accordingly, it was mostly from this angle that statisticians approached the discussions at the ILO conferences during the mid 1920s. To be sure, the ILO resolution passed in 1926 called for the collection of both income and expenditure data, and it was recommended that in published tables ‘averages calculated for different income groups should be shown’.48 Moreover, some of the recommended methods were also embraced as a possible solution to problems encountered in the ILO’s parallel endeavour of developing comparative statistics of real wages across member states.49 Nonetheless, the conference proceedings showed that delegates were interested first and foremost in the expenditure side of the surveys for use in cost-of-living indices. This began to change during the 1930s when the ILO observed that the scope and uses of family budget enquiries across the world were widening. Admittedly, some of the goals that had been set at the 1926 conference were clearly missed. The conference resolution had called on member countries to carry out family budget enquiries at intervals of no more than ten years, but by the end of the 1930s this measure was not generally implemented.50 A few countries, such as Sweden and Japan, had carried out repeated enquiries that even allowed basic analyses of changes in living standards over time, while many other countries had conducted no more than isolated enquiries that provided only synchronic snapshots; a significant number of countries had failed to act on the resolution altogether.51 Nevertheless, the ILO also noted that family budget enquiries were spreading to an increasing number of countries, colonies, and world regions, including India, China, and Latin America.52 In many countries, where national statistical services introduced experimental surveys for the first time, the methods often followed the existing ILO guidelines or the practices observed in other

 ILO Digital Repository, ILO, Third International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva, 18–23 Oct. 1926, Studies and Reports, Series N (Statistics) No. 12 (Geneva, 1926), 111.  Ibid. 33.  ‘An International Survey of Recent Family Living Studies: [Part] I. Income and Expenditure’, International Labour Review, 39 (1939), 662–705.  ‘Recent Family Budget Enquiries: The Swedish Family Budget Enquiry of 1933ʹ, International Labour Review, 31 (1935), 869–80; ‘Recent Family Budget Enquiries: Family Budget Enquiries in Japan, 1926 to 1934ʹ, International Labour Review, 32 (1935), 665–81.  ‘An International Survey of Recent Family Living Studies: [Part] I’.

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countries.53 In Colombia, for example, the first family budget enquiry was conducted as part of a new cost-of-living index in 1936: a total of 225 working class and middleclass families in Bogota were given household books to record their daily expenditure and incomes over the period of a month. The tabulated results showed expenditure patterns, among others, broken down by various commodities and cross-classified by seven ranges of monthly consumption in monetary terms. The methodological design of this study reflected a paradigmatic shift that also characterized many other enquiries during this period. While most earlier family budget enquiries had been primarily concerned with the working classes, an increasing number of studies now began to record income and expenditure patterns across a wider spectrum of different social groups. In the United States, this trend began with two small-scale local surveys from 1932/33 and 1934 that compared expenditure standards at different income levels in various occupational groups in Washington D.C. and California.54 Subsequent enquiries in the United States eventually widened the scope of the investigations to encompass the entire population.55 By the end of the decade, all existing family budget enquiries in the world covered the industrial working classes, but a growing number of studies also extended the analysis to agricultural workers, salaried employees, and civil servants.56 However, such comparisons of relative living standards between different socio-economic groups were left to individual nations. Even if the ILO contemplated possibilities for international comparisons of income differentials or by a fixed standard such as a poverty line, the unresolved problem of currency exchange rate variations made cross-country comparisons unviable.57 These developments and limitations also defined the international statistics about the cost of living that were published periodically by the ILO. The ILO tables used a common base year to compare fluctuations in cost-of-living indices in percentage terms across member countries, but revealed nothing about relative living standards.58 More detailed results from national surveys on living standards were regularly published in the ILO Yearbook of Labour Statistics, but these analyses concentrated on individual countries and did not invite any comparative perspectives. At the same time, the research also progressed to other dimensions of living standards. During the latter half of the 1930s, the ILO collaborated with the League of

 ‘Recent Family Budget Enquiries: The Colombian Family Budget Enquiry of 1936 in Bogota’, International Labour Review, 37 (1938), 425–33.  ‘Recent Family Budget Enquiries: Family Expenditure and Cost of Living at Different Social Levels in the United States’, International Labour Review, 36 (1937), 817–32.  ILO, Methods of Family Living Studies: Report Prepared for the Seventh International Conference of Labour Statisticians (Geneva, 1949).  ‘An International Survey of Recent Family Living Studies: [Part] I’.  Ibid. 671, 673.  E.g. ‘Cost of Living’, International Labour Review, 34 (1936), 540–44.

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Nations in research on nutrition and dietary requirements.59 The initiative aimed to determine national minima and was part of broader efforts to develop statistical measures for social policy purposes.60 Again the programme reflected the widening scope of research during this period: the analysis was not restricted to the working class but also looked at other social groups and income ranges, a line of enquiry that partly prefigured the research interest in income inequality of later decades. A rare indication of this interest was expressed in an ILO report from 1938, which drew attention to income as ‘the most important determinant of the standard of living’.61 While earlier publications had been largely silent on ‘inequalities of income’, the study asserted the ‘important effects’ of the ‘distribution of incomes’ on standards of living; moreover, it alerted readers to the rudimentary state of income statistics in the world. However, the revised ILO guidelines for ‘family living studies’ that were published in 1940 placed the main emphasis, again, on expenditure and consumption as ‘better measures’ than income.62 Thus, by the end of the interwar era, the development of the modern household sample survey had made much progress but was still at a relatively early stage in many countries: only four countries had so far applied modern sampling techniques in large-scale nationwide enquiries, and even some of the most advanced studies still concentrated on the working class, including the major 1937/38 survey in the United Kingdom.63 The ILO facilitated this process not only by holding international conferences and setting statistical standards, but also through the compilation and dissemination of regular reports on new surveys and lessons learned from countries around the world. The innovations of the interwar era paved the way for the global spread of the modern nationwide household sample survey during the post-war era. The work on family living studies had not even been interrupted by the Second World War in some countries such as the United States, and the ILO relaunched its own research programme in 1947/49. It was joined by other international agencies who shared the interest in measurements of living standards, notably the Food and Agricultural Organization and the United Nations Statistical Commission with its Sub-Committee on Statistical Sampling.64 Over subsequent decades, the statistical work in this field was continued in collaborations under UN auspices: during the 1950s and 1960s, various  ‘The Fourth International Conference of Labour Statisticians’, International Labour Review, 24 (1931), 1–23, at 13; ILO, Workers’ Nutrition and Social Policy, Studies and Reports, Series B (Social and Economic Conditions) No. 23 (Geneva, 1936).  ILO, The Worker’s Standard of Living, Studies and Reports, Series B (Economic Conditions) No. 30 (Geneva 1938), 5.  Ibid. 23–31.  ILO, Methods of Family Living Studies: Income—Expenditure—Consumption, Studies and Reports, Series N (Statistics) No. 23 (Geneva 1940), 2, 77–8.  Ibid. 19–25.  ILO, Methods of Family Living Studies. Report Prepared for the Seventh International Conference of Labour Statisticians (Geneva, 1949), 2–3.

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expert groups were convened and produced a number of major reports and recommendations, including a Handbook of Household Surveys published in 1964; moreover, the ILO revised its own guidelines for family living studies at the International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 1973.65 Both the ILO and the UN also reported regularly in their periodicals on new surveys to facilitate international exchange over methods and practices.66 An important forum for discussions in this field was provided by the regular conferences of the United Nations Statistical Commission and the regional Conference of European Statisticians. From the start, however, the issue was not given high priority in international statistical work programmes. This was already apparent in the plans of the UN Statistical Commission to create a ‘world statistical system’ in the late 1940s: at the top of the agenda was a long list of economic statistics, while the work on ‘cost of living statistics and family budget inquiries’ was welcomed but left to other international agencies, notably the ILO – an approach that was supported by the British delegation ‘without reservation’.67 Accordingly, the proposal to appoint an expert group on standards of living elicited an ambivalent response at the conference of the Statistical Commission in 1953. Member-state delegations differed in their views about the importance and the resources that should be attributed to the programme. While it received full support from South American representatives, who ‘were anxious that more emphasis should be given to the development of social statistics’,68 other delegates were less enthusiastic. The British delegate was instructed to signal ‘general support’, but also to warn the Secretariat not to ‘allow its attention to be distracted’ from other projects which deserved ‘higher priority’, especially the work on economic statistics such as national accounts, external trade, and wholesale prices.69 The British position remained unchanged when the discussions continued at the next conference

 UN, Report on International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living, E/CN.3/ 179, (New York, 1954); ILO, Report of the Working Group of Experts on Family Living Studies (Geneva, 1955); ILO, Family Living Studies: A Symposium, Studies and Reports, New Series, No. 63 (Geneva, 1961); UN, Conference of European Statisticians, WG 17.6 (New York, 1962); UN, Statistical Office, Handbook of Household Surveys: A Practical Guide for Inquiries on Levels of Living, Studies in Methods, Series F, No. 10 (New York, 1964); ILO, Report of the Meeting of Experts on the Scope, Methods and Uses of Family Expenditure Surveys (Geneva, 1967); ILO, Report of the Twelfth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva, 16–26 Oct. 1973 (Geneva, 1973).  E.g. ILO, Bulletin on Family Budget Surveys 1950–1960 (Geneva, 1961); UN, Statistical Commission, Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling, Sample Surveys of Current Interest, E/CN.3/Sub.1/15 (New York, 1949).  TNA, CAB 139/152, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Seventh Session of the Economic and Social Council, 8 July 1948; UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Third Session, E/Cn.3/50, 11 May 1948.  TNA, CAB 108/136, Report by the United Kingdom Representative to the Seventh Session of the Statistical Commission, 19 Mar. 1953.  TNA, CAB 108/136, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Representative to the Seventh Session of the Statistical Commission, 24 Jan. 1953.

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in the following year. Again, the British delegation was not willing to support recommendations for work on social statistics unreservedly: ‘we would not be prepared to accord it such high priority as might be desired by other members.’70 Similarly, when the work eventually produced results, British officials were not inclined to accept more than basic recommendations. The new guidelines that were developed by various working groups under UN and ILO auspices in 1955, 1962, and 1967 were deemed mostly ‘acceptable’, except where they implied any changes to the national statistical system.71 In 1962, for example, the proposed recommendation to hold large-scale family budget enquiries every ten years was rejected by the Ministry of Labour as officials were unwilling to depart from their established system of regular medium-sized surveys.72 The international discussions over methods and standards were accompanied by another spurt in the use of household surveys across the world. During the first two decades after the war, ILO officials counted more than sixty countries that had begun to carry out household surveys, a steep upward trend compared to the interwar era.73 The list of existing household surveys also included more and more countries in the global South where first steps were often undertaken in the form of more limited small-scale enquiries. Creating statistical services and developing household surveys, in particular, was widely seen as an important prerequisite not only for social and economic planning in national contexts but also for designing and monitoring international development programmes.74 To help countries develop their own household surveys, the ILO used the Expanded Technical Assistance Programme of the United Nations and collaborated with the UN in regional seminars.75 Furthermore, the UN provided spaces for exchange of statistical know-how at the regional conferences of African and Asian statisticians that were convened at regular intervals from the late 1950s; another forum where Western statisticians entered into discussions with their counterparts from the global South were the regular conferences of Commonwealth statisticians. Similar activities on the regional level were organized by US agencies, the Inter-American Statistical

 TNA, CAB 108/136, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Representative to the Eighth Session of the Statistical Commission, 30 Mar. 1954.  TNA, CAB 108/297, Draft Briefs for the United Kingdom Delegate to the Twelfth Session of the Statistical Commission, 10/13 Apr. 1962.  TNA, CAB 108/297, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Tenth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 9 Oct. 1962.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 1. 1950–1964 (Geneva, 1967).  Jerven, Measuring African Development; UN, Report on International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living, pp. iii–iv.  ILO, General Report on Progress of Labour Statistics: Report Prepared for the Eighth International Conference of Labour Statisticians (Geneva, 1954), 18–19, 29–30; ILO, Scope, Methods, and Uses of Family Expenditure Surveys (Geneva, 1971), 2–3.

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Institute, the EC, and other international organizations.76 Throughout the post-war era, the agendas of these events and conferences frequently included deliberations on household surveys.77 Despite undeniable advances in many areas, international discussions during the 1970s revealed the paucity of statistical infrastructures, especially in the global South. On the one hand, most countries in the world had already carried out or were planning some form of family budget enquiry, and a considerable number of developing countries had even built large-scale nationwide household surveys. On the other hand, many surveys had been limited to one-off investigations or had only been repeated after long intervals; furthermore, many surveys relied on relatively small sample sizes and were restricted to selected socio-economic groups or certain localities such as capital cities.78 Ultimately, the plan was to produce large-scale and regular surveys that would allow observations of socio-economic trends over time, but in many countries of the global South efforts were hampered by resource constraints and the lack of specialized personnel, as the ILO Conference of Labour Statisticians heard from delegates from various African countries in October 1973.79 In many former colonies and decolonizing countries this situation betrayed the economic and political priorities of imperial powers who had shown little interest in developing statistical infrastructures and capacities to monitor social welfare in the societies under their rule. While the main emphasis lay on the development of rudimentary systems of national accounts, statistics on poverty and other social issues were largely neglected.80 For example, British government statisticians from the metropolis rarely got involved in assisting local efforts to build household surveys in existing or former colonies during the post-war era.81 Technical assistance in this area was largely confined to their presentations at the regular conferences of Commonwealth statisticians and other regional gatherings in Africa and Asia, where they recommended their statistical methods for emulation but frequently bemoaned the incompetence of their non-European counterparts.82 In a rare acknowledgement of British inactivity in this field in the late 1960s, a government statistician observed that the French government showed greater interest in building statistical services in their former colonies than the British.83  ILO, Scope, Methods and Uses of Family Expenditure Surveys, 4–7.  E.g. TNA, CAB 108/298, UN, Economic Commission of Africa, Provisional Agenda of the Third Conference of African Statisticians, 2–11 Oct. 1963, E/CN.14/CAS.3/STAT/1, 6 Feb. 1963.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: Working Bibliography of Sources (Geneva, 1981); ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 3. 1968–1976 (Geneva, 1979).  ILO, Report of the Twelfth International Conference of Labour Statisticians (1973), 2–3.  Jerven, Poor Numbers; id., ‘History of African Poverty by Numbers’.  TNA, CAB 108/299, CSO, Papers on Statistical Activities during 1961–63 and Possible Developments in 1964–65 for the Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, August 1964.  TNA, CAB 108/302, CSO, Papers from the Conference of African Statisticians, 1967.  Ibid.

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Recognizing that many developing countries were struggling with the task of introducing even basic statistical series, the ILO Conference of Labour Statisticians in 1973 called for an action programme of sustained international assistance. During the mid 1970s, the idea of a ‘worldwide programme in support of household surveys’ gained traction and eventually materialized in the so-called National Household Survey Capability Programme initiated by the Statistical Commission of the United Nations in 1976.84 The programme envisaged providing assistance to as many as eighty developing countries over a period of ten years; it not only pursued the aim of building new statistical infrastructures in participating countries, but also aimed to collect compatible income distribution data for purposes of international comparisons.85 Substantial support was provided by the ILO and the World Bank, with the latter complementing the programme by launching the Living Standards Measurement Study in 1980.86 The search for donors and support was less successful elsewhere. The British delegation to the Statistical Commission welcomed the programme as a ‘powerful and effective method’ that ‘should encourage developing countries to help themselves’, but declined to offer any financial contribution to the programme. The decision was explained with reference to recent cuts to the foreign aid budget but also chimed with the Thatcher government’s lack of interest in the production of statistical knowledge about economic inequality.87 In the global North, developments were more rapid but similarly chequered. In most industrialized countries modern household sample surveys were introduced during the 1950s and 1960s, and nationwide household surveys covering the whole population became the norm.88 Some countries pursued the project with greater urgency than others, though. While a number of countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan, and many Eastern European countries transitioned from the previous practice of ad hoc enquiries to continuous surveys during this period, others, such as West Germany, preferred less ambitious programmes with repeated surveys at intervals of five to ten years.89 The surveys served a wide variety of macroeconomic, microeconomic, and social welfare purposes, but the collection of income distribution data initially represented more a by-product than a primary objective in national statistical programmes. By the mid 1960s, only a few countries in the world had carried out  UN, Statistical Commission, Report on the Nineteenth Session, 9–19 November 1976, E/CN.3/500 (New York, 1977), 42–3; UN, Economic and Social Council, Resolution 2055 (LXII), National Household Survey Capability Programme, 5 May 1977.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report on the Twentieth Session, 20 February–2 March 1979, E/CN.3/500 (New York, 1979), 42–7.  UN, Statistical Commission, The Living Standards Measurement Study: Report of the World Bank, E/ CN.3/1985/15 (New York, 1984).  TNA, CAB 108/704, CSO, Briefing for the Twenty-First Session of the Statistical Commission, 28 Oct. 1980. On the Thatcher governments see Chapter 5.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 1. 1950–1964.  ILO, Scope, Methods, and Uses of Family Expenditure Surveys, 6.

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enquiries specifically designed to obtain data on incomes, while most existing family budget surveys placed the main emphasis on expenditure, which limited the level of detail in the data collected on incomes and savings.90 While income data was often merely reported in summary form, the analyses concentrated mainly on consumption patterns.91 To be sure, consumption was widely seen as a useful and even ‘more direct’ indicator of the ‘level of living of various classes of the population’,92 and the published tables in ILO reports frequently showed consumption expenditure broken down by income ranges or socio-economic groups. However, the idea of monitoring movements in economic disparities or the incidence of poverty over time did not appear on the list of main uses of household surveys until the early 1970s.93 The shifting interest was reflected in ILO reports and resolutions which began to highlight the value of household surveys ‘in connection with income distribution studies, measurement of levels of living and determination of poverty levels’.94 Despite the continuous efforts to establish international standards in this field, however, the methods applied in national household surveys around the world continued to vary widely, as the ILO observed in the early 1970s.95 Hence, the international comparisons of household income and expenditure statistics published in the regular ILO reports during the 1960s and 1970s were not yet based on harmonized concepts – and were always accompanied by the caveat that they were ‘subject to important reservations’.96

The Levels of Living Programme When ILO planners had embarked on their endeavour to develop family budget enquiries during the 1920s, the goal of international comparisons of living standards had been a key concern from the start. During the early post-war era, this issue was taken up again in a related programme that set out to devise statistical indicators for international comparisons in the social field. The so-called levels of living programme began life under UN auspices in the late 1940s when the idea gained traction that international development required improved statistical measurements as a knowledge base for social and economic planning. Hence, the programme built on the earlier efforts to  TNA, CAB 108/299, UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Twelfth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 19–23 Oct. 1964, Conf.Eur.Stats/221, pp. 27–8.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 1 1950–1964, 2.  UN, Statistical Commission, A Draft Complementary System of Statistics on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, E/CN.3/400, 19 Aug. 1969 (New York, 1969), para. 20.  ILO, Scope, Methods and Uses of Family Expenditure Surveys, 44–51.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 2. 1960–72. Northern America, Europe and USSR, Oceania (Geneva, 1976); ILO, Draft Resolution II of the Twelfth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, 26 Oct. 1976.  ILO, Report of the Twelfth International Conference of Labour Statisticians (1973), 12.  ILO, Household Income and Expenditure Statistics: No. 3. 1968–1976, p. x.

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develop household surveys as a data-gathering tool. Accordingly, an expert group appointed by the UN Statistical Commission in 1953 strongly recommended ‘as a next step’ to accord ‘the highest priority’ to developing ‘uniform sample surveys’.97 The ambitions of the levels of living programme went much further, though: it aimed to construct statistical indicators for a wide range of key ‘components’ of living conditions, including health, food, education, employment, housing, social security, and consumption, with this last to be measured by indicators such as personal consumption per capita, based on national income data. Furthermore, the programme aspired to achieve international comparability at least for a selection of indicators, where the technical difficulties did not seem unsurmountable – the report called on ‘member countries to undertake to adopt uniform standards and procedures as rapidly as possible’. The bold conception to develop a set of internationally comparable ‘indicators’ prefigured many of the ideas of the social indicators movement of the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as an important precursor. Likewise, the subsequent intergovernmental deliberations about the levels of living programme in the framework of the UN foreshadowed the resistance to international comparisons encountered by the OECD during the 1970s. In contrast to views suggested in the recent literature, opposition did not only flow from the experts’ technical concerns, but also from political considerations and national interests pursued by member-state delegations.98 Even before the expert group was convened, British officials were sceptical about the practicability of the programme, given the technical difficulties and the ‘political pitfalls’ involved in the task.99 When the experts delivered their report in 1954, the British found it ‘disappointing’: it was considered to be too vague on many technical questions that were ‘bristling with all kinds of difficulties’.100 Several government departments that were consulted over the report expressed deep reservations with respect to comparability issues and data availability, but conceded that international comparisons were technically possible at least for a short list of three components, namely health, food, and aggregate consumption.101 This was also acknowledged in the written comments submitted by the CSO to the Statistical Commission. However, stronger emphasis was put on the need to develop national statistics in member countries and colonies before indicators for international comparison could be selected.102  ILO, General Report on Progress of Labour Statistics (1954), 28–30; UN, Report on International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living (1954), 59.  Jensen, ‘Inequality and Post-War International Organization’, 150–2, 154.  TNA, CAB 108/136, Report by the United Kingdom Representative to the Seventh Session of the Statistical Commission, 19 Mar. 1953.  TNA, CAB 108/136, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Representative to the Eighth Session of the Statistical Commission, 30 Mar. 1954.  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living, 23 Feb. 1955.  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living: Comments by the United Kingdom, 19 Apr. 1955.

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When the subject was discussed at the next session of the Statistical Commission in 1956, the exchanges ‘proved more satisfactory from the United Kingdom point of view than we had expected’, as the British representative reported – because ‘many countries’ in their written comments had equally cast ‘doubt on the possibility’ of international comparisons.103 In the discussions during the session, the British delegation expressed ‘doubt about the statistical practicability of the comparisons proposed’ and recommended that efforts should concentrate on ‘measuring changes over time’ within individual countries rather than ‘attempting to make comparisons between countries’. As a result, the proposals of the experts were watered down to a recommendation for further technical work on concepts and definitions that the British delegation found ‘difficult to resist’.104 When progress reports on this work were presented at subsequent conferences, it remained British policy to reiterate that international comparisons were ‘not to be encouraged’, referring to the lack of statistical infrastructure in most colonies and developing countries.105 Nevertheless, the programme produced some results and provided impetus for further work. The recommendations of a working party, which had been convened by the Secretariat of the Statistical Commission in co-operation with the ILO and other specialized agencies, were accepted by the Statistical Commission in 1961 to be issued to member states as ‘guidance’ for the measurement of levels of living.106 The guidelines and reports that resulted from the programme admittedly sidestepped core issues of economic inequality, and the marginal treatment of income and expenditure drew early criticism from several member states at the time. While an earlier version of the 1954 guidelines had cautioned against the use of national income per capita as an indicator, but suggested consumption per capita for inclusion, the new ‘interim guide’ excluded the whole area of income and expenditure from the list of ‘components’ and downgraded them to the status of mere ‘background information’ – because it was not yet deemed possible to make international comparisons of per capita income levels.107 Accordingly, comparative tables on monetary indicators were not routinely included in the United Nations’ World Social Situation report, a regular report that was informed by the levels of living programme and offered a plethora of international comparisons of living conditions, even though they were admittedly based on often sketchy data and were to be  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Twenty-Second Session of the Economic and Social Council, 30 June 1956.  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Twenty-Second Session of the Economic and Social Council, 30 June 1956.  TNA, CAB 108/306, CSO, Draft Brief for United Kingdom Representative to the Tenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 25 Mar. 1958.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of Eleventh Session, 20 April–5 May 1960, E/CN.3/282 (New York, 1960), 16; UN, Statistical Commission, International Definition and Measurement of Levels of Living: An Interim Guide, E/CN.3/270/Rev.1 (New York, 1961).  UN, Statistical Commission, International Definition and Measurement of Levels of Living, 16.

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regarded ‘with caution’.108 Existing information on ‘such basic indicators as the distribution of income’ remained ‘gravely inadequate’: hence, the World Social Situation reports could not present much evidence when they drew attention to widening disparities in income and wealth between and within countries as a major problem of development and a root cause of ‘differences in social-economic patterns’ around the globe.109 Despite the lacunae and the non-binding character of the levels of living programme, it did provide stimuli for the international development of social metrics.110 In Scandinavia, for example, the programme was credited by leading experts as a source of inspiration for the levels of living survey carried out in Sweden in 1968, which, in turn, influenced a new initiative to develop income statistics in Norway in 1972.111 The levels of living programme also inspired the Secretariat of the OECD to launch a similar initiative in the early 1960s, underpinned by the emerging transnational critique of the growth paradigm. Recognizing that ‘economic growth is not an end in itself’, the OECD Council suggested in its ‘guiding principles’ of 1962 that higher living standards across the population deserved more attention and needed to be monitored, a project that was consequently taken up by the Secretariat for inclusion in the OECD’s work programme.112 It aimed to develop definitions of social well-being and create a system of international reporting, and reference was made to the levels of living programme of the UN as a foundational model. As the Secretariat explained in a report outlining the new programme in 1965, the UN work served as a point of departure, but the OECD programme took a different approach.113 Instead of attempting to cover all ‘components’ of living conditions that were included in the UN definition, the OECD project proposed a simplified but no less ambitious design. It was intended to build a synthetic measure based on income and expenditure data that could deliver cross-country comparisons of living standards on an annual basis. Methodologically, the basic idea was to define a basket of goods and to calculate the proportions of families with incomes above or below the sum required to purchase

 UN, Report on the World Social Situation, E/CN.5/324 (New York, 1957), pp. vii, 2.  UN, Report on the World Social Situation with special reference to the problem of balanced social and economic development (New York, 1961), 58–62; UN, 1970 Report on the World Social Situation (New York, 1971), pp. viii, xi.  Cf. e.g. Ganguli and Gupta, Levels of Living in India.  Torkel Alfthan, ‘Level of Living Surveys in Sweden: Some Issues and Findings’, International Labour Review, 117 (1978), 597–609; TNA, BS 7/550, Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW), Report on Statistics in Sweden and Norway, Apr. 1979.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, OECD, MO(62)1, Guiding principles for long-term programme; OECD Historical Archives, OECD, MO(63)22, Manpower and Social Affairs Committee, Programme of Activities and Budget Estimates for 1964, 14 June 1963; OECD, MO(63)18, Manpower and Social Affairs Committee, Working Party on the 3-year operational programme, 12 Apr. 1963.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, OECD, Social Affairs Division, MS/S/65.160, Measurement of Changes in National Levels of Living, 6 July 1965.

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Fig. 3: Rough comparisons: table on income per capita in the UN’s World Social Situation report, 1961.

the corresponding basket. The single measure resulting from this calculation was the percentage of people living under an ‘average’ or a ‘modest but adequate’ level of living. In other words, the proposed OECD measure amounted to a form of international poverty line, whose movements were to be compared to other member countries and monitored over time.

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Conceptual inspiration for this approach came from the United States, where experts had drawn up standard budgets to determine a ‘modest but adequate’ level of living, and even though such definitions had not yet been adopted in most Western European countries, the OECD report argued that the construction of the proposed measure was possible ‘in every country with a developed statistical service’. Hence, one of the most compelling counter-arguments that had previously been employed against the UN levels of living programme could hardly apply in this case: within the UN framework, British delegations, among others, had repeatedly pointed to the dearth of statistical data in most developing countries and ‘dependent territories’ in order to make the case against international reporting in the social field. Within the OECD, however, by the mid 1960s almost all member countries had already gained experience with family living studies or household surveys that could serve as statistical sources for the proposed new measure. The viability of the proposal was demonstrated in the annex of the Secretariat’s 1965 report, where published data from four member countries – including the United Kingdom – was used to calculate changes in national levels of living in recent years. The results showed that, in Britain, almost three fourths of the population had household incomes below the level of average expenditure in 1957, before the index improved by about ten percentage points to 64.2 per cent by 1963.114 Apart from the United Kingdom, the report contained similar calculations for the United States, France, and West Germany. Thus, even if the report reassured member countries that it was not intended ‘to make international comparison of the level of living of different countries at this stage’, this was clearly what the Secretariat envisaged for a later stage.115 As it turned out, however, this was an endeavour that met with little enthusiasm among British officials. When Solomon Barkin, one of the instigators of the levels of living programme in the OECD Secretariat, invited comments from member countries on the initial report in the autumn of 1965, the proposal was reviewed at official level in the Overseas Department of the Ministry of Labour, which was responsible for liaising with international organizations. In the subsequent discussions, not a single official voiced support for the programme, and many of the contributions were more concerned with tactical considerations over how to halt the programme than with its ideas. One of the departmental statisticians argued that the proposed ‘minimum needs criterion’ introduced a ‘subjective element’ into the measure, although it was acknowledged that even an arbitrary threshold could serve as a basis for comparisons over time.116 With respect to the report’s findings about levels of living in the United Kingdom, the figures cited in the report were deemed correct, but it was criticized that the use of average expenditure as a benchmark wrongly implied the same tax

 Ibid. 59.  Ibid. 8.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by F. G. Forsyth, 28 Oct. 1965.

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and national insurance burden for low-income households as for average households and thereby overstated the cost of living at the bottom of the income spectrum. Another civil servant concurred ‘that we should take a cautious line’ on the grounds that ‘the theoretical problems have not been solved’, and it was deemed ‘most undesirable that countries should be persuaded to collect information at great cost just for this purpose.’117 However, all these counter-arguments failed to convince one of the officials in the Overseas Department, D. F. Pegg, who raised the question ‘whether we shouldn’t try to hit harder and try to stop the study being taken further’.118 In his note, Pegg also hinted at the more political sentiments hidden behind the technical arguments against the programme: apparently the figures are correct but we don’t like the way they are used and doubt that the exercise justifies the effort involved. I wonder whether we have here a clear enough analysis to support a clear-cut refusal to participate in any study that might later be floated within M.S.A. cttee. If we are firmly against the exercise, UK Delegation should also be briefed accordingly now. The Delegation could find out how far the M.S.A. and Dept of Economics and Statistics Directorates are together in supporting further work and whether it is endorsed at Council level. Now is the time to begin an attack.

What Pegg considered ‘even worse’ than the proposal in its present form was the possibility of a refinement to a comparative study of the evolution of incomes of different sections of the population, i.e. international comparisons of income distribution in member countries, which had been suggested by the Italian delegation at a recent meeting of the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee.119 Furthermore, several officials saw the project as yet another example of the Secretariat’s tendency to ‘embark on large-scale studies with inadequate authorization on the part of the committee’ – there was agreement that ‘uncontrolled Secretariat activity of this kind’ should be reined in.120 To prevent the project from progressing any further, Pegg suggested to build a ‘strong case’ by advancing a combination of procedural and technical arguments, among others, the alleged ‘inability of many countries (I would imagine) to produce suitable data even if they wanted to’. The counter-arguments contributed by various colleagues were collected by A. M. Morgan in the Overseas Department who condensed them into a critical letter to Solomon Barkin that was intended ‘to knock the project down on technical grounds’.121 The letter argued that the project was ‘far too ambitious for the available data and the statistical methods proposed’, and recommended that member countries should concentrate their efforts on constructing

 TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by R. J. Fowler, 3 Nov. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by D. F. Pegg, 4 Nov. 1965; Note by A. M. Morgan, 6 Dec. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, OECD, MAS(65)14, Meeting of the Working Party, 11–12 Mar. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by E. C. M. Cullingford, 10 Nov. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by A. M. Morgan, 6 Dec. 1965.

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‘good’ general price indices instead.122 Eventually, British opposition helped to put the project ‘right at the back of the queue’123 as intended: at the next meetings of the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee in May 1966, no further activities in this area were agreed for inclusion in the work programme for 1967, and the item was deferred to an unspecified expert group that was to be convened at a later date.124 Nevertheless, the project can be seen as a source of inspiration for the better known Social Indicators Programme that was initiated by the OECD a few years later in 1970 – and that was similarly concerned with the ‘development of an information system’ to measure how the proceeds of economic growth ‘may be better directed to improvement of the quality of life and the meeting of social aspirations.’125

The Attempted Standardization of Statistics on Income Distribution International efforts to develop household budget surveys and measurements of living standards also provided the context for the growing interest in personal income distribution as a political and statistical issue. The first initiative to address this longneglected subject emanated from the Statistical Commission of the UN during the mid 1950s and has been largely overlooked in the modern literature. In historical accounts, the UN Statistical Commission has been criticized for its preoccupation with the macroeconomic System of National Accounts and its failure to develop statistics on income inequality and other measures of distributive justice.126 While it is true that the subject area was consistently given relatively low priority, it actually began to appear on the agenda of the Statistical Commission not long after its inception in 1946. As early as 1950, the Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling brought the increasing interest in ‘statistical information on the inequality of the income distribution’ to the attention of the Statistical Commission, suggesting that recommendations should be drawn up and the ‘usefulness’ of sampling techniques for obtaining statistics on personal incomes be pointed out to member countries.127 Subsequently, the

 TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, A. M. Morgan, Draft letter to S. Barkin, OECD, Social Affairs Division, 6 Dec. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, Ministry of Labour, Note by E. C. M. Cullingford, 10 Nov. 1965.  TNA, LAB 13/1811, OECD, MO(66)4, Draft Work Programme for 1967, 2 June 1966.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, MSA, Working Party on Social Indicators, SI/9: Social Indicators Development Programme, 26 Dec. 1971, p. 4.  Ward, Quantifying the World, 49, 61, 83, 92, 141.  UN, Statistical Commission, Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling, Sampling Methods for Estimating Distribution by Size of Individual and Family Income, 29 Aug. 1950, E/CN.3/Sub.1/27 (New York, 1950).

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topic was discussed at the General Assembly and by the Economic and Social Council, with the latter requesting that the Secretary-General undertake work in this area.128 At the seventh session of the Statistical Commission in 1953, delegates were informed of this work and agreed that the Secretary-General should be invited to survey national practices in the compilation of statistics on income distribution as a first step on the path towards international standards in this field.129 The resulting reports provided a detailed picture of the fragmentary state of income statistics around the world during the early post-war era. As the 1956 report on country practices observed, statistics on income distribution by size and other socioeconomic characteristics were still ‘relatively undeveloped’ in ‘most countries’ at this point.130 While personal income distribution received little attention, analyses conventionally focused on incomes by industrial origin or, in particular, by functional shares. The latter occupied a central space in economics and had long been an integral part of national income statistics, but it also entailed the simplistic equation of the factors of labour, land, and capital with corresponding socio-economic groups.131 By contrast, only a few countries had collected and published data on income distribution by income groups so far, and many of the statistical sources and methods applied suffered from severe drawbacks. By 1950, fifteen countries were on record as having published statistics on income distribution by size, including France, India, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Commonwealth countries.132 In most cases, however, the published tables were based on income tax statistics, which omitted low-income groups below the tax exemption limit and focused on individuals as income units, not families or households. Up until this point, the only country that had carried out purpose-designed sample surveys on a regular basis was the United States, where the Bureau of the Census collected data from 25,000 households for the ‘Current Population Reports on Consumer Incomes’. By the mid 1950s, the number of countries using sample surveys for this purpose had grown, but apart from surveys carried out in Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands, nearly all other surveys were based on small three-digit sample sizes, exacerbating the inherent methodological problems in the form of sampling errors, non-response, and under-reporting of income.133 By this stage, population censuses with supplementary questions on personal  UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics on Income Distribution: Memorandum Prepared by the Secretary-General, 14 Jan. 1954, E/CN.3/184 (New York, 1954).  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of Seventh Session, 2–3 February 1953, E/CN.3/163 (New York, 1953), 6–7.  UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics of the Distribution of Income, 10 Feb. 1956, E/CN.3/208 (New York, 1956), 44.  Ibid. 5–7.  UN, Statistical Commission, Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling, Sampling Methods for Estimating Distribution by Size of Individual and Family Income, 29 Aug. 1950, E/CN.3/Sub.1/27 (New York, 1950), 3–6.  UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics of the Distribution of Income (1956), 37, 42–3.

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incomes had come into use in a small number of non-European countries, among others in the United States and Canada, and these created a third main source for income distribution statistics. The use of censuses offered important advantages, above all, high coverage of the population and large sampling frames that allowed cross-classification of income data with other demographic and social variables. There were nevertheless disadvantages to this method, in particular, the risk of detrimental effects on overall response rates, and this deterred many other countries from including income questions in population censuses.134 The prospects for international standardization were judged more optimistically by the authors of the reports than by member-state representatives in the Statistical Commission. The initial 1954 report by the Secretary-General had acknowledged the non-viability of international comparisons in light of the then current methodological differences across member states, but also advanced the idea of an extension of the System of National Accounts to include harmonized tables on income distribution.135 When the report was discussed at the eighth session of the Statistical Commission in 1954, however, delegates stressed the ‘difficulties’ involved in any attempt to obtain ‘international comparability’ and referred the matter back to the Secretary-General for more thorough studies.136 The more extensive report submitted in 1956 again stressed that it was ‘premature’ to seek international harmonization of statistical standards, but made detailed recommendations for ‘international guidance’ and claimed that ‘certain aspects of comparability should be relatively easy to achieve’: by using deciles as income-class intervals for purposes of analysis and graphical presentation, national statistics could circumvent the problem of currency exchange rate variations and other methodological issues, enabling ‘meaningful’ international comparisons at least ‘for certain broad characteristics’.137 Subsequent discussions at the Statistical Commission struck a more cautious note. British delegates were briefed to support the programme in principle, but also to reaffirm the reservations about international comparisons – on the grounds that most existing sample surveys in the world were mainly designed for collecting expenditure data and offered only limited value for income distribution analyses, especially in the United Kingdom’s ‘colonial territories’.138 In preparation for the 1958 conference, the CSO advised its delegation that ‘it should be pointed out that this is not a field in which it is ever likely that all countries will be able to use identical definitions’; hence, the delegation was instructed to try to get a passage deleted from the updated report that suggested a statistical work programme with a view to formulating ‘standards for

 Ibid. 27–31.  UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics on Income Distribution (1954), 7–8.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of Eighth Session, 5–22 April 1954 (New York, 1954), 17.  UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics of the Distribution of Income (1956), 4–5, 44–5.  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Representative at the Ninth Session of the Statistical Commission, 5 Apr. 1956.

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international reporting’.139 During the session, the ‘extreme difficulty of establishing international standards in the field’ was ‘generally recognized’ by the assembly, and despite the passing of a conference resolution to develop a statistical work programme on income distribution, the topic consequently disappeared from the agenda of the Statistical Commission for the next seven years.140 This reflected not only the high workload of the Commission, above all, in economic statistics, but also the low priority and reservations associated with the work on income distribution. In the mid 1960s, the Statistical Commission returned to the subject with a renewed initiative that eventually led to concrete results in the form of detailed international recommendations. At the thirteenth session in 1965, delegates passed a resolution that took up the idea of developing international guidelines within the System of National Accounts – on this occasion, the CSO could ‘easily agree with the proposals’ as they were ‘expressed in very general terms’.141 The programme became more specific over the following years, however, as the United Nations Statistical Office convened expert groups, produced papers, and surveyed statistical methods and national practices in member countries.142 Furthermore, the programme gained momentum as other UN bodies engaged in similar activities, notably the Conference of European Statisticians that had put the issue of income distribution on the agenda in the early 1960s.143 By the late 1960s, the envisaged ‘complementary system of statistics of the distribution of income and wealth’ began to take shape: it was meant to complement both the System of National Accounts and the Material Product System (MPS) in the Socialist bloc, and it was concerned not only with economic questions such as projections of consumer demand, but also with monitoring trends in levels of living and well-being among various social groups over time and in comparative perspective.144 As national statistics on income distribution in many member countries could not yet meet the data requirements

 TNA, CAB 108/306, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Representative at the Tenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 27 Mar. 1958; UN, Statistical Commission, Statistics of the Distribution of Personal Income, 7 Mar. 1958, E/CN.3/233 (New York, 1958), 19, para. 80.3.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Tenth Session, 28 April–15 May 1958 (New York, 1958), 13–14. No items on income distribution were included in the conference agendas of the subsequent eleventh and twelfth sessions in 1960 and 1962.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Thirteenth Session, 20 April–7 May 1965 (New York, 1965), 26–8; TNA, CAB 108/300, CSO, Brief for the United Kingdom Delegate at the Thirteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 9 Apr. 1965.  UN, Statistical Commission, Income Distribution Statistics: Report by the Secretary-General, 30 Aug. 1966, E/CN.3/348 (New York, 1966).  TNA, CAB 108/297, UN, Statistical Commission and Economic Commission for Europe, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of the Tenth Plenary Session, 29 Oct. 1962.  UN, Statistical Commission, National Accounts and Balances: A Complementary System of Statistics of the Distribution of Income and Wealth, 4 Jan. 1968, E/CN.3/363 (New York, 1968).

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for such a system, however, it was clearly indicated that the suggested guidelines were meant to set long-term goals for the future and not for immediate implementation.145 The response of the Central Statistical Office to the proposals was to urge caution. In the early stages of the programme, British officials were ‘clear that considerably more detailed work will be required before anything in the form of internationally acceptable recommendations can emerge’.146 When recommendations of an expert group were advanced for discussion in 1967, officials in the CSO noted that the ‘most important point which should be stressed’ was the ‘differing needs in different countries’ – and that ‘it would not therefore be possible to lay down more than general guidelines for international use’.147 Accordingly, the proposed system outlined in the UN report in 1968 was to be ‘welcomed’ in principle, but also criticized as ‘much too ambitious’.148 In particular, it was argued that the proposals underestimated the methodological difficulties involved in reconciling sample survey data with national accounts: much of the information sought by the proposed system was only obtainable from household surveys, but due to sampling errors and other issues grossed-up survey data frequently showed discrepancies with national accounts aggregates. UN experts were more optimistic about these issues than many member-state delegations, as British representatives observed in the discussions about the draft complementary system during 1970.149 However, British officials took credit for having ‘put a check on some of the more impracticable of the suggestions’ advanced during the discussions, in which they ‘took a leading part’, wielding their superior ‘experience’ in this field.150 Furthermore, as the system was understood to be ‘no more than an indication of the lines on which countries might develop their own work in this field’, it seemed ‘generally acceptable’ from the British point of view. To allow extra time for further consultations, formal adoption of the revised complementary system by the Statistical Commission was delayed until the seventeenth session in 1972 when it was approved for publication and use as international guidelines for the long-term development of statistics on income distribution, consumption, and accumulation.151 Subsequently, however, the system had little immediate impact – a predictable

 Ibid. 13.  TNA, CAB 108/301, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegate to the Fourteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 4 Oct. 1966.  TNA, CAB 108/302, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Fifteenth Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 14 June 1967.  TNA, CAB 108/303, CSO, Draft Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Fifteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 16 Feb. 1968.  TNA, CAB 108/693, CSO, Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Eighteenth Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, undated (1970).  Ibid.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Sixteenth Session, 5–15 October 1970 (New York, 1971), 42–3; UN, Statistical Commission, Report of the Seventeenth Session, 13–24 November 1972 (New York, 1973), 23; UN, Statistical Commission, A Draft System of Statistics of the Distribution of Income, Consumption and Accumulation, 3 Feb. 1972, E/CN.3/425 (New York, 1972).

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outcome in light of the non-binding character and the limited ambitions of the scheme, as the CSO noted: ‘Unlike the work in some other fields – national accounts, industrial classifications, etc. – it is not intended to set up standards to which all countries will be urged to conform, but rather to encourage the developments in this field on broadly parallel lines as between countries. It is recognized that progress in this field is likely to be slow and it may be many years before any attempt can be made at international reporting on a comparable basis.’152 Consequently, British officials saw no need to implement any changes to their own statistical system, even though the main source for income distribution in the United Kingdom, the Family Expenditure Survey, could have been adjusted ‘with very little addition to the data already available’ to comply with the new UN guidelines.153 Compliance with the guidelines remained low, not only in the United Kingdom. Four years after it had been approved by the Statistical Commission, British officials observed that ‘the UN draft complementary system does not appear to have received much attention internationally’.154 In 1977, the UN published a revised system, but, again, its guidelines were seldom adopted.155 Nevertheless, the work laid the foundations for related activities in this field: it was used as a conceptual building block in the work of international organizations on social indicators during the 1970s, and provided a conceptual basis for the renewed efforts to formulate international standards in statistics on income distribution that were undertaken by the Canberra Group during the 1990s. Other initiatives in this field made significantly less progress or were stopped in their tracks. In the late 1960s, for example, the Hungarian delegation at the Conference of European Statisticians proposed a comparative survey on income inequalities in member countries. The project was seen as a useful test for the proposed complementary system, and a number of countries volunteered to participate. The British delegation initially raised doubts, then belatedly joined the programme only to drop out again when officials felt that the project was ‘going much further’ than expected.156 After almost ten years of deliberations the conference eventually decided that the results of the study should not be published because of the lack of comparability in the collected data.157 During the early 1970s, the international discussions on this subject

 TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 5 at the Seventeenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 1 Nov. 1972. Italics in the original.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 108/699, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 5c at the Nineteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 18 Oct. 1976.  Expert Group on Household Income Statistics, Final Report and Recommendations, 8.  TNA, CAB 108/303, CSO, Brief for United Kingdom Delegation at the Sixteenth Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 12 June 1968; TNA, CAB 108/693, CSO, Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Eighteenth Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, undated (1970); TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 3.1.1. at the Twentieth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/701, Conference of European Statisticians, Provisional Agenda of the Twenty-Sixth Session, June 1978.

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also motivated the Statistical Office of the European Communities (SOEC) to initiate talks about a possible adoption of the UN system of income distribution statistics for international reporting within the EC. However, British officials anticipated from early on that this work was ‘likely to be given low priority’ so that ‘no immediate problems’ would arise.158 Only a few years later, this expectation was proven right. In 1976, British officials observed that ‘until recently it seemed that SOEC would be active in the field of statistics on distribution of incomes, but it now seems that, mainly because of the lack of basic data and a reluctance by most member countries to co-operate in such work at the present time, developments in EEC will be insignificant’.159 The reluctance of governments to engage in projects in this area had already become apparent in the OECD in 1971 when the influential Working Party No. 2 of the Economic Policy Committee discussed a paper prepared by the Secretariat proposing a new programme on trends in income distribution across member countries.160 The paper argued that income distribution was a relevant issue that fell within the remit of the Working Party, and despite the heterogeneous state of income statistics in many countries, existing sources allowed at least a partial analysis. Moreover, it was suggested that the OECD should engage in the ‘development of better statistics’ and provided ‘the most convenient forum’ for discussions on this issue in advanced market economies. In Whitehall, however, the only expression of support for this proposal came from one of the pioneers of income distribution analyses in the CSO, John Leonard Nicholson, who commented that the ‘OECD should be congratulated and encouraged for (at last) showing some interest in this subject’.161 The Treasury officials who represented the United Kingdom at the OECD adopted a more critical line, suggesting that the Working Party should devote its attention to the ‘study of public expenditure’, while the income distribution project should ‘be given rather low priority’.162 Alongside other reservations, officials argued that the proposal duplicated the ongoing UN work in this area. The same argument was also employed against an initiative by the ILO two years later when the Office put the issue of statistics of household income and expenditure on the agenda of the Conference of Labour Statisticians in October 1973: the British delegate noticed ‘occasional signs of rivalry between UN and ILO’ in the course of the

 TNA, CAB 108/696, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 4.1.3 at the Twenty-First Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/699, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 5c at the Nineteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 18 Oct. 1976.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, CPE/WP2(71)2, Some Aspects of Income Distribution in OECD Countries 1950–1970, 13 Jan. 1971.  TNA, CAB 139/763, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to N. Harvey, HMT, 26 Jan. 1971.  TNA, CAB 139/763, HMT, E. H. Boothroyd, Report on the meeting of the OECD Economic Policy Committee, Working Party No. 2, Paris, 28/29 Jan. 1971.

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discussions, and the Norwegian representative intervened to argue that ‘the subject should be left to the UN’.163 Throughout the post-war era, it was accepted wisdom among international officials that the development of adequate statistics on income distribution ‘will inevitably take time’,164 although countries like the United Kingdom had managed to build statistical series in this field within a matter of years. Accordingly, no delegate in the drawn-out discussions in the various intergovernmental forums suggested that they should press ahead with establishing international standards in this field with the same urgency as for certain key areas of macroeconomic statistics, which were continuously given higher priority. Hence, by 1970, income statistics were still in their infancy in many countries, and the rate of progress since the 1950s could hardly be described as dramatic. By 1970, the United Nation Statistical Commission had learnt of 105 national surveys and studies on all continents, with most entries relating to European countries.165 In many cases, however, data on income distribution was just a by-product of statistics mainly designed for other purposes. Even in many advanced market economies, tax data was still the only source of income distribution statistics, despite its well-known limitations. While most of the centrally planned economies conducted annual surveys, the majority of enquiries in market economies were surveys that were either ad hoc or repeated at intervals of five or more years. The income and expenditure surveys undertaken in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America mostly represented ad hoc enquiries primarily concerned with determining weights for consumer price indices. A statistical area that suffered from even greater neglect than income distribution was the distribution of personal wealth. Following a somewhat circular logic, international efforts to establish statistical standards during the post-war era tended to focus on the former as the latter was regarded as even more lacking in established statistical sources. The first international attempt to explore statistical aspects of the subject was undertaken by the Conference of European Statisticians in the mid 1950s when the conference convened a working group on personal savings and began collecting information on country practices. In Whitehall, however, the initiative was treated with scepticism. Officials reckoned that ‘because of the lack of common ground’ among national statistics in Europe the conference should hold discussions on the subject only ‘in general terms [. . .] rather than to attempt a too specific discussion’.166

 TNA, CAB 108/697, DE, Report by the UK delegates at the Twelfth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, 19 Dec. 1973.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, CPE/WP2(71)2, Some Aspects of Income Distribution in OECD Countries 1950–1970, 13 Jan. 1971.  UN, Statistical Commission, National Practices in Statistics of the Distribution of Income, Expenditure and Wealth, 10 June 1969, E/CN.3/399 (New York, 1969).  TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Third Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 20 Sept. 1955.

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In the subsequent discussions, the subject received ‘enthusiastic support’ from the International Monetary Fund, but was not accorded ‘very high priority’ by the conference.167 When it appeared on the agenda again in the late 1950s, the Dutch rapporteur stated that ‘there had been very little international discussion of statistics of savings’ so far, but also noted the considerable progress that had become apparent in a number of national reports.168 However, another report on country practices presented to the conference by the ILO in 1964 revealed that not all countries collected data on savings and only a few countries regarded the existing savings data as ‘good’.169 Consequently, the international guidelines formulated by the UN for a complementary system of income distribution and related statistics gave ‘low priority’ to the distribution of wealth on the grounds that only ‘very few official efforts’ had been made in member countries to gather and compile data due to the ‘conceptual and practical difficulties’ involved in this task.170 The rising academic and political interest in the distribution of wealth during the 1970s put the spotlight on the gaps in the existing statistical knowledge, but progress remained limited and international comparability a remote prospect. The decades-long neglect of wealth statistics was explained by the CSO in a paper to the Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians in 1975 with reference to ‘the fact that the distribution of wealth had not been regarded as of prime importance for the management of the economy’ in Britain.171 However, since the issue of wealth inequality had appeared on the political agenda, ‘the paucity of statistics’ in this area became ‘a matter of some concern’ in the country.172 Nevertheless, international observers saw few improvements at the global level. In 1977, an OECD working group concerned with statistical indicators of income and wealth lamented that ‘data on the distribution of wealth are practically non-existent’.173 A detailed account of existing statistical practices and possibilities for international comparisons was prepared by an academic expert, Alan J. Harrison, for the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW) in Britain at the end of the decade. The report emphasized the ‘general lack of comparable data’ and

 TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Report by the United Kingdom Delegation to the Third Plenary Session to the Conference of European Statisticians, 4 Nov. 1955.  TNA, CAB 108/305, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of Fifth Plenary Session, 10 July 1957, p. 18.  TNA, CAB 108/299, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of Twelfth Plenary Session, 19–23 Oct. 1964, p. 28.  UN, Statistical Commission, A Draft Complementary System of Statistics on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (1969), 14.  TNA, CAB 108/698, CSO, Paper for Agenda Item F at the Eighth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 9 May 1975.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 108/700, CSO, OECD Working Parties or Groups of Experts Dealing with Statistical Subjects, 3 Feb. 1977.

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the diversity of methods applied in ten selected developed countries.174 Wealth statistics were derived mostly from three main sources, which were all beset by difficulties in the valuation of non-financial assets and other problems. Sample surveys on wealth assets were hampered by problems of low response rates and under-reporting, in particular among the elites, while the estate duty multiplier method, which relied on samples of taxable inheritances, covered only relatively small proportions of the population above the tax exemption limit. Similar limitations applied to wealth estimates derived from investment income statistics. Another source, national balance sheets based on national income data, required much sophistication and estimation in the disaggregation and allocation of wealth holdings to individuals or households. The differing approaches and varying stages of development of wealth statistics in the countries under consideration precluded international comparisons between most of them; for example, the data for France was found to be ‘poor’, and the West German statistics omitted ‘substantial quantities of wealth’.175 Hence, Harrison’s final report contained no international league tables showing comparative Gini coefficients or quantile shares as was the case in the comparative tables on income distribution that were simultaneously prepared by another consultant for the RCDIW, Thomas Stark.176 The only three countries where a certain degree of comparability allowed careful comparisons were the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom – with the latter identified as the country with the largest shares of wealth accruing to top wealth-holders.177 The wave of academic studies on wealth inequality during the 1970s did not prompt international organizations to pursue the subject with any greater urgency. For example, Eurostat’s work programme in the second half of the decade was filled with tasks relating to trade statistics, national accounting, and employment statistics, among others, while ‘little or no resources’ could be made available for the development of wealth statistics.178 Similarly, the subject hardly featured in the list of high priority work programmes of international organizations earmarked for the late 1970s and early 1980s: the United Nations Statistical Office pursued work on national balance sheets and wealth accounts in the framework of the System of National Accounts, and several projects reflected an ongoing interest in income inequality, such as the World Bank’s work on a global socio-economic database, and the programme on the measurement and analysis of income distribution run by the Economic Commission for

 TNA, BS 7/548, RCDIW, Draft Report, The Distribution of Wealth in the United States and Canada, Alan J. Harrison, June 1978.  TNA, BS 7/549, RCDIW, Draft Background Report, Alan J. Harrison, Feb. 1978, p. 27.  TNA, BS 7/288, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief for the Meeting on 30 Oct. 1978.  TNA, BS 7/549, RCDIW, RC(78)38, Note by the Secretary: International Comparisons of the Distribution of Personal Wealth, 3 July 1978.  TNA, CAB 108/653, Commission of the European Communities, Statistical Programme of the European Communities, 1977–1979, 31 Mar. 1976.

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Latin America in co-operation with the World Bank.179 Wealth distribution, by contrast, was not even mentioned as a statistical issue in this list. The marginal attention devoted to this topic was partly associated with the rise of neo-liberal policies and market-driven reforms in a number of countries: in the United Kingdom, for example, the CSO was instructed to halt work on wealth distribution by the new Thatcher government in the early 1980s.180 Thus, the international statistical system perpetuated the artificial division of income and wealth distribution in socio-economic analyses that had been highlighted by economists since the nineteenth century. The close interdependency of income and wealth accumulation that has been brought to the attention of the modern world in recent years through Thomas Piketty’s bestselling books and other studies had already been emphasized in the writings of scholars such as Hugh Dalton or Edwin Cannan, who described inherited wealth in particular as ‘by far the most potent cause of inequality’ in the early twentieth century.181 The ‘iron curtain’ (Nicholas Kaldor) between income and wealth was not just rooted in the thinking of economists, however, as British sociologist Richard Titmuss observed in a critical intervention in 1962 – it was also enshrined in official statistics that continued to treat both factors as separate entities with no visible links.182 Even in a country with an advanced statistical system like the United Kingdom, however, no attempt was made to lift this barrier until the mid 1970s when a project of the RCDIW to produce a joint distribution of income and wealth was undertaken but failed to make much progress.183 On the international level, this issue was beyond the scope of most discussions, which were concerned with more basic questions. Nevertheless, wealth distribution remained a concern in intellectual debates about measurements of social well-being, not least in connection with the social indicators movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Social Indicators Movement The plethora of international work programmes on social indicators that emerged in the second half of the 1960s in many ways continued and expanded the preceding research on levels of living, but assumed larger proportions and gained more traction. Alongside a transnational community of academic experts, it was driven by a host of competing international agencies, from various UN bodies via the OECD to the EC,

 UN, Statistical Commission, A Review of Achievements in Co-Ordination in Selected Areas and International Statistical Programmes, 1979–1983, 13 July 1978, E/CN.3/528 (New York, 1978).  See Chapter 5.  Dalton, Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Communities, 56ff, 67ff, 99ff, 126f, 131ff, 139–40, 142–5.  Kaldor, Expenditure Tax, 33; Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change, 31–4.  See Chapter 4.

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among others. Developing tools for measuring and monitoring social conditions over time was seen as essential for a more knowledge-based approach to policy-making, and the activities prompted many member countries to adopt similar initiatives in their own statistical programmes, where social statistics had often suffered from neglect. By the end of the 1970s, a total of twenty-nine different countries were on record as publishing or preparing regular official reports on social indicators, although in many cases the publications represented mere compilations of already existing statistics instead of newly created series; moreover, many developing countries still lacked the statistical sources required to cover the suggested list of measurements.184 What the protagonists of the social indicators movement had in mind was a new set of harmonized social metrics suitable for cross-country comparisons and regular international reporting, but the pursuit of this ambitious goal soon got bogged down in drawn-out intergovernmental negotiations. Consequently, the movement was watered down to more limited aims. By the mid 1980s, it was commonly agreed that existing social indicators programmes should first and foremost provide guidance for member states in developing their own statistical systems, while international comparability was no longer considered a ‘primary objective’.185 This meant that the original idea of a system of international social reporting was off the table for the time being, even if the transnational discussions continued to inspire work in various countries.186 Preliminary work on social indicators and related programmes were set in motion by United Nations bodies and the OECD around the same time during the late 1960s. Within the framework of the UN, the main contender was the proposed development of a SSDS, which was first discussed at the Conference of European Statisticians in 1968. The programme was conceived as an ambitious attempt to create a social equivalent to the macroeconomic national accounts and to merge both into an integrated system.187 What characterized the proposed system, according to key documents that were prepared by British statisticians Claus Moser and Richard Stone for the UN working group on the subject, was its ‘totality’ and its potential ‘to trace connections’ between different sub-systems and variables.188 The system consisted of a matrix of sub-systems and selected aspects of social life that were linked to social indicators as one data source among others. The list also included ‘the distribution of income, consumption and accumulation’, a topic that Claus Moser considered as ‘so  TNA, CAB 108/757, Eurostat, Directorate Social and Demographic Statistics, EEC Work on Social Indicators, June 1978, Eurostat/C3/318/78e.  TNA, CAB 108/709, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Provisional Agenda of the ThirtyThird Plenary Session, 2 Apr. 1985.  Zapf, ‘Social Reporting’.  TNA, CAB 108/693, CSO, Brief for Item 4.2. at the Eighteenth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1970.  TNA, CAB 108/347, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, An Integrated System of Social and Demographic Statistics: Memorandum by C. A. Moser, 29 May 1969, Conf.Eur.Stats/273; TNA, CAB 184/ 96, Richard Stone, Towards a System of Social and Demographic Statistics (Draft), Dec. 1973.

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important that it should figure throughout the system as a basic classification variable’.189 The data was to be collected from the UN’s complementary system of the same name, which was still in the process of ratification but was expected to become ‘one of the main sub-systems of the system of demographic and social statistics’.190 Aligning the SSDS with the complementary system also established a link to the System of National Accounts and thereby implied international comparability. When the proposal was discussed on the international level during the early 1970s, however, it soon turned out that a number of member-state delegations could not countenance the idea of such an all-encompassing system. In a ‘lively discussion’ at the Conference of European Statisticians in Geneva in June 1970, the French and British delegates, in particular, asserted that ‘at this stage national interests should come before international interests’.191 On the other hand, the idea was supported by the US representative who emphasized that ‘in the long-term it was desirable to establish an international system’ and suggested that it was possible to develop ‘some social indicators’ in the short term. The optimism was based on the experience in his country, where a range of social indicators had been defined to monitor ‘goal concerns’, including the growth and distribution of income. Nevertheless, the conference concluded that international standards should not be adopted until more progress on technical questions had been made.192 In subsequent discussions, ‘considerable disagreement’ and ‘considerable confusion’ persisted among member states with respect to the future directions and possible purposes of the programme – that some expected to lead to a similar set of authoritative league tables as had emerged from the System of National Accounts in the early post-war era.193 While some delegations were in favour of giving the highest priority to the international harmonization of concepts and classifications, other delegations, notably the French, ‘felt strongly’ that the SSDS remit had ‘expanded too fast’ and should concentrate on narrower areas, a view that was ‘broadly supported’ by the United Kingdom delegates. In an attempt to resolve the controversy over Richard Stone’s elaborate draft system, Claus Moser reassured member countries in a memorandum in 1974 ‘that SSDS should not be thought of as a single package’ or a ‘pre-planned set of tables’, but ‘rather as a set of principles’ that

 TNA, CAB 108/347, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, An Integrated System of Social and Demographic Statistics: Memorandum by C. A. Moser, 29 May 1969, Conf.Eur.Stats/273.  TNA, CAB 108/693, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Provisional Agenda of the Eighteenth Plenary Session, 23 Apr. 1970. On the complementary system see the previous sub-section.  TNA, CAB 108/693, CSO, Report of the United Kingdom Delegation to the Eighteenth Plenary Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, 12 Aug. 1970.  TNA, CAB 108/693, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of the Eighteenth Plenary Session, 15–19 June 1970, Conf.Eur.Stats/295.  TNA, CAB 108/697, CSO, Brief for Agenda Item 5a at the Eighteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 20 Sept. 1974.

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allowed ‘different interpretations’ and pragmatic implementation by member states in national statistics according to self-determined priorities.194 This took the sting out of the original proposal to create an integrated international system. Consequently, there was little disagreement in the Statistical Commission with continuing to work on the system along these lines, even though some delegates ‘felt that such an approach might not be sufficient’.195 As member countries were not obliged to adopt the non-binding SSDS framework, it left few traces in national statistical work programmes around the world. While Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Canada were starting or preparing projects relating to the SSDS during the early 1970s, ‘no continuous work on SSDS’ was going on in the United Kingdom, apart from a small-scale feasibility study undertaken to provide Claus Moser with briefing material for his role in the UN working group.196 Over the following years, UN bodies continued to pursue some theoretical work on the proposed system, but it never came anywhere close to implementation in Britain or elsewhere.197 The discussions during the early stages of the SSDS initiative also created the impression that the development of social indicators was ‘more urgently required than the rest of the system’; thus, in a separate strand of the programme, UN bodies began to engage in work on international guidelines for social indicators. As the UK delegation noted with some concern in 1972, the UN’s Statistical Office was ‘aiming at quite specific recommendations for a set of internationally comparable indicators, which countries will be asked to produce to aid in assessing progress towards the goals of the second UN development decade’.198 Officials in the CSO were clearly intent on reining in these ambitions already at this stage. The British delegate attending the next round of talks on this subject was instructed to support theoretical discussions on concepts and methodology, but was also advised that ‘it might be stressed that the UK is beginning to develop grave doubts about the usefulness or feasibility of actually specifying internationally comparable social indicators in statistical terms’.199 Furthermore, the British argued that the UN project duplicated the ongoing work at the OECD and attempted to achieve too much at the same time; in particular, they criticized the social indicators selected in the UN programme as being ‘policy-free’ in that they did

 UN, Statistical Commission, System of Social and Demographic Statistics (SSDS): Potential Uses and Usefulness (prepared by C. A. Moser), 19 June 1974, E/CN.3/449.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report on the Eighteenth Session, 7–18 October 1974 (New York, 1975), 17.  TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 3.2. at the Twentieth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/707, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 10.1. at the Thirty-First Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1983.  TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 3.2. at the Twentieth Session of the Conference of European Statisticians, June 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 9(a) at the Seventeenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 1 Nov. 1972. Italics in original.

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not relate to any specified social concerns or political goals, as was the case in the OECD programme.200 In other words, the British side questioned whether the idea of an information system designed to monitor a ‘hard core of social parameters which are likely to be universally and continuously relevant’ was justified in terms of ‘costs and benefits’. Other member countries, however, adopted exactly the opposite view, arguing that a narrower approach would be impracticable in light of the diversity of social conditions and policies among member states – and ‘that the statistics were needed to detect and identify social problems’.201 Given the ‘conflicting reactions’ to the proposed draft guidelines, the Statistical Commission consequently felt unable to adopt and publish preliminary guidelines on social indicators.202 It was not until the end of the decade that a progress report appeared that offered illustrative examples of social indicators, but was only ‘intended for information’ and therefore raised ‘no points of difficulty’ from the British point of view.203 Consequently, the UN programme reverted to a documentation of country practices with little discernible impact on statistical programmes in member states. In the United Kingdom, there was still ‘no formal definition of social indicators’ in use by the time the next descriptive progress report was published by the UN in 1983.204 Establishing international definitions to enable comparative social reporting also proved to be an unattainable goal for the SOEC. At the start of the 1970s, SOEC’s activities in social statistics were ‘still on a very small scale’ – to the point that statisticians in this division became ‘somewhat frustrated’ in the face of the ‘low priority’ assigned to their remit.205 But in 1972, SOEC signalled that it was about to join the many international agencies that were already active in this field when it included an annex on social indicators in the annual report on the social situation in the community, although British officials regarded the paper as rather ‘unsatisfactory’ and not very ‘sophisticated’.206 Subsequently, Eurostat started work on European social indicators with a view to creating an information base for the Commission’s Social Action Programme in

 TNA, CAB 108/697, CSO, Draft Brief on Agenda Item 5b at the Eighteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, 20 Sept. 1974; TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, UN Work on a System of Demographic, Manpower and Social Statistics and on Social Indicators, 8 Sept. 1971.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report on the Seventeenth Session (1972), 31.  UN, Statistical Commission, Report on the Eighteenth Session (1974), 18.  TNA, CAB 108/702, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 7 (c) at the Twentieth Session of the Statistical Commission, 19 Jan. 1979. Italics in original.  TNA, CAB 108/707, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 8 at the Twenty-Second Session of the Statistical Commission, 15 Feb. 1983.  TNA, CAB 108/694, CSO, Report on Visit to the Statistical Office of the European Community, Jan. 1971, 15 Sept. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/696, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 4.2.1. at the Twenty-First Session of the Statistical Commission, June 1973.

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1974.207 In the CSO, it was noted with some scepticism that ‘most international organizations are trying to jump on the same band-wagon with varying degrees of competence’, but officials were reassured by the fact that the European project made no attempt to construct new statistical indicators, but was to be based on existing statistics only, even if Eurostat’s work programme had made tentative provision for possible projects to supplement the available information with new surveys.208 At the first meeting of a working party convened by Eurostat in February 1975, member-state representatives agreed to a pragmatic work programme aiming in the first instance at producing a European social statistics publication compiled from statistics already available in member states.209 Staff at Eurostat came to the conclusion, however, that existing statistics would not suffice as an information base for the envisaged European system of indicators. Consequently, the Office convened a seminar in November 1975 to discuss the possibility of new household survey programmes for Europe-wide data collection purposes, but this idea was rejected: as ‘a number of countries had reservations’, Eurostat had to concede that it ‘could not take any useful initiative’ in this area.210 As a result, the first volume on European social indicators published by Eurostat in 1977 merely presented data for a limited number of indicators based on non-harmonized national statistical series, with no tables on income distribution or other measures of economic inequality.211 Eurostat’s ambitions in this particular area were also curtailed when separate plans to develop harmonized household surveys met with opposition: some member states, notably Italy and France, objected to the collection of income data at the European level although it was collected by most countries in their national surveys.212 Subsequently, Eurostat’s work on social indicators was not further extended, a decision that British officials had helped to engineer, as was noted in the CSO in early 1979: ‘With UK encouragement, SOEC has agreed to attempt no conceptual or other development work.’213 To achieve this outcome, British officials had frequently warned that the Eurostat project would duplicate the ongoing OECD programme, but behind this seemingly procedural argument were also more tactical considerations. As one of the British Treasury delegates to the OECD explained in an internal note, it

 TNA, CAB 108/649, CSO, Committee on Statistical Collaboration with the European Communities, Community Statistics Programme 1975–1978, 22 Apr. 1974.  TNA, CAB 108/649, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 3 at the Conference of Directors-General of National Statistical Offices, 30 Apr. 1974.  TNA, CAB 108/754, CSO, Eurostat: Working Party on Statistics for Social Indicators, 10 Feb. 1975.  TNA, CAB 108/757, Eurostat, Directorate Social and Demographic Statistics, EEC Work on Social Indicators, June 1978, Eurostat/C3/318/78e, pp. 7–8.  Eurostat, Social Indicators for the European Community 1960–1975 (Luxembourg, 1977).  TNA, CAB 108/506, DE, E. Hunter to D. Ramprakash / CSO, SOEC Family Budget Surveys, 29 Dec. 1977, and D. Ramprakash / CSO to E. Hunter / DE, 21 Dec. 1977.  TNA, CAB 108/702, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 7(c) at the Twentieth Session of the Statistical Commission, 19 Jan. 1979.

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was ‘clearly better for the broader exercise to be pursued in the OECD, with its less mandatory situation, and bringing in the Canadians and Americans who tend to have greater similarities with our own attitudes than do some other members of the EEC’.214 This was a typical case of ‘forum-shopping’,215 a technique that member countries frequently employed to advance their national interests in a playing field of competing international organizations, but British officials also had other reasons to give preference to the OECD programme: it was regarded as more advanced than the Eurostat project, and defining common policy goals seemed more sensible in a context of OECD countries with similar social values and levels of economic development.216 The OECD’s work on social indicators has been widely regarded as the most advanced programme in this field, but when it ran out in 1985 it had equally failed to realize the goal of international social reporting, like all other previous initiatives. It has been credited with influencing practices of social reporting across the globe and even inspiring the revival of the movement in the 1990s, but during the 1970s, no agreement could be found over the question of harmonized statistical definitions that could have enabled international comparisons in the social field.217 As Matthias Schmelzer has argued, the failure of the programme was due to five main reasons: difficulties in finding agreement on commonly accepted definitions of the quality of life; the lack of a conceptual framework akin to the economic theories and concepts that underpinned the System of National Accounts; a disconnect with the scholarly community, even if a number of academic experts were involved; reluctance among member states to change their statistical systems and agree to international comparisons in light of potential political repercussions; and finally, a paradigmatic reorientation towards growth-oriented policies after the onset of the economic crisis in 1973/74, which reinforced these sentiments. According to Schmelzer, the social indicators programme reached its zenith in the mid 1970s and lost its momentum in the latter half of the decade.218 Some of these arguments were already being debated by contemporaries. For example, Claus Moser disputed that the System of National Accounts was built on much stronger theoretical foundations than the proposed system of social statistics.219 Furthermore, the social indicators initiative could build on earlier international work on the measurement of levels of living that went back to the early 1950s.220 In any event, the fate of the programme hinged not so much on the merits of academic ideas as on the deliberations and decisions of the  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Working Party on Social Indicators—Meeting on 13–16 Mar., 21 Mar. 1978.  Alter and Meunier, ‘Politics of International Regime Complexity’.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, OECD/MAS Working Party on Social Indicators. Note by the Treasury and the Central Statistical Office, 4 Oct. 1972.  Schmelzer, Hegemony of Growth, 308, 312.  Ibid. 309–11.  TNA, CAB 108/347, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, An Integrated System of Social and Demographic Statistics: Memorandum by C. A. Moser, 29 May 1969, Conf.Eur.Stats/273, pp. 6–7.  See the sub-section on the UN’s levels of living programme above.

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intergovernmental committees that were convened at the OECD to discuss the project. As the following analysis will demonstrate, the discussions revealed deeper-rooted reservations among member governments that began to materialize even before the end of the ‘golden age’ in 1973/74. The OECD’s social indicators initiative grew out of the earlier programme on levels of living that the Secretariat had pursued in the mid 1960s before it had been referred to an expert group. In 1968, the experts submitted their recommendations for a set of indicators that largely mirrored existing UN definitions and prefigured many of the defining features of what was to become the OECD’s Social Indicators Programme: the selected measures were not only meant to render visible social trends in national contexts, but were also seen as foundational for establishing international comparisons of levels of living at a later stage.221 The continuous work in this field meant that the OECD and its incoming Secretary-General van Lennep were well equipped to respond to the transnational intellectual critique of the growth paradigm during this period: in 1969, van Lennep not only began to spread ‘the gospel of qualitative growth’ but also proposed new indicators of social well-being as an alternative to GDP.222 Preliminary consultations provoked early signs of opposition and put constraints on the programme from the start. Following an OECD Council decision in May 1970 to initiate a development programme for social indicators, the Secretariat of the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee prepared a work programme, based on the advice of an expert group, and in March 1971, the plan was presented to a committee meeting.223 The Secretariat’s proposals envisaged creating a system of statistical indicators to be ready for use in social reporting within three to five years. However, this idea was criticized by the British delegation at the meeting as ‘grossly over optimistic’.224 As it turned out, the British ‘were alone in voicing any doubts’. Nevertheless, the intervention had consequences: the OECD Secretariat agreed to seek ‘fresh authority’ from member countries before proceeding from a first phase, in which a list of ‘social concerns’ was to be defined, to the next stage when the construction of statistical measurements was to begin. When this point was eventually reached in 1973, the British delegation negotiated a similar backstop: they agreed to enter the second phase on the condition that this would not commit them to adjusting their national statistics or to participating in international reporting in a possible third phase.225 This reservation was consequently endorsed by all other member-state delegations – it

 TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Measurement of Changes in National Levels of Living, 21 May 1969.  Schmelzer, ‘The Crisis before the Crisis’, 1005–8.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, OECD/MAS Working Party on Social Indicators: Note by the Treasury and the Central Statistical Office, 24 Nov. 1972.  Ibid.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley to F. E. R. Butler, 13 June 1977.

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entrenched the division of the development programme into three separate phases whose remits subsequently became contentious issues in themselves.226 The defensive British manoeuvres can be understood against the backdrop of a difficult relationship and a deeper sense of scepticism towards OECD activities that persisted in Whitehall during this period. In 1971, an official review even reconsidered British membership of the organization, but concluded that it would be disadvantageous to disengage from the OECD as an important forum of exchange between industrialized countries of the Western world. This was despite the ‘less satisfactory features’ that were associated with the organization, its expanding activities, and, in particular, the ‘superficial’ analyses of the British economy in the annual country surveys that provided ‘the opportunity for other members to lecture us’, as one official put it.227 Furthermore, the Prime Minster, Edward Heath, had taken issue with the fact that British officials had encouraged the Secretariat’s work on ‘the problems of modern society’, a project that inspired some of the ideas behind the OECD’s Social Indicators Programme.228 Many in the government, including the Prime Minister, clearly preferred to ‘opt out’ of at least some of the OECD activities, but feared ‘serious repercussions’.229 Similarly, British representatives at the OECD tended to suspect Secretariat initiatives as attempts at ‘empirebuilding’ and reacted sensitively to the Secretariat’s ‘counter-manoeuvres’ in response to their own ‘tactics’.230 Such accusations were levelled, for example, at Ron Gass, the director of the Social Affairs, Manpower and Education directorate (SME) and one of the leading OECD officials in the Social Indicators Programme.231 Conversely, Gass began to question the seriousness of the British negotiating position. In early 1977, he enquired with the CSO director, Claus Moser, asking for ‘clarification of the UK attitude and the extent of our willingness to co-operate’.232 The CSO, in turn, denied that ‘the UK has ever had “special difficulties” over the Social Indicators work, or over any possible Phase III’, as Gass had suggested.233

 TNA, CAB 108/749, OECD, MSA, Working Party on Social Indicators, SI/8: Social Indicators: First Working Party Meeting Held on 21–23 June 1971, 29 July 1971; OECD Historical Archives, OECD, MSA, Working Party on Social Indicators, SI/9: Social Indicators Development Programme, 26 Dec. 1971, p. 5.  TNA, FCO 69/228, HMT, Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Prime Minister, 3 May 1971; Trade Policy Department, R. G. Britten, Meeting of Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy on 29 Apr. 1971: Future Policy Towards OECD, 26 Apr. 1971.  TNA, FCO 69/228, Trade Policy Department, R. G. Britten, Meeting of Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy on 29 Apr. 1971: Future Policy Towards OECD, 26 Apr. 1971.  TNA, FCO 69/228, Trade Policy Department, R. G. Britten, Future Policy Towards OECD, 25 Mar. 1971.  TNA, T 371/505, UK Delegation to the OECD, A. F. Green to C. M. J. Hess / DE, 8 Mar. 1978; HMT, Report of Meeting on 29–31 Mar., D J Halley, 14 Apr. 1977.  TNA, T 361/1, HMT, H. A. Copeman to Baldwin, 26 Sept. 1973.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Social Indicators Working Party: Report of Meeting on 29–31 Mar., D J Halley, 14 Apr. 1977.  TNA, T 371/505, CSO, Draft letter, C. A. Moser to J. R. Gass / OECD, 18 Apr. 1977.

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In fact, Whitehall officials began to harbour doubts about the Social Indicators Programme even before the OECD Working Party first met in June 1971. In particular, Treasury officials raised ‘considerable doubts’ about the programme, first because of the overlap with parallel programmes in other international organizations, and, more importantly, with regard to the technical feasibility of constructing ‘meaningful indicators’ as a basis for international comparisons within the envisaged timeframe.234 Admittedly, it was generally recognized in Whitehall that the programme served important purposes and complemented ongoing initiatives in the civil service to develop better statistical information systems to inform and monitor domestic policies. Nevertheless, participation in the programme was first and foremost seen as a tactical necessity to maintain influence and to prevent an even ‘more unacceptable’ outcome. As one of the civil servants in the Treasury put it, ‘on the positive side’, there was ‘some chance’ of producing useful measures, but, on the other hand, there were grave concerns over the potential political pressures that the programme might generate: ‘We do not want phoney international comparisons to be used as arguments for more public expenditure’.235 Hence, Treasury officials demanded to have ‘a strong voice’ in the programme ‘to defend the policy corner’, all the more so as the CSO director, Claus Moser, was known to have a strong personal interest in the subject.236 The deep reservations that ministers and civil servants held against international comparisons were brought up quickly whenever officials discussed the issue. In autumn 1971, another Treasury official welcomed the growing international interest in social statistics, but only ‘insofar as it does not lead to the construction of international “league tables” giving rise to erroneous international comparisons and misguided pressures to raise public expenditure’.237 Thus, the prospect of international reporting in a possible third phase of the programme caused the greatest controversies in the negotiations. By contrast, it proved less difficult for the OECD Working Party to find agreement on the list of ‘social concerns’ in the first phase. The draft list was finalized for formal approval in autumn 1972, with a total of twenty-six fundamental social concerns and more numerous subconcerns.238 The discussions about the list had raised few controversies, except for a number of notable points. For example, British officials considered rejecting social concern C-1 on full employment ‘because of potential political embarrassment [. . .] if and when a league table is published’, but the item eventually remained on the final

 TNA, T 316/191, HMT, J. M. Bridgeman to K. Couzens, Responsibility for Work on Social Indicators, 26 May 1971.  TNA, T 316/191, HMT, K. Couzens to J. B. Hunt, 16 June 1971.  Ibid.  TNA, T 316/191, HMT, M. S. Levitt to W. Widdup, 15 Sept. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/750, OECD, MSA, Working Party on Social Indicators, Social Indicators: Draft Report of the Working Party to the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee, SI/52, 6 Nov. 1972.

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list.239 Smaller amendments were agreed in the phrasing of certain concerns to make them more palatable for member countries; for example, the British delegation asked for a more neutral formulation of sub-concern H-1, which demanded ‘that the degree of social inequality be reduced’.240 Planners regarded distributional questions as an integral part of the work programme: from the outset, it was intended that all indicators should not only show national averages, but also break down the distribution of ‘social results’ among the population and by income groups.241 The ‘dispersion in the structure of income and wealth’ was included in the final list as a sub-concern in the area of ‘command over goods and services’. In the deliberations on this particular social concern, the Working Party agreed to draw on the UN’s new complementary system of income distribution, among other data sources.242 In this key area planners hoped to achieve comprehensive tables, based on harmonized international standards and broken down by measures such as the Gini coefficient and quintile shares, that could be ‘easily understood by the laymen’.243 Not all member-state delegations were on board, though. Throughout the first phase of the work programme, British officials continued to drive home their ‘original point’ to the Working Party that ‘exact comparability may not be achievable’ and ‘that the desire for such comparability must not be carried too far’.244 The existing reservations against international comparisons across Whitehall became apparent again when the question arose in late 1972 whether the United Kingdom should support the OECD programme to proceed to Phase II. In the consultations most government departments displayed ‘a lukewarm attitude’ – to the point that CSO officials were concerned that the interdepartmental committee responsible for this question might consider vetoing or opting out of Phase II altogether.245 As the Treasury and the CSO warned in a joint memorandum, however, the majority of member states were expected to vote for the continuation of the programme; therefore, it was argued, British interests were better served by trying to influence the form and pace of Phase II

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, OECD/MSA Directorate: Working Party on Social Indicators. Note by the Central Statistical Office and the Treasury, 24 Nov. 1972; OECD, List of Social Concerns Common to Most OECD Countries (Paris, 1973).  Ibid.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, MSA, Working Party on Social Indicators, SI/9: Social Indicators Development Programme, 26 Dec. 1971, pp. 9, 11.  TNA, CAB 108/753, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Report on the 8th Meeting of the OECD Working Party on Social Indicators, 27 Nov. 1974.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, OECD/MSA Directorate: Working Party on Social Indicators. Note by the Central Statistical Office and the Treasury, 24 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 139/782, CSO, N. Nissel to C. A. Moser, Social Indicators: OECD Working Party, 24 Nov. 1972.

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than trying ‘to stop it outright’.246 In the committee meeting in November 1972, several departments reaffirmed the view that ‘it was impossible to make precise international comparisons in many areas of social concerns because of different legal or administrative systems’, but in light of the possible ‘value’ of the work and the likely support of other countries, the committee decided, on balance, to accept Phase II.247 After Phase II was eventually launched in 1973, it remained British policy to insist that developing statistical indicators should primarily serve national purposes, and British representatives could wield the safeguard against Phase III that they had obtained in the preceding negotiations. The question of introducing Phase III became the subject of intense debates in 1976/77. For a brief moment an agreement on international reporting seemed to be a real possibility, but by early 1978, it became clear that Phase III would never materialize. In early 1976, the Secretariat had begun to press ahead with attempts to commit member countries to a timetable for the start of Phase III. The first attempt failed at a Working Party meeting in February 1976 when the Secretariat’s proposal for the system of indicators to become ‘operational within 2–3 years’ was opposed by the delegates of Canada, Sweden, the US, and the UK.248 Subsequent efforts undertaken by the Secretariat over the summer of the same year proved more successful and led to a remarkable change of course in Whitehall. At a meeting in July 1976, the SME director, Ron Gass, presented new proposals for a timetable, arguing that ‘an early decision on Phase III was necessary in order to maintain the impetus’ of the programme – this time, the British delegate was the only one to oppose the Secretariat’s report and even asked for his reservation to be removed from the meeting record to avoid the impression of diplomatic isolation.249 Recognizing that the majority of member countries seemed willing to commit to plans for Phase III, Treasury officials began to reconsider their stance, encouraged by their colleagues from the CSO: international comparisons were ‘potentially valuable’, they argued, and if the specialized OECD working groups could produce ‘some good indicators’, the CSO would ‘try to persuade the Treasury that Phase III might be a good idea’, even if this was expected to be ‘at least three years ahead’.250 Not only was this a rare case of British civil servants endorsing the idea of internationally comparable social statistics, but the discussions also revealed that government statisticians regarded the task as technically feasible in the medium term, despite the many occasions when allegedly unsurmountable technical obstacles were cited as counter-arguments against the programme in the briefings and discussions.

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, OECD/MSA Directorate: Working Party on Social Indicators. Note by the Central Statistical Office and the Treasury, 24 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 4th Meeting, 28 Nov. 1972.  TNA, T 371/267, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Working Party on Social Indicators, 26 Feb. 1976.  TNA, T 371/267, DE, J. E. D. Slater to D. J. Halley / HMT, 19 July 1976; HMT, D. J. Halley to H. Synott, UK Delegation to OECD, 1 July 1976.  TNA, T 371/267, CSO, E. J. Thompson to D. J. Halley, HMT, 27 July 1976.

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Consequently, the changed situation with the UK standing ‘alone’ and with an imminent vote in the OECD Council prompted the lead official in the Treasury to backtrack on the long-held British opposition against Phase III – by proposing to allow ‘some relaxation in our rigidity’ and to ‘permit slow progress’.251 The arguments advanced to persuade the Social Services Division and other officials in the Treasury showed how much was at stake in this question from the point of view of the civil servants involved in the discussions:252 While recognising SS desire to avoid international comparisons, could we ask them to consider that comparisons are made now, anyway, and it will be better if we can get them better based; that some reasonable and pragmatic progress in the OECD is better than being forced ahead faster in the EEC; and that it may be desirable to allow the truth to emerge, even if it is unpalatable (and it won’t necessarily be so in all respects), so long as we try to make sure that it is as near as possible the truth and not distortion of the facts.

The proposed policy change won approval from the Treasury’s Chief Secretary, but never led to a complete U-turn.253 Instead of fully endorsing Phase III, Treasury officials suggested adopting a more flexible, but still defensive approach: what they had ‘in mind’ as the future ‘UK line’ in the Social Indicators Programme was to ‘question the positive value to the UK, to stress the limitations and qualifications in over simplified presentations, to play it long, to confine the consequences so far as possible, but to go reluctantly along with the majority while trying to steer it in sensible directions’.254 A crucial moment where the UK might have been forced to go along with the majority and accept a commitment to international reporting arrived in late 1976: new proposals advanced by the Secretariat aimed to drop ‘the reservation recorded in 1973ʹ and ‘establish the objective of Phase III in principle’.255 Briefing in the Treasury initially suggested accepting the proposals with qualifications, as officials were keen to avoid ‘an isolated stand in the OECD’.256 In the immediate run-up to the critical OECD meeting in early 1977, however, the UK delegation was briefed more defensively – to ‘sound out’ other delegations for ‘a preconcerted move’ to secure a reaffirmation of the original reserve against Phase III.257 At the meeting of the OECD Executive Committee on 10 February 1977, the British delegation eventually achieved just that with the support of the US and Canadian delegations: the move forced the Secretariat to reconfirm the ‘1973 reservation’, while all other delegations ‘strongly and unanimously favoured’ the Secretariat’s proposals.258

       

TNA, T 371/267, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Social Indicators, 24 Sept. 1976. Ibid. TNA, T 371/268, HMT, I. L. Smith to D. J. Halley, 22 Oct. 1976. TNA, T 371/267, HMT, D. Winrow / D. J. Halley to Anson, 16 Aug. 1976. TNA, T 371/268, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD: Development of Social Indicators, 21 Oct. 1976. Ibid. TNA, T 371/268, HMT, D. J. Halley to T. L. A. Daunt, UK Delegation to the OECD, 27 Jan. 1977. TNA, T 371/268, HMT, D. J. Halley, Note for the Record, 10 Feb. 1977.

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As a compromise, it was agreed to set up a smaller working group to explore possibilities for the implementation of Phase III, but discussions in the group could not resolve the ‘fundamental difference’ between member countries and the Secretariat about this issue – despite strong interventions by Secretariat staff who pleaded ‘that the OECD could not continue to operate as though it lived in a world where economic indicators were the only statistics’ and that ‘“a social conscience” must be introduced into economic discussion’.259 By the time the working group concluded the talks in autumn 1977, no more than ‘a modest and practical programme’ had been agreed, without any suggestion of international reporting.260 As the Social Indicators Programme was being cut down to size, impatience grew among British officials ‘to stop this working party wasting other people’s money’, and little enthusiasm for the programme remained across Whitehall, as the lead official in the Treasury explained: ‘Most Treasury divisions share your views; the CSO and Departments have slightly more interest in the exercise, but on a selective not blanket basis. We continue to participate because of other wider OECD considerations; and on terms which protect our interests.’261 British officials had to defend their interests once more in March 1978 when the Secretariat undertook a final attempt to propose international reporting for selected indicators on a voluntary basis, accompanied by forceful appeals by Ron Gass and other Secretariat staff.262 As usual, the British delegation opposed the proposal, anticipating that even a voluntary reporting scheme could create pressure to participate, but were joined only by the Danish and Norwegian delegations, while all others were willing to accept the idea, including the US and Canada.263 By this time, it was clear to observers that the OECD programme was becoming irrelevant, reverting to a mere research exercise and ‘a professional forum for exchanges and review purposes’.264 The British were admittedly not alone in their reluctance to support the OECD Social Indicators Programme, but, according to British reports, the United Kingdom’s was the only member-country delegation that consistently argued against the concept of international reporting on all occasions. As British representatives at the OECD observed, even if other delegations such as those from the US and Canada shared similar concerns they were thought to be interested in ‘a positive outcome’ of the programme; by contrast, the

 TNA, T 371/505, CSO, J. Peretz to Thompson, 14 Apr. 1977; J. Peretz, Special Group on Phase III: Meeting in Paris on 31 Mar. 1977, 13 Apr. 1977.  TNA, T 371/505, CSO, J. Peretz to Thompson, 15 Nov. 1977.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, A. J. Perry to D. J. Halley, OECD Social Indicators Working Party, 30 Nov 1977, with handwritten comment by Halley.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Working Party on Social Indicators: Meeting on 13–16 Mar., 21 Mar. 1978.  Ibid.  TNA, T 371/505, HNT, D. J. Halley to F. E. R. Butler, OECD Working Party on Social Indicators 13–16 Mar., 7 Mar. 1978.

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British position questioned ‘the merit of the OECD activities themselves’.265 Treasury officials, in particular, credited themselves with the ‘leading restraining role’ that the UK delegation had played in the programme, which meant that British representatives had to ‘pursue our cautionary line in near isolation at the start of each occasion’ but ‘attracted enough company each time to justify it generally’.266 The main reasons why British officials had ‘already played it fairly slowly since the original initiative was made in 1971ʹ, were of both technical and political nature, but what stood out in the internal British deliberations were the deep concerns over the political implications of international comparisons, which were widely seen as an intrusion into domestic affairs.267 Officials were sensitive to the fact that social reporting implied prescriptions for ‘policy formulation and analysis’, tasks that were regarded as the preserve of national governments.268 Thus, in mid 1977, the coordinating Treasury official described this as the motivation behind the British tactics: ‘Over all these years, and until quite recently, one of our concerns has been to try to put off the day when international social reporting would result in league tables, providing possible fuel to UK social expenditure lobbies.’269 These political considerations were frequently more strongly emphasized in the British discussions than the technical obstacles. For example, the deputy secretary in the Treasury, Peter Baldwin, belittled the search for internationally comparable social indicators as an emotional pursuit that his department had sought to rein in:270 ‘Social policy’ is an area in which, naturally enough, there are strong pressure groups and much feeling and enthusiasm; and a correspondingly wide and divergent demand for statistical information. At the same time there are formidable technical problems in providing reliable information with clear meaning and direct relevance to major issues of policy. Some of the enthusiasms seem to rub off on to the statistical analysts themselves, in the pursuit of ‘social indicators’ and international and other comparisons on the basis of them. (The OECD and the EEC are both engaged in this pursuit, and we have been seeking to prevent them from rushing towards potentially embarrassing formulations of national situations.)

The concerns over the technical feasibility of international comparisons was not pure pretext. The concerns were shared by government statisticians in most member countries. However, some experts believed that realistic possibilities existed at least for a certain range of options. This became apparent in the proceedings of the OECD working group that was set up to develop statistical indicators for income and wealth distribution and poverty during Phase II in 1976, the so-called Communal Development  Ibid.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley, OECD Social Indicators Working Party: Report of Meeting on 29–31 Mar., D J Halley, 14 Apr. 1977.  TNA, T 371/268, HMT, D. J. Halley, Draft Submission to Chief Secretary, 21 Oct. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/702, CSO, Brief on Agenda Item 7(c) at the Twentieth Session of the Statistical Commission, 19 Jan. 1979.  TNA, T 371/505, HMT, D. J. Halley to F. E. R. Butler, 13 June 1977.  TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, P. Baldwin to D. Henley, MISC 78(75)1: A Joint Approach for Social Policies, 14 Apr. 1975.

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Effort No. 6 (CDE 6). Like all other existing CDEs in the programme, the group was composed of specialized government statisticians from member countries and Secretariat staff, including British economist Malcolm Sawyer who acted as an independent expert consultant to the OECD. By spring 1977, CDE 6 had produced a set of draft guidelines for a common framework, recommending harmonized concepts for the compilation and presentation of statistics on income distribution, measured by decile shares and Gini coefficients; it was recognized, however, that the proposed framework was ‘not in all respects immediately realizable’.271 A survey of national practices conducted by CDE 6 once more revealed the diversity of sources and definitions currently in use in income distribution statistics across member countries – this situation was described as the main reason for the ‘opinion of the CDE that the data are not suitable for international comparisons’.272 In the separately investigated field of wealth distribution statistics, the situation seemed even less encouraging; hence, instead of pressing ahead with the construction of statistical indicators, the working group resolved to focus on developing guidelines for the improvement of international statistics in the long term.273 Similar arguments were brought forward to exclude all but one of the proposed approaches to the construction of social indicators for the sub-concern of ‘material deprivation’, including ideas for an international poverty line defined as a fraction of median income, similar to the concept advanced by EC bodies around the same time.274 The group could agree, however, that it seemed possible to recommend ‘an analysis of the bottom fifth of incomes’ as ‘the best approach’ for ‘making international comparisons’ of low-income groups. This was a reminder that viable technical solutions existed at least for some of the envisaged indicators, which some participants in the working group seemed more willing to pursue than others. For example, the US delegate advocated the use of a relative poverty line for the construction of an international indicator, and the Dutch representative even argued that international comparisons of income distributions should ‘not be ruled out’.275 The limited comparability of existing data was stressed, in turn, by the

 OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme: Draft Report of CDE No. 6 on the Size Distribution of Income, SME/CA/CDE6/76.10, 25 Mar. 1977.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme, CDE No. 6: Sources of Income Distribution Statistics, SME/CA/CDE6/77.7, 1st Revision, 28 June 1978.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme, CDE No. 6: Summary of the Fourth Meeting on 20/21 July, SME/CA/CDE6/78.08, 10 Oct. 1978; OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme, CDE No. 6: Guidelines for the Distribution of Wealth: Note of Conceptual Issues, SME/CA/CDE6/79.1, 12 Feb. 1979.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme: Draft Report of CDE No. 6 on Social Indicators of Low Incomes, Poverty and Material Deprivation, SME/CA/CDE6/ 79.4; OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme: Possible Approaches to the Construction of International Indicators of Poverty, SME/CA/CDE6/78.3, 22 June 1978.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme, CDE No. 6: Summary of the Fourth Meeting on 20/21 July, SME/CA/CDE6/78.08, 10 Oct. 1978.

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British and other delegates by pointing, among others, to national differences in the provision of social benefits and public services in kind, which supplemented personal incomes and distorted any comparisons of overall income distributions unless precisely measured. Another major technical obstacle consisted in the differing analytical definitions underlying the available data. However, a more optimistic view was shared even by one of the most distinguished British experts in income distribution statistics, John Leonard Nicholson. In a discussion on international analyses of income distribution in a separate working group in the OECD, ‘Mr. Nicholson said that the difficulties in using non-standardized income data could be exaggerated, and that studies in greater depth could fruitfully be made for countries where detailed data is available, on for example, the average family size, indicating the number of people being supported on a given income’.276 At the same meeting, the US delegate mentioned a new methodological approach currently in use by government statisticians in the US: based on new computer software, ‘basic data’ from existing statistical series could be ‘regrouped’ into different units of analysis. This technique prefigured the methodology later developed by the Luxembourg Income Study during the 1980s, which used computer software to convert micro-data from member countries to a comparable standard.277 As one of the experts involved in CDE 6, Malcolm Sawyer, retrospectively asserted in an interview, this methodology would have been technically feasible much earlier.278 However, the idea did not yet feature in the discussions in the OECD during the 1970s. The OECD work chimed with the rediscovery of economic inequality as a scholarly subject and political problem in many societies during the early 1970s. The growing interest in questions of income and wealth distribution was reflected in new academic research and a multitude of activities in various international organizations. International scholarship on the subject was on the rise but still relatively small.279 In 1975, staff of the RCDIW identified a total of sixty-eight relevant books and articles published since the 1950s, with many publications covering individual countries, but also a number of comparative studies.280 Parts of the literature looked at the issue exclusively from the point of view of development economics, but some studies also investigated trends in relative inequalities in developed countries.281 Furthermore, academic experts contributed much to the work of international agencies in  TNA, PIN 34/657/1, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy. Record of the Third Meeting, 28–30 Apr., SME/CA/75.26, 8 July 1975, p. 11.  On the Luxembourg Income Study see the sub-section below.  Interview with Professor Malcolm Sawyer, University of Leeds, by the author, via Skype, 14 Sept. 2017.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Inequality in the Distribution of Personal Income, by the OECD Secretariat, SME/CA/74.108, 10 Dec. 1974.  TNA, BS 7/545, RCDIW, E. Jones to T. Stark, 17 June 1975.  UN, Incomes in Post-War Europe (1967); Kuznets, ‘Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations’; Kravis, ‘A World of Unequal Incomes’; Adelman and Morris, An Anatomy of Patterns of Income Distribution in Developing Nations; Chenery et al., Redistribution with Growth.

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this field. In spring 1972, for example, the ILO started a new programme on income distribution in the context of employment and poverty reduction policies with a host of studies and sub-projects run by scholars and research institutions in developing and developed countries.282 Questions of income distribution and related topics also appeared on the agendas of learned societies such as the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. As John Leonard Nicholson observed in late 1973, ‘there has thus, in recent months, been a mushrooming of interest at all possible levels in the distribution / redistribution of income, income maintenance programmes including negative income tax, poverty research, and so on’.283 In autumn 1973, for example, Nicholson was invited as ‘the chief expert’ to attend an international meeting convened by the UN in Czechoslovakia: here, experts from Western and Socialist countries engaged in discussions on issues of income distribution and social justice, and their conclusions included the observation that ‘equality of incomes is a desirable aim of social policy’.284 The growing interest in the subject in expert circles and the media was not necessarily matched by political action, though. Most member governments took a less idealistic view. This was noted by OECD staff in early 1974 when a new working group was launched whose remit was tentatively described as ‘income maintenance for the poorer groups in society’, but expressly excluded ‘the overall equality of income distribution’:285 Very few governments, if any, are seriously interested in the overall equality of income distribution and most of them probably take the view – rightly or wrongly – that the degree of equality across the board is something that is neither within their power to influence much nor something that cries out for rectification in the interests of natural justice or social stability. At the same time they accept that society has a sort of paternalistic duty to look after the aged, the sick, the unemployed or others who, for one reason or another, need to have some form of safety net provided for them.

Subsequent developments in the new working group corroborated this view. The new working group was initially concerned with specific social security schemes, causing a ‘battle’ with British officials who ‘sought to deflect OECD activities away from dabbling’ in this field.286 Therefore, Whitehall initially welcomed the Secretariat’s move to broaden the remit of the working party in spring 1975, even if this was openly declared as an attempt ‘to revamp the Working Party into a major vehicle for our work on equality issues’.287 As part of this endeavour, the Secretariat also put income and

 Felix Paukert, ‘Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development’.  TNA, PIN 34/364, DHSS/Economic Advisers Office, J. L. Nicholson to P. Rogers, 5 Dec. 1973.  TNA, PIN 34/364, UN Office at Geneva/Division of Social Affairs, Expert Group on the Structures of Income Distribution and Implications for Social Development, 30 Sept.–9 Oct. 1973.  TNA, PIN 34/364, OECD, Department of Economics and Statistics, Suggested Outline for an International Co-Ordinated Research Project on Income Maintenance, DES/IRMP/74.1, 21 Jan. 1974.  TNA, PIN 34/657/2, DHSS, International Relations Division, D. S. Beaumont to D. White, 6 Aug. 1975.  TNA, PIN 34/657/1, OECD/SME, A. Maddison to I. Byatt / HMT, 6 Mar. 1975.

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wealth distribution and redistribution on the agenda – and made very clear that it was also interested in exploring possibilities for the development of ‘better information and analysis’, including ‘comparable and reliable data’.288 The working party had agreed to support this subject at a previous meeting, and for more detailed deliberations, the Secretariat subsequently prepared discussion papers, including a report on income distribution statistics in member countries. Contrary to contemporary conceptions, the information provided by national statistical offices seemed to suggest ‘that there has been no clear trend towards greater income equality in recent years in spite of considerable extensions in social welfare programmes’.289 To investigate whether this conclusion held true ‘for member countries as a whole’, the Secretariat proposed ‘further work’ with a view to examining not only ‘the facts’, but also associated ‘methodological and measurement problems’. This agenda was presented as all the more pressing as ‘most countries’ were judged to ‘have very poor data indeed for policyrelevant analysis’ so that ‘a much bigger effort of data collection’ was required.290 Member-country delegations made sure, however, that this effort never materialized. When the Secretariat’s proposals were presented to the working party in spring 1975, the idea of OECD work on ‘overall distributive analysis’ met with ‘strong opposition’.291 As the US delegation was keen to emphasize, ‘a number of delegations’ spoke out against comparative studies of redistributive effects of government policies in member countries and international comparisons of income and wealth distribution.292 In subsequent discussions in the working party, the Portuguese delegate was the only one to express support for continuing the Secretariat’s income distribution studies.293 The French delegation, by contrast, received support from other delegations when it urged the working party to ‘avoid making international comparisons’ and to focus on individual country studies instead. This approach was also favoured by the British delegation who agreed to the inclusion of distributional analyses in the OECD work programme on the condition that studies were confined to observations ‘within single countries’.294 In the Treasury, the project was seen as yet ‘another OECD

 TNA, PIN 34/657/1, OECD/SME, J. R. Gass to Heads of Delegations, 21 Mar. 1975.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Discussion Note on Issues Concerning Income Distribution and Redistribution Which May Be Worth Future Examination by the Working Party, SME/CA/75.09, 24 Mar. 1975.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Inequality in the Distribution of Personal Income, by the OECD Secretariat, SME/CA/74.108, 10 Dec. 1974.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Comments by the US Delegation on the Future Work Programme, MAS/WP4(76)3, 12 Mar. 1976.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Note by the Australian Delegation to the Working Party, MAS/WP4(76)9, 22 Sept. 1976.  OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Record of the Fourth Meeting, 17–19 Mar., MAS/WP4(76)5, 19 May 1976.  TNA, PIN 34/657/2, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Note by the United Kingdom Delegation to the Working Party, MAS/WP4(76)6, 24 June 1976.

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activity’ that was supposed to enlarge ‘the “Gass” empire’; furthermore, averting ‘misleading comparisons’ was deemed important because of the ‘cross-bearing’ to the Social Indicators Programme.295 In fact, British officials were confident that they could steer the working party in the desired direction, especially since Treasury official Ian Byatt had been offered the chairmanship in spring 1975. In light of similar research on redistributive effects of social policies that was underway in the British civil service at the time, Byatt reckoned that ‘[we] may have something useful to learn from thinking in other countries, especially if we can use the Secretariat to organize discussions on general approaches and keep them away from making international statistical comparisons. I suppose we would find it easier to do this if we provided the Chairman of the Working party’.296 Consequently, discussions in the working party moved away from international analyses of income distribution and concentrated on national case studies of redistributive policies and measures, among other issues. What resulted from this exercise was an insightful and detailed report on redistribution in four OECD countries that had been in the making since 1976, but the planned publication of the report was eventually vetoed by both the new Thatcher government and the French government in 1979.297 The final blow to the efforts of the Secretariat to initiate international work on income distribution was delivered in the fallout from a much-criticized OECD publication in 1976 that deterred the organization from venturing into this field again for many years to come. The publication went back to discussions in the Working Party No. 2 of the Economic Policy Committee, which had extended its original growthoriented remit to ‘social objectives’ and ‘the effects of economic growth on the quality of life’ in 1973.298 As part of its work on income maintenance schemes, the Working Party had embarked on comparative work on national poverty rates and the search for a definition of ‘a generally applicable poverty line’; furthermore, more work was planned on the subject of income distribution.299 Encouraged by British economist Wilfred Beckerman in his role as a consultant to the OECD,300 the Secretariat commissioned a paper on income distribution that would not only explore the issue of comparability, but also attempt ‘inter-country comparisons’ by a range of ‘inequality measures’.301 The research was taken on by another British consultant to the OECD  TNA, T 371/267, HMT, D. Winrow / D. J. Halley to Anson, 16 Aug. 1976.  TNA, PIN 34/657/1, HMT, I. C. R. Byatt to F. B. Hindmarsh / DHSS/IR, 26 Mar. 1975.  TNA, T 414/200, DE, L. B. Garcia to A. F. Green / UK Delegation to the OECD, 29 Aug. 1979.  TNA, T 371/268, OECD/WP2, Revised Terms of Reference for Working Party No. 2 Adopted at its Meeting on 15–16 Nov. 1973.  TNA, PIN 34/657/1, OECD, SME, Working Party on Social Aspects of Income Transfer Policy: Record of the Third Meeting, 28–30 Apr., SME/CA/75.26, 8 July 1975, p. 11.  Interview with Professor Malcolm Sawyer, University of Leeds, by the author, via Skype, 14 Sept. 2017.  TNA, PIN 34/657/1, OECD, Ad-Hoc Group of Working Party No. 2 of Experts on Income Maintenance Programmes, 13 June 1975.

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Economics and Statistics Division, Malcolm Sawyer. The finished paper was eventually circulated and approved by delegations in Working Party No. 2, and subsequently published in an OECD periodical in July 1976.302 In the paper, Sawyer conceded that due to the well-known methodological problems, comparative studies of this kind were ‘in a strict sense’ impossible.303 However, he argued, his study relied on official data from twelve selected OECD countries that were based on ‘similar’ statistical concepts and definitions, hence, they were ‘“reasonably” comparable’. What grabbed headlines in the aftermath of the publication, particularly in Paris, was that France came out as the country with the highest degree of inequality by all measures.304 Back at the OECD, French delegates levelled ‘severe criticism’ at Sawyer, attacking his methodology as ‘dangerously misleading’.305 In France, Sawyer’s report sparked public debates and irritated reactions at the highest political levels: the Prime Minister went on record to dispute the findings, and the French government issued the OECD with an official protest note; furthermore, the French Statistical Office rushed to produce a study to counter Sawyer’s report.306 The political backlash and the methodological concerns contributed to the fact that the OECD refrained from undertaking any more work on international comparisons of income distribution until the 1990s, as one of the leading specialists in the organization, Michael F. Förster, later recalled.307 In 1989, OECD officials finally began initial consultations ‘to take a crack at redoing Malcolm Sawyer’s infamous report’, this time in collaboration with the researchers of the Luxembourg Income Study who had found a way to resolve the ‘Sawyer problem’.308

 TNA, T 371/268, Note to D. J. Halley, OECD Work on Public Expenditure, July 1976. The paper was approved for publication by WP2 as an annex to the document CPE/WP2(75)5 in Nov. 1975 and subsequently circulated to member states for final comments by May 1976.  Sawyer, ‘Income Distribution in OECD Countries’, 3, 12, 17.  ‘La France, médaille d’or de l’inégalité’, Le Monde, 20 Aug. 1976; ‘OECD unclear on income distribution in UK’, The Times, 5 Aug. 1976, 20; ‘In France, the Income Disparity is Great’, New York Times, 10 Sept. 1976, 75.  TNA, BS 7/564, CSO, D. Ramprakash, OECD Social Indicators Development Programme: CDE No. 6, Report on the First Meeting, 21/22 Oct., 26 Oct. 1976. Sawyer replied to the criticism in the meeting by pointing out that ‘a draft of his work was with the French for eight months without comment’.  ‘Comment classer les pays selon le degré d’inégalité des revenues’, Le Monde, 16 Nov. 1976.  Information from Michael F. Förster, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, to the author by email, 12 Sept. 2017.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, Timothy Smeeding / Vanderbilt Univ. to Anthony Atkinson / LSE, 14 Mar. 1989; Anthony Atkinson to Timothy Smeeding and Lee Rainwater / Harvard Univ., 14 Jan. 1991. On the Luxembourg Income Study see the sub-section below.

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The European Anti-Poverty Programmes From the ILO’s family living studies to the UN’s levels of living programme to the OECD’s Social Indicators initiative, much of the international work on social metrics during the post-war era had shared an interest in financial poverty and low-income groups as one aspect among others, but the topic took centre stage in the EC’s antipoverty programmes that spanned nearly two decades from 1975 to 1994. The first programme was launched by the Council of Ministers as part of the Social Action Programme announced in 1974; it was underpinned not only by recent intellectual discourse about ‘quality of life’ as a goal of economic growth but also by the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in many member states since the mid 1960s.309 Outside of Europe, in the United States, the ‘second poverty enlightenment’ had been instigated by social commentators and academic research in the late 1950s, leading to the ‘war on poverty’ announced by the Johnson administration in 1964.310 The movement was coupled with liberal ideas for a more interventionist role of the state in redressing inequalities as well as the belief in knowledge as a progressive vehicle for the ‘common good’ – consequently, the ‘war on poverty’ not only entailed the creation of a veritable ‘poverty research industry’, but also the recognition of poverty as an object of government investigations.311 In the United Kingdom, the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ was associated with academic research that gained momentum in the early 1960s and transformed public discourse in the country when the scholars Peter Townsend and Brian AbelSmith published their groundbreaking book on The Poor and the Poorest in late 1965. In the 1970s, Brian Abel-Smith went on to play a leading role in the EC’s anti-poverty programme that relied heavily on academic experts.312 In the first instance, the Commission consulted with experts to develop proposals for a limited series of ‘pilot projects’. The plans went ahead despite deep reservations encountered in Whitehall: officials had advised that the Commission’s role in this field should be ‘strictly limited’ to ‘helping with the exchange of information’, and that the ‘UK could not accept at this stage a commitment to pilot projects’.313 In conceptual terms, the programme approached poverty as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with income as a central determining factor; hence, it was not only concerned with social policies, but also ventured into the field of European income statistics.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, Commission of the European Communities, Final Report from the Commission to the Council on the First Programme of Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty, COM(81)769, 15 Dec. 1981.  Ravallion, Economics of Poverty, 91–7.  O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 9–12.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, Commission of the European Communities, Final Report from the Commission to the Council on the First Programme of Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty, COM(81)769, 15 Dec. 1981.  TNA, PIN 34/364, Briefing on Cabinet Paper EUO(73)181, EEC Guidelines to a Social Action Programme.

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Alongside a number of mostly local ‘action-projects’ carried out in member countries and research studies on the effectiveness of social services and poverty-reducing policies, the programme also included a cross-national survey of popular opinion that showed particularly high levels of indifference towards existing poverty among British respondents in the mid 1970s.314 Furthermore, independent researchers were commissioned to assess national statistical sources and gather information on the incidence of poverty in member countries. Despite acknowledging the limited comparability and deficiencies in many national statistics, the group of experts under the leadership of AbelSmith attempted ‘a rough estimate’ and consequently produced the first league table of poverty in Europe: the published table in the official report on the first EC programme of 1981 ranked the United Kingdom as one of the countries that displayed the lowest poverty rates during the mid 1970s.315 The limited comparability of the underlying data was a reminder of the slow progress in a separate long-standing EC programme that was concerned with harmonizing family budget surveys across Europe. This programme went back as far as the mid 1950s when the European Coal and Steel Community conducted a harmonized family budget survey among four-person households with employment in the coal and steel industries across member countries.316 At the time, planners even considered extending this innovative approach to the whole population, an idea that was deemed desirable, but also too costly. The next community-wide household survey was held in 1963/64, but plans to repeat the exercise in 1973 were dropped, so that it took the Statistical Office of the EC until 1978/79 to organize another round of partly harmonized family budget surveys.317 The surveys were not about economic inequality, though, and there was no attempt to collect data on income distribution. The main purpose was to deliver harmonized data on expenditure and commodities – in order to cater for the needs of users such as the European parliament and market research firms. Eurostat’s working party on household surveys continued to operate on the assumption that progress in harmonizing survey methods and concepts ‘could only be made gradually’.318 The idea to use harmonized European surveys for the analysis of

 See the coverage in New Society, 25 Aug. 1983.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, Commission of the European Communities, Final Report from the Commission to the Council on the First Programme of Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty, COM(81)769, 15 Dec. 1981, pp. 80–2.  TNA, CAB 108/305, UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of Third Plenary Session, 7 Oct. 1955; UN, Conference of European Statisticians, Report of Fifth Plenary Session, 10 July 1957.  TNA, CAB 108/525, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys: SOEC Family Budget Survey 1979, 23 June 1978.  TNA, CAB 108/664, EC, Eurostat, Conference of the Directors General of the National Statistical Institutes, Luxembourg, 29–30 Nov. 1984.

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financial poverty in the Community was briefly raised in the mid 1980s, but the conference of national statistical directors was in agreement that ‘the search for new data would be costly’.319 Consequently, the topic was referred to a working group and a research exercise in two selected member countries.320 In the long term, this work did yield results. In the second EC poverty programme, the harmonized family budget surveys were used to produce more comparable estimates of poverty by relying on expenditure data as a proxy indicator for income.321 It was not until the 1990s and 2000s, though, that a common conceptual framework for harmonized household surveys was established that allowed standardized measurements of income inequality: in 1992, the European Community Household Panel was launched and it was followed up by the introduction of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in 2003. EU-SILC came with the obligation for member countries to collect and provide harmonized datasets and has thus created an integrated system of international reporting on economic inequality in the EU. This outcome was far removed from the EC’s activities in this field during the mid 1970s. When the EC’s first anti-poverty programme was launched in 1975, the development of statistics did not feature prominently in the work programme. The situation changed in 1977, however, when the scope of the programme was extended to include national reports on social conditions in member countries; subsequently, statistical measurements became a major concern. Controversies arose, in particular, from the poverty league table and the underlying statistical indicator presented in the 1981 report: the ranking was based on a relative poverty line set at half average net income, a measure that was to acquire considerable significance as the precursor of the widely used present-day poverty measure of 60 per cent of median equivalized household income.322 The admittedly ‘arbitrary’ ‘50% definition’ had been agreed by ‘the majority of the national independent experts’, but was not generally accepted by member-state governments. This hardly came as a surprise at the time, given that few countries in the world had adopted official poverty lines. A rare exception was the United States, where a poverty line focused on basic needs had been developed by government statistician Mollie Orshansky in 1965. In most other countries, like the United Kingdom, governments frequently refused to accept any official definition of poverty, and discussions on the subject usually relied on proxy indicators such as the

 Ibid.; TNA, CAB 108/665, EC, Eurostat, Conference of the Directors General of the National Statistical Institutes, Brussels, 27–29 Nov. 1985.  TNA, CAB 108/666, EC, Eurostat, Conference of the Directors General of the National Statistical Institutes, Seville, 6–8 May 1986: Item 5 on the Agenda: The Work of Eurostat in 1986.  TNA, PIN 34/1445, EC, Commission, Final Report on the Second European Poverty Programme, COM(91)29, 13 Feb. 1991, pp. 2–3.  EU, Eurostat, Measuring Material Deprivation in the EU. Indicators for the Whole Population and Child-Specific Indicators (Luxembourg, 2012), 9.

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proportion of social assistance recipients in the population.323 Thus, as the EC experts indicated in their 1981 report, the problems involved in ‘defining and agreeing a poverty line for comparative purposes’ were ‘in part political’; nevertheless, they recommended developing ‘a strategy for improving the statistical information at the European level’ with a view to enabling comparisons between member countries. The definition of a European poverty line remained a contentious issue. When the renewal of the EC’s anti-poverty strategy in a possible second programme was under discussion in 1982, the vast majority of member countries supported the programme – except for the British and West German delegations who both adopted an ‘extremely reserved position’ regarding ‘the justification for a new programme’.324 The stance of the German delegation was partly inspired by the belief ‘that their benefits system was fine and without stigma and that there was no poverty in Germany’.325 The British delegation in turn expressed strong reservations about plans for research on social policies, but also raised questions over the concept of poverty adopted in the programme; the British were frank about the fact that they were ‘not particularly interested’ in the proposed ‘collection of comparable data’.326 Even some of the most committed member-state delegations voiced doubts about this particular part of the programme. The French delegation, for example, who were secretly mocked by their British counterparts for their ‘usual pious expressions of support for the Commission’, posited that the programme was ‘too concerned’ with the measurement of financial poverty; for proof, they pointed to the seemingly ‘strange results’ produced by the suggested European poverty line.327 The widespread scepticism among European government statisticians came to the fore in the discussions at the conferences of national statistical directors in the mid 1980s. At a meeting in 1985, almost all delegates spoke out against the use of a ‘simple poverty line’ and called for wider measures than just financial indicators; even the ILO observer concurred that poverty was ‘virtually impossible to quantify’.328 From the perspective of today’s conventional wisdom in econometrics, there was some validity in the criticism: in the modern literature, ‘strongly relative poverty lines’ in the sense of ‘a

 OECD Historical Archives, OECD, SME, Social Indicators Development Programme: Replies to Questionnaire on Low Income/Poverty Lines, SME/CA/CDE6/78.4, 19 July 1978.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, EC / Council / Working Party on Social Questions, Report of Meeting on 14 Sept., 21 Sept. 1982.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, DE/CS1D, M. A. B. Harlow, Report on Meeting of Social Questions Working Group on 29 June, July 1982.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, EC / Council / Working Party on Social Questions, Report of Meeting on 14 Sept., 21 Sept. 1982.  TNA, PIN 34/1100, UK Permanent Representative to EC, J. W. Mackley to J. Grewe / FCO, 1 July 1982; DE/CS1D, M. A. B. Harlow, Report on Meeting of Social Questions Working Group on 29 June, July 1982; EC / Council / Working Party on Social Questions, Report of Meeting on 14 Sept., 21 Sept. 1982.  TNA, CAB 108/664, EC, Eurostat, Conference of the Directors General of the National Statistical Institutes, Heerlen, 8–10 May 1985.

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constant proportion of the mean’ have been found to be ‘hard to defend conceptually’, but also to be potentially ‘quite adequate’ as an ‘easily understood and communicated’ measure to capture trends, as long as a range of different poverty measures are used.329 However, this was not what the directors suggested, and this troubled at least one knowledgeable person in the room. In a remarkable intervention, British income distribution specialist Deo Ramprakash went against the majority by asserting that ‘what was needed were clear starting points that were unequivocally defined. Income, or the lack thereof, seemed to be the indicator which more or less determined all the other characteristics’.330 However, another meeting of the statistical directors in the following year reaffirmed the ‘mixed views’ and the palpable ‘ambiguity’ about the proposed Eurostat programme which would have involved ‘collecting and disseminating regular and comparable statistics’ on poverty in the Community. Symptomatically, one of the points raised in the discussions was ‘the lack of political consensus in defining poverty and the associated problem of harmonization of the statistical standards’. Despite the failure to find agreement on statistical definitions and communitywide reporting on poverty, EC bodies continued to use the ‘50% definition’ in research and reports, which inevitably led to frequent political clashes, in particular, with the British government. Under the Thatcher government, increased potential for conflict in this matter arose, firstly, from the New Right’s ideological rejection of the concept of relative poverty, and, secondly, from the massive rise in unemployment and the incidence of poverty in the country during the 1980s.331 Both factors set the government up for political embarrassment: in 1989, the leaked interim report on the second EC programme showed that the United Kingdom had seen the largest increases in the numbers below 50 per cent of average income across Europe during the decade – in the European poverty ranking, only Portugal, Spain, and Greece had poverty rates worse than the British.332 Consequently, British ministers and officials scrambled to respond to the publicity fallout and battled to contain the EC programme as a whole, especially when the second programme expired and consultations for a possible third EC anti-poverty programme began in the same year. From the start, British representatives considered ‘the definition of poverty’ as one of the ‘key points’ in the negotiations and hoped that ‘we have a good chance of making common cause with the Germans and possibly the Danes’.333 Subsequent discussions in the EC working party revealed some scepticism among member countries with regard to the suggested statistical work. However, all but one of the delegations were in agreement, albeit with some reservations, over the established definition

 Ravallion, Economics of Poverty, 208–12, 233–4.  Ibid.  See Chapter 5.  TNA, PIN 34/1362/2, FCO, White to A. Bowtell, DSS, 26 Apr. 1989.  TNA, PIN 34/1362/2, UK Permanent Representative to the EC, K. Masson to R. Moon / FCO, 25 Apr. 1989.

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of poverty – the British delegation stood alone in their attempt to convince their European counterparts to drop the definition and adopt alternative measures.334 In light of the British ‘government’s position on the use of relative measures to define poverty’, Thatcher’s Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, even suggested vetoing the third EC programme altogether.335 This would also have been the preferred option for the Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore, whose department had the lead in this matter. However, in light of current domestic debates and the majority view in the EC, he suggested resorting to more technical counter-arguments to delay the decision and to negotiate cuts to the overall budget as ‘the best way to restrict’ the extent of the planned ‘statistical work’.336 At the heart of the British government’s opposition was the definition of poverty championed by the EC, as Moore indicated in a letter to Geoffrey Howe: I do not see how we can accept the programme unless the definition is removed from the draft decision. Without the definition, the programme would no longer promulgate the belief that a poverty line can be drawn, and the Commission would find it more difficult to extend the statistical programme beyond the actual projects. Restricting the overall budget as far as possible would also lead to a smaller budget for the statistical work, again reducing the prospects of statistical absurdities being promulgated. The difficulty is, of course, that I do not want to be seen (especially at the present time) to be blocking proposals that could mean extra help for less welloff people throughout the Community because of a disagreement over a definition.

In the end, British ministers were able to win concessions in the discussions at the Social Affairs Council, where the proposals for a third EC anti-poverty programme were approved on 12 June 1989: supported by the German delegation, in particular, they secured a significant reduction in the budget as well as the removal of the poverty definition from the text of the Council decision. Furthermore, the Commission had accommodated the British government by eliminating the word ‘poverty’ from the title of the programme, although, to the dismay of officials, it was still being commonly referred to as ‘the third poverty programme’.337 As it turned out, however, it was premature to think that the underlying issues had ‘been resolved’ and that the reduced EC programme ‘no longer’ needed to be ‘regarded as a problem area’.338 On the one hand, ‘Poverty 3ʹ proved to be a mere ‘networking and information exchange exercise’, consisting of mostly local pilot projects with ‘no overall research strategy’; the statistical component was limited to ‘a range of methodological research’ on, among others things, indicators of social exclusion.339 In practice, however, EC bodies

 TNA, PIN 34/1326/2, DSS, Williams to Groombridge, 9 May 1989; Masson, UKRep, Report on Meeting of the Working Party on Social Questions, 18 May 1989.  TNA, PIN 34/1326/1, HMT, Sparkes to J. Groombridge, DSS, 7 June 1989.  TNA, PIN 34/1326/2, DSS, J. Moore to G. Howe / FCO, 6 June 1989; TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS, Hayes to Michaelis, DE, 23 Oct. 1991.  TNA, PIN 34/1326/2, DSS/IR, E. James to I. Williams / B2, 12 May 1989.  TNA, PIN 34/1326/2, DSS/B2B, L. Maderson to C. Hayes / IR, 24 Oct. 1990.  TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS, Papers and correspondence on the evaluation of Poverty 3, 1993.

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and academic experts involved in the programme continued to apply the contentious definition to estimate trends in poverty across Europe. Accordingly, the final report on the second EC poverty programme, drafted by Brian Abel-Smith and three other European experts, again contained a poverty league table with the United Kingdom at the top of the list of member countries with the sharpest increases in poverty between 1980 and 1985.340 The impact of such reports on domestic politics in the United Kingdom was noted with some concern in the Department of Social Security (DSS), whose remit included low-income statistics and briefing on all issues related to poverty. On previous occasions, the EC figures had been reported on by national newspapers, notably The Guardian, and cited by the ‘poverty lobby’ as well as by opposition politicians; inevitably, the new report was expected to ‘trigger off another flurry of media interest’.341 The official response, prepared by DSS officials, was to reject the figures as ‘totally arbitrary’ and ‘technically indefensible’ on the grounds of methodological differences between national survey data sets and the fact that social benefits and public services in kind had not been factored in.342 At an earlier occasion in autumn 1990, when Eurostat had published preliminary results showing the steep rise in poverty in the United Kingdom, the CSO had even sent a strongly worded letter of protest, attacking the report for ‘poor professional standards’ and for ‘incorrectly’ suggesting ‘that there is a generally accepted measure of poverty’.343 DSS chief statistician Deo Ramprakash blamed the Portuguese Eurostat official Lidia Barreiros for ignoring methodological conclusions from a recent working party meeting about the need to apply ‘several indicators’ instead of a single poverty line – and felt tempted ‘to whip this official into shape and submission’, as he raged in his official report.344 Instead, Ramprakash suggested that he could bring British ideas about the construction of poverty statistics to bear from within the European Statistical Office, as he was about to be seconded to Eurostat. British officials had helped to engineer this move partly as an ‘attempt to get the work in much more responsible and capable hands’, hoping that ‘if that happens British influence will be assured’.345 From 1992, Ramprakash went on to develop the methodological work on poverty measures in his new role as a Eurostat official. As he explained to a meeting of European officials in autumn 1992, he operated on

 TNA, PIN 34/1445, EC, Commission, Final Report on the Second European Poverty Programme, COM(91)29, 13 Feb. 1991, annex 1.  TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS/B2B, L. Maderson to H. Dudley / PS/PSC, 9 Oct. 1991.  Ibid.; DSS, J. Groombridge, Briefing for PM, 15 Apr. 1991.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, CSO, M. J. Erritt, Eurostat Rapid Reports on Population and Social Conditions 1990 No. 7, 20 Nov. 1990.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS/ASD4, D. Ramprakash to L. Maderson / B2D, 21 Nov. 1990.  TNA, PIN 34/1326/2, DSS/ASD, D. Ramprakash to L. Maderson / B2, 8 Feb. 1990.

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the assumption that ‘there was still a substantial way to go to establish a basis for timely, reliable and regular statistics on poverty but that this was a primary goal’.346 British officials scrambled in vain, however, to persuade their European counterparts to refrain from using relative poverty lines. Ramprakash and other DSS representatives had used every opportunity in meetings with European working groups and representatives to argue ‘passionately’ and ‘violently’ against the ‘idea of a European poverty line’347 In a characteristic remark, Ramprakash had even ridiculed this idea as ‘Socialism through the back Delors.’348 As an alternative, they suggested that their European colleagues adopt the British methodology from the newly introduced statistical series Households Below Average Income (HBAI) that DSS statisticians had developed in 1986/88. In Britain, the introduction of this new series was criticized by independent experts because it went hand in hand with the scrapping of a previously existing time series based on a purely relativist indicator, but it was also welcomed as a more complex set of statistics offering a wider range of alternative measurements.349 However, the repeated ‘efforts to sell Eurostat the HBAI approach for adoption in the community’ failed to convince relevant EC bodies to discard the European poverty line.350 On the contrary: as a DSS official observed, the concessions made by the Commission to the British government prior to the start of the third programme had ‘not stopped them from continuing to hunt for the Holy Grail of a meaningful definition of poverty and a way of measuring it that would be accepted across Europe’.351 Neither was the Commission persuaded that the figures derived from the contentious definition could not be used to describe social realities in Europe. As DSS officials observed, this created a situation where the Commission was using ‘these attention-grabbing figures as often as they can’, while British officials were ‘“rubbishing” these figures at any EC meeting or conferences where they are cited’ and seizing ‘every opportunity to explain the advantages of our HBAI approach’.352 British officials continued to object to the use of a European poverty line, but they soon had to tone down their briefings when it became possible for Eurostat and other researchers to produce more reliable international comparisons of income distribution and poverty based on harmonized datasets.353 In the mid 1990s, Eurostat started to produce results from harmonized household surveys on consumption as an indicator for poverty in Europe, and in spring 1997, the first results from the European Community  TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS/ASD, A. R. Martin, European Poverty 3 Programme, Research Group Meeting on 1 Dec., 4 Dec. 1992; Ramprakash, ‘Poverty in the Countries of the European Union’.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to L. Maderson, 9 Nov. 1990.  Ibid.  See Chapter 5.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to G. Harris, 22 Feb. 1991.  TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS, L. Maderson to I. Stewart, 28 Aug. 1991.  TNA, PIN 34/1445, DSS, Maderson to Stewart, special adviser, 28 Aug. 1991.  E.g. TNA, JB 3/44, DSS/ASD 6, G. Harris, Briefing on the Article ‘Poverty in the UK. A Comparison with Nineteen Other Countries’ by Jonathan Bradshaw, 18 Dec. 1996.

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Household Panel were published that also included cross-country comparisons of income inequality.354 This was one of the earliest but not the first project that succeeded in overcoming the severe comparability issues that had hampered attempts at international comparisons in this field for so long. An important breakthrough had already been achieved by the researchers of the Luxembourg Income Study in the late 1980s and early 1990s.355

The Breakthrough: The Luxembourg Income Study The idea of developing a global statistical framework for international comparisons of living standards had been pursued by the ILO and other international agencies since the interwar era, but the repeated initiatives in various intergovernmental forums had been frustrated for decades by technical arguments about the lack of suitable statistics and the incomparability of non-standardized national data. Unsurprisingly perhaps, an important breakthrough was eventually achieved outside the framework of intergovernmental organizations by a group of independent scholars. The basic idea went back to an international academic conference in 1982 where American and European social scientists identified the lack of comparability of national poverty studies as a major problem; to tackle this issue, conference participants subsequently launched the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) in 1983, which was led by a group around Gaston Schaber, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy Smeeding.356 To avoid the problems encountered by earlier studies in comparing non-standardized national datasets, LIS collected the original raw data from national statistical offices in an electronic database hosted by the University of Walferdange in Luxembourg: this infrastructure allowed researchers to convert the recorded micro-data to a common standard. As a conceptual basis for the ‘lisification’ of national statistics, LIS adopted the system of income distribution statistics developed by the United Nations in the 1970s.357 Income data was initially collected from seven industrialized countries with datasets relating to the years between 1979 to 1983; subsequent waves of data collection followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s with growing participation from national governments. In 1985, the LIS team held its first major workshop and made the LIS database available to external researchers via

 Hagenaars et al., Poverty Statistics.  Buhmann et al., ‘Equivalence Scales, Well-Being, Inequality and Poverty’; Förster, ‘Comparing Poverty in 13 OECD Countries’.  Smeeding, Higgins, and Rainwater, Poverty, Inequality and Income Distribution.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, LIS, Karen Gardiner: Lisification from United Nations Definitions of Income Distribution Statistics to the LIS Variables, 18 July 1991.

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remote computer access, stimulating new research projects, working papers, and publications.358 By the end of the 1980s, it had become apparent that LIS had indeed opened up ‘new vistas for comparative research’.359 This was recognized not only by academic experts, but also by governments. In early 1989, one of the officials in the British DSS warned his superiors of the political implications of the activities of LIS: ‘Ministers can therefore expect international comparisons to become a much more important part of the debate about income levels, inequality, poverty and benefit adequacy.’360 The methodology of ‘lisification’ resolved the long-standing comparability issues in this field to a large extent. Complete harmonization of national datasets could not even be achieved through the LIS databank, as certain differences inherent in the micro-data remained – for example, variations in data robustness especially at the upper end of the income scale, or ‘slightly’ differing national definitions of households and families as underlying analytical units.361 As a consequence, the LIS methodology produced results that were found to be not fully reconcilable with the results of national statistics in, among others, the United Kingdom. For reasons that were not immediately apparent to the experts involved in the project, the LIS figures differed moderately from the figures produced by the DSS and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, even though the overall differences were regarded as ‘not so striking’.362 Accordingly, LIS publications acknowledged that full comparability was impossible to achieve, but also demonstrated that discrepancies between LIS tables and national statistics were ‘not large’.363 To a certain degree, the methodological challenges encountered by the LIS team thus vindicated some of the technical objections that had been raised frequently in international discussions throughout earlier decades. Some of the concerns had also been shared by one of the foremost experts in the field, Anthony B. Atkinson, who changed his opinion, though, when he attended the first LIS workshop in 1985 and was consequently persuaded that the proposed methodology was suitable for producing sound international comparisons as an ‘alternative reference standard’ for ‘domestic policy’.364

 LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson Personal Papers, Box 93, Timothy M. Smeeding, Richard Hauser, Lee Rainwater, Martin Rein, and Gaston Schaber, ‘Poverty in Major Industrialized Countries: Comparability, Structure, and Explanation’. LIS-CEPS Working Paper No. 2, July 1985.  Ibid.  TNA, JB 4/157/2, DSS, Smee to Clark, 22 Feb. 1989.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, A. B. Atkinson, P. L. Rainwater, T. S. Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries: Level and Trend. Proposal for a Project on Behalf of the OECD from the LIS, 15 Sept. 1989.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 5, A. B. Atkinson to T. S. Smeeding et al., 21 June 1994.  Atkinson, Rainwater, and Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries, 38, 75–6.  Atkinson, ‘Introduction’, in Smeeding, Higgins, and Rainwater, Poverty, Inequality and Income Distribution.

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The activities of the LIS also revived the interest of OECD Secretariat staff in international reporting on income inequality. In 1989, the head of the OECD Economics and Statistics Department, British economist David Henderson, enquired with the LIS team about the possibilities of a collaborative project on comparative trends in income distribution in OECD countries over time. Members of the LIS team were ‘very keen’ to embark on the suggested co-operation with the OECD – from the point of view of Timothy Smeeding, it looked certain that the proposed project ‘would in time become the jewel in LIS’s crown’.365 While earlier LIS work had been primarily concerned with poverty, the OECD project was to concentrate on income inequality. As one of the LIS researchers noted, this was ‘a nice switch from the US line which generally is that you can talk about poverty but inequality isn’t policy relevant’.366 For the OECD, the project was set to be the first ‘in-depth examination of income distributions in member countries since the study by Malcolm Sawyer’ in 1976, and Henderson made it clear that the Secretariat conceived of this project not as a one-off report, but as ‘the beginning of a series of studies’ that ‘may become an integral part of the regular work of the Secretariat’.367 Government officials from participating member countries sat on the advisory board and provided constructive criticism that did not prevent the project from going ahead – in marked contrast to the discussions in OECD working parties during the 1970s. The first landmark study resulting from the project was eventually published in 1995.368 It presented for the first time officially sanctioned international comparisons of income inequality in OECD countries by Gini coefficients and other measures. The highest levels of income inequality were found in the United States, but the largest rise in inequality during the first half of the 1980s was observed in the United Kingdom, while other countries such as France, Italy, and Canada had experienced little or no change during this period.369 Subsequently, the OECD rankings acquired international authority as the most reliable source in this field – they were found hard to dispute even in defensive briefings from government departments in the countries facing the most disadvantageous findings. While officials in the DSS rejected international comparisons published by other international agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations as unreliable, no such fundamental criticism was levelled at

 LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, Timothy S. Smeeding to Anthony B. Atkinson, 14 Mar. 1989.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, Timothy S. Smeeding (?), Notes on Meeting at OECD of the Advisory Board, undated (1991).  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, LIS, Income Distribution Project, Minutes of the Advisory Board Meeting, 18 Mar. 1991.  Atkinson, Rainwater, and Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries.  LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson Personal Papers, Atkinson/05/10, folder 1, Draft Press Notice, 2 Oct. 1995.

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the OECD tables and the underlying LIS data.370 When researchers from the University of York used the LIS database to produce what was recognized in the DSS as ‘the first international comparison of income distributions using 1990s data’ in 1996, officials conceded that it was based on ‘the best available data and a respectable methodology’; accordingly, the main conclusions could hardly be called into question: ‘While some of the results have a spurious precision, it is almost certainly true that UK disposable income inequality, at a point in time, is towards the upper end of the range of income inequality, among developed nations.’371 The widely-shared recognition of LIS as an authoritative research exercise put pressure on governments to participate. By the mid 1990s, the number of cooperating countries in the LIS had grown from initially seven to twenty, before further expanding to about fifty countries in the present-day database. The collaborative work of the LIS and the OECD thus established a system of international reporting on income inequality that has become a staple of domestic and global debates on the subject ever since. This chapter suggests a new chronology in the global history of the metricization of the social in the modern world: it identifies the mid 1990s as an important turning point in the emergence of what can be described as a global knowledge regime in the field of economic inequality. These developments can be described as a long-delayed process of globalization defined as a form of structured integration and not just growing interconnectedness. An alternative chronology based on the latter would paint a broader, but also more diffuse picture of increasing transnational exchanges, entanglements, and transfers of knowledge between experts and governments on various levels throughout the twentieth century with notable peaks in the 1960s and 1970s. Interconnectedness has been a major theme in much of the historical writing on global history, but, as Sebastian Conrad has recently argued, connections could assume varying quality and intensity, and it is the point where a certain degree of structured integration is achieved that defines processes of globalization and deserves more attention in research on global history.372 In the epistemological field under consideration here, this point was reached in the mid 1990s when international reporting was established: it amounted to structured integration in that it created formalized links between national statistics on a permanent basis, transforming a previously fragmented landscape into a common framework complete with a global data infrastructure. While these advances in knowledge and methods are undeniable, there has been no hint of any teleological linearity in the history of this globalization process in

 TNA, JB 3/43, DSS/ASD6, R. Endean to J. Hope / PS/SoS, Briefing on two newspaper articles containing international comparisons, 22 July 1996.  TNA, JB 3/44, DSS/ASD6, G. Harris, Briefing on an article by Jonathan Bradshaw and Jun-Rong Chen, 18 Dec. 1996.  Conrad, Global History, 9–11, 90–114.

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the present chapter: far from a straight path, it followed a twisted and complicated trajectory where progress was slow and repeatedly stalled over decades. The global knowledge regime in this field represented the culmination of decadeslong activities in international organizations. To understand this trajectory, the present chapter has traced the relevant initiatives and discussions in various forums on the intergovernmental level from the 1920s to the 1990s; as such, it speaks to recent historical research that has developed new perspectives on competition and co-operation between international organizations in the twentieth century.373 While the earlier literature has often concentrated on intra-organizational dynamics in single international organizations and focused primarily on political decision-making, in particular, the bargaining among member states, the latest research has explored inter-organizational exchanges from the perspective of transnational cultural history and the history of knowledge.374 The transfer of ideas between different agencies has also been a major theme in the present chapter as a longitudinal case study covering a whole range of international organizations. It has shown how the early ILO initiatives in the interwar era inspired a long series of programmes in various international agencies, which adopted and further developed the idea of constructing comparative measurements of living standards. During the 1970s, in particular, this led to considerable overlap and competition, but also to continued co-operation and exchanges among international organizations in the field, for example, through the practice of inviting observers from other agencies to the proceedings of the respective work programmes; some programmes were coordinated in labour-sharing agreements between agencies, while others were run jointly. The ‘regime complexity’375 in such seemingly crowded fields of international work diminishes to a certain extent, however, when the precise scope and relative weight of the various activities is taken into account, as some of the nominally competing programmes covered different ground, were downgraded at certain points, or pursued less ambitious or more theoretical aims than others from the start. Most importantly perhaps, the chapter has shown that overlap and duplication were frequently used by member-state delegations as arguments advanced to redirect existing activities for purposes of ‘forum-shopping’376 strategies or in attempts to contain them on the grounds of technical misgivings or political considerations. While the older literature has been rightly criticized for placing too much emphasis on the agency of national governments and bargaining between member states,377 this chapter has demonstrated that decision-making processes on the international level mattered not only in the context of classical themes of political history such as treaties and policies, but also in areas of greater interest to cultural historians such as transfers

    

Kaiser and Patel, ‘Multiple Connections’. Ibid. 341–2. Alter and Meunier, ‘Politics of International Regime Complexity’. Ibid. Kaiser and Patel, ‘Multiple Connections’, 347.

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of intellectual ideas and configurations of epistemological practices. Analysing the intergovernmental negotiations over the development programmes for social metrics has also shed new light on the multiplicity of actors involved in the discussions and on related questions of agency, priorities, and power relations. In almost all cases studied in this chapter, similar patterns and constellations emerged. Ideas for the development of social metrics were usually advanced and promoted by committed Secretariat staff; across various international organizations, they relied on overlapping networks of transnational experts to deliver the conceptual groundwork. Possible implementation of these ideas and the progression of associated programmes, however, hinged on the deliberations in intergovernmental committees and working parties where civil servants from member states engaged with Secretariat staff and selected experts – and where the former frequently showed markedly less enthusiasm for the programmes than the latter. The officials acted on behalf of their governments and received briefings from their parent departments and specialized interdepartmental committees, where the negotiating positions were formulated, again, mostly in discussions among civil servants. Ministers and other elected politicians were rarely involved. An important exception and illustrative example was the British safeguard against international reporting negotiated in the context of the OECD Social Indicators Programme in 1973, which had been requested by government ministers. In a remarkable episode that demonstrated their far-reaching autonomy, civil servants continued to operate on this policy even after the change of government in 1974 without consulting the incoming Labour government on this matter. It was not until late 1976 that officials briefly got a minister involved to request permission to soften the policy as it threatened to isolate the United Kingdom in the talks. The chapter has thus highlighted the role of civil servants as a group of actors with a major voice in the international discussions over the development of social metrics, a theme that will recur in subsequent chapters. The chapter has demonstrated the divisions in this field, where, more often than not, internationalist officials sided with academic experts, while the majority of member-state governments and their representatives showed little appetite for international social reporting. The reluctance to accord greater priority to this endeavour remained a constant throughout the decades and in varying contexts. In the early post-war era, it was reinforced by the unfolding Cold War as the idea of comparative statistics on living standards raised the prospect of propagandistic exploitation; similar considerations were associated with the politics of late colonialism and the ensuing decolonization. On the other hand, the discussions in the Statistical Commission and regional statistical conferences of the United Nations also provided important forums for exchanges and even collaborations between government statisticians from all sides of the iron curtain and the global North-South divide, especially during the 1970s. Most importantly perhaps, economic statistics continued to enjoy the highest priority in statistical work programmes, reflecting the unbroken faith in economic growth as the bedrock of an international political economy geared towards productionism and consumerism. This consensus was upheld with slight modifications even

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during the 1960s and 1970s, when the intellectual critique of the growth paradigm and the overreliance on existing macroeconomic statistics as measures of social welfare inspired the search for new social metrics. These ideas resonated with secretariats and academics across the world, but were not taken up with the same urgency by government ministers and officials. As a British government statistician put it in a briefing in 1974, the widespread dissatisfaction with the System of National Accounts was not necessarily a ‘major concern to those who use the national accounts as a framework for purposes of short or medium-term economic management’, although it was acknowledged as ‘understandable that users should also look to the national accounts for indicators of national welfare’.378 Moreover, the economic crisis of the 1970s refocused attention on the stimulation of growth and neoclassical policies in the fight against ‘stagflation’; in Britain, in particular, curbing public expenditure had already become a major concern among policy-makers and officials since the late 1960s.379 Counterintuitively, however, the Social Indicators Programme in the OECD came closest to an agreement on international reporting at the height of the crisis in 1976/77, but was thwarted by opposition from a minority of member governments, including the United Kingdom. The subsequent neo-liberal paradigm shift in many countries further undermined international activities in this area, as the Thatcher government, among others, did not regard social reporting as conducive to the propagated concept of entrepreneurial ‘wealth creation’. There were admittedly genuine concerns over the technical feasibility of international comparisons, and the practical obstacles remained considerable until the late twentieth century. There can be little doubt that many technical arguments advanced to make the case against international social reporting were justified. For example, quantifying public services and benefits in kind as non-monetary income supplements has been challenging even within individual countries and raised even more difficult questions in comparisons between countries, given their considerable differences in the provision of such services. Even more obvious were the distortions inherent in comparisons based on non-standardized national data. Also, the lack of sound statistical data in many developing and even in some industrialized countries was certainly not an excuse, but an undeniable reality. However, there was little political pressure to tackle these obstacles, and many experts involved in devising the programmes were much more optimistic about the practicability of some of the proposals. Moreover, even some of the compromise solutions that seemed to offer viable options were mostly not pursued with any urgency. In other words, many of the technical issues cited in the discussions can be regarded as the consequences, not the causes of the decades-long neglect of social statistics throughout the world.

 TNA, CAB 108/697, CSO, Briefing on Agenda Item 11(a) at the Eighteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, Sept. 1974.  Tomlinson, The Labour Governments 1964–70, 203–7.

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Underpinning the various procedural and conceptual arguments brought forward to avert international reporting were nationalistic undercurrents that manifested themselves across different economic and political contexts. Warned by previous experience with sometimes humiliating peer reviews of national economic performances, and wary of the potential political implications of any such activities in the social field, governments tended to regard international comparisons as an encroachment on national preserves. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, this stance ran counter to a larger trend that saw the nation dissolving as a category on many different levels as a result of rising economic liberalism and increasing international entanglements during the 1970s and 1980s, as David Edgerton has recently observed.380 In the field of social statistics, British officials defended national borders until this position became untenable in the 1990s. Similarly, government statisticians seemed reluctant to adapt concepts and ideas from the various international discussions on social metrics for implementation in national statistical programmes. The CSO admittedly did respond to the international debates by embarking on a general expansion of social statistics during the latter half of the 1960s. However, the only concrete change inspired by the social indicators movement in British official statistics was the inception in 1968/70 of an official journal on Social Trends to complement the established CSO periodical Economic Trends. Social Trends represented an annual compilation of national social statistics including a few international tables. More importantly, British officials adopted no methods or definitions from the various social indicators programmes. Government statisticians often saw no need to make any adjustments to international guidelines, or rather saw more sense in others following the British model, pointing to the United Kingdom’s reputation as a country boasting one of the most advanced statistical services in the world. Methodologically, the British statistical system was informed by the international scholarly literature, but it insisted on its own choice of methods and on the restriction of coverage to the national population. Methodological nationalism was an essential part of the national knowledge regimes that governed epistemological practices and norms before the internationalization of the field in the late twentieth century.

 Edgerton, Rise and Fall.

III The Post-War Knowledge Regime, 1948–1972 In 1974, the newly formed Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW) embarked on a large-scale evidence-gathering exercise that took stock of the imperfect state of knowledge on economic inequality in post-war Britain. In an operation that amounted to an unprecedented survey of opinion among British elites on this topic, the Commission collected written and oral statements from academic experts, government departments, professional associations, trade unions, think tanks, campaign groups, political parties, and affiliated organizations that represented all sides of the debate. In the increasingly polarized political climate of the time, the recorded views on this politically sensitive subject differed widely. The differences were not only rooted in opposing political philosophies on issues of distributive justice, but also extended to more technical questions such as the preferable income definition. Furthermore, seemingly technical statistical issues often carried political implications in themselves; for example, the dispute over whether pension rights should be regarded and counted as a component of personal wealth was a methodological choice that could either increase or decrease the degree of measurable inequality in the distribution of wealth. Most importantly, the testimonies highlighted the many gaps and deficiencies in the existing body of statistical knowledge. This became apparent from a long list of suggested improvements. This included calls for combined income and wealth statistics that were still treated as separate entities despite the close connections between the two factors. Several submissions proposed more comprehensible presentations of official statistics: to make statistical findings more transparent to the general public, it was suggested that tables should display summary measures such as the Gini coefficient.1 Others pointed to the lack of statistics on economic inequalities on the regional and local level, while yet others proposed more cross-sectional analyses by age, gender, and region; comments on inequalities of race were conspicuously absent from most submissions.2 The Labour Research Department also lamented the non-existence of statistics on stock ownership and land ownership, while confessing that it did not possess enough ‘expert knowledge of statistical techniques’ to answer some of the more technical questions posed by the RCDIW enquiry.3 The most frequently raised concerns related to the well-known weaknesses of the main statistical series on income and wealth distribution, which produced partly contradictory results and remained open to contestation. Even a market liberal think tank such as the Institute of

 TNA, BS 7/73, Communist Party of Great Britain, Evidence to RCDIW, 1975.  TNA, BS 7/32, Greater London Council (GLC), Evidence to RCDIW, 19 Feb. 1975; TNA, BS 7/31, National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), Evidence to RCDIW, 1975; TNA, BS 7/56, Trade Union Congress (TUC), Evidence to RCDIW, 26 Feb. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/64, LRD, Evidence to RCDIW, 8 Apr. 1975. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-003

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Economic Affairs (IEA) therefore advocated developing a new wealth survey, expecting that the results would downgrade exaggerated estimates of wealth concentration in Britain by bringing to light the undocumented assets owned by the lower strata of the population.4 Existing statistics on income distribution, in turn, differed in coverage, methods, and empirical results to such an extent that past trajectories of income inequality in the country were difficult to discern with certainty, as LSE economist Alan R. Prest advised the RCDIW in his witness hearing: ‘It was still an open question whether in the period since the war there had been a reduction in inequality in incomes’.5 Over the preceding three decades, this controversial question had remained at the heart of public debates and political narratives about the post-war settlement, the ‘affluent society’ and the welfare state.6 In contemporary discussions, the workings and effects of the welfare state were often measured by movements in income and wealth distribution, despite the gaps in the underlying statistics.7 During the early post-war era, income tax statistics derived from Inland Revenue (IR) records provided the only available source for such analyses. However, the IR statistics suffered from significant drawbacks: most importantly, they excluded large proportions of the population below the tax exemption limit. In 1949, newly published IR statistics led contemporary commentators to conclude that an unparalleled ‘equalisation of incomes’ was occurring.8 The narrative of the ‘great redistribution’ was popularized by a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and articles, not least by economists such as Harold Lydall and Frank W. Paish, as LSE sociologist Richard Titmuss criticized in a widely noted intervention in 1962.9 Titmuss had already observed the political consequences of this narrative in earlier years: it fuelled criticism of the welfare state that allegedly pushed redistribution to ‘excessive’ levels at the expense of the middle and upper classes.10 As Titmuss noted, claims of the Conservative party and others about the dangers of redistribution to the economic health and the moral fibre of the nation rested on wrong assumptions, including the illusion that it was even possible to gauge the exact redistributive effects of the welfare state. It is noteworthy that a similar narrative about a historic ‘income revolution’ emerged around the same time in the United States, where economists inflated Simon Kuznets’s findings about recent reductions in top income shares, even if these claims were swiftly refuted by the Labour Research Association and other economists.11 In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the

 TNA, BS 7/57, J. B. Wood, IEA, Evidence to RCDIW, 1975.  TNA, BS 7/30, RCDIW, Oral Evidence Session, A. R. Prest, 11 Mar. 1975.  Crosland, Social Democracy.  Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain, 282.  ‘Redistribution of Incomes’, The Economist, 21 Jan. 1950.  Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change, 15–18; Lydall, ‘Long-Term Trend’.  Titmuss, ‘Social Division of Welfare’, 34–8.  Bronfenbrenner, Income Distribution Theory, 67–72.

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IR statistics underlying the ‘great redistribution’ narrative were not subjected to a detailed critique for more than a decade, as Richard Titmuss pointed out in 1962. Hence, the intellectual critique of the narrative of the ‘affluent society’ during the 1950s could not build on any authoritative statistical sources other than the existing IR series – results from the main alternative source of later years, the newly created Family Expenditure Survey, were not made available to the public until the early 1960s. As academic interest in the subject picked up in the latter half of the decade, researchers began to challenge the conventional picture of decreasing inequalities.12 In 1967, John L. Nicholson’s work on the Family Expenditure Survey suggested that the trend towards greater equality had come to an end by 1957; moreover, the bottom 30 per cent even experienced slight reductions in their income shares, while most of the observed redistributive effects benefited the income ranges in the middle.13 In the same year, however, a study by Alan R. Prest and Thomas Stark painted a picture of a clearer trend towards equality between 1949 and 1963.14 Anthony Atkinson’s analyses from the early 1970s, in turn, suggested ‘that what redistribution there has been is not between the rich and the poor, but between the very rich and the rich,’ echoing arguments advanced earlier by Titmuss and others about the middle classes as the main beneficiaries of the welfare state and the post-war settlement.15 Similarly, research on the incidence of poverty in post-war Britain arrived at diverging findings with poverty rates ranging between 3.5 and 9 per cent; the research established the widely accepted view that a significant minority of the population lived below the Supplementary Benefit level, that is the social security benefit that was widely used as an unofficial poverty line at the time. However, by the early 1970s, the fragmentary evidence still did not allow any clear conclusions to be drawn about trends over time during the past twenty years.16 In 1970, for example, an extended public debate about the economic record of the outgoing Labour government could not resolve whether or not the poor had become poorer under the premiership of Harold Wilson since 1964.17 Despite growing academic research efforts, trends and trajectories of economic inequality remained fiercely contested, as the hearings at the RCDIW demonstrated. By the mid 1970s, the statistical debates had morphed into historical arguments about the economic balance sheet of the post-war settlement, with firmly entrenched battle lines that mapped onto the political divisions in Britain. The Communist Party, for example, emphasized that great inequalities in wealth persisted and that the trend towards greater income equality during the early post-war years had been reversed

 Morris and Preston, ‘Inequality, Poverty and the Redistribution of Income’.  Nicholson, ‘Distribution of Personal Income’; Nicholson, Redistribution of Income in the United Kingdom.  Prest and Stark, ‘Some Aspects of Income Distribution in the United Kingdom’.  Atkinson, Unequal Shares; Titmuss, ‘Social Division of Welfare’; Abel-Smith, ‘Whose Welfare State’.  Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 197–8.  Beckerman, The Labour Government’s Economic Record.

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since the mid 1950s – the extent of redistribution through the welfare state had been exaggerated by the mass media and the ‘apologists for capitalism’, the submission argued.18 By contrast, the Confederation of British Industry suggested that the evidence about past trends in the distribution of income and wealth remained inconclusive, juxtaposing recent research by Atkinson and other economists with a pamphlet published by the IEA.19 In the pamphlet, George Polanyi and John B. Wood of the IEA spoke of the ‘great transformation’ that had occurred in British society over the past twenty-five years: according to Polanyi and Wood, the true extent of redistribution had been grossly underestimated by Atkinson and the Left, with damaging political and economic consequences.20 The narrative of the ‘great transformation’ was advanced by the Right to argue that redistribution had gone too far. Redistribution through the expanding welfare state was singled out as a major cause of national decline, a powerful narrative that the New Right under Thatcher deployed to attack the ‘progressive consensus’ of the post-war era.21 In a landmark speech in 1975, Thatcher claimed that the ‘promotion of greater equality’ that went hand in hand with the ‘extension of the welfare state and state control over people’s lives’ had done ‘damage to our economy in a variety of ways’, weakening the social and moral fabric of British society by creating a culture of dependency instead of rewarding ‘thrift’.22 As RCDIW staff noted, however, Thatcher’s claim that ‘the rich are getting poorer and the poor are getting richer’ was built on a very selective reading of existing statistics with ‘rounding and errors’ pointing ‘all in the “right” direction’.23 The defence of inequality had always been central to Conservative political philosophy, but the proponents of the New Right in the party developed even more uncompromising positions, a shift in ideological thinking that partly occurred in response to the ‘social democratic moment’ and the renewed emphasis on redistribution and egalitarianism in the Labour party during the early and mid 1970s, as the policies of the main parties partly evolved in reaction to each other.24 Consequently, the controversies over past and present trends in economic inequality acquired new political significance during the 1970s. The continued uncertainty over basic facts of post-war social history had already hampered political analyses during the preceding decades, opening up spaces for political narratives to flourish largely unrestrained by any established scientific consensus. It  TNA, BS 7/73, Communist Party of Great Britain, Evidence to RCDIW, 1975.  TNA, BS 7/53, Confederation of British Industry, Evidence to RCDIW, 20 Feb. 1975; Polanyi and Wood, How much Inequality?  TNA, BS 7/57, J. B. Wood, IEA, Evidence to RCDIW, 1975.  Hickson, ‘Conservatism and the Poor’, 345–7.  Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let Our Children Grow Tall’, speech to the Institute of SocioEconomic Studies, New York, 15 Sept. 1975; at [https://www.margaretthatcher.org/docu ment/102769], accessed 18 Oct. 2022.  TNA, BS 7/561, RCDIW, E. Jones to Bayliss, 23 Sept. 1975.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 444–5.

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was widely accepted that improved statistical machinery was required to produce more refined statistical knowledge, and this was part of the rationale behind the establishment of the RCDIW, which was set up by the new Labour government in 1974 not only as an instrument for Labour’s industrial policies, but also with a view to enabling a more informed political debate. The activities and reports of the RCDIW cast light on the work left unfinished from the preceding decades. Furthermore, it eventually provided partial answers to some of the questions that politicians, academics, and commentators had grappled with during the post-war era. In its seventh report published in July 1979, the RCDIW offered an authoritative analysis of the historical trends in income distribution in the United Kingdom since the end of the war: it confirmed that the reductions in top income shares had mostly benefited other groups in the top half of the income spectrum, while the income shares in the bottom half, in particular those of the bottom 30 per cent, had remained virtually unchanged throughout the period between 1949 and 1977.25 By the time this information was published, however, the new Thatcher government had already taken over, and the short-lived social democratic moment of the early 1970s had long since given way to a political climate that was much less receptive to policy ideas concerned with distributive justice. The chronological timeframe of this chapter coincides with the period of the ‘golden age’ in the United Kingdom, but that does not mean that it follows the conventional narrative of the post-war consensus and its disintegration in the 1970s. The wider political context influenced the circulation of inequality knowledge in British society and how it was used in policy-making and public debates, but the production of this knowledge was not primarily driven by politicians, and it often defied the political chronology. As an important caesura in this context, historians have identified the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in 1965 when the publicity surrounding Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith’s groundbreaking book on The Poor and the Poorest put poverty back on the political agenda.26 While this chapter will take a fresh look at the rediscovery of poverty and subsequent efforts to improve statistical knowledge on the incidence of low incomes in Britain, it moves beyond the conventional chronology in that it emphasizes the early 1970s as an important turning point, when academic and political attention shifted from the narrower focus on poverty to wider considerations of overall economic inequality. The early 1970s saw changes on various levels that amounted to a transformation of the existing knowledge regime; conversely, the changes also cast light on past practices and configurations of the preceding decades. In party politics, to start with, the topic became central to the ideological confrontation between the Left and the New Right, after it had played a more subordinate role during most of the post-war era. At the same time, media interest picked up noticeably, without surging to the high levels

 RCDIW, Report No. 7: Fourth Report on the Standing Reference, 157.  Townsend and Abel-Smith, The Poor and the Poorest.

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seen in the 2010s, but still surpassing the coverage of previous years. In economics and sociology, the number of researchers in the field of economic inequality had remained relatively small throughout the 1950s and 1960s, before the early 1970s saw landmark book publications by leading scholars such as Amartya Sen and Anthony B. Atkinson that reflected the growing academic interest in the subject. Furthermore, new techniques of visual presentation made the statistics more accessible to the public, in contrast to the published tables of the post-war era that usually required explanation by experts and journalists. The growing demand for more refined statistical knowledge was met by the RCDIW in an ambitious programme under the auspices of a corporatist steering committee that could draw on the assistance of the Government Statistical Service. The collaboration with the RCDIW signalled a change compared to previous years and decades, when government statisticians had mostly operated behind closed doors, even if they engaged with the academic literature and frequently consulted with external experts. Ultimately, however, government statisticians still remained in control of the statistical system. Scholars were well aware of the power of civil servants to choose statistical methods and measures at their own discretion.27 Furthermore, the concepts and definitions chosen by government statisticians were built into the official data on which most academic work on poverty and income distribution in the United Kingdom depended. The influence of government statistics was also felt by Peter Townsend who warned the scholarly community against uncritically reproducing official concepts and views in their academic work. In 1972, Townsend concluded a journal article on the politics of official statistics with the following advice: ‘Social scientists must escape the trap of discussing poverty only as defined by the Government.’28 As we shall see, the farreaching control of the civil service over poverty and income statistics remained a defining feature of the knowledge regime until the 1990s, and during the post-war era, the predominance of government statistics in this field was even more pronounced, especially before the rise of the ‘poverty lobby’ in 1965. This chapter will analyse the workings of the post-war knowledge regime and trace the evolution of statistical policies and knowledge production on poverty and inequality.

The Production of Knowledge on Economic Inequality In 1974, the new Labour government’s policy interest in a fairer distribution of income and wealth brought the inadequacy of the existing statistical knowledge to the fore: when officials of the Central Statistical Office briefed the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, on the subject, they acknowledged that available data was not of sufficient

 Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 56.  Townsend, ‘Reports and Surveys’.

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quality ‘to represent accurately and monitor changes’ in the distribution of income and wealth.29 The damning stocktaking reflected the chequered record of government statistics in this field during the post-war era. Most statistical knowledge about economic inequality was derived as a by-product from administrative records and not from purpose-built sources. Furthermore, the various sources all suffered from different disadvantages and exhibited different degrees of reliability, but could not be combined to complement each other as they were largely incompatible due to differing underlying definitions of income units, types of income, periods of observation, and geographical coverage. In the statistical programmes of the post-war era, four main areas of work can be distinguished that were partly connected, but formed discrete lines of enquiry with separate statistical series and publications: income distribution, financial poverty, redistribution, and wealth distribution. The following sections will trace the production of knowledge in these four key areas in turn, before the chapter concludes with an overall analysis of the defining features of the post-war knowledge regime.

Wealth Distribution Wealth distribution occupied a central space in political discourse on economic inequality in post-war Britain. The British Left largely concentrated on this topic, while devoting less attention to income distribution; in particular, the vexed issue of inherited wealth was seen as an urgent problem of economic justice.30 This view also informed an important argument in Anthony Crosland’s revisionist programme for ‘The Future of Socialism’ of 1956: overestimating the scale of redistribution that had taken place in post-war Britain, Crosland argued that the scope for redistribution of incomes had been largely exhausted and the socialist agenda for equality should consequently focus on a more equal distribution of wealth instead. However, wealth distribution also happened to be the weak spot in the statistical analysis of economic inequalities in Britain, where even less knowledge was available than on income inequality or poverty. The information gathered from official Inland Revenue data remained partial at best even if it allowed tentative conclusions about larger trends. When the Central Statistical Office (CSO) reported to the Prime Minister about the state of statistics in this area in 1974, the officials were clear that the problems encountered in the measurement of income distribution were outstripped by the difficulties with wealth distribution. Although it was beyond question that the flows and stocks of income and wealth were inseparably intertwined, the CSO saw no other option but to uphold the

 TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Meeting with Prime Minister: Statistics on the Distribution and Redistribution of Personal Income and Wealth, 4 Nov. 1974.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 170–2.

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‘artificial’ distinction and the ‘separate treatment’ in official statistics until ‘better information’ existed.31 For decades, experts had criticized the ‘iron curtain’ between income and wealth distributions as a major obstacle to more meaningful analyses of economic power in Britain, but the problem persisted throughout the post-war era and beyond.32 The neglect of personal wealth distribution in official statistics puzzled contemporary observers, given its significance for the social and economic order in the country: in an analysis in 1961, the economists Harold Lydall and David Tipping regarded the ‘extreme roughness’ of the available figures as ‘the most striking thing about them’.33 Speculating about the causes of the large gaps in knowledge in this important area, the RCDIW pointed to a general lack of interest in stock concepts as opposed to flows that was rooted in the Keynesian economic thought of the time.34 A source from the CSO indirectly lent credence to this view by asserting that the greater attention given to income statistics reflected ‘the fact that the distribution of personal wealth has not been regarded as of prime importance for the management of the economy’.35 Despite large gaps in the underlying data, there was a body of statistical knowledge that informed political narratives and judgements about wealth inequality in post-war Britain. The main source for analyses of wealth distribution consisted in tax records from the levy of estate duty: the taxable wealth of recently deceased persons was used as a random sample of the wealth of the living population. Existing data series derived from estate duty returns went back as far as 1911–13 and were used in a number of pioneering academic analyses during the interwar era and the early post-war period. The analyses consistently showed a downward trend in the concentration of wealth in the country.36 At the same time, they also revealed the stark skewedness of the distribution and were cited by Labour politicians and other commentators as proof of the persisting inequalities in the country.37 In 1954, for example, Hugh Gaitskell interpreted new figures published in an academic journal to the effect that the top 1 per cent in Britain owned as much as 50 per cent of the country’s wealth.38 Such claims testified to the pervasiveness of a political language and imagery of economic inequality that was informed by statistical knowledge and created visions of a society divided by percentiles and relative shares in wealth.

 TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Note for Prime Minister in Distribution and Redistribution of Income, 4 Apr. 1974.  Kaldor, Expenditure Tax; see Chapter 2, section ‘The Attempted Standardization of Statistics on Income Distribution’.  Lydall and Tipping, ‘Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain’, 259.  RCDIW Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 69.  TNA, CAB 108/698, CSO, Paper to the Eighth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 9 May 1975.  Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 132–3.  Langley, ‘Distribution of Private Capital’.  TNA, CAB 139/477, CSO, Draft Reply to Mr Pilkington, 23 Dec. 1954.

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Initially, all existing work resulted from unofficial analyses by academic researchers with access to estate duty statistics – it was not until 1962 that the Inland Revenue started publishing official tables on personal wealth distribution derived from estate duty data on an annual basis. Leading experts such as Anthony B. Atkinson relied on the IR tables in their academic work and defended the underlying methodology as ‘a valuable way of obtaining data on the distribution of wealth’, despite its severe shortcomings.39 Most importantly, the IR data was known to exclude large proportions of the population due to rising tax exemption limits; given the vulnerability of estate duty to tax avoidance, the resulting statistics also understated the concentration of wealth assets at the top. It was estimated that more than half of the population was missing from the statistics, and the published tables only showed subdivisions within the top 20 per cent, while it was not possible to break down the remaining 80 per cent by wealth ranges.40 In important contributions from the early 1970s, Atkinson presented alternative calculations by factoring in estimates of the missing wealth, which somewhat reduced the degree of inequality in the distribution.41 Meanwhile, the IR continued to publish its official wealth tables unadjusted. The IR reports presented trends in wealth inequality measured by the Gini coefficient in two alternative tables that were both based on ‘extreme’ assumptions, as Atkinson criticized in his evidence to the RCDIW: series A ignored the excluded wealth holders altogether and thus arrived at a much lower estimate of wealth concentration than series B, which assumed that the excluded population owned no wealth at all. The Inland Revenue argued that both series taken together could still indicate broader trends, but, as Atkinson noted, series A showed a much more marked decline in wealth concentration between 1960 and 1972 than series B, where the Gini coefficient merely fell from 0.87 to 0.86.42 Importantly, official statistics invariably gave more weight to series A, which was presented as the main table not only in the published IR reports but also in other government publications such as the CSO journal Social Trends, while caveats and information on series B were banished to footnotes and annexes. Accordingly, the statistics were open to very different political judgements, as commentators noted.43 Furthermore, government statisticians observed that due to the lack of more detailed statistics, wealth as a category was largely absent from social policy debates, despite its relevance for a variety of issues.44 Hence, Atkinson’s first two recommendations to the RCDIW were concerned not only with the presentation of official

 TNA, BS 7/26, Anthony B. Atkinson and A. J. Harrison, Evidence on the Distribution of Wealth to the RCDIW, Jan. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/500, RCDIW, Wealth of the Bottom 80 per cent and of Owner-Occupiers, 15 Nov. 1978.  Atkinson, Unequal Shares.  TNA, BS 7/26, Atkinson, Evidence to the RCDIW, Jan. 1975.  Sandford, ‘The Distribution of Personal Wealth’.  TNA, BS 7/465, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Note on Savings Surveys, 27 Sept. 1974.

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statistics, which had so far ‘misled many people’, but also, more fundamentally, with the need to produce more knowledge about the undocumented wealth of the missing population.45 The deficiencies and gaps in official statistics also affected other discussions of politically important aspects of wealth distribution in Britain. This applied, in particular, to the issue of inheritance, a factor of economic power that was widely seen as conflicting with notions of equality of opportunity. This issue was singled out by the RCDIW in its first report as one of the major weaknesses of existing statistics: IR sources provided no information whatsoever about the total wealth transmitted between generations, and neither was it possible to quantify the importance of inheritance in relation to other sources of wealth.46 In other words, IR statistics did not allow any analysis of the extent to which recorded wealth was derived from inheritance or accumulated lifetime savings. Academic research on the subject suggested that inheritance continued to play a major role in British society, with patterns largely unchanged since the interwar era, but it mostly concentrated on samples of top wealth holders and could not compensate for the dearth of information on the overall size and distribution of transmitted wealth.47 Existing research only enabled tentative conclusions to be drawn as to whether the importance of inheritance was decreasing or increasing. Alongside the issue of the missing population, this problem strengthened the case for a new wealth survey to supplement existing IR statistics, a proposal that was also supported by Anthony B. Atkinson.48 The first wealth surveys in post-war Britain were drawn up during the early 1950s, but were later mostly remembered for the difficulties encountered in the process. Sample surveys of personal savings were carried out by academic researchers at the Oxford Institute of Statistics in collaboration with the Government Statistical Service in 1952, 1953, and 1954. In 1955, the CSO assumed responsibility for the work and conducted another savings survey. However, this was followed up by only two more surveys, in 1960 and 1961, the results of which were never published. This was despite encouraging results and a partly enthusiastic reception of the first four surveys in the transatlantic academic world. Modelled after the Consumer Finances Survey in the US, the Oxford surveys were based on large samples of around 2,600 income units from all social strata – this represented the first large-scale attempt ever to extend the analysis of living standards from the traditional focus on working-class households to the whole population in Britain and was therefore celebrated by some as a veritable ‘technological revolution’.49 The surveys collected information on both incomes and savings, exploring

 TNA, BS 7/26, Atkinson, Evidence to the RCDIW, Jan. 1975.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 129.  Harbury, ‘Inheritance and the Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain’; Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 154–5.  TNA, BS 7/26, Atkinson, Evidence to the RCDIW, Jan. 1975.  Tobin, Review of Harold Lydall, British Incomes and Savings (Oxford, 1955).

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important questions regarding saving habits, distributions by size, and the interrelatedness of savings and income.50 Much of the results were deemed ‘reasonably full and accurate’ and there was ‘a remarkable consistency between the results’ of the four surveys.51 However, well-known problems with non-response and underreporting of wealth assets that were particularly prevalent among higher wealth ranges meant that the surveys tended to understate the degree of inequality in the distribution of wealth.52 Furthermore, there were discrepancies between the survey results and national income estimates, although it was recognized that the latter did not necessarily provide a reliable yardstick, as national income statistics were known to have considerable deficiencies in the domain of personal savings.53 The seemingly overwhelming problems associated with wealth surveys in Britain flowed more from experience with the CSO surveys of 1960 and 1961 than with the Oxford surveys of the early 1950s. When the CSO had taken over responsibility for the 1955 survey, it had been expected to continue the surveys on an annual basis, but subsequently climbed down on resource grounds.54 The decision to relaunch the savings surveys in 1960 had been partly prompted by calls from outside the CSO, most prominently by the recommendations of the Radcliffe committee, which reported on monetary policy in Britain in 1959, emphasizing the potential value of regular savings surveys for a variety of analytical purposes.55 Consequently, the CSO initiated fieldwork on the new survey in January 1960 with an ambitious methodological design: the sample was chosen with secretive assistance from the Inland Revenue, which provided addresses of surtax payers to increase coverage in the top wealth ranges. The CSO intended to make a decision on the introduction of annual surveys as soon as the results from the 1960 survey became available, but ran into problems and consequently refrained from planning any further surveys after 1961.56 The problems had started with the computing of the results: although the Oxford Institute of Statistics had offered to take on the analysis, it was contracted out by the CSO to a commercial firm, which failed to produce usable results of the 1960 survey and caused long delays; this also affected the work on the 1961 survey, which was put on hold while the problems persisted.57 There were also more conceptual concerns that were later found to be exaggerated. Preliminary results seemed to suggest significant underreporting of income

 Harold F. Lydall, British Incomes and Savings (Oxford, 1955).  Nicholson and Erritt, ‘The 1955 Savings Survey’.  Ibid.; TNA, CAB 108/698, CSO, Paper to the Eighth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 9 May 1975.  Nicholson and Erritt, ‘The 1955 Savings Survey’.  TNA, CAB 139/532, CSO, R. E. Beales to L. Moss / Social Survey, 23 June 1959.  TNA, CAB 139/532, CSO, R. E. Beales to L. Moss / Social Survey, 28 Oct. 1960.  TNA, CAB 139/532, CSO, Meeting on Savings Survey, 29 Sept. 1960.  TNA, CAB 139/691, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to R. E. Beales, 30 July 1962.

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among ‘a number of respondents’ and showed discrepancies with control totals from other sources, so that CSO officials feared the results might be ‘too unreliable to justify publication’.58 Meanwhile, the search for solutions was also hampered by inactivity in the CSO. The fact that no work was undertaken on the 1961 survey even after several years since the fieldwork had taken place met with incomprehension in Whitehall: one of the officials in the Social Survey Division critically remarked ‘that the failure over the 1960 Survey was not a sufficient reason for not trying to do something with the results of the later survey’.59 However, even the negative assessment of the 1960 survey, which had discouraged any further work on the 1961 survey, was gradually reversed in later years. In 1965, an internal re-analysis in the CSO came to the conclusion ‘that while some of the survey results are poor, some are very good and there is no reason to distrust the survey as a whole’.60 The Social Survey Division was not fully convinced of the success of the CSO effort ‘to rehabilitate the 1960 survey’,61 but it was vindicated when government statisticians revisited the 1960 and 1961 surveys again two years later, as a CSO paper retrospectively explained: ‘A re-examination in 1967 showed that, if properly processed, these two surveys would have been as good as their predecessors.’62 As for the reasons why the surveys had not been processed properly, the paper pointed to the allocation of staff resources, which reflected the priorities of the CSO: while the 1953 survey had been processed at the Oxford Institute of Statistics by ‘2 full-time statisticians plus two others for parts of the year together with some 5 or 6 trained economists to work on the returned questionnaires for 5 to 6 weeks at the editing stage’, the CSO assigned only one statistician to work part-time on the 1960 and 1961 surveys.63 Notwithstanding the more positive outlook, mounting a national savings survey was still regarded as a technically challenging task, and as it turned out, the CSO could not be convinced to invest in such an undertaking, despite growing calls to close this significant gap in official statistics. In light of the ‘complete lack of information’ in this area, the need for ‘a new enquiry on personal savings’ was included in the recommendations of the Jackson report in 1967, which had been commissioned to develop proposals for the reform of the Government Statistical Service.64 In late 1968, the CSO also faced pressure from government ministers in the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) who argued strongly in favour of reinstating regular savings surveys – as Claus Moser suspected, the interventions were inspired by the views

 TNA, CAB 139/691, CSO, R. G. Beales to P. Baldwin, 31 Aug. 1961.  TNA, CAB 139/691, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to Berman, 22 June 1964.  TNA, CAB 139/691, CSO, G. A. Dean to Berman, 25 Aug. 1965.  TNA, CAB 139/691, SSD, W. F. F. Kemsley to G. A. Dean, 27 Sept. 1965.  TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Surveys of Personal Savings, 15 Apr. 1969.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 139/567, CSO, Statistical Policy Committee, Meeting on 5 May 1967.

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of John Leonard Nicholson, the former CSO statistician who had transferred to the Department of Health and Social Security in March 1968.65 In April 1968, Nicholson had enquired from Moser whether he ‘could give some idea of the prospects of collecting up-to-date information on this subject’, which was required, among other things, for analyses of the effects of taxation and social security on personal savings.66 Moser, however, declined on staff resource grounds, pointing out that two full-time statisticians were required for work on savings surveys that he was not willing to commit to this task: ‘I do not think that they should take precedence over the other jobs which we now have in hand. They must wait until we have more staff.’67 Consequently, the issue was discussed at the Statistical Policy Committee, but there was little support for the idea and the issue remained on the inactive agenda.68 The pros and cons of a new savings survey were again rehearsed in interdepartmental deliberations in 1973; however, the concerns over the ‘severe technical difficulties’ still outweighed the considerations of the ‘potential usefulness’ of cross-sectional savings data that could shed light on the relationship between income and wealth among households with various socio-economic characteristics.69 In terms of potential uses, earlier papers and discussions among officials had focused primarily on savings habits as a topic of particular interest, and not even John Leonard Nicholson’s intervention in 1969 had mentioned the potential of savings data as a source for monitoring movements in wealth inequality. The idea that sample surveys could be used to fill in the gaps in the existing estate duty statistics on the distribution of wealth did not surface in the discussions in Whitehall during the 1960s. This was despite the fact that leading experts such as Harold Lydall had demonstrated in their published work during the 1950s and 1960s that savings surveys had a role to play in supplementing Inland Revenue data or as a source in their own right.70 Furthermore, the concept of savings underlying the pioneering Oxford surveys in the 1950s matched the definition of wealth in the estate duty statistics to a great extent: apart from items such as consumer durables and insurance policies, both sources covered largely the same financial and non-financial asset types.71 Nevertheless, government statisticians mostly discussed the subject in narrower terms of ‘savings’ and seldom before 1973 referred to the more comprehensive term ‘wealth’.  TNA, CAB 139/568, DHSS, Judith Hart to Edmund Dell / Board of Trade and chairman of the Statistical Policy Committee, 16 Oct. 1968; DHSS, Stephen Swingler to Edmund Dell, 6 Dec. 1968; CSO, Claus Moser to S. F. James, 21 Oct. 1968.  TNA, CAB 139/561, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to C. Moser / CSO, 23 Apr. 1968.  TNA, CAB 139/561, CSO, C. Moser to J. L. Nicholson, 29 Apr. 1968.  TNA CAB 108/347, CSO, Statistical Policy Committee, Meeting on 8 May 1969.  TNA, CAB 108/448, CSO, Committee for Programme Development, Pilot Returns to Part 2 of the Statistical Programme Questionnaire, 10 July 1973.  Lydall and Lansing, ‘Comparison of the Distribution of Personal Income and Wealth’, 57–61.  Ibid. 58; TNA, BS 7/553, RCDIW, RC(74)22: Items for Possible Inclusion in the Definition of Personal Wealth, 27 Nov. 1974.

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In another noteworthy episode during the early 1970s, the CSO also pushed other work that had a bearing on the analysis of wealth in Britain to the back of the queue. In attempts to produce estimates of total wealth in Britain, the Cambridge economist Jack Revell had pioneered the sector balance-sheet method: based on the system of national accounts, the method drew on independent sources to calculate the sum of all assets and liabilities across sectors, including the personal sector.72 This work was of considerable relevance for the analysis of wealth distribution because estimates of balance-sheet totals for the personal sector could be used as control totals for the estimates derived from estate duty statistics.73 The balance-sheet totals were themselves subject to methodological reservations, but they were widely regarded as a valuable tool to calculate the size of the missing wealth and other deficiencies in the estate duty statistics. According to the latest estimates of the early 1970s, the sum of total wealth derived from estate duty records amounted to only about 70 per cent of the balance-sheet total, and the balance-sheet method provided a basis for adjusting the estate duty statistics accordingly, although allocating the corrected wealth to specific wealth ranges required complicated procedures.74 This work had been produced by a team of researchers at Cambridge University funded jointly by the Bank of England and the CSO, and following the publication of the results in the CSO journal Economic Trends in 1971, Revell handed the work over to the CSO. At the CSO, however, the work was subsequently ‘largely abandoned’.75 When the RCDIW showed interest in the topic and contacted Revell in early 1975, he could not conceal his disappointment over ‘the fact that CSO had not made arrangements for national balance sheets to be published on a regular basis’.76 The CSO, in turn, ‘had not foreseen the Commission’s interest in this field’ when it was approached by the RCDIW: as CSO representatives explained, possible future work in this area had been considered, but there had been ‘little pressure for the task to be given any priority’.77 As a result, little progress was made in the improvement of official estimates of wealth distribution in post-war Britain, as the most promising avenues for research to fill in the large gaps in the existing data were pursued only half-heartedly or were even closed down. The upward trend in academic research on economic inequalities in the early 1970s was not matched by increased efforts in the Government Statistical Service to improve the existing body of knowledge. What officials in the CSO and Inland Revenue took away from Anthony Atkinson’s landmark 1972 study ‘Unequal

 Revell, The Wealth of the Nation.  TNA, BS 7/489, RCDIW, Background Papers on Balance Sheets, 1975.  Ibid.; TNA, BS 7/553, RCDIW, RC(75)1, Reconciliation of Certain Estimates of Net Personal Wealth, 8 Jan. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/553, RCDIW, RC(75)1, Reconciliation of Certain Estimates of Net Personal Wealth, 8 Jan. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/489, RCDIW, F. J. Bayliss to Chairman: Luncheon with Professor Revell, 24 Jan. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/465, RCDIW, A. Johnson to E. Jones, National Balance Sheets, 29 Jan. 1975.

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Shares’ was that alternative approaches were ‘unlikely’ to alter the present picture of wealth distribution significantly, and officials saw only ‘some marginal scope’ for improving the estate duty statistics; in their view, none of the alternative approaches justified ‘the very considerable effort und staff resources required to pursue it’.78 In fact, current staffing arrangements even imposed further reductions to the available data: due to severe staff shortages at the Estate Duty Office, the IR Statistics Division had to ‘accept reduced coverage of the smaller estates and reduced reporting of asset detail rather than being able to follow up plans to increase the coverage’.79 This contrasted with the growing interest in wealth distribution at the political level, as government ministers faced more and more parliamentary questions on this issue and Atkinson’s book challenged the conventional wisdom that inequality was diminishing.80 These developments were part and parcel of the ongoing transformation of the knowledge regime, which entailed that wealth distribution eventually moved up on the agenda of government statistics in subsequent years.

Income Inequality In a remarkable parallel that characterized developments in the measurement of income inequality during the post-war era, John Leonard Nicholson of the CSO explained in correspondence with the Ministry of Food in 1949 that ‘practically nothing’ could be deduced from existing information on income distribution in the United Kingdom about the positions of the top and bottom deciles; and almost a quarter of a century later, a near identical assessment was made in a reply to a parliamentary question in autumn 1973 when the government announced that ‘information was not available to estimate the income of the poorest 10 per cent in the United Kingdom’.81 This was despite numerous and multi-faceted efforts by the Government Statistical Service (GSS) to develop statistical machinery for producing more knowledge on the material resources of households and individuals. These activities led to improvements on various levels and resulted in new statistical series, most notably, the Family Expenditure Survey (FES, 1957), the New Earnings Survey (NES, 1968), and the General Household Survey (GHS, 1971); however, the efforts were not consistent and sustained enough to build a unified system of income statistics that could have closed the existing gaps and provided more conclusive answers to questions about movements in economic inequality and related issues raised by social scientists and social activists in the country. The persistent shortcomings were partly due to the limited

 TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, J. H. Gracey to Jones, Distribution of Wealth, 24 Aug. 1973.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 139/809, HMT, D. Seammen to J. H. Gracey, Distribution of Wealth, 17 May 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/268, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to E. H. H. Lloyd, Ministry of Food, 5 Nov. 1949; TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, K. J. Newman to P. H. Richardson / Department of Trade and Industry, 5 Apr. 1974.

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resources allocated to this cause in the GSS, where economic statistics were constantly prioritized over social statistics, but also to the changing interests that drove statistical work programmes in this area in Whitehall. During the first two decades of the post-war era, interest mainly centred on expenditure data, information on earnings, and the redistributive effects of the welfare state, and when interest in income inequality picked up in the mid 1960s, it largely concentrated on questions of poverty and the bottom of the income scale, while work on overall income inequality ground to a halt or was even scaled back. In the immediate post-war years, the strong commitment of the Labour government to notions of equity did not translate into urgent action to monitor the effects of social policies statistically. The Attlee government’s top priority was to rebalance the national economy and to this end it pursued a rigorous strategy of austerity that was sold to the public in a propaganda campaign based on notions of ‘fair shares’ and the promise of rising living standards and increased levels of consumption in the future.82 The strategy of austerity also guided the government in the implementation of the Beveridge social security plan and the creation of the National Health Service – what resulted was an ‘austerity welfare state’ with benefits set at very low levels.83 The same applied to the non-poverty living standard that was introduced under Attlee, and although the government was strongly committed to the reduction of poverty, there was no revival of the empirical investigation into poverty of earlier decades.84 Existing sources on living standards in government statistics were severely limited in scope. The National Food Survey that had been introduced in 1940 only covered the working classes before it was extended to the whole population in 1950; furthermore, it recorded only rough information on incomes, and published results showed average values for various family types without breaking down the distribution above and below the average.85 Official information on the distribution of personal incomes in post-war Britain first became available in 1949 when the Inland Revenue published tables based on income tax records broken down by income ranges. In the same year, the IR began a series of quinquennial Surveys of Personal Incomes (SPI) that were complemented by smaller annual surveys in 1962: the data from these sources also provided the basis of the national income estimates that were published in the so-called Blue Books. Due to their limited coverage, however, the IR statistics significantly understated the degree of inequality: they excluded an unknown number of households below the tax exemption limit, and they included no information on important income components such as social benefits and allowable deductions such as mortgage relief that benefited home owners. Similarly, statistics

 Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 21–32.  Ibid. 29.  Page, ‘Towards a “Red” and Pleasant Land?’; Gazeley, Poverty, 157.  TNA, LAB 17/370, Draft Manuscript by Peter Townsend, ‘The Concepts of Poverty and Subsistence’ (1962).

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on wage rates had been published annually since 1946 and reflected rising average earnings, but did not show the distributions within individual industries or occupations and obviously covered only earnings, not incomes as a whole.86 With regard to contemporary discussions of poverty, the absence of more precise information on the distribution of incomes helps to explain why commentators relied so heavily on the misleading results of the Rowntree survey of York in 1950–51. Household surveys offered a viable alternative with much more comprehensive coverage, but it took the GSS a decade to develop the FES as the main statistical source on living standards in the United Kingdom. In the modern literature, the familiar story appears to be rather straightforward: in 1947, the Cost of Living Advisory Committee recommended repeating the Family Budget Enquiry of 1937–38 to update the Cost of Living Index, and this paved the way for the large-scale Household Expenditure Survey of 1953–54 and the subsequent introduction of the continuous FES in 1957.87 The FES, in particular, has been hailed as marking ‘a new era for poverty research in the UK’.88 A closer look reveals a more complicated, long-drawn-out process that was fraught with technical difficulties and differences of opinion over the purposes of the future survey. The long duration was partly due to the fact that the GSS had ‘very little experience’ with sample surveys and had to undertake a series of experimental pilot surveys between 1949 and 1951 to develop viable techniques.89 Other delays were due to interdepartmental conflicts over the responsibility for the surveys in Whitehall. The Ministry of Labour had overseen the 1937–38 and 1953–54 surveys for purposes of the Retail Price Index and resisted calls from the CSO that it should take over, but, as John Leonard Nicholson argued, it lacked the statistical expertise to fully exploit the results, and by early 1956 it had still not produced a detailed analysis of the 1953–54 survey.90 Leaving the Ministry of Labour in charge signalled a lack of interest in the data on the part of the government, Nicholson argued: ‘It boils down, therefore, to the simple question, are we really interested in the continuing family budget enquiries or not?’91 In the meantime, impatience with the slow progress had also grown outside the GSS. In a critical editorial in 1951, The Times advocated that household surveys should be developed for the purposes of ‘good government’ and not be left to the sectional interests of the Ministry of Labour; and in 1956 the Prime Minister, Macmillan, included household surveys in his list of demands for improvements when he publicly reprimanded the GSS

 TNA, IR 64/532, DE, Historical Account of British Labour Statistics, Jan. 1970. Statistical enquiries on the distribution of earnings were made in 1886, 1906, 1938, and 1960, before the New Earnings Survey was introduced in 1968.  Whitehead, ‘The Government Social Survey’.  Deeming, ‘The Historical Development of Family Budget Standards in Britain’, 778.  TNA, CAB 108/373, CSO, J. L. Nicholson, 1959.  TNA, CAB 139/378, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to H. Campion, Who should be in Control of a Continuous Family Budget Survey?, 12 Jan. 1955.  TNA, CAB 139/378, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to H. Campion, 27 Mar. 1956.

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for the deficiencies in the statistical machinery. Inside the CSO, Nicholson pressed his superiors to act on the recommendations of the Economic Policy Committee and other bodies for a continuous household survey, and in spring 1956, the CSO eventually began the process of planning for it, with an interdepartmental committee in charge of the arrangements.92 The administrative disputes over the household survey reflected the uphill struggle faced by statisticians at the CSO, notably John Leonard Nicholson, to broaden the narrow focus of the early family budget enquiries. Analysing economic inequalities remained at best a subordinate function of official household surveys during the first two decades of the post-war period. To specialists such as Nicholson it was clear, not least from the ongoing transnational discussions in the ILO and developments in the US and elsewhere, that household surveys could be used to ‘obtain information about the standard of living, proportions above and below the “poverty line”, comparisons with nutritional requirements, and comparisons over time and space’.93 Until the mid 1950s, however, the British family budget enquiries were conducted ‘with very limited aims in view’, primarily to obtain weights for calculating cost of living indices.94 The extension of family budget surveys had been on the government agenda from the early post-war years, but even bodies such as the Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research were sceptical about the possibilities for widening the scope beyond the traditional focus on the working class.95 In interdepartmental deliberations about the aims and the design of the prospective household survey in the late 1940s, the CSO struggled to convince other departments to use the survey for the collection of income data. The Ministry of Labour, in particular, was primarily interested in expenditure data and had reservations about including questions on income due to concerns over possible detrimental effects on response rates.96 The fact that the large-scale 1953–54 survey recorded income at all was due not least to the strong lead provided by John Leonard Nicholson who in discussions with other government departments tirelessly stressed the importance of closing the gap in knowledge about incomes. While the primary focus remained on expenditure, interest gradually shifted towards income and related distributive questions. In 1954, Harry Campion and John Leonard Nicholson managed to get the go-ahead from Treasury officials to embark on a new type of analysis to gauge the redistributive effects of the tax/benefit system, despite concerns in the Treasury over the ‘political risks’ involved in such analyses, and on the condition that this line of work would not distract the CSO from other commitments

 TNA, CAB 139/378, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to H. Campion, 10 Jan. 1956; CSO, H. Campion, Note on Arrangements for Continuing Family Budget Enquiries, 15 May 1956.  TNA, CAB 139/268, CSO, J. L. Nicholson, Some Views on Family Budget Enquiries, 13 Aug. 1949.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 139/182, Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research, Note for 9th Meeting, 15 Jan. 1948.  TNA, CAB 139/268, CSO, Informal Meeting on Family Budget Enquiry, 15 Sept. 1949.

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that were deemed more important, such as the work on shares.97 This occurred in the context of ongoing public debates about the workings and beneficiaries of the welfare state, and the innovation of nationwide household surveys for the first time provided a data source comprehensive enough for such analyses.98 In the latter half of the decade, the CSO also developed more interest in the monitoring of income inequality over time as a subject to be pursued in the new FES, a topic that was analytically distinct but received less attention than the synchronic analysis of the distributive effects of benefits and taxes in a given year.99 In interdepartmental discussions on the FES, officials continued to regard the provision of expenditure data for the official price index as the main purpose of the survey until interest began to gravitate to the income side in the mid 1960s: in 1965, officials observed increasing interest in the FES for a growing variety of policy issues across departments, and income was recognized as a variable of paramount importance, while it had previously been considered merely as an ‘important auxiliary variable’.100 This shift was partly motivated by the increasing demand for earnings statistics at a time when industrial relations and debates over incomes policies and pay restraint were high on the political agenda, but also by a growing awareness of the inadequacies of the welfare state that precipitated enquiries within the civil service even before Townsend and Abel-Smith published their headline-grabbing book.101 Hence, the shift in attention towards income was primarily associated with povertyrelated issues, a link that was only reinforced in the wake of the ‘rediscovery of poverty’: after 1965, in particular, the efforts of statistical offices in the United Kingdom concentrated mostly on the circumstances of low-income families instead of income distribution as a whole.102 These discussions unfolded against the backdrop of transnational efforts for improved social metrics that inspired some statistical reforms in the GSS; however, the changes did not go far enough to overcome the identified deficiencies in the existing machinery. In particular, there was an unresolved problem that severely affected the

 TNA, CAB 139/477, CSO / HMT, Notes on Meeting between H. Campion / CSO and H. Brittain / HMT, 21 July 1954; TNA, CAB 108/247, CSO, J. L. Nicholson, The Social Redistribution of Income, 14 Feb. 1956.  TNA, CAB 108/247, CSO, J. L. Nicholson, Suggested Analyses of the Ministry of Labour’s Household Expenditure Survey, 5 Nov. 1956.  TNA, CAB 108/373, CSO, J. L. Nicholson / Kemsley, Some Experiments in Methods of Conducting Family Expenditure Surveys, 19 Oct. 1959.  TNA, LAB 17/403, CSO (SEP)(65)19, 14 June 1965; TNA, CAB 139/681, CSO, Correspondence and paper on ‘income problems in the FES’, Apr. 1966; TNA, CAB 108/377, CSO, Note on definition of income, 17 May 1966.  TNA, CAB 108/378, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 19 July 1967; O’Hara, ‘“Planned Growth of Incomes”’; O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment, 44–52; Veit-Wilson, ‘The National Assistance Board’.  TNA, CAB 108/346, CSO(S)(68)2, Use of FES for Social Research, Note by the Ministry of Social Security, 6 June 1968; TNA, CAB 108/517, CSO, Meeting, Validation of FES Data, 27 Nov. 1970; TNA, CAB 108/ 751, CSO, Interim Report on FES Review, 26 Apr. 1973.

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accuracy of statistical analyses in a broad range of subject areas, from the incidence of individual welfare benefits to the circumstances of specific sub-groups of social security recipients. This problem consisted in the relatively small sample size of the FES, which caused large error margins for certain results. Thus, interdepartmental discussions in 1965 came to the conclusion that the original sample size of 5,000 households in the FES should be quadrupled in two subsequent phases within two consecutive years, an enlargement that was to improve the quality of the analysis in many areas, but was not even dramatic enough to push the error margin in analyses on smaller geographical regions such as Northern Ireland below certain thresholds.103 During the implementation of the first phase in 1967, however, a drop in the response rate and concerns over the quality of the enlarged interviewer field force led the GSS to abandon the plans for further expansion.104 This meant that statisticians had to content themselves with a sample size of about 7,000 responding households, a level that was known to be too low for many analytical purposes. Most importantly perhaps, it entailed extremely small sub-samples for specific sub-groups in the population that were relevant for policy questions such as one-parent families, families with four or more children, the long-term sick, and the unemployed.105 Error margins for social groups of less than 50,000 were as wide as +/- 60 per cent, and even estimates for larger groups of about 500,000 were subject to a potential range of error of +/16 per cent; however, the FES data were still regarded as ‘the best available’ source for the measurement of poverty and other research purposes.106 While the precise knowledge of the limited validity of the data was not made available to users of the FES outside the government, government officials in the Treasury and the DHSS noted with some concern that policy decisions had to be taken on such a shaky basis.107 The FES was seen by government departments as ‘a unique fund of important economic and social data’, but especially the small numbers representing the tails at the top and bottom of the income spectrum limited its potential uses, including the application of FES data in computerized micro-simulations of the incidence of social security benefits.108 Consequently, the inadequacies of the FES led to an internal review in 1971 that addressed a range of technical issues, among others, the difficulties encountered in identifying ‘low-income households’, but it concluded in 1973 without recommending another expansion of the FES: the idea of increasing the sample size seemed too expensive and was even regarded as ‘wasteful’ by government

 TNA, CAB 108/377, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, 1st Meeting, 21 Jan. 1966.  TNA, CAB 108/378, Social Survey Division, 13 July 1967; TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO(S)(69)4, 29 Apr. 1969.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on FES, Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 130/807, MISC 78(75)7, 8 Dec 1975: Interim Report on Financial Poverty, Appendix D.  TNA, CAB 108/518, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 29 Apr. 1971; TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 15 Dec. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Review of the Family Expenditure Survey, 28 Sept. 1971.

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statisticians who were interested mainly in the bottom of the income spectrum rather than in the income distribution as a whole.109 Moreover, any increase in the sample size was expected to cause losses in quality and lower response rates as larger samples required the service of an enlarged field force with new, inexperienced interviewers. As a result, the problems associated with the small sample size of the FES continued to hamper statistical analyses of economic inequalities in the United Kingdom; given the added deficiencies in the coverage of higher incomes, investment incomes, and the incomes of the self-employed, the FES was not considered reliable enough as a source on income distribution in its own right.110 To obtain more precise information on incomes, government statisticians also explored other potential sources and methods, but again ran into problems. One of the most promising lines of enquiry consisted in the proposal to include a question on income in the Census of Population, which seemed to offer a host of advantages: a reliable sampling frame, large sample sizes, and the possibility of cross-classification with a rich fund of demographic and social variables. Income information from the Census held the promise of redressing many of the shortcomings of existing income statistics: it was expected to provide a picture of the income distribution on a detailed geographical basis, complete with coverage of lower incomes below the tax exemption limit. Using the Census for the collection of income data had been a well-established practice of statistical offices in the US and a number of Commonwealth countries since the 1940s, but had never been tried in the United Kingdom.111 The failure to follow these examples was blamed by many on the opposition of the General Register Office (GRO): at the Inland Revenue, there was frustration over the ‘sad history of previous attempts’ in the late 1950s and mid 1960s when similar requests had been rejected.112 A new attempt was made in 1966–67 when officials advanced the idea of including a question on incomes in the 1971 Census and even brought the issue before the Cabinet, where it won approval in 1968. The question was subsequently piloted in Census pre-tests in the same year and the following year, but the GRO found the results disappointing and argued that the inclusion of an unpopular question on incomes risked dragging down overall co-operation in the Census.113 The view at the CSO was more optimistic: the response rate of 55 per cent in the 1969 pre-test did not seem discouraging, and experience from the US showed that participation could be expected to increase once the question was established and accompanied by publicity.114 Furthermore, the CSO director, Claus Moser, proposed to restrict the income question to a 10 per cent sample in the Census to minimize the potential risks. Alongside the

     

TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Interim Report on FES Review, 26 Apr. 1973. Ibid.; Economic Trends, June 1976. Anderson, American Census, 181–3. TNA, CAB 139/560, IR, S. J. to Bishop, CSO, 4 May 1967. TNA, CAB 139/568, Memorandum by the Minister of State, Board of Trade, Nov. 1968. TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting on 27 Aug. 1969.

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CSO, numerous government departments expressed ‘strong interest’ in obtaining income data from the Census. Nevertheless, the CSO director, Claus Moser, eventually gave in to the misgivings of the GRO, despite his personal support for the idea: in August 1969, it was agreed that the question was to be dropped from the Census and be pursued instead in a voluntary follow-up survey to the Census.115 In the event, controversies around the 1971 Census led ministers to postpone the follow-up survey and when it was finally carried out in the form of a postal questionnaire in 1972 it achieved a response rate of only slightly over 50 per cent. Results did not become available until the mid 1970s and were never fully exploited.116 Thus, despite the high hopes placed on the Census, it did not become a major source for income statistics in the United Kingdom, although related ideas were further pursued later in the 1970s. The expansion of social statistics in the Government Statistical Service during the 1960s led to a number of other innovations that made valuable additions to existing knowledge on economic inequalities in the United Kingdom, but failed to remedy the core problems. Considerable improvements were achieved in statistics on earnings, an area that received much attention in light of the political interest in incomes policies and collective pay bargaining during this period. Before the late 1960s, official statistics concentrated on documenting average wage rates in various sectors and industries, but offered little information on the distribution of earnings, apart from two enquiries conducted in 1938 and 1960. Consequently, debates about incomes policies under Conservative and Labour governments of the 1960s could not draw on detailed data on the dispersion of wages but focused mostly on rougher measures such as the growth of average wages or the wage share. In 1966, for example, a paper on statistical requirements for incomes policies prepared by the Department of Economic Affairs stated that the ‘existing information’ on ‘the main categories of factor income i.e. employment income, income from self-employment, gross trading profits of companies’, and other components was ‘sufficient to review the progress of the policy over the economy as a whole’, although it was recognized that there were significant gaps in official statistics and that future political events would ‘doubtless throw up new demands for statistical information’.117 Nonetheless, obtaining more information on earnings was on the agenda of the GSS. This goal was not only part of the rationale behind the expansion of the FES in 1967; in the same year, the Ministry of Labour and other interested government departments also pushed ahead with plans for a new survey, which resulted in the introduction of the NES in 1968.118 The NES provided regular information on earnings by industries, occupations, and sex, showing the distribution in relation to the median in each category. This filled an important gap:

 TNA, CAB 108/748, CSO(S)(70)9, 27 Oct. 1970.  TNA, BS 7/476, RCDIW, Reports and correspondence on the Census Follow-up Survey, 1974–8.  TNA, CAB 139/536, DEA, Evidence to the Estimates Committee, 20 Apr. 1966.  TNA, CAB 108/378, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 7 Apr. 1967; TNA, CAB 139/566, F. Jones, Statistical Policy Committee: Earnings Information, 19 July 1967.

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previously, earnings statistics had been cited in official circles as a prime example of the tardiness of government statistics, and the NES allowed much more sophisticated questioning in debates about earnings.119 On the other hand, the NES obviously covered only a single, if important income component; furthermore, it reduced the momentum of the reform drive in the area of income statistics in that it eliminated a major argument for a further expansion of the FES as a source for incomes as a whole.120 As the FES was serving more and more purposes and the questionnaire was increasingly overburdened, the GSS under Claus Moser also embarked on work on a new household survey in the late 1960s, which eventually began life as the GHS in 1971. Comprising a broad range of ‘core questions’, the GHS bore the hallmarks of the transnational social indicators movement of the time, although Moser had cited the Japanese model as an inspiration for a new multi-purpose household survey in his blueprint for the future of the GSS from 1967.121 With a large sample size of 20,000 households, the GHS was planned to enable regional analyses and better coverage than the FES, but was not designed to fill the gaps left in the information on incomes.122 Even though income was recognized as ‘one of the most powerful factors’ that had bearing on almost any other variable, the income section in the GHS was kept relatively simple and could not substitute for the detailed data derived from the FES.123 Another possible route to improvements in the income data obtained through the FES was repeatedly blocked by the Inland Revenue. According to ideas developed by John Leonard Nicholson at the CSO and other government statisticians, IR records could be linked to the FES or even be used as a sampling frame to obtain information about the characteristics of non-respondents. This method could have helped to address the problem of differential non-response rates and to fill in the gaps in the underlying data. However, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, all requests for co-operation in this matter were refused by the Inland Revenue on grounds of data confidentiality.124 The possibility of records linkage remained on the agenda, though, and in early 1973, the CSO set up a task force authorized by the Prime Minister to explore better uses of administrative data for statistical purposes.125

 TNA, CAB 147/21, T. Balogh, Memorandum on Economic and Social Intelligence, 17 Nov. 1974.  TNA, CAB 139/566, Note by Ministry of Labour, An Alternative Method of Obtaining Improved Earnings Statistics, 30 Mar. 1967.  TNA, CAB 139/534, Report by the Director of the CSO, Claus Moser, ‘The Role and Development of the Central Statistical Office’ (Moser report), 1967.  TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO(S)(69)4, Multi-Purpose Household Survey, 29 Apr. 1969.  TNA, CAB 108/349, CSO, Working Party on Multi-Purpose Household Surveys, Pilot Study: Documents, 21 Jan. 1970.  TNA, CAB 139/378, SSD, L. Moss to J. L. Nicholson / CSO, 26 Nov. 1957; TNA, CAB 108/517, CSO, SubCommittee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 9 Nov. 1970; TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, SubCommittee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 15 Dec. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 7 May 1973.

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Linking and reconciling the main sources of income distribution in the United Kingdom was the perennial problem that remained unresolved throughout the postwar era. Major discrepancies persisted in particular between the FES, the Inland Revenue’s SPI, and the tables on personal income distribution contained in the annual National Income publications, the so-called Blue Books (NIBB) that were mainly based on tax records from the IR and complemented with other sources: the various statistical series used different definitions and concepts, but even if the raw data was adjusted for comparisons, the resulting figures did not match and the FES showed considerably greater degrees of inequality than the NIBB and especially the SPI.126 The discrepancies between the grossed-up income and expenditure totals in the FES and the NIBB had been a long-standing matter of concern, and by the time of the major FES review in 1972–73, government statisticians were not even clear about the exact causes, which became a subject of investigation in itself.127 The problems were exacerbated by deficiencies in the underlying data, again accompanied by considerable uncertainty about the scale and the reasons of the problems. In the case of the FES, it was commonly assumed that the lower and upper tails of the income distribution were underrepresented in the survey, but the exact degree to which the FES sample was representative of the population was unknown; furthermore, investment and self-employment incomes were believed to be understated, and income and expenditure totals did not add up.128 The Blue Book tables, in turn, were based mainly on the income tax records from the Inland Revenue that suffered from incomplete coverage of investment incomes, among others; furthermore, all incomes and components that were not covered by IR records such as social security benefits and those below the exemption limit had to be estimated.129 In attempts to remedy the main weakness of the Blue Books, the CSO proposed to use FES data to fill in the gaps at the lower end of the NIBB; in 1958, CSO statisticians even produced an alternative income distribution table by adding 4.8 million tax units below the exemption limit from FES records to the Blue Book table.130 In practice, however, IR statisticians used the FES mainly for allocating estimates of non-taxable social security benefits, which were excluded from IR records, to income ranges in the NIBB.131 IR statisticians were reluctant to rely on any source that did not square with national income figures, although it turned out later that it was not impossible to combine both sources: when the activities of the RCDIW prompted CSO statisticians to return to the issue in the mid 1970s, they managed

 TNA, BS 7/465, CSO, D. Ramprakash, The FES, SPI and NIBB Distributions, 12 Sept. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/240, CSO, Matters outstanding in the Arrangements for the 1962 Family Expenditure Survey, 25 Oct. 1961; TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on the FES, Nov. 1972.  Ibid.  TNA, IR 64/532, IR, G. Paine, Statistics of United Kingdom Income, Conference Paper, Mar. 1958.  TNA, CAB 108/239, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 8 Dec. 1960; TNA, IR 64/200, CSO, H. E. Bishop to J. W. S. Walton / IR, 26 Mar. 1958.  TNA, BS 7/462, RCDIW, Meeting at CSO regarding Blue Book table, 22 Oct. 1974.

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to find a way to fuse the NIBB and the FES.132 Meanwhile, at least ‘20–25 per cent’ of the population continued to be missing from the IR records and the derived Blue Book tables; the exact numbers were unknown.133 Instead of attempting to resolve the issue, the IR eventually decided to drop the Blue Book tables on income distribution. In the summer of 1970, the CSO granted a request by the IR to discontinue the table ‘because of the amount of estimation involved’, which had been increasing in recent years in line with the numbers of households below the tax exemption limit and the amounts of non-taxable social security benefits that needed to be allocated to income ranges.134 This cut to the existing body of knowledge came despite considerable public interest in the Blue Book tables. The consequences were dramatic: the decision meant that ‘the only alternative source’ on income inequality that the GSS could offer was the FES with its well-known deficiencies, while the SPI was not even considered to be a serious alternative because of its much more limited coverage in its unadjusted form.135 Responding to enquiries from outside the government, the CSO defended the decision and reassured the public that it was ‘not our intention that matters should simply be left as they are’, as ‘new data sources’ were being explored to produce more ‘respectable estimates’ – this defensive line referred to the ongoing work on the Census follow-up survey and the GHS, although insiders were aware that both these sources could neither match the FES nor substitute for the loss of the NIBB in the foreseeable future.136 Inside the CSO, officials were clear that there was ‘no early prospect of being able to reintroduce comprehensive estimates of income distribution’.137 Discontinuing a major statistical series without any appropriate substitute in sight was symptomatic of the peripheral place of income distribution in the work programmes of the GSS during this period. In contrast to the surge in activities in this field after 1973–74, CSO officials had to admit in hindsight that work on income distribution ‘had virtually stopped in the early part of the 1970s’.138 The CSO’s John Boreham had to make a similar confession when CSO officials sat down with staff of the incoming RCDIW in 1974 for a briefing session on the state of income and wealth statistics in the

 TNA, CAB 139/809, IR, J. W. S. Walton to J. Boreham / CSO, 7 Nov. 1973; on the RCDIW see Chapter 4.  TNA, CAB 139/809, IR, J. W. S. Walton to J. Boreham / CSO, 7 Nov. 1973.  TNA CAB 108/713, CSO, Working Party on National Income, Meeting on 5 May 1970; TNA, BS 7/462, RCDIW, Meeting at CSO regarding Blue Book table, 22 Oct. 1974.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Background Note to Draft Reply to Parliamentary Question of Michael Meacher, 17 Oct. 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, J. Boreham to P. R. E. Layard, London School of Economics and Political Science, 26 June 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Background Note to Draft Reply to Parliamentary Question of Michael Meacher, 17 Oct. 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/703, CSO, Review of Activities since 1975. Paper to the Ninth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 12 Mar. 1980.

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country. When it came to the continuing differences and contradictions between the existing statistical sources, Boreham was frank about the fact ‘that virtually no work had been done on reconciling the results of the different surveys within the same statistical frame’.139 Creating a unified ‘statistical frame’ for the analysis of income distribution was not even on the agenda of the CSO and had not been given much thought. In an answer to questions from RCDIW staff, Boreham clarified ‘that the CSO had no definite strategy for improving the information on income distribution’.140 Neither were any plans in place to reintroduce the Blue Book series at any point in the future.141 As Boreham explained to the RCDIW, the CSO had confidence in IR statistics as a source for higher income brackets, but harboured doubts about the value of voluntary surveys; according to Boreham, the problematic area of the lower income brackets ‘could probably only be tackled through a combination of sources’. The vagueness of senior government statisticians on this important area of work was mirrored by the tardiness in the processing of relevant statistical data: by the time of the briefing session in autumn 1974, no results of the GHS of 1971 had been published yet and the returns from the Census follow-up survey of 1972 had not even been fully processed. At the end of the post-war period, official statistics on income distribution in the United Kingdom were in an unfinished state with little immediate prospects for improvement. The abolished Blue Book tables represented the only imperfect attempt to amalgamate different sources to obtain more reliable results, and what remained was an inconclusive patchwork. The inactivity of statistical offices in this area was not reversed until political and academic interest shifted from the narrower topic of poverty to questions of income and wealth inequality in 1972–73. The preoccupation with issues of poverty had been part of the reasons why the work on wider issues of economic inequality had received markedly less attention during most of the post-war era.

Poverty and Deprivation In July 1972, the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy commissioned a sociologist at the Civil Service College, Dr Cyril Smith,142 to develop a research agenda for the next phase of the ongoing Family Poverty Research Programme that had been launched under the Heath government in 1970–71.143 Not only could Smith claim a long-standing familiarity with the relevant academic literature, but he also had ample opportunity to

 TNA, BS 7/462, RCDIW, Briefing Session at the CSO, 10 Sept. 1974.  Ibid.  TNA, BS 7/462, RCDIW, Notes on Meeting at CSO, 22 Oct. 1974.  Dr Cyril Stanley Smith, born 21 July 1925; Who’s Who and Who Was Who 2020; at [https://www. ukwhoswho.com], accessed 18 Oct. 2022.  TNA, BN 82/32, DHSS, Correspondence on the Family Poverty Research Programme, 1971–4.

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discuss the subject with officials and statisticians at government departments responsible for poverty-related social policies.144 When he delivered his report in the autumn of the same year, his recommendations highlighted the many lacunae in the existing body of knowledge and indirectly reflected what the state bureaucracy had failed to achieve in the development of government research on social structures and poverty in Britain over the past decades. What was needed for knowledge-based social policies in the alleviation of poverty, Smith argued, was nothing less than a sophisticated ‘taxonomy of the poor’, something that the present information base could not provide. Existing information was often ‘some years out of date’ and categories were ‘not always crossrelated’; furthermore, certain important categories were missing from the analysis or represented ‘in only a crude way’, most notably, data on ‘immigrant communities’. Smith was clear that developing the statistical tools required for a taxonomy of the spatiality, the dynamics, and the dimensions of poverty would have to form an important part of the proposed research programme. The proposal did not seem unrealistic: by the time of writing, the CSO was still weighing options for improving the FES and other sources to obtain better information about low-income groups. Similar assessments and demands had been made only a few years earlier by a panel of specialists commissioned by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), headed by the future chairman of the Supplementary Benefit Commission, David Donnison, and including experts such as Brian Abel-Smith and John Leonard Nicholson. In 1968, their report concluded that ‘many of the first and basic questions about poverty remain unanswered’, while ‘some have barely been asked’.145 Like Smith, the experts called for regular publication of detailed statistics on living standards and incomes broken down by regions, demographic groups, and household types, cross-referenced by variables such as employment, education, health, and housing. The experts were clear that the provision of detailed statistics on personal income and expenditure ‘should be a government responsibility’, and the government should undertake ‘new types of investigation’ such as ‘regular mini-censuses’ and create linkages between IR records, the Census, and Social Survey data to overcome the perennial problem of the small sample size of the main household survey, the FES. While the SSRC expert group acknowledged that developing the required statistical machinery might take ‘a long time’, a more impatient view was expressed by Peter Townsend. In 1972, he pointed out in a critical article that the FES could not provide ‘any precise conclusions about trends in poverty’ and demanded that ‘special surveys of poverty need to be carried out’.146 Around the same time in Whitehall, however, the ongoing interdepartmental review of the FES recognized the problems flowing from the insufficient sample size of the survey, but instead

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, An Initial Framework for the Study of the Interdepartmental Aspects of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 152/126, SSRC, Panel on Poverty Studies, Poverty: A Paper for the SSRC, Apr. 1968; Published version: SSRC, Research on Poverty (London, 1968).  Townsend, ‘Reports and Surveys’, 107.

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of recommending an enlargement, officials placed their bets on the Census follow-up survey, a project that was still in the making, but never received enough support from government departments to fill the gap.147 The persistent gaps in the statistics had consequences. There was a lack of evidence in discussions on a wide range of research questions, including the controversy over the ‘culture of poverty’.148 Existing statistics could not provide conclusive answers to key questions that had been raised by the ‘rediscovery of poverty’, despite increasing research efforts by statistical offices in the latter half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Hence, the available figures on trends in poverty remained contested, and disputes about the numbers became a staple of the political culture during this period. According to some observers, the preoccupation with the big numbers created path dependencies that impeded other lines of enquiry. As Cyril Smith observed in his 1972 report, more detailed investigations into the character of poverty had been ‘stultified’ for years by the public fixation with the movements in poverty rates that were measured using the Supplementary Benefit (SB) level and certain multiples as a benchmark. This methodology had been introduced to the debate in Britain by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith’s work in the course of the ‘rediscovery of poverty’. In their groundbreaking book of 1965, Townsend and Abel-Smith argued that a poverty line should be drawn at 140 per cent of National Assistance.149 In response to the book and the ensuing public debate, the Labour government accepted neither this nor any other measure as an official poverty line; however, government statisticians adopted Townsend and Abel-Smith’s methodology in subsequent enquiries of their own. The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ and the pressure from the emerging poverty lobby prompted the Ministry of Social Security and its successor, the DHSS, to carry out several ad-hoc surveys and analyses that all used the SB level as a benchmark.150 This line of enquiry eventually resulted in a regular statistical series: in May 1974, the DHSS started to publish annual tables in Hansard showing the numbers of people by family types at various multiples of the SB level.151 The tables represented a prime example of how the ideas of social scientists could manifest in official statistics. The Hansard tables were commonly regarded as the main statistics on poverty in the United Kingdom, and the SB level was widely used as an unofficial poverty line. The Hansard tables and the earlier ad-hoc reports were always treated with considerable

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on FES, Nov. 1972.  Welshman, Underclass, 233; id., Transmitted Deprivation.  Gazeley at al., ‘The Poor and the Poorest’.  Ministry of Social Security, Circumstances of Families; DHSS, Two Parent Families: A Study of their Resources and Needs in 1968, 1969 and 1970; DHSS, Report of the Committee on One-Parent Families.  Hansard, House of Commons, 20 May 1974, vol. 874, col. 47; Hansard, House of Commons, 26 Oct. 1977, vol. 936, col. 756; Hansard, House of Commons, 1–2 Aug. 1978, vol. 955, col. 272/434; Hansard, House of Commons, 1 Nov. 1979, vol. 972, col. 660.

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reservation by governments, however. Caveats were made not only with respect to the large sampling errors in the underlying FES data, but also regarding the SB level as a poverty measure. The measure produced paradoxical results, the argument went: whoever received SB to prevent them from falling into poverty counted as poor, and upratings in the real value of SB rates that were supposed to make recipients better off led to increases in the poverty count. Thus, the main official set of poverty statistics in Britain was widely seen as imperfect and controversial: while some were quick to dismiss it, others regarded it as a valid measure. Officials at the Supplementary Benefits Commission (SBC) saw the SB level as ‘a misleading index of “poverty”’, but also acknowledged that it did ‘at least represent what the community considers given families should have as a minimum, and it must therefore be a matter for concern if any significant number of families fall below those levels’.152 Nevertheless, the complexities did not end there. The fluctuations in the numbers of SB recipients were not necessarily caused by movements in poverty alone, but were also affected by movements in prices, earnings, and benefits, as an internal government report on poverty pointed out in 1971.153 What further complicated matters was that the SB count could not be easily reconciled with FESbased analyses as the two series used different analytical units: the latter was based on households while the former was based on families: according to the analysis by households, for example, a poor pensioner living in a household with resources above SB level did not count as poor.154 Despite all its shortcomings, the SB level was used as an unofficial poverty line by sociologists, the media, and social activists. Commentators did also rely on other measures such as the unemployment count and the level of earnings, but the SB line served as a key indicator on which political arguments were built about larger trends in poverty and the efficiency of social policies. For example, when the director of the Child Poverty Action Group, Frank Field, appeared on a Radio 1 programme in 1971 to talk about those ‘who actually live below the poverty line in this country’ he explained that ‘by the poverty line I mean the Supplementary Benefit level which is approved by Parliament each year’.155 Poverty figures based on the SB level were given a prominent place in the publicity of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and other anti-poverty NGOs. In some cases, the figures cited in CPAG campaigning material were derived from local investigations carried out by the activists themselves. In 1969, for example, the Merseyside branch sponsored a poverty survey of 208 individuals in Liverpool, with a poverty line set at the SB level plus two pounds; the survey found that one in three persons was living in poverty, a finding that was ‘treated with

   

TNA, AST 31/27, SBC, Briefing for Deputy Chairman, 18 July 1969. TNA, BN 13/189, Report of the Steering Group for Family Poverty Review, June 1971. Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 196. TNA, AST 31/28, Transcript, BBC 1, 11 Nov. 1971, 6.00 p.m.

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considerable reserve’ by officials at the SBC.156 Government officials were usually quick to dismiss these and other small-scale surveys, such as the enquiry carried out by Molly Meacher in Islington in 1971, as unrepresentative.157 As the CPAG lacked the resources to mount larger enquiries on a regular basis, it relied first and foremost on government statistics in its publicity, including the official figures on the numbers at or below the SB level. Similar constraints limited the diagnostic potential of local surveys conducted by sociologists in various cities. Sociological enquiries in Liverpool in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, for example, were based on samples comprising at most a few hundred households.158 By contrast, only central government could deliver large-scale nationwide surveys that were repeated on a regular basis and could be used to trace trends in poverty over time. Notwithstanding the important academic work that was going on at the University of Exeter, at the LSE, and elsewhere,159 there was little doubt that government statistics carried the greatest weight in discussions of poverty. Government statisticians had long been aware of the lack of statistics on lower incomes and poverty in Britain, but it was not until the mid 1960s that growing realization of the gaps in knowledge on this subject led to greater research activities in Whitehall. According to a former minister, the incoming Labour government in 1964 ‘inherited a situation in which very little indeed was known about family poverty’.160 In earlier years, the National Assistance Board had carried out some research behind closed doors, but this was mainly based on the FES as a source that offered only limited coverage at the lower end of the income spectrum.161 In 1965, various government departments recognized the need for better information on low-income groups, and the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance conducted a special survey of retirement pensioners,162 a group that was commonly regarded as particularly vulnerable and had already received much attention in the sociological research of Dorothy Cole and Peter Townsend.163 After the publication of Townsend and Abel-Smith’s book The Poor and the Poorest in December 1965, the Ministry also launched a more wideranging enquiry to measure the ‘circumstances of families’, based on administrative records; the report was published in 1967 and came to the conclusion that there were 345,000 families with resources that did not meet their requirements, with 160,000 families living below the SB level.164 The figures struck commentators in the media as

        

TNA, AST 31/27, SBC, Briefing for Deputy Chairman, 18 July 1969. TNA, BN 82/32, DHSS, Briefing for Keith Joseph for meeting with CPAG, 25 May 1972. Todd, ‘Affluence, Class and Crown Street’, 504. An overview of contemporary research activities is provided in SSRC, Research on Poverty. David Ennals, ‘The Labour Government and Poverty’, The Tribune, 12 Feb. 1970. TNA, AST 36/598–599, NAB, Research Papers on Expenditure of NA Recipients, 1960–6. TNA, CAB 108/305, CSO, Working Party on Social Statistics, 2 June 1965. Gazeley, Poverty, 174–6. Ministry of Social Security, Circumstances of Families.

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‘much greater than was supposed’, but the report also drew criticism for a number of limitations – it not only excluded other family types such as one-parent families but also the whole of Northern Ireland.165 The figures were soon regarded as outdated, as it was assumed that numerous changes to social policies and benefit schemes in subsequent years must have altered the picture. However, progress on the survey front stalled. In 1967, the Social Survey Division withdrew from a planned co-operation with an academic research consortium led by Townsend and Abel-Smith with funding from the Rowntree Trust.166 Furthermore, plans for a new edition of the 1966 enquiry were abandoned by the GSS in 1968; instead, it was decided to use the enlarged FES as a continuous data source for this purpose.167 In fact, government statisticians subsequently mined the FES for a new investigation into poverty, but the official report was not published until summer 1971 and was restricted to specific family types, namely ‘two-parent families’ where the father was in full-time work or wage-stopped.168 Thus, in the intervening years, the absence of up-to-date survey data covering the whole population precluded any more precise assessments of trends in poverty, although it was assumed by researchers that changes to social security schemes had helped to improve the situation of many low-income families.169 The 1971 report could not fill the gap either – as before, it remained ‘difficult’ to trace year-to-year changes in the incidence of poverty in Britain.170 In any event, the ambitious Family Poverty Research Programme (FPRG) launched by the Heath government in 1970/71 was less concerned with measuring the incidence of poverty than with the characteristics of the poor.171 The ‘culture of poverty’ theory that looked for causes of poverty in individual behaviour rather than in structural factors proved less influential in Britain than in the US, as Jon Welshman has demonstrated.172 However, it had noticeable influence on the directions of government research. Officials were open to taking the ‘culture of poverty’ into consideration, and

 ‘Editorial: Britain’s Poor’, The Times, 10 July 1967, 9; ‘Report on Poverty Criticised’, The Guardian, 6 July 1967, 5.  TNA, AST 31/27, NAB, Aide-Memoire for the Chairman about the Meeting of the Advisory Committee on the Survey of Poverty held on 26 May, 6 June 1967.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys: Note by the DHSS, 8 Dec. 1971.  DHSS, Two Parent Families. The so-called wage-stop limited the benefit rate of unemployed recipients whose previous earnings fell below the current SB rate.  TNA, AST 31/27, SBC, Citizens or Poor People? Speech by the Deputy Chairman to the CPAG Conference, 17 Sept. 1969; Lafitte, ‘Income Deprivation’.  ‘At Least 105,000 Families “live in poverty”’, The Times, 29 July 1971, 4; TNA, CAB 152/126, SSRC, Panel on Poverty Studies, Poverty: A Paper for the SSRC, Apr. 1968.  TNA, CAB 139/782, Cabinet Office, Committee on Social Affairs: Family Poverty Research, 1 Nov. 1973.  Welshman, Underclass, 171, 229–34; Welshman, ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Public Policy’, 340.

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even the academic experts on the SSRC poverty panel did not dismiss the theory altogether.173 Consequently, it not only guided the studies on the ‘cycle of deprivation’ under the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, Keith Joseph, but also informed related statistical work programmes. The first phase of the interdepartmental Family Poverty Research Programme was designated to be an analysis of existing statistical material, while the second phase was to develop a wider research framework: instead of ‘mere counting of the numbers of the “poor”’, it was planned to explore the ‘dynamics’ and the ‘typology’ of poverty by focusing on ‘the nature, circumstances and locations of those families in poverty’.174 Accordingly, officials in the FPRG steering group were interested first and foremost in the ‘causes and characteristics’ of the poor and saw one of the most promising avenues for research in the cross-sectional analysis of administrative case records of SB and Family Income Support (FIS) recipients, a large fund of material that had not previously been exploited for such purposes by government statisticians.175 As innovative as this method seemed, though, it would have delivered only a partial ‘taxonomy of the poor’, as it excluded all families under the poverty threshold who were not entitled to benefits, those not claiming them, and everyone just above the levels defined by the benefits. Furthermore, while research on the smaller FIS scheme produced some results, work on the SB side ran into problems: in 1973, the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy was informed that ‘there was no prospect of even a pilot study on the use of Supplementary Benefit records as a source of statistics, due to the present impossibility of increasing the work-load of local offices’.176 Almost three years into the research programme, there seemed to be more compartmentalization of government investigations instead of the systematization sought by the FPRG steering group, despite a flurry of ongoing activities. Among others, research projects were underway on two-parent families, one-parent families, and the characteristics of FIS recipients, although the latter was not followed up by further research to address more fundamental questions about causes of poverty.177 Another research project had begun life as an investigation into the adequacy of current SB scale rates, a delicate endeavour that could potentially embarrass the government – and that was consequently downgraded to an analysis of expenditure patterns.178 Insiders began to think that the programme lacked coherence. By autumn 1973, departmental statisticians  TNA, CAB 152/126, SSRC, Panel on Poverty Studies, Poverty: A Paper for the SSRC, Apr. 1968; TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, An Initial Framework for the Study of the Interdepartmental Aspects of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 10 July 1972. For further correspondence on the aims and concepts of Phases I and II see TNA, CAB 108/768.  TNA, CAB 108/749, Cabinet Office, Report of the Steering Group for the Family Research Poverty Review, 12 Oct. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 22 Oct. 1973.  Ibid.  Ibid.; TNA, CAB 108/749, Cabinet Office, Report of the Steering Group for the Family Research Poverty Review, 12 Oct. 1971.

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in the DHSS noted with some concern ‘that there had recently been a movement in their policy branches towards more restricted studies of certain aspects of poverty research instead of more general studies’.179 Finding answers to larger questions hinged on the availability of a suitable knowledge base, but there were no new statistical tools and surveys on the horizon that could have delivered the required data. During the parallel review of the FES, proposals were advanced to build an additional survey to compensate for the weakness of the FES at the lower end of the income spectrum, but OPCS officials advised against such an undertaking in the absence of a suitable sampling frame from which a sample could be drawn.180 It was hoped that a sampling frame could be derived from the ongoing work on the Census follow-up survey. As has been noted above, however, this project was not treated with enough urgency to serve this purpose – thus, the lack of progress in this particular project also had serious repercussions for government research on poverty. This led to frustration especially in the group of officials around John Leonard Nicholson in the DHSS Economic Advisers Office, where ‘it has been the general view that a special survey will have to be mounted if the characteristics of those on lower incomes are to be established convincingly’.181 However, three years later, in spring 1976, Nicholson complained to a member of staff of the RCDIW that the DHSS statistics branch had still ‘not been able to get such a survey given priority’. Alternative statistical sources had yet to be fully developed, or allowed only approximations of the effects and manifestations of financial poverty. In the future, officials were hoping to be able to draw on the General Household Survey to produce data about the characteristics of the poor and to use the GHS as a sampling frame to assemble a sample of low-income families nearly twice as large as that from the FES.182 In other departments, ongoing work at the OPCS shed light on the interrelations of social class, medical care, and mortality, based on the broad categories of the official social class schema.183 The National Food Survey, in turn, provided information on nutritional standards for different categories of families and was considered as another potential sampling frame for follow-up enquiries on low-income groups, but it contained only rough data on incomes that were tabulated in merely six large income ranges, and the parent department, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food was reluctant to overburden the survey with more detailed questions.184

 TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 22 Oct. 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on FES, Nov 1972.  TNA, BS 7/634, RCDIW, F. J. Bayliss to Gottlieb, 23 Mar. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/772, CSO, Working Party on General Household Survey, 10 Feb. 1972.  Other existing longitudinal studies were not designed for the analysis of poverty: TNA, CAB 108/ 750, CSO, Strategy for Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Studies, 7 Nov. 1972; TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Family Poverty Research Programme, Phase II Research, 10 July 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Potential Uses of the National Food Survey in Studies of Family Poverty, 20 Dec. 1972.

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The only official source for longitudinal data, which was important for examining poverty over life-cycles, was the National Child Development Study, but the survey offered no information on incomes. Instead, it relied on rather crude indices of deprivation derived from the housing situation and the Registrar General’s broad social class gradings.185 Researchers and officials were aware of the lack of longitudinal data in Britain, but despite the interest in the dynamics of poverty and the ‘cycle of deprivation’ under the Heath administration, no sustained attempt was made to close this gap.186 When a third round of the National Child Development Study was under consideration at the DHSS in 1972, there were no plans to collect data on incomes.187 To explore the potential uses of longitudinal data, the GSS set up a sub-committee, but there were concerns about the costs and benefits, so the sub-committee’s work was largely confined to desk research and consultations with the SSRC and other experts.188 Independent experts regarded this as one of the most glaring weaknesses of social statistics in Britain: existing statistics only provided synchronic snapshots and could not be used for tracking movements of people in and out of poverty or for examining patterns of lifetime earnings.189 This type of analysis was pioneered by scholars at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan in the US: in 1968, they kicked off the first round of the influential study of income dynamics that went on to become a model for modern panel surveys. However, this important innovation escaped British government statisticians who barely mentioned the Michigan study in their discussions and papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Existing information on incomes was insufficient for even the most basic analyses. In the footsteps of earlier social investigations, much interest in government research centred on the living standards of particular sub-groups and family types that were considered to be at the highest risk of poverty: in the latter half of the 1960s, the list included the elderly, the long-term unemployed, the chronic sick and disabled, one-parent families, low-paid wage earners and their families.190 Furthermore, the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ drew attention to the vulnerability of larger families with four or more children and all recipients of SB in general.191 For the majority of these groups, however, the numbers in the existing FES sample were ‘extremely small’ so that hardly any valid conclusions could be drawn from them – this was noted almost  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, An Initial Framework for the Study of the Interdepartmental Aspects of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 28 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Strategy for Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Studies, 7 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 22 Oct. 1973; CSO, Interim Report of the Sub-Committee on Longitudinal Studies, 27 Apr. 1973.  Rudolf Klein, ‘The Will o’ the Wisp of Social Justice’, New Society, 25 Mar. 1976.  TNA, AST 31/38, CPAG, Incomes Policy for Families: Manifesto for Discussion with Secretary of State of Health and Social Security, Jan. 1970.  TNA, CAB 108/346, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 13 June 1968; TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on FES, Nov. 1972.

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with embarrassment by officials in the interdepartmental FES review in 1972: ‘In particular the area of low-income families is one where both the DHSS and the Government Statistical Service are very much at risk of criticism for failing to provide sufficient information in an area of great social concern.’192 In the parallel Family Poverty Research Programme, government statisticians resorted to combining three years of FES data to obtain sufficient numbers of two-parent and one-parent families for their respective reports, a technique that was viable but obviously not an option for observing year-to-year changes.193 There was no doubt that ‘the small numbers in the sample at the lower end of the income scale were a severe problem’ that hampered progress in the government’s research programme on poverty on many different levels.194 The limited availability of statistical information on lower incomes imposed grave constraints on analyses on a wide range of related issues, including the trending investigation into spatialized material deprivation. The Plowden report of 1967 linked disadvantages in education and child development to patterns of spatialized deprivation and led to the establishment of so-called Educational Priority Areas. Furthermore, in 1968, the Wilson government launched the Urban Aid programme that targeted deprived areas marred by multiple social needs, with housing, unemployment, family size, and immigration among the main markers of disadvantage.195 The emerging field of urban studies attracted increasing attention from academic researchers, social activists, local authorities, and central government. Numerous studies on individual cities and areas were produced by local authorities, and research units in several government departments engaged in work to develop indicators of area-based deprivation. The list of participating departments included the Home Office, the Department of the Environment, and the Population Division in the OPCS; furthermore, the Wilson government set up the Centre for Environmental Studies that later collaborated with the OPCS on the development of multivariate socio-economic area classifications.196 In the early 1970s, this work was still in its infancy, though. Plans for using data from the Census of Population to identify geographical areas of deprivation were discussed in connection with the Family Poverty Research Programme in late 1971, and officials such as Cyril Smith placed great hopes in the ability of the OPCS to pinpoint deprived areas down to the level of enumeration districts.197 Census data allowed only approximations, however.

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Interim Report on FES, Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Family Poverty Research Programme Phase 1, 20 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, 15 Dec. 1971.  Andrews, ‘Multiple Deprivation’, 610–11; Shapely, Deprivation.  TNA, CAB 108/754, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Progress Report from the Working Group on Area Classifications, 27 Aug. 1975.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, 10 Dec. 1971; TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, Framework for Study of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.

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As the Census did not contain any data on incomes, deprivation had to be measured by proxy indicators such as the housing situation. Integrating more social statistics for cross-referencing proved to be difficult. For example, government statisticians had yet to find a way to incorporate data on SB recipients because the administrative areas of the SB scheme did not match the areas used in the Census.198 By 1971/72, officials were still searching for suitable ‘surrogate indicators’, and once more the Census follow-up survey was brought up as a potential solution for the missing dimension of income in the analysis.199 The lack of income data did not, however, render such statistical sources invalid or useless. Findings from sources such as the National Child Development Study and from local surveys of housing conditions and unemployment rates painted a larger picture of spatial patterns of social disadvantage that did not fail to impress commentators, researchers, and officials.200 As Cyril Smith observed in his 1972 report, the recent expansion of urban studies had led to ‘greater awareness’ among urban planners of ‘the way in which social inequalities are expressed in differences in quality of physical environment and amenities’.201 In noteworthy remarks that revealed the openness of officials to behaviouralist ideas of the time, Smith also expected future urban research to ‘throw light on the apathy of the poor and the way in which a culture of poverty develops as an adaptation to extreme deprivation’. On the other hand, there was also awareness of the limitations of any analysis of deprivation that excluded income as a category. The ‘lack of accurate data’ precluded the development of multivariate analyses that could ‘tie together spatial distributions of groups “at risk” with income distributions’, as a researcher from the Centre of Environmental Studies, Gillian Lomas, explained in a paper to the Central Policy Review Staff in 1973.202 Similar conclusions were reached by the ‘task force’ reviewing the FES during the same year. Its recommendations included ‘that consideration should be given to the long-term development of an “area low income index”’ to identify ‘small geographical areas containing a high concentration of low-income households’.203 However, officials in the task force were clear that due to ‘the smallness of the area sub-samples’ in the FES, such an undertaking would require ‘radical alterations in the sampling procedure’ to produce results precise enough to map ‘the location of “poverty pockets”’, which were often expected to be found on the micro level of ‘individual streets or Census Enumeration Districts’. Even the Census follow-up survey was deemed too small for this

 Ibid.  TNA, BN 82/32, DHSS, Proposals for the Application of Census Data to the Epidemiology of Poverty / Deprivation, undated (May 1972).  Andrews, ‘Multiple Deprivation’, 611.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, Framework for Study of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 184/96, CES, G. Lomas to M. Auston / CPRS, Social Affairs Strategy, 14 May 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Interim Report of the Task Force for the Review of the Family Expenditure Survey, 26 Apr. 1973.

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purpose. By the time of the review in 1973, there was no prospect of developing statistical tools suitable for mapping the social geography of income poverty in Britain in the immediate future. The insufficient coverage of lower incomes in the FES even affected its original purpose, the provision of weights for the calculation of price indices. There was a long tradition of criticism questioning the reliability of the Retail Price Index (RPI), in particular, with regard to its ability to accurately reflect the impact of inflation on the poor. This had prompted calls for a separate price index to focus specifically on households on low incomes, but the Cost of Living Advisory Committee rejected such proposals in 1968, although a special price index was constructed for pensioners.204 In the early 1970s, the idea was taken up for further investigation by the Family Poverty Research Programme, but officials were sceptical of the practicability of constructing such an index, due to ‘the limited number of low-income families with a given composition’ in the underlying FES data; consequently, the RPI remained unchanged and continued to draw criticism.205 Finally, the perennial problem of the small numbers in the FES also hampered the production of statistical knowledge about redistributive effects of social policies. Developing statistical machinery for the evaluation of social policies was high on the agenda of the Family Poverty Review Programme, and quantifying the workings of the welfare state was moreover of great political relevance for current debates about pending social security reforms and the planned integration of the tax/benefit system. The deficiencies of the existing system were encapsulated in ‘the poverty trap’, a term coined by Frank Field and David Piachaud in an article in 1971 to describe how the cumulative withdrawal of social security benefits in the event of additional earnings that exceeded certain thresholds caused high marginal taxes and cancelled out much of the gains in low-income families.206 Removing such disincentive effects was a central concern behind the tax credit reform proposals advanced by the Heath government, and planners, researchers, and commentators were in dire need of reliable numbers.207 The workings of the poverty trap and the total number of families trapped on low incomes, however, could only be estimated based on hypothetical calculations.208 To produce statistical analyses of the effects of policies, the Treasury and the DHSS were experimenting with new computerized simulation models, but, as Cyril Smith observed in late 1972, the work had ‘as yet not progressed very far because

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, Framework for Study of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Family Poverty Research Programme, Phase II Research, 10 July 1972; ‘The Unjust Index’, New Statesman, 14 Nov. 1974; TNA, BN 89/ 366, on related comments by DHSS officials who advised that the difference between the RPI and a possible special price index for low incomes would be negligible.  Frank Field and David Piachaud, ‘The Poverty Trap’, New Statesman, Dec. 1971.  Sloman, Transfer State.  TNA, BN 13/189, DHSS, J. W. Stacpoole to Wendt, The Poverty Trap, 17 May 1972.

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of weaknesses in the data available, especially from the main source, the Family Expenditure Survey’.209 The difficulties encountered in the attempts to quantify the redistributive effects of economic and social policies laid bare the limitations to knowledge-based policy-making during the post-war era.

Redistribution In the publicity of the GSS, the FES was hailed as a ‘multi-purpose inquiry serving a wide variety of needs and providing an invaluable supply of economic and social data’ including data on the redistributive effects of taxation and social services.210 At international conferences, British government statisticians were proud to explain how the FES was used for estimating ‘changes in the inequality of the income distribution brought about by different taxes and benefits’.211 The ‘relevance’ of the ongoing work based on the FES ‘for fiscal and social service policy’ was also stressed by the incoming CSO director, Claus Moser, in his 1967 blueprint for the future strategy of the GSS: ‘At the request of the Treasury, the work now has to be widened in an attempt to estimate the likely effects of different polices.’212 The impression of a more rational policy-making process informed by detailed statistical analyses has been echoed by the historical literature and has chimed with narratives of technological progress and expert-led modernization in governance in Britain. The reality was far more banal. Statisticians at the CSO had admittedly made considerable advances in the exploitation of household survey data for studies of the redistribution of income through the tax/benefit system. However, the resulting analyses were rather limited in scope and allowed retrospective assessments at best rather than enabling prospective simulations that could have been used to inform policy-makers about the probable effects of different policy options. As a result, governments routinely made political decisions on taxation and social policies without recourse to any statistical knowledge about their possible impact. In other words, governments were mostly flying blind or were simply following their intuitions during much of the post-war era until issues of redistribution returned to the political agenda and became hotly disputed in the early 1970s. During the early post-war years, political arguments about the redistributive effects of the welfare state could not draw on detailed statistical data, apart from existing income tax statistics that offered only partial insights. The earliest attempts to measure the impact of public expenditure were made by academic researchers who

 TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, Framework for Study of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.  DE, ‘Family Expenditure: A Plain Man’s Guide to the Family Expenditure Survey’; GSS, Family Expenditure Survey Handbook.  TNA, CAB 108/676, CSO, Paper to the Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 26 June 1970.  TNA, CAB 139/534, Report by the Director of the CSO, Claus Moser, ‘The Role and Development of the Central Statistical Office’ (Moser report), 1967.

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relied on rather crude calculations, as they lacked access to micro-data to gauge the effects of government policies on households and individuals more precisely.213 In 1945, the economist Tibor Barna had delivered the most ambitious study to date when he set out to estimate the effects of all taxes, social benefits, and other public finance measures. Apart from more limited studies, Barna pointed out, there had previously been ‘no attempt to answer the question how far were incomes redistributed by the government and how much was transferred from the rich to the poor’.214 Barna’s research interest in the ‘inequality of incomes’ was clearly motivated by a concern with ‘social justice’, but his methodology rested on shaky ground. His comparisons between initial and final income distributions were based on macroeconomic national income statistics, which depended on many assumptions and required a great deal of interpolation in the allocation of public expenditure to income ranges.215 Despite all the shortcomings, this and other studies certainly helped to spark the interest of government statisticians such as John Leonard Nicholson. At the CSO, Nicholson led the efforts to develop more precise analyses based on household survey data. After getting the go-ahead from the Treasury in 1954, Nicholson started producing detailed analyses of the redistribution of income in Britain for internal government purposes. In 1962, the analyses were finally made available to the public when the CSO started to publish annual articles on the incidence of taxes and social benefits in the official journal Economic Trends.216 The resulting analyses were highly innovative on many levels: they were among the earliest social statistics calculated on a computer system, and the ambition to measure the workings of the tax/benefit system was unprecedented. The published reports in Economic Trends showed the effects of taxes and benefits on the incomes of various household types in the most recent year for which data was available – a procedure that usually entailed a time lag of more than twelve months. The analyses detailed and compared the net payments made and the transfers received by households across income ranges. This sort of analysis served the main purpose of investigating and monitoring the progressiveness of the tax/benefit system, a concern that was also encapsulated in the search for ‘break-even points’ – the points in the income spectrum where households of various types paid in as much as they received. The analyses suffered from a number of weaknesses, though. First of all, the allocation of benefits in-kind and public services to specific income ranges was based on rough estimates and an admittedly arbitrary procedure: it was generally assumed

 Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 171; Titmuss, ‘Social Division of Welfare’, 38–9; Cartter, Redistribution of Income.  Barna, Redistribution of Incomes, 2.  Ibid. 227, 236–7.  TNA, CAB 108/247, CSO, J. L. Nicholson, The Social Redistribution of Income, 14 Feb. 1956; TNA, CAB 108/373, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Redistribution of Income in 1957, 8 Jan. 1960.

The Production of Knowledge on Economic Inequality

Fig. 4: Difficult to read: analysis of redistribution in Britain in the CSO journal Economic Trends, 1962.

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that all households benefited equally from public expenditure on state education or the National Health Service. This procedure sidestepped a political debate that went back to the 1950s; it revolved around the argument that the welfare state disproportionately benefited the middle class, although the investigation into different levels of uses of public services by different social groups was fraught with methodological difficulties.217 Another weakness concerned the temporal structure of the analyses: the Economic Trends articles focused exclusively on individual years and were not designed to trace changes over time – government statisticians were acutely aware that this restriction limited the value of the analyses for the political debate.218 The analyses were not easy to digest, anyway. Amid growing controversies about the welfare state, the CSO’s redistribution analyses brought more clarity only for those who were equipped to interpret the complex reports and the many different tables with their impressive number of cells. Moreover, while the reports offered a plethora of detailed findings, there was no attempt to digest the results in key indicators or summary measures that could have rendered the analyses more comprehensible. Thus, the CSO analyses did not infuse the political debate about the tax/benefit system with any big numbers. While the Economic Trends reports offered analyses of trends in the past, the statistical machinery for prospective analyses about future trends was still in its infancy. For most of the post-war era, policy-makers and officials had little statistical information at their disposal about the possible distributional effects of policy proposals and alternative policy options. Making use of statistical knowledge to inform policy decisions had been a long-standing concern in discussions about the modernization of governance in Britain – it chimed with the belief in expert-led economic and social planning that had gained traction in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 219 Advocates of technocratic governance such as the Labour MP Jeremy Bray criticized that ‘the changed public attitude to planning has not yet resulted in a changed handling of statistics’ and called for ‘a fuller use and provision of statistics by government and industry’, envisaging a ‘system [which] will give individual decision makers fuller knowledge both of the opportunities open to them, and of the consequences of their decisions’.220 Despite the expansion of government statistics during the 1960s, however, such a system had yet to materialize. The need to improve the government machinery for more knowledge-based planning was highlighted by the widely noted recommendations of the Fulton Committee for the reform of the civil service in 1968. Consequently, the recommendations were

 CSO, The Incidence of Taxes and Social Service Benefits in 1967, Economic Trends, 184 (Feb. 1969), p. xii; Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 172–3.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Meeting with Prime Minister: Statistics on the Distribution and Redistribution of Personal Income and Wealth, 4 Nov. 1974.  O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment, 22–32.  TNA, CAB 139/534, J. Bray, Economic Statistics for a Labour Government, 8 Aug. 1963.

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taken up in interdepartmental discussions about the formulation of a White Paper on Planning in 1970. The discussions showed, on the one hand, that most departments had engaged in developing structures and mechanisms for purposes of informed political planning in the course of the 1960s. For example, the DHSS set up a planning branch in 1964; it appointed John Leonard Nicholson to head a new economic advisers’ group in 1968; and it established the Statistics and Research division in 1969. Nevertheless, the draft White Paper painted a gloomy picture of the ‘limitations of present-day knowledge’ and the inability to incorporate existing knowledge into the policy-making process: ‘No comprehensive framework is in sight within which to present the range of social and political choices and their implications in a single intelligible structure, much less in a form suitable for quantitative analysis.’221 Knowledge-based policy-making was still a remote prospect – this was conspicuous even in the most central areas of government activity. In policy domains as important as the budget, Cabinet decisions were routinely taken without prior consideration of statistical analyses. This observation was made by an economic adviser to Edward Heath in 1968:222 Many of our crucial economic policy decisions, and particularly those connected with the budget, are taken in a vacuum. Never, to my knowledge, do ministers see sets of policy proposals together with alternative economic forecasts for each set of proposals. Usually, because of the secrecy surrounding policy decisions, the effects of given policy changes are estimated on [sic] by one or two people on the backs of envelopes. Indeed, it is only after a budget that any real effort is made to estimate its effects!

Interest in more sophisticated forecasting techniques began to pick up after the CSO’s work on redistribution started to produce results in the early 1960s. Officials at the Treasury and the Inland Revenue recognized the potential value of such statistical analyses for the formulation of policies, and the ‘Treasury’s general interest in the subject’ continued ‘on an upward trend’, as John Leonard Nicholson noted in 1974.223 In particular, Nicholson credited the influential permanent secretary at the Treasury, William Armstrong, with stoking demand for the CSO’s analyses in Whitehall. At the request of the Treasury, the CSO delivered estimates of the redistributive effects of particular budget measures and major policy proposals. In 1962, for example, the CSO assessed alternative purchase tax schemes to ascertain whether they were regressive, neutral, or progressive; in 1966, the CSO calculated the impact of different options for value-added taxes (VAT) on the Gini coefficients for various household types.224 All of

 TNA, CAB 152/141, Draft White Paper on Planning, Jan. 1970.  TNA, CAB 139/538, Brian Reading, The Economic Management in the 1970s, 24 Sept. 1968.  TNA, PIN 34/364, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to E. A. Johnson, 17 Dec. 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/686, CSO, P. N. Nye to L. Duck, Customs and Excise, 23 Nov. 1966; CSO, Estimated Effects on Different Households of Spreading Purchase Tax, 23 Mar. 1962.

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these analyses were intended for government purposes only and kept secret; some of them were even protected with security classifications. The secrecy was gradually lifted in the late 1960s. In 1968, the Treasury for the first time published a statistical assessment of the distributional impact of the budget as a whole. This was a key budget in a critical year that saw much controversy when the Labour government responded to the devaluation crisis by prioritizing economic health over social justice, a response that even led to regressive tax policies.225 In this political context, the published analysis of the redistributive effects of the budget seems mainly to have served presentational purposes – it was certainly not used to inform the decision-making process from start to finish. While the budget was under discussion, policy-makers and officials considered the expected impact of proposed measures on ‘the well-to-do’ and ‘the masses of wage earners’ in more general terms. The detailed distributional analysis by John Leonard Nicholson of the CSO only entered the frame after the ‘general shape’ of the budget had already been agreed between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.226 Again, in the internal deliberations over the 1969 budget, the distributional analysis by the CSO occurred in the last phase of the consultations and was subsequently used for press briefings, but was not taken into consideration as an integral part of the decision-making process itself.227 In fact, the practice turned out to be just a ‘brief experiment’.228 In the preparation of the 1970 budget, the CSO produced another estimate of the distributional effects, but requested that the Treasury cite only the descriptive findings about the progressiveness of the budget and not publish the exact figures. The reasons lay in a familiar problem: officials knew that the figures were subject to considerable error margins, especially in the lower income ranges because of the weaknesses of the underlying data from the FES.229 The deficiencies of the FES data were one of the main reasons why the publication of official estimates of the distributive effects of the budget was subsequently discontinued altogether.230 Nevertheless, the ‘brief experiment’ further reinforced the demand for such knowledge. Despite the discontinuation of the published estimates, efforts continued inside Whitehall to develop statistical tools and to provide analyses about redistributive effects of government policies on an ad-hoc basis. The work was severely limited  Tomlinson, The Labour Governments 1964–70, 200–9.  TNA, T 171/829, HMT, K. Berrill to W. Armstrong, 9 Feb. 1968; R. T. Armstrong to W. Armstrong, 20 Feb. 1968; CSO, J. L. Nicholson, The Redistributive Effects of the Budget, 15 Mar. and 25 Mar. 1968; Tomlinson, The Labour Governments 1964–70, 208–9.  TNA, T 171/839, HMT, F.E.R. Butler to Dowler, 11 Apr. 1969; F.E.R. Butler, Briefing for the Budget Debate: Effect of the Budget on Income Distribution; Tomlinson, The Labour Governments 1964–70, 208–9.  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, Folger to Levitt, 15 Jan. 1973.  TNA, T 171/1317, Correspondence between HMT and CSO on the redistributive effects of the 1970 budget.  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, Symons to Folger, 24 Jan. 1973.

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by technical and resource constraints, though. Alongside the well-known problems associated with the small size of the underlying FES datasets, the ‘inflexibility of the data available in the CSO’ proved to be a major obstacle. This meant, for example, that analyses of possible changes to tax schemes could not ‘be done fast enough to be of real help’ in the policy-making process.231 As Treasury officials explained in interdepartmental discussions in 1971, the current process was ‘much too slow for ministers to choose between alternative strategies’ as this would have required ‘answers in only a few days’.232 When the Heath government announced changes to social security schemes in autumn 1970, for example, officials in the Treasury’s Fiscal and Incomes Policy Division were unable to produce a timely and precise analysis of the redistributive effects of the proposed measures. As they lacked access to the raw data of the FES and due to ‘the shortage of time’, Treasury officials had to resort to the published FES reports. The published reports, however, did not contain detailed enough information to enable an accurate assessment of the estimated impact of the policy changes. To overcome these problems, the Treasury embarked in 1970 on the development of a computer model provisionally labelled the ‘Household Incidence Model’.233 After some technical problems, the project began to make progress in 1971, initially with more limited aims. From the start, the model was not designed to measure the incidence of the tax/benefit system as a whole. First, it was restricted to the analysis of indirect taxes on expenditure, as the income data in the FES was regarded as ‘highly suspect’ for the reasons flagged up by the ongoing review of the FES. And second, the FES was calculated on a household basis and was therefore difficult to reconcile with the Inland Revenue statistics that were based on tax units and were deemed more reliable for the analysis of the incidence of direct taxes. Similar problems limited the diagnostic potential of another simulation model that was developed at the DHSS around the same time to obtain a new tool for estimating the effects of means-tested benefits.234 Both the DHSS and the Treasury realized that the size of the FES was ‘too small’ for these and other ‘important purposes’.235 Hence, by the early 1970s, government statisticians were still not in a position to provide policy-makers with more than rough information about the possible distributional effects of policy proposals. The idea of developing a computerized simulation model for this purpose remained on the list as an important project for the future.236

 TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Requirements of the Treasury, 9 Nov. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 13 Oct. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Requirements of the Treasury, 9 Nov. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 13 Oct. 1971.  TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting on 15 Dec. 1971.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, R. E. Fry to Kershaw, Note for Prime Minister on Distribution and Redistribution of Income, 4 Apr. 1974.

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While the work on the effects of budget measures and tax policies produced at least initial results, even less was known about the distributional impact of social policies. In the White Paper on Planning in 1970, social policy was described as one of the most neglected policy areas in this context. As was pointed out in the paper, Whitehall still lacked ‘a social calculus comparable to the development in the economic field’.237 Senior civil servants agreed that while planners were ‘already pretty well catered for’ on economic matters, ‘nothing comparable’ existed in the social field; the CSO director, Claus Moser, concurred that there was ‘a clear gap in the present planning apparatus for fields such as education, health, social care, and housing’.238 The gaps also meant that the distributional effects of public expenditure in a wide range of social policies were clouded by uncertainty. This problem was felt acutely at a time when ministers and officials were looking to curb public expenditure. In the wake of repeated currency crises, in particular, after the devaluation of the pound in 1967, concerns grew over the apparent inability to forecast and monitor the impact of spending on public services with sufficient precision. As was highlighted in a paper produced by the Treasury for the ministerial Committee on Social Services in May 1968, it was ‘extremely difficult to define and to measure’ the effects of public spending ‘especially in the field of social service outlays’:239 The effects are manifold and virtually incomparable and unquantifiable. Decisions on the relative values of the stream of benefits from extra expenditure on secondary education, on hospitals, or on pensions, involves unquantifiable social judgments which as yet cost-benefit analysis cannot treat. We cannot, for example, measure and compare the effect on economic output and efficiency in the economy of these three types of outlay. Nor can we measure the effect on the distribution of income, still less the social and political effects of these public expenditures.

The absence of more precise information about distributional effects and other political implications of public spending was a defining feature of the culture of decision-making in contemporary Britain. As the Treasury paper concluded, the limited ability to quantify the benefit side in the cost-benefit analysis of public expenditure meant that ‘decisions on relative priorities for marginal expenditure will still have to be taken largely as a matter of intuitive judgment’. This practice remained unchanged despite various initiatives to improve social statistics and the machinery of government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Central Policy Review Staff observed in 1972, the limited information base of policy-making in Britain had become obvious in a number of recent Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) exercises in various areas of social policy:240

 TNA, CAB 152/141, Draft White Paper on Planning, Jan. 1970.  TNA, CAB 152/141, R. R. D. McIntosh to B. Trend, 4 Feb. 1970; CSO, C. Moser to B. Trend, 16 Feb. 1970.  TNA, T 230/948, Cabinet, Ministerial Committee on Social Services, Development of the Social Services, May 1968.  TNA, CAB 184/48, CPRS, Draft Report: Social Affairs and the Information Base, 21 July 1972.

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Policy analysis is impossible without relevant information. The PARs on the Elderly, Higher Education and Schools Expenditure have shown that relevant information, even of the less sophisticated kind, is often not readily available. Ready availability is important. It is no good telling Ministers that they will have to wait for a year or two until we can prove whether a given scheme is cost-effective or well-aimed; if we do, Ministers will take decisions entirely on judgement and without the necessary factual basis.

The Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) attributed the ‘present lack of relevant information as a basis for policy decisions’ not so much to a general lack of statistical knowledge as to the ways in which it was collected, administered, and presented. This applied, among other things, to the missing linkages between statistics that were gathered by different government departments, published in separate statistical series, and organized on different levels of local and central government. Furthermore, existing statistics were often ‘not in the right form for policy use’ and could not easily be reconfigured, as in the case of aggregated data on incomes from the system of national accounts that could not be ‘split down into relevant slices’, for example, ‘into income distribution quintiles or the local/regional distribution of the total class’. The need to develop statistical information ‘which could be useful for policy appraisal’ was also recognized at the Treasury where officials saw much need for ‘a framework of common definitions’ and ‘a regular flow of data from which at least partial information relevant to policy can be derived’.241 Moreover, they also found fault with another common practice in Whitehall. The actual effects of policies during and after the implementation were rarely monitored to establish whether or not they led to the intended results: ‘There is very little follow-up of this kind at present even for instance in the roads programme where forecasts would be relatively easy to check.’ In other words, neither the formulation nor the assessment of social policies was informed by sufficient knowledge. As a Treasury officials observed, a closer look at the decision-making process in British government – as had been demonstrated in the recent PAR on the elderly – ‘showed a frightening absence of information at both the national and local levels, [. . .] on needs, costs and achievement’.242 The efforts to improve the information base were closely linked to wider initiatives to create interdepartmental machinery for more rational and more coordinated social policy-making in Whitehall. On the one hand, these initiatives were inspired by growing awareness of the multidimensional nature of many social policy issues that criss-crossed departmental boundaries; on the other hand, they were also guided by the urgent sense that the difficult economic situation following devaluation and the resulting pressures on the social services budget required more efficient procedures for the allocation of scarce resources and for ‘establishing priorities both within and

 TNA, T 316/191, HMT, Couzens to J. M. Bridgeman, Development of Social Statistics for Policy, 8 Mar. 1972.  TNA, T 316/191, HMT, J. M. Bridgeman to Couzens, 15 Mar. 1972.

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between departments’.243 In late 1967, proposals for a ‘system of budgeting for the social services as a whole’ were advanced by the then Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, Michael Stewart, who also pointed out ‘the desirability of some central mechanism for the gathering of information and research findings properly interrelated to the needs of the various social services’.244 To meet this goal, Stewart proposed ‘to make fuller use’ of the existing Social Statistics Committee, while ‘the creation of some fresh body’ was not deemed possible in the ‘present circumstances’. The proposals were welcomed at the Treasury. Senior officials regarded the suggested budgeting system as a helpful ‘new research tool’ for ‘scrutinising expenditure on the social services’ and ‘their relative effectiveness’ with respect to ‘economic as well as social considerations’. Moreover, the proposals were ‘generally agreed’ by ministers at a meeting of the Social Services Committee in early 1968.245 However, both officials at the Treasury and the discussions at the committee meeting dampened expectations that ‘a sizable increase in work on social statistics’ was possible in light of the ‘already heavily burdened’ resources of the Social Statistics Committee and the restraints on spending in the current climate. In 1972, the CPRS, the government think tank headed by Victor Rothschild, initiated a renewed attempt to reform the decision-making process in social policy. The topic first appeared on the work programme of the CPRS in 1971, before discussions in Whitehall were kicked off by a CPRS paper on resource allocation in social affairs that was presented to a Cabinet meeting at Chequers in May 1972. Subsequently, the CPRS was given a mandate by the Prime Minister to convene a ministerial Strategy Group on Social Affairs to further explore the issues raised at the meeting.246 CPRS officials were hoping not only to achieve improvements to the government machinery and a central coordinating role for the CPRS ‘in identifying the problem areas and in seeking ways of tackling them’, but also to develop an overall ‘strategy for social affairs’ by singling out major policy issues that required particular attention.247 The list of topics that were considered to be of central importance for the suggested Social Affairs Strategy included the redistribution of income. According to some in the CPRS, this was an area where a government strategy was conspicuously ‘non-existent’ but urgently required. Engaging with distributional questions not only seemed important in light of the political context of the time, with ongoing tripartite talks over industrial relations, debates about incomes policy, and the rising cost of living in 1972, but also with respect

 TNA, T 227/2636, Michael Stewart, Development of the Social Services. Memorandum by the First Secretary of State, 15 Dec. 1967.  TNA, T 227/2636, M. Stewart to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 15 Dec. 1967.  TNA, T 227/2636, SS(68)2nd Meeting, 7 Feb. 1968; HMT, A. J. Phelps to N. Jordan-Moss, 6 Feb. 1968.  TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, Resource Allocation: Social Affairs, May 1972; CPRS, Note by P. W. Carey, 18 Aug. 1972.  TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, M. Aston, Draft Paper: Strategy–Social Affairs, Oct. 1972.

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to wider social issues.248 To facilitate such an ‘overall strategy on social affairs’, the CPRS approach envisaged the creation of new structures in the civil service that would include ‘an executive group in the Cabinet Office concerned with the coordination of departmental activities’ and the ‘establishment of a sound body of knowledge’ to inform the formulation of policy.249 In the end, however, the ambitious CPRS proposals got bogged down in interdepartmental wrestling over influence in social policy. Competing initiatives emerged from the DHSS not long after the CPRS had presented their proposals at Chequers. In August 1972, Sir Philip Rogers, the permanent secretary at the DHSS, renewed an earlier bid to establish a steering group consisting of the permanent secretaries to oversee the development of ‘joint social policies’.250 At the CPRS, this idea was lauded as ‘admirable’ but also regarded as ‘worrying’: officials sensed potential ‘dangers for the CPRS’ who were determined not ‘to surrender to the group any of the initiative’ in this field nor to ‘tolerate the group’s trying to interfere with our work programme’.251 The situation was complicated by a separate proposal made by Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State at the DHSS and a leading figure of the emerging New Right in Britain: in late June 1972, Joseph had advanced the idea of setting up a new ministerial committee for the coordination of interdepartmental policy issues in the social field as a sub-committee of the Home and Social Affairs Committee (HS).252 From the CPRS point of view, both proposals taken together created ‘the possibility of a new channel of communication from the Permanent Secretaries’ Steering Group to the Sub-Committee of HS’, and thus ‘the possibility of the emergence of a “lobby” or “pressure group” pushing particular aspects of social policy.’253 Although this scenario did not materialize and a labour-sharing arrangement was subsequently agreed between the CPRS group and the Rogers group, the episode gave a taste of the difficulties involved in any attempt of creating central machinery in Whitehall against the resistance of departments that were sensitive to any potential encroachment on their domains. The well-documented interdepartmental politics in Whitehall254 help to explain why the CPRS initiative eventually ‘ran into heavy fire both from Ministers and officials’, as the CPRS deputy director, Dick Ross, retrospectively put it.255 A programmatic CPRS paper proposing ‘an ongoing review of social affairs activities’ was ‘given short shrift’ at a meeting of ministers in November 1973,

 TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, M. Aston to Lord Rothschild, 11 Oct. 1972.  TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, R. E. Crum to Burgh, 20 Nov. 1972.  TNA, T 227/3811, DHSS, P. Rogers to W. Pile, DES: A Possible Approach to a Joint Social Policy, 2 Mar. 1972.  TNA, CAB 184/98, CPRS, J. F. Mayne to C. R. Ross, 24 Jan. 1973.  TNA, CAB 184/98, DHSS, K. Joseph to R. Maudling, Home Office, 30 June 1972.  TNA, CAB 184/98, CPRS, C. R. Ross to B. Trend, Cabinet Office, 29 Sept. 1972.  Hennessy, Whitehall.  TNA, CAB 184/156, CPRS, C. R. Ross to J. Hunt, 15 May 1974.

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and even ‘some greatly modified proposals’ advanced shortly afterwards were rejected.256 In hindsight, one of the CPRS officials working on the initiative, William Plowden, placed part of the blame for this failure on the CPRS director, Lord Rothschild, who had ignored the advice of his officials and submitted a largely unamended paper that not only sounded ‘hopelessly optimistic’ but also was ‘abrasive’ in tone. However, the discussions suggested that the initiative also drew criticism because it was regarded as an intrusion into departmental autonomy. At a ‘painful meeting’ with Keith Joseph at the DHSS, who turned out to be ‘one of the main critics’ of the initiative, Joseph told CPRS officials that the proposals threatened ‘wholesale intervention in departmental activities and inordinate demands on hard-pressed officials’.257 The resistance encountered in these talks brought the CPRS initiative to a stop even if officials at the think tank were still convinced ‘that the substance of its original proposals was right’.258 Nevertheless, as it turned out later, the CPRS work laid the groundwork for a renewed effort under the next administration.259 In the meantime, the problems identified by the CPRS remained unresolved. Social policy-making was based on insufficient knowledge, and this applied in particular to social issues and inequalities that cut across established social categories.

Intersectionality Throughout the post-war era, official statistics projected an image of a society in which the dividing lines of class, gender, and race were hardly visible, let alone the intersections between these and other social categories. In reproducing images of a white British nation fed by male bread-winners, government statisticians were in tune with contemporary sociologists whose class analyses were premised on a model of the white male worker – despite the changing position of women and the growing presence of ethnic minorities in British society.260 Perceptions began to change during the 1960s and 1970s when inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality were brought out by social movements and also received more attention from mass media, scholars, and government institutions.261 The growing awareness of categorical inequalities was not matched by government statistics, though. It was not until the 1990s that data on core dimensions of economic inequality by ethnicity was collected and published.262 The

 TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, Note by W. Plowden, 27 Jan. 1977.  Ibid. The Keith Joseph quotation was cited from notes taken by Plowden during the meeting.  TNA, CAB 184/156, CPRS, C. R Ross to J. Hunt, 15 May 1974.  See Chapter 4, section ‘Visions of Knowledge-Based Policy-Making: The Joint Approach to Social Policy’.  Savage, ‘The Fall and Rise of Class Analysis in British Sociology’, 62–5.  Thane, ‘Equalities in Britain’, 189.  Kimber, ‘Race and Equality’, 42.

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gaps in official statistics persisted for decades although civil servants were well aware of these lacunae. While the concept of ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 1980s and gained much traction in subsequent years, the idea that interlocking dimensions and categories of inequality can produce particular forms of racialized and gendered disparities had already been present in Black Feminism and Black Political Economy in earlier decades.263 During the 1960s and 1970s, the interrelatedness of social variables was also recognized by civil servants and government statisticians in Britain, a paradigmatic shift that certainly owed much to the transnational social indicators movement of the time. These ideas prompted new initiatives to develop statistical tools tailored to capture multidimensional inequalities. However, the programmes did not get very far. Government statistics continued to neglect the economic positions of ethnic minorities and women, a situation that was similar to many other societies in the post-war period.264 During the first two decades of the post-war era, existing government statistics offered little information of this sort. The income tax statistics published by the Inland Revenue treated husbands and wives as a single tax unit and thus brushed over gender imbalances in incomes; only on the wealth side, the IR statistics gave information for men and women separately, revealing large differences in the distribution of wealth by sex. The Department of Employment’s regular reports on the FES, in turn, presented the results mainly by household types, but provided no comparative data on income differentials between men and women. As far as earnings were concerned, the Ministry of Labour’s regular statistical enquiries on wage rates and salaries supplied extensive information on women’s earnings; however, before 1968 most of these sources only gave information about averages, not about the distribution or the make-up of earnings.265 Even the New Earnings Survey that was introduced in 1968 to provide regular data on the earnings dispersion among male and female employees left many questions unanswered: alongside other shortcomings, the NES was not detailed enough to be used as a data source for monitoring the implementation of the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Furthermore, earnings were just one income component among others, while women’s incomes as a whole were not documented in separate analyses by government statistics, as was pointed out in the first report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in 1975.266 This was despite the great importance attributed to issues of economic inequality by second wave feminists during the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside wider demands for cultural change in

 Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’; Hill Collins, ‘Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy’.  Simon, ‘Choice of Ignorance’.  TNA, CAB 139/567, Cabinet, Statistical Policy Committee: Productivity, Prices and Incomes Policy – Earnings Information, 19 July 1967.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 149.

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attitudes and behaviour towards women, equal pay was a key concern of the Women’s Liberation Movement.267 Even less information was available about the economic circumstances of ethnic minorities. In the Family Expenditure Survey, households were ‘not excluded’ from the sample ‘if some or all members are not British subjects’, as was explained in the introduction to the first published FES report of 1961.268 However, neither citizenship nor ethnic origin were recorded in the survey, a methodological choice that precluded any cross-sectional analysis of income or expenditure by race. The Population Censuses, in turn, did not include any questions about income but provided other information, such as data on housing conditions that could be used as proxy indicators of deprivation, an approach that was pioneered in the Urban Programme of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Census also offered possibilities to gather data about the immigrant population in the form of indirect questions about the country of birth and the birthplace of the parents; the latter was added in 1971 before officials decided against including a direct question on ethnic origin in the 1981 Census.269 All in all, the Census was not regarded as a sound basis for detailed analyses in this particular area. As officials at the General Register Office conceded in internal discussions in 1970, ‘they cannot as yet provide sophisticated enough statistics on the immigrant population or on the identification of areas of special need and the impact of current policy in these areas’.270 Other statistical series left this question out altogether. Data on ethnic minorities was collected neither in the Inland Revenue’s income and wealth statistics nor in official earnings statistics. As staff of the RCDIW noted in the mid 1970s, the available income data on ethnic minorities in Britain remained ‘patchy’ at best.271 The dearth of information contrasted sharply with the political salience of debates about immigration, strained community relations, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism in post-colonial Britain. The gradual dissolution of the British Empire was accompanied by large-scale immigration of Commonwealth citizens that transformed British society on many levels. However, post-war governments did little to develop an information system to analyse and monitor social change associated with immigration. Admittedly, various government departments such as the Home Office and the General Register Office set up committees or units concerned with research on minority groups and racial disadvantage, but these bodies were not invested with powers to direct statistical policies and had to work with whatever information was available.272

 McCarthy, ‘Gender Equality’.  Ministry of Labour, Family Expenditure Survey: Report for 1957–59 (London: HMSO, 1961), 1.  Brückweh, Menschen zählen, 281–5.  TNA, CAB 108/748, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Consideration of Social Statistics by the Ministerial Committee on Social Services, 7 May 1970.  TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, Note of Meeting with Ms Lomas, 29 Oct. 1976.  TNA, HO 376, Records of the I Division in the Home Office from the 1960s/80s; TNA, RG 19/347, Correspondence of the Committee on Technical Aspects of Minority Group Research at the RGO; TNA,

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The lack of statistical knowledge in this area became increasingly felt towards the end of the 1960s, as government statisticians noted in an internal stocktaking of social statistics in 1970:273 One field of policy needs which has come to the fore in recent years is in respect of data on the population of non-United Kingdom origin: up-to-date information is wanted on the evolution of the concentrations, their size and characteristics, as part of research and policy formation in the field of Community Relations.

Demand for statistical knowledge was pushed by the Home Office, in particular. In the context of the Urban Programme, ongoing efforts to identify deprived areas were closely associated with research and policies directed at the immigrant population. In 1968, the year when the controversial Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, the Research Unit at the Home Office enquired with the CSO in this matter. Home Office staff hoped ‘to obtain information through the FES about the financial circumstances of immigrants and coloured people’ only to be told that ‘it would not be possible’ to use the Family Expenditure Survey for this purpose.274 Although the CSO offered to hold talks about the ‘possibilities for later years’, no significant changes were undertaken and the idea of including a question on ethnic origin in the FES was not considered. The non-existence of statistical information in this critical area raised eyebrows not only in the Home Office. It also prompted questions at the CPRS when the think tank embarked on a new initiative to improve the knowledge base of social policy in 1972: ‘Great Britain is now a multiracial society. Have we a coherent strategy for managing these problems?’275 For other reasons, official statistics were also silent on economic disparities associated with social class. While the GSS failed to collect more detailed information on race and gender inequality, data on class differentials was readily available from internal analyses but not incorporated into published statistics. Instead, the tables produced by the Inland Revenue showed income and wealth distributions broken down by income ranges or percentile shares without any other socio-economic classification – the tables conveyed a picture of gradual, classless inequality. Similarly, no references to social class appeared in the official reports and analyses that were based on the FES. Both in the annual FES reports and in the Economic Trends articles on redistribution the data was analysed first and foremost by household types, that is the composition of households by the number of adults and children. The absence of any analyses by social class

CK 1 and CK 2, Records of the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission from the 1960s/70s.  TNA, CAB 108/748, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Consideration of Social Statistics by the Ministerial Committee on Social Services, 12 Mar. 1970.  TNA, CAB 139/681, Correspondence between T. S. Lodge, Home Office, and H. E. Bishop, CSO, Aug./ Sept. 1968.  TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, C. R. Ross, Social Affairs, 20 Oct. 1972.

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was all the more conspicuous as such analyses were at hand in the CSO. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, John Leonard Nicholson and his team at the CSO produced tables for internal government purposes that not only classified FES data by household composition and income ranges, but also presented separate distributions for the ‘middle class’ and the ‘working class’, defined by occupations or a certain level of income in the case of retirement pensioners.276 Furthermore, the CSO statisticians also provided redistribution analyses that showed the redistributive effects of the tax/benefit system on working class families and middle class families.277 Results were summarized using the Gini coefficient or in terms of the ratio of average income between the two social classes – measurements that could have served as powerful key indicators to show the trends in class differentials in Britain’s social and economic order.278 None of these analyses and indicators ever appeared in the published reports, however. When the first official report on the results of the new FES was drafted in 1961, Nicholson offered to prepare tables ‘with or without further sub-division by social class’ but the Ministry of Labour opted for the latter because officials regarded the class-based analysis as too delicate for political reasons.279 In discussions with the CSO it had been agreed to keep the published report ‘purely descriptive’, and officials at the Ministry had even raised ‘doubts about using the words “redistribution of income”’, a term that was seen as politically charged, too.280 Consequently, the draft report was sanitized of all terms and measurements that potentially carried ideological associations. In May 1961, Ronald Fowler at the Ministry of Labour forwarded the draft report to the CSO and explained the revisions to the text as follows:281 You will see that we have referred to the redistribution of income analysis as a ‘distribution of income’ analysis, in order to avoid a title which, though useful for departmental purposes, may possibly have political overtones for some readers. For the same reason, we have not referred to analyses by social class.

Depoliticising issues of class and inequality was in tune with the wider political culture of the time. While many contemporaries shared the deep-seated view of Britain as a society divided into two or three social classes, the main political parties tried to disassociate

 TNA, LAB 17/225, CSO, H. E. Bishop to R. M. Hobsbaum, MinLab, 17 Apr. 1958; TNA, CAB 108/374, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys: Report on the 1960 Experimental Surveys, 21 July 1961.  LSE Archive, J. L. Nicholson Papers, box 126, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys: Redistribution of Income in 1957, 8 Jan. 1960.  LSE Archive, J. L. Nicholson Papers, box 126, CSO, Note on the Gini Coefficient and the Two Classes, 13 Feb. 1961.  TNA, LAB 17/226, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to R. F. Fowler, MinLab, 10 Feb. 1961.  TNA, LAB 17/226, MinLab, R. M. Hobsbaum to Ward; 23 Feb. 1961; CSO, H. Campion to R. F. Fowler, MinLab, 9 June 1961.  TNA, LAB 17/226, MinLab, R. F. Fowler to H. Campion, CSO, 24 May 1961.

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themselves from notions of class-based politics.282 In 1959, Harold Macmillan famously proclaimed ‘that the class war is over’ and after 1964, the incoming Labour government under Harold Wilson operated on a platform of classless populism.283 The vision of a classless society was bolstered by official statistics that rendered class divisions invisible, but the absence of meaningful analyses of personal income distribution by social class was not conducive to an informed political debate. This helps to explain why the British Left commonly discussed distributional politics in terms of factor shares.284 Juxtaposing labour and capital, entrepreneurs and employees, corresponded to hierarchical views of a society divided between those at the top and the majority at the bottom, a view that was part and parcel of the political imagery on the Left. Moreover, resorting to the wage share as a key indicator of inequality also made sense because this information was regularly updated and readily available from the official statistics of national accounts. As a macroeonomic measure it could be used to detect larger changes. For example, downward movements in the wage share have accurately reflected the trend of rising inequality since the second half of the 1970s. On the other hand, the wage share was a crude measure with many shortcomings. Among others, it brushed over the heterogeneity of incomes within social classes and thus tended to obscure more fine-grained inequalities.285 As government statistics provided few separate analyses of economic disparities by gender, race, and class, there was little scope for cross-sectional analyses, let alone investigations into spatialized inequalities in smaller geographical areas. What official statistics failed to detect during much of the post-war era only became apparent in later decades. In the 1990s, new approaches to official income statistics revealed disproportionate levels of poverty among communities of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, in particular, among British Muslim women.286 It was not that there were no ideas for developing statistical tools for such purposes in earlier decades. During the latter half of the 1960s, approaches to multidimensional statistics were on the cards in the transnational social indicators movement and the subsequent expansion of social statistics in Whitehall. When officials and ministers took stock of the existing statistical system in 1970, the CSO noted that it ‘sees many gaps in social statistics especially of background and contextual data which relate to these interrelationships between different kinds of social characteristics’.287 CSO officials were confident that some of these gaps could be filled by the ongoing work on a new multi-purpose household

 Cannadine, Class in Britain, 150, 157.  Ibid. 149; Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, 132.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 176–7.  Ibid.; Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, ch. 9.  Kimber, ‘Race and Equality’.  TNA, CAB 108/748, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Consideration of Social Statistics by the Ministerial Committee on Social Services, 12 Mar. 1970.

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survey that was eventually introduced as the General Household Survey (GHS) in 1971: when the CSO had advanced concrete plans for the new survey in 1968, it was advertised as an instrument that could deliver much-needed information ‘about the interrelations between topics (e.g. household composition, health, education, jobs, etc.)’, with a sample size large enough to break down cross-tabulations down to the regional level.288 The CSO hoped that the GHS would provide nothing less than a ‘continuous statistical monitoring system of the interrelationships of the various characteristics of individuals and households’.289 Even if the interrelatedness of social conditions consequently received more attention, this did not necessarily mean that multidimensional forms of inequality moved to the forefront of the discussions. In fact, categorical inequalities were treated at best as a topic among others. None of the papers and meetings discussing the designated purposes and departmental requirements in the planning for the GHS explicitly mentioned women as an area where more statistical work was needed. Race, however, was highlighted as a topic of particular concern by several departments: apart from the Home Office, the Department of Employment and the General Register Office expressed a special interest in data on ‘employment and unemployment by race’ and the ‘characteristics of immigrants’.290 Consequently, it was decided to record data on ‘coloured groups’ in the survey: the survey schedule included questions on the country of birth as well as the parents’ country of birth – in addition to a subjective ‘assessment of colour’ by the interviewer.291 However, when CSO officials surveyed departmental data needs for the new multi-purpose household survey, most departments identified rather narrow topics that had bearing on their particular policy agendas instead of asking questions of more general importance. In other words, departments planned to use the GHS as a new quarry of information for specialized departmental purposes – and not like an innovative instrument for a multidimensional analysis of larger social trends. This was also noticed by officials at the Social Survey Division (SSD). In spring 1973, a CPRS official met with Louis Moss, the SSD director, to enquire how the GHS could be used for the CPRS work on social affairs, and this is what he took away from the meeting:292 It is painfully apparent that the survey is (i) mis-used [and] (ii) under-used. It is mis-used in that Departments seem not to realise the potent[i]alities of the survey and the information that can

 TNA, CAB 108/346, CSO, Sub-Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Multi-Purpose Household Surveys, 20 Sept. 1968.  TNA, CAB 108/748, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Consideration of Social Statistics by the Ministerial Committee on Social Services, 12 Mar. 1970.  Ibid.; TNA, CAB 108/346, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Multi-Purpose Household Surveys, 20 Sept. 1968; TNA, CAB 108/347, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy: Multi-Purpose Household Surveys, Notes of Informal Meetings, 30 Apr. 1969.  TNA, CAB 108/349, CSO, Working Party on Multi-Purpose Household Surveys, Pilot: Instructions to Interviewers, 21 Jan. 1970.  TNA, CAB 184/96, CPRS, R. E. Crum to Ross, General Household Survey, 11 Apr. 1973.

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be obtained from it. It is interesting that it is the Scots who have used it most intelligently so far. The net result is that so far it has been used to serve narrow departmental interests in a not very intelligent manner and there is no coherent overall picture being built up. Mr Moss is being bullied by Moser to produce an overall picture, but is forced by circumstances to use the departmental bits; the end result will be a fascinating mess. It is being under-used first in that there is apparently no way in which any non-departmental person may use it to obtain a coherent picture, and publish it. No results have been published.

Furthermore, technical problems surfaced that affected the value of the information yielded by the GHS. Contrary to the hopes of planners to create a large-scale survey that could produce reliable data on regional differences, the sample size of around 11,600 responding households in Great Britain proved to be too small for many purposes. Even in Scotland, where the relative size of the sub-sample was twice as large as those in England and Wales, it was ‘not possible to produce many desired analyses’, a lesson that government statisticians learnt from the first rounds of the survey.293 Moreover, the GHS sample also generated relatively small numbers of households from minority groups such as ‘single parent families, coloured immigrants and those with low incomes’. At the Home Office, for example, where officials were interested in income information from the GHS in connection with ongoing work on urban deprivation and ‘on matters of colour’, in particular, officials found that ‘the numbers are so small for some of the parameters in which we are interested and the bias may be so large that we are chary of using the data extensively’.294 To make the GHS work in the future, Home Office statisticians were hoping to combine several years of GHS data when they became available to obtain ‘large enough numbers for cross-analysis of various factors’, but in the short term officials struggled to find solutions to the problem. Increasing the overall sample size was considered too costly and possibly detrimental to the quality of the data, while the alternative, differential sampling, was technically unfeasible.295 Differential sampling meant using a higher sampling fraction for selected key areas to increase the representation of underrepresented groups and regions, but this required a viable sampling frame from which the households and areas could be chosen. The sampling frame of the GHS was the Electoral Register, which was not suitable for identifying clusters of the ‘coloured community’, and by the early 1970s, the GSS had not yet developed any sampling frame that could have served this purpose. The non-existence of such a statistical infrastructure was symptomatic of the low priority that had for so long been accorded to this topic. Finally, any solution to the problem that involved a substantial increase in the GHS sample size required extra resources, a major hurdle

 TNA, CAB 108/773, CSO, Working Party on General Household Survey: GHS Sample Size, 26 Sept. 1975.  TNA, CAB 108/773, Home Office, S. V. Cuncliffe to D. L. H. Roberts, CSO, 4 Mar. 1974.  TNA, CAB 108/773, CSO, Working Party on General Household Survey: GHS Sample Size, 26 Sept. 1975.

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in a period when curbing public expenditure had become a central concern for policy-makers and officials. By the end of the post-war era, there was a growing body of qualitative and quantitative knowledge on immigrants in Britain, but key planks were missing or remained insecure. Existing information from government sources included the annual reports published by the Community Relations Commission. Furthermore, independent researchers stepped up to provide analyses on race relations. Academic scholarship on economic issues surrounding immigration thrived during the 1970s,296 in particular, stimulated by the wave of social activism during this period.297 New research programmes emerged that were devoted to improving existing knowledge on the immigrant population. In 1970, for example, the Research Unit on Ethnic Relations was set up at the University of Bristol with funding from the Social Science Research Council.298 In the absence of precise income and expenditure data, however, any attempt to analyse the economic situation of immigrants had to rely on proxy indicators – this caveat also applied to the widely noted report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ published by the Institute of Race Relations in 1969.299 Admittedly, the political debate revolved first and foremost around issues of racial discrimination and tensions arising from prejudice and perceived competition for housing, school places and other resources between immigrants and the white majority.300 However, the economic situation of immigrants was widely seen as a yardstick for racial discrimination and existing research revealed at least some basic trends. Measuring employment rates or ‘occupations of the coloured workforce’ provided a coarse-grained picture of immigrants’ situation in the labour market, and cross-classification with Census data placed the immigrant population in lower social strata than the rest of the population.301 What such analyses could not render visible were the disadvantages experienced by different social groups at the household level. Even if the term ‘intersectionality’ had yet to be coined, researchers and activists began to grasp the importance of interlocking categorical inequalities. In the case of Gillian Lomas, for example, who worked as a social statistician at the Centre of Environmental Studies (CES), this notion informed her analytical approach to questions of inequality and redistribution, an approach that she also put forward when the CES engaged in a collaboration with the CPRS in its Social Affairs programme during the

 TNA, BS 7/666, Records of the RCDIW: in an internal study on immigrants in the labour market prepared by the Department of Employment in Oct. 1976, the overwhelming majority of titles cited in the bibliography dated from the early and mid 1970s.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 420–5.  Research Unit on Ethnic Relations, Ethnic Relations.  Institute of Race Relations, Colour and Citizenship.  Brian Walden, ‘The Picture of Prejudice’, The Guardian, 10 July 1969.  Lomas, Census 1971: The Coloured Population of Great Britain; Lomas and Monck, The Coloured Population of Great Britain.

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early 1970s. For the overall goal of improving the information base of social policies, the CPRS was interested in developing a statistical framework for the analysis of interrelationships between social variables. In this context, Lomas was clear in papers and discussions that she saw social inequalities as mutually reinforcing and ‘accumulative’.302 Admittedly, later scholarship on intersectionality developed more complex understandings of how overlapping social identities and associated disadvantages did not simply accumulate but produced distinct forms and experiences of inequality. Nevertheless, studies such as Lomas’s contributed to the developing epistemology of intersectionality avant la lettre. Growing awareness of multidimensional social inequalities was paired with calls for more reliable knowledge. Lomas, for example, not only pointed to the interdependencies between social and spatial variables that had major distributional implications – she also highlighted the fact that these effects were ‘to a large extent obscured’ by the existing analytical machinery. Lomas’s interventions brought out the persisting gaps and conceptual flaws in official statistics. The lack of a more sophisticated statistical infrastructure and a clearer conception that could have helped to capture intersectional inequalities in official statistics remained defining features of the post-war knowledge regime.

The Circulation of Knowledge and the Politics of Statistics As the preceding sections demonstrate, the production of statistical knowledge on economic inequality remained firmly in the hands of civil servants during the post-war era, despite the frequent input and the increasing importance of various actors and organizations outside the government. The previous chapter showed the influence of international organizations and research activities beyond Britain’s borders. From the early beginnings during the interwar era, the development of household surveys in Britain was part of a larger transnational movement that was closely associated with efforts led by the International Labour Office from the mid 1920s. Furthermore, statistical government enquiries into the living standards of the working class such as the 1938 enquiry were informed by the academic work of leading statisticians such as Arthur Bowley, and government officials also drew on Bowley’s advice when they embarked on work on living conditions in the late 1940s that eventually led to the creation of a new household survey in Britain in the 1950s.303 Senior government statisticians such as Harry Campion and John Leonard Nicholson operated at the intersection of the civil service and the scientific community. Nicholson’s personal papers reflect his multiple roles and his broad interests as a government statistician and international expert: he

 TNA, CAB 184/96, CES, G. Lomas, Social Affairs Strategy, 13 May 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/268, Meeting and correspondence between officials in the CSO and the Ministry of Food with Arthur Bowley in 1948/49.

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closely followed and contributed to the academic literature, kept in touch with other scholars in the field, and participated in conferences of international organizations and learned societies such as the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.304 At the 1961 IARIW conference in Tutzing, West Germany, for example, he presented his work on income distribution as measured by the Gini coefficient to an audience of international academics and government statisticians. Frequent transnational exchanges and the international literature provided an important context for the construction of official statistics, and references to academic work were often included in internal discussions, correspondence, and official documents of the CSO. Perhaps the most striking example of how scholarly work shaped official statistics was the 1965 poverty study by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, which established the National Assistance / SB level as a widely used yardstick in public debates and government reports. In many other cases, however, the impact of academic studies and other research activities in the outside world was less evident. In the mid 1930s, to start with, British statisticians did not follow the American example of extending statistical enquiries on living standards in the working class to the whole population.305 Then, during the post-war era, one of the most influential transnational initiatives, the social indicators movement, left few traces in the British statistical system of the 1960s and 1970s: the only innovation that British officials ‘partially’ associated with the social indicators programme was the new government publication Social Trends that presented information which had previously ‘remained hidden in the records of different government departments’.306 Proposals emanating from domestic debates in Britain did not fare much better. Richard Titmuss’s critical 1962 intervention that laid bare the deficiencies of official income distribution statistics had no discernible consequences for statistical work programmes in Whitehall. Similarly, the recommendations of the SSRC expert panel on poverty in 1968 and Peter Townsend’s calls for a purpose-built survey on poverty were not implemented by the Government Statistical Survey even if some of the ideas were taken into consideration. Determining the directions of statistical programmes remained the preserve of ministers and civil servants. Decisions about policies and priorities were prepared and taken mostly behind closed doors in the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, various sub-committees, or in departmental statistical branches and not least in the CSO. Government statisticians were not only in control of the production of statistical knowledge per se, they were also privy to meta-knowledge about the production of knowledge. They had access to information about the possibilities and limitations of official statistics that was usually not available to anyone outside the state bureaucracy. Hence,

 LSE Archive, John Leonard Nicholson, personal papers, e.g. boxes 118 and 126.  See Chapter 2, section ‘Research on Living Standards and the Evolution of Social Surveys’.  TNA, CAB 108/695, CSO, Committee on Statistical Relations with International Organisations, Brief for Seventeenth Session of the UN Statistical Commission, 1 Nov. 1972; TNA, CAB 139/560, Ministry of Social Security, G. M. Jones to K. Mansell, CSO, 7 June 1967.

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some of the most detailed and concrete proposals for improving the existing machinery for collecting and using statistical knowledge for government purposes were advanced by civil servants; for example, the suggested framework for research on poverty outlined in the report by Cyril Smith in 1972, and the ideas developed by the CPRS in connection with their social affairs programme. Furthermore, civil servants exerted considerable control over the circulation of statistical knowledge in the wider society. Most notably, the analyses of the redistributive effects of the tax/benefit system that John Leonard Nicholson and his colleagues at the CSO prepared for internal government purposes in the mid 1950s were not made available to the public. This effectively meant that the government chose not to intervene in the ongoing public debates about the welfare state and the ‘affluent society’. The CSO analyses could have provided a check to political claims about the ‘great transformation’ of British society and the extent of social change during the post-war era. For example, an analysis prepared by Nicholson in the late 1950s showed that the ‘inequality of income’ in Britain had been reduced to a lesser extent than was assumed by many commentators. Compared to the pre-war situation in 1938, the inequality of market incomes before redistribution by public finance had decreased by only six percentage points by 1957; similarly, inequality after redistribution had sunk to 64 per cent of the pre-war level in 1951 but subsequently rose again to 73 per cent by 1957.307 In other words: although the distribution of income had become ‘very much more equal in 1947 than in 1938ʹ, ‘inequality has been increasing again since 1957ʹ.308 However, this and earlier analyses were not released to circulate outside the government, although some officials were in favour of lifting the secrecy. In early 1960, the Deputy Director of the Economic Section at the Treasury, W.A.B. Hopkin, floated this idea with the Chief Economic Advisor to the Treasury, Robert Hall:309 I have also been wondering whether some way could not be found of making the results of the work already done available to the public. This might involve giving someone a bit of leave to write it up in suitable shape. But it seems a pity to keep it all under cover in Whitehall.

In response to this suggestion, Hall scribbled on the note that ‘I think it would be useful to encourage the CSO but I can see some difficulties about publication!’ Consequently, Hopkin wrote to the CSO to signal the Treasury’s interest in further developing techniques to analyse ‘the effect of public finance on the distribution of income’, stressing that such analyses would be useful ‘for internal purposes’.310 Similar discussions

 TNA, T 230/490, HMT, W. A. B. Hopkin to J. L. Nicholson, 9 Feb. 1960. The table was included in a conference paper on the ‘Social Redistribution of Income in the United Kingdom’ presented by Nicholson to the fifth IARIW conference in 1957, but not included in Nicholson’s article in the IARIW volume of 1964; Nicholson, ‘Redistribution of Income in the United Kingdom in 1959, 1957 and 1953ʹ.  TNA, T 230/490, HMT, W. A. B. Hopkin to R. Hall, 10 Feb. 1960.  Ibid.  TNA, T 230/490, HMT, W. A. B. Hopkin to H. Campion, CSO, 19 Feb. 1960.

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arose about the possible publication of results from the FES around the same time. Analyses from the first round of the FES in 1957 were available in Whitehall by early 1958 but publication was deferred several times. Objections raised by officials in the Ministry of Labour were mainly concerned with the reliability of some of the figures that did not square with findings from the National Food Survey.311 As the existence of the FES was no secret – a description of the new survey had been published in the CSO journal Economic Trends in 1957 – more and more enquiries from outside bodies, universities, and market research firms raised questions. The ‘deadlock in the matter of publishing F.E.S. results’ also caused irritation at the CSO where John Leonard Nicholson was of the opinion that ‘there does not seem to be any serious objection’ to the publication of results in certain forms. In spring 1960, he briefed the CSO director, Campion, as follows: ‘Whatever the initial form of publication, we should get the benefit of wider discussion. We would also overcome the embarrassment of sitting on a large pile of very interesting information.’312 In spring 1961, mounting pressure finally convinced ministers and officials at the Ministry of Labour to agree to the publication of a report which eventually appeared in October 1961, about four years after the data had been collected.313 Preparing statistical reports for publication again required multiple decisions by civil servants, a process in which the relevant statistical knowledge underwent another transformation before it was made available to the public. In the process, officials chose the forms and the language in which the statistics were presented and selected contents and tabulations for inclusion in the reports. In the case of the first FES report of 1961, officials at the Ministry of Labour decided in light of staffing constraints to reduce the scope of the report ‘to the minimum essential’, and the eventual publication was restricted to the expenditure side of the survey, while no tables on income data were included.314 Notable restrictions were also placed on the CSO analyses on the redistributive effects of the tax/benefit system that were first published in Economic Trends in autumn 1962.315 The analyses were cleared of any references to terms and categories such as social class that were seen as politically charged, as has been noted above; the first article in the series even avoided any mention of the term ‘redistribution’. Monitoring ‘changes in the degree of inequality in the distribution of income’ over time was openly discussed among government statisticians in internal correspondence

 TNA, LAB 17/226, Ministry of Labour, Minutes and correspondence about the publication of the FES, 1958–61.  TNA, CAB 139/378, CSO, J. L. Nicholson to H. Campion, 11 Apr. 1960.  TNA, LAB 17/226, MinLab, Note for the Record, R. F. Fowler, 10 Apr. 1961.  TNA, LAB 17/226, MinLab, R. M. Hobsbaum to M. A. Barkess, 16 June 1960; Ministry of Labour, Family Expenditure Survey: Report for 1957–59 (London: H.M.S.O., 1961).  CSO, ‘The Impact of Taxes and Social Service Benefits on Different Groups of Households’, Economic Trends, 109 (1962).

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and confidential documents as a central part of their work on redistribution, but neither the term nor the results appeared in the Economic Trends articles.316 What is more, the published analyses also lacked an assessment of overall trends by summary measures of inequality, although Gini coefficients were calculated by the CSO and circulated within Whitehall. In internal documents, John Leonard Nicholson recommended and applied the Gini coefficient as a ‘measure of the degree of inequality’ in combination with the associated Lorenz curve that could provide ‘a convenient summary of the whole distribution’ in a visual form.317 Thus, in CSO papers prepared for the government, ‘the redistributive effects of different taxes and benefits have been condensed by using a single measure of the degree of inequality in the distribution of income’.318 By contrast, the published analyses were presented in a much more complicated way: the Economic Trends articles offered separate analyses of redistributive effects for five different household types with varying numbers of adults and children in overlapping income ranges, without tying the analyses together to identify any overarching trends (see Fig. 4). The analyses were hard to read even for members of parliament who took an active interest in the matter. The Conservative MP John Anthony Leavey, for example, was looking for information on aspects other than trends in inequality, but it was still symptomatic that he struggled to comprehend the Economic Trends analyses. In a remarkable exchange of letters with John Leonard Nicholson at the CSO in spring 1964, Leavey subtly reproached the CSO for not presenting the material in a more accessible manner:319 I have to confess, as I believe I did on an earlier occasion, that the greater proportion of the text and tables is too difficult for me. [. . .] I am (with difficulty!) willing to concede that it is my lack of comprehension and analytical ability rather than inability to be simple and straightforward on the part of the Central Statistical Office. Nevertheless, I do regard that it is difficult for the non-specialist to get at the simple facts which interest him, namely the comparison between what is paid out in various taxes and what is received by way of various State benefits etc. [. . .] Notwithstanding my inability to benefit fully from these surveys and their statistical analysis I find the results absorbing, and I very much hope the time will come when they can be offered to the general public in a more readily understood form.

There were different reasons for the forms of presentation and the sanitized language adopted in the CSO reports. On the one hand, government statisticians clearly felt obliged  LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson papers, box 126, CSO (G) (RI)(65)1, Redistribution of Income through Taxes and Benefits in 1963, 31 Mar. 1965 (confidential).  LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson papers, box 126, CSO, Notes on Redistribution of Income Analysis, Feb. 1960.  LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson papers, box 126, CSO (G) (RI)(64)2, Redistribution of Income through Taxes and Benefits 1957 to 1962, 13 Nov. 1964 (confidential).  TNA, CAB 139/687, Correspondence between J. A. Leavey and J. L. Nicholson, Mar./Apr. 1964. Leavey had already tabled a parliamentary question in 1961 to enquire when the government would publish an analysis of the ‘expenditure of families of representative income groups’ from the FES; Hansard, House of Commons, Oral Answers to Questions, 17 Apr. 1961, vol. 638.

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to demonstrate impartiality in what was a politicized field of research, and ministers and officials at the Treasury, in particular, were certainly wary of the political implications that reports on trends in income inequality might have. However, the cautious approach and the omission of certain aspects of the presented knowledge also had more technical reasons. Similar to the concerns over the reliability of the first returns from the FES in the late 1950s, the internal CSO analyses of trends in income inequality and redistribution were initially regarded as tentative and possibly not trustworthy enough to be published – although even the published data in Economic Trends were accompanied by the caveat ‘that reasonable caution is required in the interpretation of the results’.320 Technical difficulties also accounted for the complicated presentation of the statistics. Moving away from the presentation by household types hinged on the development of equivalence scales, an area where progress was slow. Early precursors of this statistical tool had already been used in the social investigations and surveys on living standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not ready for use in official statistics during the early post-war era.321 Equivalence scales were designed to reduce households of different sizes and composition to a common analytical standard. For this purpose, statisticians assigned differential weights to adults and children of various ages to factor in the differences in their relative consumption needs – this procedure not only took account of the pooling of resources in households but also allowed comparisons between different household types. In other words, equivalence scales allowed statisticians to summarize differences and trends in living standards across society in a single table – instead of calculating separate tables for each household type as before. Constructing equivalence scales required sophisticated statistical techniques, though, and a variety of theoretical approaches were proposed in the international econometric literature, including methods tested by John Leonard Nicholson in his work on living standards in the working class during the 1940s.322 The development of equivalence scales for purposes of government statistics was a more complicated matter. In the mid 1960s, Nicholson led efforts at the CSO to make progress in this area, taking advantage of electronic computer technology that was becoming available and that proved to be ‘essential’ to calculate Gini coefficients from equivalized household data.323 Nicholson pursued the matter with even greater

 LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson papers, box 126, CSO, Notes on Redistribution of Income Analysis, Feb. 1960: ‘With more time, all of these estimates could be made more accurate.’ CSO, ‘The Impact of Taxes and Social Service Benefits on Different Groups of Households’, Economic Trends, 109 (1962), p. ii.  ILO, Methods of Conducting Family Budget Enquiries (1926).  Nicholson, ‘Variations in Working Class Family Expenditure’; Prais and Houthakker, The Analysis of Family Budgets.  TNA, CAB 139/685, CSO, J. L. Nicolson to P. N. Nye, Equivalent Adult Scales, 2 Feb. 1965; P. N. Nye, Note for the Record: The Calculation of Gini Coefficients for Pooled Data in 1966, Using the Clary Computer, 4 Dec. 1967.

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urgency after transferring as the new Chief Economic Advisor to the DHSS in 1968. However, at the CSO the work was not given ‘very high priority’ due to concerns over the ‘conceptual foundations’ of the project and scarce computer resources – the CSO director Claus Moser declined Nicholson’s repeated requests to agree to more than occasional assistance in programming and analysis.324 The DHSS, in turn, was ‘becoming increasingly interested in the subject’ that was considered to be important for a variety of policy purposes.325 In mid 1973, Nicholson’s Economic Advisers Office in the department proposed a new project for the development of equivalence scales that were needed for ‘the monitoring and formulation of policies’; the project was thought to be relevant, for example, for the ongoing discussions over the proposed tax credits system, and, not least, for ‘the analysis of income distribution and redistribution which requires a means of standardising income etc by family type’.326 By the end of the post-war era, there was still no unified approach in Whitehall to applying equivalence scales to official social statistics. In a CSO paper of 1970, using equivalence scales was even described as ‘an alternative approach’ among others to ‘obtain a single distribution for all types of families and then measure the rate of change of, for example, the lower quartile’.327 In a similar paper prepared five years later, the CSO announced that this topic was on the list for ‘future work’: ‘making more use of “equivalence scales”’ would not only clear the path for ‘using quantile shares to present distributions in addition to summary measures of the degree of concentration’ in income inequality and ‘analysing trends in redistribution over time’, the paper explained, it was also expected to facilitate the further development of more comprehensible ‘presentational forms’.328 As long as the GSS could not agree on a choice of equivalence scales, the potential benefits could not be reaped. This placed constraints on the diagnostic potential, the presentational power, and the potential political effects of official income distribution statistics. Official reporting on poverty during the early 1970s, for example, concentrated on a specific family type, the two-parent family, instead of analysing the incidence of low incomes across all family types.329 These limitations also became felt in the social affairs work of the CPRS. As part of the CPRS’ endeavour to improve the knowledge base of decision-making in social policy, officials were interested in ‘some quick and simple calculations to facilitate a comparison between the growth rates of

 TNA, CAB 139/685, CSO, Note for Record: Redistribution of Income, Meeting held on 3 Mar. 1969; LSE Archive, John L. Nicholson papers, box 126, CSO, C. Moser to J. L. Nicholson, DHSS, Work on Redistribution of Income, 24 July 1969.  TNA, CAB 139/685, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to R. L. Brown, CSO, 11 June 1970.  TNA, BN 89/361, DHSS, L. D. McClements, EAO Project on Equivalence Scales: Objectives, 10 May 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/676, CSO, Paper to the Seventh Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 26 June 1970.  TNA, CAB 108/698, CSO, Paper to the Eighth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians, 6 June 1975.  See above, section ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.

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various types of family income over two periods of time’.330 When an official on the CPRS team, Peter Rogers, sought to include such information in a submission to ministers in late 1973, however, he felt compelled to confine the tabulation in the report to one selected family type, namely ‘a married couple with two young children’, even if other family types such as pensioner households were ‘of equal or greater interest’. The inclusion of more tables on additional family types, Rogers argued, would entail an ‘inevitable loss of simplicity and impact’. In other words: contemporaries were clear that if statistics were to make an impact on political discussions, they had to be presented in simple, intelligible ways. As this episode demonstrates, officials even tried to use this principle to their advantage in internal government communication within Whitehall. Presentational choices shaped the political languages in which issues of inequality were discussed. Most notably, the statistics on personal incomes and wealth published by the Inland Revenue showed distributions arranged by percentile shares – together with the associated commentary in the media and in parliament this mode of presentation popularized the figure of the top 1 per cent as a yardstick of inequality in Britain. However, both the Inland Revenue’s reports on personal incomes and the series on wealth distribution only covered tax-paying individuals and thus provided no information on the financial circumstances of families or households, even if commentators in practice often brushed over such complexities.331 Other statistical series were couched in more complicated tabulations and measures that were less suited for immediate political use, as has been demonstrated above. Even the income distribution tables in the so-called Blue Books, widely seen as one of the most authoritative sources, offered no ready-made answers: the tables were broken down by income ranges in money terms instead of percentiles and required further calculations to make trends in inequality visible.332 The fragmentary statistical system in the field of economic inequality hardly helped to establish a political vocabulary of inequality. Published reports on official statistics included few key indicators that could have been used to construct ‘stylised facts’ to inform public debates in comprehensible terms as in more recent years. Consequently, there was little public discussion of trends in inequality by summary measures. The Gini coefficient, for example, did not appear in any article published in the Guardian until 1968, when the Wilson government used it to sell a controversial budget to the public.333 In parliament, it was mentioned only on a couple of occasions in connection with questions raised by statistics-savvy members such as Labour politician Jack Diamond in discussions of wealth inequality during the early 1970s, but

   

TNA, CAB 184/96, CPRS, P. B. Rogers, The Time Profile of Family Income, 5 Nov. 1973. E.g. Anthony Sampson, ‘Titles Mightier than Money’, The Observer, 18 Mar. 1962. CSO, National Income and Expenditure 1969 (London: H.M.S.O., 1969), 27–8. Peter Jenkins, ‘Now it’s up to the Unions’, The Guardian, 22 Mar. 1968.

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Fig. 5: Hardly discernible trends: the income distribution tables in the Blue Book, 1969.

never in earlier decades.334 In a debate in the House of Lords in autumn 1972, for example, various peers ridiculed the indicator by associating it with ‘Aladdin’s lamp’, and Quintin Hogg, the Lord Chancellor and a leading Conservative intellectual of the time, admitted nonchalantly that he ‘had never heard of the Gini coefficient’ until recently.335 Worse still, Hogg was subsequently interrupted by Labour peer Thomas Balogh, an

 A database search in Hansard shows that the term was mentioned only a dozen times on a smaller number occasions in both houses between 1970 and 1974.  Hansard, House of Lords, 23 Nov. 1972, vol. 336, col. 1093.

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economist by profession, who wrongly corrected him, falsely claiming that ‘the Gini coefficient does not refer to wealth at all’, only to incomes, to which Hogg replied: ‘My Lords, that only goes to show how foolish I was to try to answer Lord Diamond’s question’.336 Such ignorance contrasted sharply with the familiarity of political elites with macroeconomic key indicators that were taken much more seriously – measures of income and wealth inequality gained nowhere near as much currency as the ubiquitous measures of GDP growth or the unemployment count. Similarly, the figure of the top 1 per cent still occupied a relatively marginal place in public debates on issues of inequality during the post-war era compared to its increasing importance in later years and decades. Tracing the share of the national wealth taken by the top 1 per cent and comparing it to the shares of lower percentile groups was a well-established measure of wealth concentration in the post-war academic literature, but it did not yet dominate the political discourse on the subject.337 In parliament, for example, members only occasionally referred to the ‘top 1 per cent’ or other percentile terms when it came to issues of economic inequality. The term had not yet acquired the qualities of a political buzzword: in debates about the economic and social policies of the Heath government in 1972, for example, Labour’s expert on matters of inequality and poverty, Michael Meacher, invoked the ‘£5,000-a-year-man’ instead of referring to the top 1 per cent as a metaphor for the super-rich.338 The complexity of official statistics made it difficult for facts about poverty and inequality to circulate easily in wider society.339 Government publications such as the FES reports and the redistribution analyses in Economic Trends contained a plethora of complicated tabulations and much statistical detail, but the commentary offered little guidance in the interpretation of the results and the graphs were not tailored to a nonspecialist audience. Furthermore, most citizens did not have direct access to government periodicals: Economic Trends, for example, had a print run of 2,750 copies in the mid 1960s, and more than seven hundred out of 2,142 subscriptions went to government departments, local authorities, and other public bodies; other groups of subscribers included universities, political parties, and major newspapers.340 Thus, conveying the findings from official statistics to the general public required the attention of the media and translation by experts and journalists. Michael Stewart, for example, a reader in  For example, an analysis of wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient appeared in the 1972 edition of Social Trends, see Malcolm Dean, ‘More Equal Than . . . ’, The Guardian, 30 Nov. 1972.  E.g. Lydall and Tipping, The Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain.  Michael Meacher, Letter to the Editor: ‘Time to wake up to the facts about income redistribution’, The Guardian, 14 Aug. 1972; Hansard, House of Commons, Oral Answers, 7 Dec. 1972, col. 1663; TNA, T 328/1008, Correspondence between Treasury officials about Meacher’s claims.  Morgan, ‘Travelling Facts’.  TNA, CAB 139/535, CSO, Reply to questions raised by the Estimates Sub-Committee, 17 Jan. 1966; TNA, CAB 108/219, Notes on the readership and the circulation of Economic Trends in 1961.

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political economy at University College London, demonstrated in an article for The Times in early 1972 how the information presented in Economic Trends and in the FES reports could be reworked and transformed into more comprehensible tables. By converting the income data from two different years into quintiles and comparing the relative shares of the top and bottom quintiles for each household type, Stewart found ‘a genuine increase in the inequality of income over the two-year period’ from 1969 to 1971.341 A similar conclusion was reached by Labour MP Michael Meacher, who provided an even more user-friendly presentation in a Sunday Times article in autumn 1973: based on published data from the Blue Books and the FES, Meacher juxtaposed the changing income shares of ‘the richest 10%’, ‘the middle 60%’, and ‘the poorest 30%’ between 1949 and 1972 in a single table.342 The results, Meacher argued, told ‘a story far removed from the popular myth, promulgated by many Conservatives, of a flattening juggernaut of inequality’. Meacher’s estimates even held up under scrutiny by government statisticians: in an internal assessment, the CSO found that Meacher’s calculations represented ‘an estimate which is very approximate indeed’ and their own estimates provided ‘no grounds for disputing’ Meacher’s conclusions.343 The episode of Meacher’s article exemplified that government statistics could be reworked into more comprehensible forms to circulate more widely, and the preparation of statistical knowledge for travel depended on the activism and the expertise of specialists. Interventions by politically minded pundits and politicians committed to the alleviation of poverty became more frequent in the latter half of the 1960s, in marked contrast to previous years. In the two decades before the mid 1960s, MPs in the House of Commons tabled no more than a handful of parliamentary questions concerned with poverty in the United Kingdom, and many Labour politicians who campaigned for social causes, such as the MP for Wythenshawe in Manchester, Alfred Morris, had never received any professional training in statistics.344 Michael Meacher, by contrast, embodied a new type of left-wing anti-poverty champion with outstanding proficiency in statistics. Before winning the seat in Oldham West for Labour in 1970, Meacher had been a research fellow and lecturer in social administration at the Universities of Essex, York, and, briefly, the LSE, all hubs of poverty research in the United Kingdom.345 Following his election to the House of Commons, Meacher ‘immediately made a mark as a forensic  Michael Stewart, ‘Are the Poor Getting Poorer?’, The Times, 2 Jan. 1972.  Michael Meacher, ‘The Poor Getting Poorer . . . and Poorer’, The Sunday Times, 6 Oct. 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/809, CSO, Draft Answer to Parliamentary Question and Background Note, 24 Oct. 1973.  Database analysis in Hansard of parliamentary questions and written answers about ‘poverty’ between 1945 and 1973; Tanni Grey-Thompson, ‘Morris, Alfred, Baron Morris of Manchester (1928–2012)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/105438].  Gavin Hyman, ‘Meacher, Michael Hugh (1939–2015)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at [https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.110822]; Sloman, ‘Harold Wilson, “Selsdon Man”, and the Defence of Social Democracy’, 95.

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and effective performer’ with a particular area of specialization in questions of poverty and inequality, which earned him the reputation as a ‘Robin Hood in spectacles’.346 In his long career in parliament, the number of contributions made by Meacher approached 17,000; in his first year alone, Meacher tabled more than 250 parliamentary questions on a wide range of issues, often requesting detailed statistical information from the government, among others, on the numbers in poverty.347 Meacher’s skilful interrogation of existing knowledge on poverty and inequality frequently forced MPs and ministers to engage in advanced discussions of statistical questions. In a debate in early 1971, for example, Meacher delivered a passionate statement about the rise of inwork poverty, based on detailed explanations about how he had applied ‘reworking techniques’ to derive overall trends in the incidence of low incomes from a variety of statistical sources – from government surveys to the publicity of the Child Poverty Action Group to the research of Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith:348 Even on a more conservative basis, however, the Minister seemed to indicate that the number of working poor had risen by last year to about 300,000 households, comprising, perhaps, 1,300,000 persons. Moreover, since the Secretary of State’s estimates of earnings clearly related to the supplementary benefits levels existing prior to the latest increase on 2nd November last, the number of fulltime workers forced to subsist below the State poverty line must be still greater today, and I believe that the total of members of their families must now be steadily approaching 1½ million, or 3 per cent. of the entire population. It must be admitted at once that, while the estimates I have given have been calculated from the most precise material available, they are indicative only due to the margin of error arising from comparing data compiled by different methods and requiring a variety of technical adjustments and assumptions. Their status should, perhaps, be seen as informed guesses. However, having entered that caveat, I insist that the evidence is steady enough and consistent enough to render the picture of the general trend irrefutable. It is a sobering but undeniable truth that the working poor have become poorer under Administrations of both parties. Above all, both the scale of the problem today, touching, perhaps, one in every 40 persons in this country, and the speed of development of work-poverty—almost a tenfold increase in two decades—are an affront to the conscience of any civilised nation.

Meacher took statistical literacy in the House of Commons to the next level – campaigners like him made a real difference in a knowledge regime where few organizations or actors wielded enough expertise to challenge the authority of the GSS. The academic community of experts in the measurement of poverty and in income and wealth distribution was still relatively small.349 It was not until the mid 1960s that

 Ibid.; Julia Langdon, ‘Michael Meacher Obituary’, The Guardian, 21 Oct. 2015.  Historic Hansard, 1803–2005, Summary Information for Mr Michael Meacher, at [https://api.parlia ment.uk/historic-hansard/people/mr-michael-meacher/index.html] accessed 18 Oct. 2022; e.g. Hansard, Written Answers, Low-Income Households, 3 Feb. 1971.  Hansard, House of Commons, Low Income Families, 15 Feb. 1971, vol. 811, cols. 1566–71.  Morris and Preston, ‘Inequality, Poverty and the Redistribution of Income’. This review of past inequality studies in Britain lists only eight studies before 1973, among them those by Lydall, Paish, Nicholson, Prest and Stark.

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economists started to rediscover personal economic inequality as a long-neglected field of research; Anthony Atkinson, for example, embarked on his doctoral work on poverty and social security in 1966.350 Apart from the work of Townsend and AbelSmith and his own study that appeared in 1969, the only other notable academic analysis of poverty in post-war Britain was published by Ian Gough and Thomas Stark in the same year.351 Furthermore, much of the econometric literature of the time was first and foremost concerned with theoretical approaches to theories and measurements of personal income distribution, a field that saw a surge in academic activity in the mid 1970s.352 Neither were many contributions concerned with scrutinizing the official statistical system or with ideas for statistical reforms – Richard Titmuss’ powerful critique of 1962 was a notable exception. When Anthony Atkinson published his widely received edited volume on personal income and wealth inequality in 1973, he pointed out in the introduction to the book that despite the importance of these subjects, ‘they have not been among those with which economists have been most concerned in the postwar period’.353 A similar picture emerges on the political level. The government faced little pressure from the British Left to pursue the reform of the statistical system with greater urgency. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of conflict-ridden industrial relations, and the Trade Union movement was primarily interested in statistics on wages.354 Trade unionists at Congress House, the TUC main office, assiduously kept track of developments in national and international labour statistics and were aware of the deficiencies of official statistics in Britain: in 1968, a note about points to be raised with the CSO began with the assertion that ‘the most serious gap in existing statistics is the inadequate information on income distribution’.355 Nevertheless, most communication about statistics at Congress House continued to revolve around earnings, not incomes – not surprisingly perhaps, in light of the importance of wages as a primary political issue in the contemporary disputes over industrial relations. In the Labour party, in turn, leading figures such as Anthony Crosland overestimated the scale of social change brought about by rising ‘affluence’ in post-war Britain and reproduced official statistics uncritically in speeches and publications.356 Even the activists at the Labour Research Department (LRD) rarely brought up the topic – their records and research memoranda contain surprisingly little discussion of what was known about

 Lecture delivered by Anthony Atkinson at the LSE on 30 Apr. 2015.  Atkinson, Poverty in Britain; Morris and Preston, ‘Inequality, Poverty and the Redistribution of Income’, 304.  Sahota, ‘Theories of Personal Income Distribution’; Sen, Economic Inequality.  Atkinson, Wealth, Income and Inequality, 7.  Whiting, ‘Affluence and Industrial Relations’.  Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS.292B/800.2/3, Trade Union Congress, 27 May 1968.  Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 172.

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poverty and inequality. A rare memorandum on the distribution of income and wealth was prepared by LRD staff in 1967: it shows that the LRD thoroughly reviewed the academic literature on the subject and made a ‘point’ about the need for better information, but did not produce any more detailed reform proposals.357 By the end of the post-war era, however, the Left’s competence in statistics was much enhanced not only by the likes of Michael Meacher and Frank Field, but also by scholars such as Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith who brought their expertise on poverty and social security to bear, including in lectures and pamphlets written for the Fabian Society.358 The advent of statistically-minded anti-poverty champions such as Michael Meacher and Frank Field in British politics was clearly associated with the rediscovery of poverty and the emergence of the ‘poverty lobby’ in the mid 1960s.359 As one of the first NGOs in the country,360 the CPAG brought together campaigners such as Tony Lynes and Ruth Lister, future Labour MPs such as Frank Field and scholarly experts such as Peter Townsend, Brian Abel-Smith, and Jonathan Bradshaw. CPAG started out as a single-issue pressure group with a single solution: it campaigned for increases in Family Allowances as a remedy for family poverty, and it regarded expertise and knowledge as a primary instrument for building an independent profile, raising awareness among the general public, and lobbying the media and the government.361 CPAG’s activities transformed the role of scholars who acted in a double capacity as academic experts and political campaigners – they helped to politicize both issues of poverty per se and the statistical knowledge that was required to inform the public debate.362 The statistical knowledge produced by the government thus became a matter of political concern in itself. Academic experts such as Peter Townsend criticized the government for delaying the publication of long-awaited statistical results and understating the extent of poverty in the country.363 Similarly, in early 1970, the CPAG accused the government of failing to provide adequate information about poverty to the public and of presiding over actual increases in poverty at least among some groups.364 Both claims were vigorously rejected by government ministers in the ensuing public debate: the

 People’s History Museum, Manchester, Labour Research Department, The Distribution of Income and Wealth, Re. 109, Mar. 1967.  LSE, Digital Library, Peter Townsend, Poverty, Socialism, and Labour in Power, Fabian Tract 371 (London: Fabian Society, 1967); Brian Abel-Smith, Freedom in the Welfare State, Fabian Tract 353 (London: Fabian Society, 1964).  Lowe, ‘Rediscovery of Poverty’.  Evans, ‘Poverty: Stopping the Poor Getting Poorer’; McKay and Hilton, ‘Introduction’.  Davidson and Gosling, The Child Poverty Action Group: Researchers Report Summarising the Holdings in the LSE Archive.  See above, section on ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.  Townsend, ‘Reports and Surveys: Politics and the Statistics of Poverty’; Peter Townsend, Letter to the Editor, New Statesman, 20 Aug. 1971.  CPAG, Poverty and the Labour Government (London, 1970).

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Minister of Health and Social Security, David Ennals, asserted that the government ‘commissioned far more research and published more information than any previous Government’ and that it was ‘sheer nonsense to suggest “that the Government does not want the public to know”’.365 In fact, government officials had been somewhat ambivalent over the production of statistical knowledge because it was seen as a potential source of political ‘pressure for action’ and public expenditure: in a symptomatic discussion among civil servants over the question of whether to leave ‘the field completely to the universities and other unofficial bodies’ or to ‘adopt an active policy towards surveys’, officials still advocated the latter on the grounds that it was more advantageous if the government stayed ‘ahead of the academics’.366 Government ministers like Douglas Houghton expressed sympathies for the efforts of researchers such as Townsend and Abel-Smith who were ‘doing so much to uncover the truth about poverty in our society’, but in the political climate of the looming devaluation crisis the government’s commitment to this cause was surpassed by the higher priority accorded to curbing public expenditure.367 Accordingly, officials tended to be cautious when it came to the release of statistical information with a bearing on social policy issues and potential expenditure implications. In 1971, for example, Treasury and DHSS officials intervened against plans by the CSO to include an article on poverty in the next issue of the official journal Social Trends, criticizing the CSO for ‘their enthusiasm in making advances in knowledge’ while being ‘not particularly sensitive to the policy implications’.368 For similar reasons, civil servants were reluctant to commit the government to any official definition of poverty. Using multiples of the SB rate in percentage terms, for example, 120 per cent of the current rate, to measure the numbers just above the SB level was seen as risky because it could precipitate political demands for higher payouts.369 For official enquiries and government reports, departments adopted pragmatic working definitions, but, as Cyril Smith observed in his 1972 report, there was no unified analytical approach across Whitehall so that definitions varied between individual government departments. Under Wilson and Heath, government departments increasingly engaged in statistical research on poverty, but there was not even a commonly accepted concept of what actually constituted poverty – despite or because there were definitions on offer that had been proposed by independent researchers and social activists. The advent of the poverty lobby on the political scene in Britain clearly reinforced the wariness among ministers and officials of the potential implications of politically sensitive knowledge.

 TNA, AST 31/28, David Ennals, Letter to the Editor, Tribune, 3 Mar. 1970; David Ennals, ‘The Labour Government and Poverty’, The Tribune, 12 Feb. 1970.  TNA, AST 31/38, SBC, C. G. Jarrett to D. Sargent, 12 May 1965.  TNA, AST 31/27, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to the Prime Minister, 18 Jan. 1966.  TNA, BN 89/156, DHSS, M. E. H. Platt to Blunt, 19 Aug. 1971.  TNA, BN 89/156, DHSS, G. D. Caldwell to Riddelswell, 5 July 1971.

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Disputes about poverty figures and related statistical questions often pitted researchers and activists against ministers and civil servants. New academic ideas and concepts that challenged the conventional wisdom were not always well received in Whitehall. Most notably, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith were widely credited by contemporary commentators and later historians with establishing the concept of relative poverty in Britain, that is ‘the principle that the minimum level of living regarded as acceptable by a society increases with rising prosperity’ and cannot be defined by setting minimal nutritional requirements or any other arbitrary standard.370 Their rejection of the traditional definition of subsistence needs as a yardstick, however, did not necessarily convince all civil servants. Senior officials at the National Assistance Board (NAB) and the successor body, the Supplementary Benefits Commission, were ‘anxious to maintain good informal relations’ with the poverty lobby, but there were also some irritated reactions to the work of Townsend and Abel-Smith.371 After reading their book The Poor and the Poorest in December 1965, a civil servant at the NAB ridiculed the idea of relative poverty and contended ‘that in the absolute sense there is very little necessary poverty today’; moreover, referring to the ‘systematic research and studies’ that the NAB had conducted mostly behind closed doors in recent years, he was also of the opinion that ‘the Board are probably more qualified than anyone to judge poverty’.372 An even harsher judgement was passed at the Ministry of Labour, where an official described The Poor and the Poorest as ‘a poor effort both as a piece of research and as a commentary on real social problems’, not least because of the ‘absurd’ definition of poverty proposed in the book.373 This official also implied that in reality poverty meant ‘real hardship or physical distress’. This was still the prevalent view in government departments across Whitehall, as Cyril Smith concluded in his report for the Family Poverty Research Programme in 1972:374 It is apparent from the discussion so far that the concept of poverty varies widely between departments but a further complication is that these concepts may not be shared outside the administration. The administration is still very much influenced by a subsistence definition of poverty whereas some academic commentators see poverty as one aspect of wider inequalities in the distribution of resources.

The subsistence definition of poverty also manifested itself in the measurements that officials developed to put figures on the phenomenon. This became particularly apparent in the poverty research programme under the auspices of the Heath government in

 Gazeley, Poverty, 178–81; Townsend, ‘Measuring Poverty’.  TNA, AST 31/27, SBC, Note by K. R. S. on the meeting of the chairman with Tony Lynes, CPAG, 30 Dec. 1966.  TNA, AST 31/27, NAB, Runcorn to Sargent, 30 Dec. 1965.  TNA, LAB 17/370, MinLab, F. G. Forsyth to J. I. Barnes, NAB, 12 Jan. 1966.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, An Initial Framework for the Study of the Interdepartmental Aspects of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.

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the early 1970s. In a report on family poverty submitted by an interdepartmental group of officials in June 1971, it was acknowledged in the introduction that ‘poverty is inevitably relative’; however, the discussion was mainly concerned with what was called ‘the residual poor’, that is the population with incomes below the SB level or just slightly above.375 In a subtle nod to Townsend and Abel-Smith’s methodology, officials included not only the numbers below SB in their poverty count but also those with the head in full-time work and an additional two pounds per week, a group that was labelled ‘the hard-pressed’. The analysis was restricted to two-parent families and excluded the unemployed and all SB recipients, however, and expressing the threshold in monetary terms helped officials to avoid measurements in percentage terms that had become common as an unofficial poverty line in Britain.376 In contrast to Townsend and AbelSmith’s measure of 140 per cent of SB, the DHSS calculation produced considerably smaller figures, namely 60,000 two-parent families below the SB level and 70,000 hardpressed families, a surprisingly low count that was explained with reference to methodological choices in the report: ‘The estimates are substantially less than some made recently by political and academic commentators, differences of definition accounting for the differences to a large extent.’ For the government, a poverty count as low as this was politically useful and helped to counter the claims of the poverty lobby. The small numbers cited in the 1971 report on family poverty were interpreted by DHSS to the effect that there was ‘no immediate need for a further major initiative’: in a briefing note for the Secretary of State, Keith Joseph, it was argued that in light of these findings the department should ‘be able to resist pressure for precipitate action by pointing out that the dimensions of the problem are less than had been thought’.377 Shifting the debate to focus on the ‘residual poor’ followed in the footsteps of earlier statistical analyses by the predecessor department, the Ministry of Social Security: in 1967, the official survey on ‘Family Circumstances’ produced a similar headline figure of 160,000 families living below the SB level.378 Although the report also gave the higher number of families receiving SB, the figure of 160,000 was seized upon by commentators and fuelled the emerging neo-liberal critique of the welfare state. Geoffrey Howe, for example, cited the figure in a pamphlet for the Conservative Bow Group to bolster the argument against any further expansion of social expenditure: ‘We must not be led into far-reaching, expensive and potentially disastrous changes in our entire tax and welfare system for the sake of a hard-pressed, but proportionately very small, section of the community.’379

 TNA, BN 13/189, Report of the Steering Group for Family Poverty Review, June 1971.  TNA, BN 89/156, DHSS, G. D. Caldwell to Riddelswell, 5 July 1971.  TNA, BN 13/189, DHSS, G. D. Caldwell, FPR Report: Outline of a Paper by the Secretary of State, 9 July 1971.  Ministry of Social Security, Circumstances of Families.  TNA, AST 31/27, Geoffrey Howe and Norman Lamont, Bow Group Memorandum: Policies for Poverty (London: Bow Publications, 1967).

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On the other side of the debate, commentators and experts not only counted in the ‘residual poor’ but also the much higher numbers of those on or slightly above the level of SB, including ‘some 2 million pensioners alone receiving supplementary benefit’ by the late 1960s.380 Nevertheless, the widespread understanding of poverty in terms of a bare minimum showed that, by the end of the post-war era, the concept of relative poverty was more contested and less well-established than had previously been assumed. Even at the CPRS where officials were working on proposals for more enlightened social policy-making, there was scepticism as to whether the state should be concerned with relative poverty at all. Commenting on a strategy paper drafted by David Donnison that identified life-cycle poverty as a problem of social policy, a CPRS official raised the following objections that were admittedly ‘political in nature’:381 The life-cycle of relative poverty certainly exists, but I’m not sure that in itself this is a sufficient reason for state intervention. Certainly the state should intervene in cases of absolute poverty, but if it acts to even out all relative poverty it is really fostering an attitude of ‘live for today, tomorrow the state will provide’. It reminds me of the comparison of a car-worker and a teacher in Coventry. The car-worker earned more money, ran a large car, lived in a council house, and saved nothing. The teacher was buying his house on a mortgage, ran a small and old car, and was insured etc. Eventually the car-worker will become a burden on the state. Is this the attitude we want to foster?’

The reluctance to abandon the concept of absolute poverty was not the only manifestation of reservations that some civil servants harboured about the work of academic experts. As much as government statisticians relied on the econometric literature and consulted with academics when they needed advice on specific statistical questions or projects, there were limits to their willingness to be open and let outsiders in on the construction of official statistics. This is not to deny the frequent exchanges and the good working relations between government officials and academics during the postwar era. Maintaining close relations with universities and social scientists, in particular, was adopted as a guiding principle at the CSO from the start: as early as 1945, the first director, Harry Campion, declared his commitment to close co-operation with the academic world, although Treasury officials were of the opinion that the CSO should first and foremost serve the government.382 The strong interest in incorporating social and economic research into government planning and policy-making was also expressed by various government bodies that included outside experts, notably the Clapham Committee that delivered its report in 1946.383 This did not mean that scientists

 TNA, AST 31/27, BBC, Radio 3, Transcript: Living below the Poverty Line, 14 Oct. 1969.  TNA, CAB 184/74, CPRS, David Donnison, Draft paper: Problems of Social Policy, 13 Nov. 1972; R. E. Crum to M. Aston, 15 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 139/182, Meeting of the Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research, 26 July 1945.  TNA, CAB 139/182, Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research, Note by the Secretary: ‘Departmental Research Problems: Taking Thought for the Future’, 27 Jan. 1950.

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gained unrestricted access to government knowledge, though: when the Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research requested the CSO to make unpublished data available to researchers in spring 1948, Campion signalled that the CSO was willing to publish as much as possible but also insisted that the majority of the internal CSO correspondence remained confidential.384 On the other hand, government departments demonstrated enough openness for collaboration with researchers that new advances in social investigation became possible – for example, it allowed Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith to get hold of the data required for their groundbreaking study of poverty. Following a series of enquiries with the Ministry of Labour that went back to late 1960, Townsend was eventually granted permission to use raw data from the Family Expenditure Survey, which unlocked many more analytical possibilities than the published FES reports on which other less well-known studies relied.385 Interestingly, Townsend’s correspondence with the Ministry soon evolved into more academic exchanges about statistical and interpretative questions. The discussions also touched upon the concept of relative poverty, which was criticized by one of the officials responsible for the FES at the Ministry, F. G. Forsyth, as ‘a little unfair’ in light of real existing ‘hardship’.386 Forsyth even provided detailed feedback and suggested revisions to the draft manuscript of The Poor and the Poorest, but was not pleased about the critique of the FES included in the published book, and he subsequently helped to prepare a rebuttal to counter some of the claims made in the study.387 The exchanges continued in the following year when Townsend and Abel-Smith made detailed proposals for a collaborative effort to resolve the documented deficiencies of the FES. They were not satisfied with the response of the Ministry, though, where officials subsequently received ‘some sort of complaint from Abel-Smith about uncooperative behaviour on our part over some joint research possibilities suggested by Profs. Townsend / Abel-Smith’.388 To advance their plans, Townsend and Abel-Smith even used their acquaintance with the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry, Labour politician Shirley Williams. In particular, they suggested a joint project that would have revisited a sub-sample of low-income families in the FES to improve the statistics on poverty. However, most officials involved in the discussions raised objections to the proposed collaboration.389 The episode demonstrated the possibilities but also the limitations of co-operation between civil servants and academics.  TNA, CAB 139/182, Correspondence between the Interdepartmental Committee on Social and Economic Research and the CSO, Mar. 1948.  TNA, LAB 17/370, Correspondence between Peter Townsend and the Ministry of Labour, 1961–6; Morris and Preston, ‘Inequality, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Income’, 303.  TNA, LAB 17/370, MinLab, F. G. Forsyth to Peter Townsend, 10 Nov. 1965. In mid Jan. 1965, Townsend had also sent copies of the draft manuscript to and asked for comments from Louis Moss at the Social Survey Division and John Leonard Nicholson at the CSO.  TNA, LAB 17/370, MinLab, F. G. Forsyth to J. I. Barnes, NAB, 12 Jan. 1966.  TNA, LAB 17/370, MinLab, F. G. Forsyth to R. Thatcher, 20 Oct. 1966.  TNA, LAB 17/370, MinLab, R. M. Hobsbaum to R. F. Fowler, 20 Dec. 1966.

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There was palpable reluctance among civil servants to give academic experts a place at the table when it came to the construction of official statistics. This was demonstrated again by interdepartmental discussions in connection with the Family Poverty Research Programme that was launched under the Heath government in 1971. When the Secretary of State at the DHSS, Keith Joseph, asked for proposals for consulting academics about the second phase of the programme that was expected to start in 1973, the response of his officials revealed their ambivalence about the inclusion of external experts. Officials usually had no qualms about asking experts for advice about technical details concerning the implementation of existing work programmes, but allowing them to get involved in setting the agendas and the directions of future work programmes was a different matter – the latter was considered to be the preserve of the government. The reservations were also prompted by suspicions about the political leanings of many poverty experts. Inviting someone such as Peter Townsend as an adviser was out of the question, as officials explained to the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy in late 1971:390 Because of the difficulty in finding academic advisers who are both interested in poverty research and not too committed to specific political solutions we have so far advised against inviting academics to suggest the direction and objectives of our research programme. Instead we have suggested that outside advice would be more useful (and less potentially embarrassing) if it were directed to the best ways of executing research objectives selected by the Department. Of course, objectives might be modified by advice on methodology or on the nature of foreseeable results – there would be an inter-action – but advice would be given within a framework approved by the Department and would not be at large.

Officials reacted with similar scepticism to proposals for the creation of a central poverty research unit with participation of outside experts. Proposals along these lines were first made by the Social Science Research Council expert panel on poverty in 1968 and further elaborated in a paper by David Donnison; however, the plans were subsequently dropped by the Labour government, despite repeated calls for such a research unit in parliament.391 In autumn 1972, the idea was brought up again by an official at the Civil Service College, Cyril Smith, who had been commissioned to develop recommendations for a research framework in the ongoing Family Poverty Research Programme.392 In his report, Smith suggested locating a new research unit either in a service department such as the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys or outside of government, attached to the SSRC but not in a policy department like the

 TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Note by DHSS: Family Poverty Review Research Programme, 3 Dec. 1971.  TNA, BN 82/35, SSRC, Research on Poverty; David Donnison, Proposal for a Centre of Research on Poverty, 23 June 1968; Hansard, House of Commons, 24 May 1966, vol. 729, col. 359.  TNA, CAB 108/750, CSO(S), C. S. Smith, An Initial Framework for the Study of the Interdepartmental Aspects of Family Poverty, 13 Nov. 1972.

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DHSS to ensure its independence from departmental interests. When Smith’s report was first discussed at the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy in November 1972, the idea received support from several departments, among others, the OPCS and the CSO, while other departments, in particular the DHSS, ‘had serious reservations on the setting up of a poverty research unit’ and ‘several departments expressed doubts about there being enough people of sufficient calibre to be able to set up such a unit’.393 Continued discussions in the following year showed that the idea found much support but also met with apprehension in departments across Whitehall. Some of the objections raised during the talks betrayed mixed views of the academic community and tactical considerations concerning the poverty lobby. Summing up the ‘main arguments against a poverty research unit’, the CSO pointed to the ‘scarcity of good social scientists’ and the ‘danger that the Unit would become a mere focus for pressure groups’, although the CSO turned out to be the only department that was in favour of a new research unit to be set up outside of government at the SSRC.394 Another tactical angle on this issue that was not discussed openly during the interdepartmental talks aroused even more concern in internal discussions, in particular, among officials within the DHSS. Despite or rather because of the strong policy interest in issues of poverty, ‘the Department has not been enthusiastic about the setting up of a unit’, as a DHSS official summed up the departmental discussions in spring 1973.395 On the one hand, DHSS officials such as John Leonard Nicholson acknowledged that there was ‘a pressing need for more research into family poverty’, including ‘a need for new surveys to measure the extent of poverty and to provide a data base for assessing the impact of new policy measures’, even if extensive research efforts were already underway, most notably, in the newly created Urban Deprivation Unit at the Home Office and the Working Party on Transmitted Deprivation set up by Keith Joseph in co-operation with the SSRC.396 However, the idea of a research unit anywhere outside the DHSS alarmed officials, who were wary of any potential intrusion into the departmental policy remit. In a telling remark, an official from the departmental Statistics and Research division summed up the grave concerns at the department about the new research unit as follows: ‘located within DHSS it may be a nuisance, but its location elsewhere could well be a worry.’397 In the interdepartmental negotiations about the new research unit, DHSS officials were thus determined ‘to ensure that it did not subsume departmental responsibilities and have powers which, politically, could prove embarrassing’.398

 TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting, 28 Nov. 1972.  TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting, 8 Feb. 1973.  TNA, BN 82/35, DHSS, Note by C. S., 30 Apr. 1973.  TNA, BN 82/35, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to S. P. Osmond, 5 Dec. 1973; Welshman, Transmitted Deprivation.  TNA, BN 82/35, DHSS, V. M. Thompson to Rudoe, 28 Sept. 1973.  TNA, BN 82/35, DHSS, Note by C. S., 30 Apr. 1973.

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In the event, the Committee on Social Affairs decided in mid 1974 not to go ahead with the proposal for the time being even though it had previously won the approval of the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy.399 While the idea of a central research unit was put on hold, preference was given to the new ‘joint approach to social policy’ that grew out of the earlier Social Affairs programme of the CPRS. The episode demonstrated how research programmes were at times superseded by competing initiatives. In a complex political environment like Whitehall, where government departments contended for influence in overlapping policy areas, the creation of new infrastructure for the production of knowledge had far-reaching implications and was an issue of departmental politics in itself. Directing the production of knowledge invested departments with the ability to identify, conceptualize, and measure social problems, capacities that allowed departments to define and promote policy priorities in a climate of increasing pressures on public expenditure and competition for resources in Whitehall. The reactions to the proposal for a central poverty research unit showed once more that officials treated the production and circulation of knowledge as a matter of power. The power held by the civil service over the production of inequality knowledge in post-war Britain manifested itself in different ways and achieved ambivalent results. On the one hand, it allowed progressive government statisticians such as John Leonard Nicholson to lead the development of important innovations such as new household surveys and the pioneering redistribution analyses. On the other hand, the power of civil servants to make decisions about priorities and resource allocation could also have the opposite effect of preventing new ideas for statistical work programmes from being taken forward. In many cases, this stopped serious proposals to improve the existing knowledge on economic inequality in their tracks. As a result, the statistical system in this field remained a patchwork: there were hardly any authoritative tables on trends in poverty and inequality that were not subject to serious reservations. Consequently, considerable uncertainties about the ‘true’ extent of poverty and inequality remained that left all the more scope for what was sayable in crucial political debates about the welfare state, the ‘affluent society’, and social class divisions. The deficiencies of the knowledge base arguably contributed to the diminished political salience of questions of social class that characterized the discussions during the 1960s – in contrast to the political climate of the 1970s. As the following chapter will demonstrate, renewed efforts to improve the knowledge base on questions of inequality underpinned the resurgence of the ‘class war’ in the early and mid 1970s. The knowledge regime in this field was transformed by sustained attempts to set the production of statistical knowledge on poverty and inequality on a new footing, forcing officials to engage with outside bodies and academics more extensively than ever before.

 TNA, CAB 108/753, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting, 12 July 1974.

IV The Social Democratic Knowledge Regime, 1973–1979 In 1972/73, the unfolding transformation of the existing knowledge regime in the field of economic inequality was heralded by a broad wave of political and academic interest in the subject. Alongside a noticeable increase in the sheer volume of public commentary and discourse, the early 1970s also witnessed a critical shift in the terms of the debate: in contrast to the preoccupation with narrower issues of poverty that had dominated discussions in previous years, attention began to turn to the income spectrum as a whole. The renewed interest in the gap between rich and poor was echoed by civil servants across Whitehall. At the Treasury, a paper on income distribution requested by the permanent secretary, Douglas Allen, in early 1974 explained the recent shift in emphasis with reference to the present economic crisis and the stagnation of real wages, in particular: ‘Until recently interest [was] mainly in [the] position of [the] poor rather than [in the] overall distribution of income; but the low rate of growth of real average take-home pay has led to increasing public questioning about the entire distribution.’1 Officials in other departments, in turn, pointed to the social and fiscal policies of the incumbent Heath government to account for ‘the growth of political concern with income distribution’: John Boreham, the director of the Social Statistics Division at the Central Statistical Office, saw ‘the largest illustration of this greater political interest’ in the ‘tax credit scheme’ that was under discussion at the time. By the time of writing in late 1973, Boreham reckoned it was ‘almost certain that the next three years will see a big increase in the range of work carried out in the redistribution of income section’.2 The early 1970s witnessed a rediscovery of economic inequality that manifested itself on many different levels. In party politics, distributional questions moved to the forefront of political thought on the British left. Most prominently, in 1970, Labour leader Harold Wilson began to attack the Conservatives in public speeches for their regressive policies and their alleged commitment to ‘greater inequality’.3 In academic scholarship, economists, in particular, had begun to rediscover interpersonal economic inequality as a long-neglected field of research in the mid 1960s, and in the early 1970s, this research trend produced more and more results.4 This was also noticed by John Leonard Nicholson, the pioneer of income statistics and redistribution analyses in the British government, who observed in an internal note in late 1973:

 TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, M. S. Levitt to D. Wass, Sunningdale Paper on Income Distribution, 27 Feb. 1974.  TNA, CAB 139/778, CSO, A. J. Boreham, Future Work Programme of the Government Statistical Service, 10 Dec. 1973.  Sloman, ‘Harold Wilson, “Selsdon Man”, and the Defence of Social Democracy’, 81, 94.  Ibid. 92–6. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-004

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‘The subjects of income distribution and re-distribution have in the last year or two received far more attention from economists / social scientists than ever before. Books and articles on these subjects come thick and fast.’5 Additional impetus came from the activities of international organizations such as the UN Statistical Commission, the OECD, and the ILO, where various programmes were underway to develop new social metrics including efforts to define international standards for statistics on income distribution.6 In autumn 1973 alone, Nicholson attended or learnt of a whole number of events organized by international organizations and learned societies. When he looked back at the end of the year he described the activities ‘in recent months’ as ‘a mushrooming of interest at all possible levels in the distribution / redistribution of income, income maintenance programmes including negative income tax, poverty research, and so on.’7 Admittedly, the increase in research activities on economic inequality during these years pales in comparison with the surge in scholarship on the subject in the 1990s and later decades. Furthermore, even in the late 1990s, the doyen of the discipline, Anthony Atkinson, still felt that income distribution had yet to be brought ‘in from the cold’ and into the mainstream of economics.8 Compared to previous years and decades, however, the research trend that emerged in the 1970s undoubtedly took the field to a new level. The rising interest in income distribution also put the subject on the agenda of policy-makers in Britain. This became apparent in late 1972 when officials of the Central Policy Review Staff surveyed the views of ministers and officials across Whitehall about what they considered to be the most important ‘longer-term policy problems’ in Britain.9 The lists that resulted from the departments’ responses also included the ‘growth and distribution in personal incomes’ as a major policy issue in the social field.10 Indeed, the urgency of this issue seemed self-evident in a political context of strained industrial relations and ongoing conflicts over distributive questions. In a paper from an earlier stage of the same exercise in autumn 1972 that reflected the personal views of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) directors about the longerterm problems facing British society, Dick Ross indicated that a ‘class war’ was going on.11 Historians have identified the resurgence of class politics as a prominent feature of the political culture in 1970s Britain. While class divisions were often blurred in public discourse in previous decades, the ‘political salience of class’ was reinstated through the growing importance of trade unions in the 1970s, as Lawrence Black and

 TNA, PIN 34/364, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to E. A Johnson, 17 Dec. 1973.  See Chapter 2.  TNA, PIN 34/364, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to P. Rogers, 5 Dec. 1973.  Atkinson, ‘Bringing Income Distribution in from the Cold’.  TNA, CAB 139/765, Cabinet, GEN 141, Longer-Term Policy Problems, 5 Jan. 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/765, Cabinet, GEN 141, Longer-Term Policy Problems. Note by the CPRS, 8 Jan. 1973.  TNA, CAB 139/765, CPRS, C. R. Ross, Longer-Term Work, 27 Sept. 1972.

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Hugh Pemberton have argued.12 Indeed, the late 1960s and 1970s saw a surge in trade union membership and industrial militancy, a development that was interpreted by commentators as a sign of a new ‘class struggle’ and growing ‘class consciousness’ among the working class.13 This view has been challenged by Florence SutcliffeBraithwaite and colleagues who have pointed to the complexities of social class identities that manifested themselves in the decline of deference in social attitudes, the rejection of traditional class divisions in vernacular languages, and the dealignment of class and voting habits.14 In this reading, the conflicts of the 1970s were not necessarily a sign of growing class consciousness but can be seen as ‘evidence for growing demands for autonomy’ and an expression of rising ‘popular individualism’. Increasing individualism did not mean that remaining structural inequalities in Britain were ignored, and some of the existing visions of individual empowerment suggested ‘that personal liberation could be best realised through collective responsibility, not in opposition to it’.15 A combination of libertarian and collectivist ideas also drove the Women’s Liberation Movement and other social movements that advocated individual rights but also highlighted persisting inequalities in gender, race, and class.16 Campaigning for equal rights and equal pay not only required media strategies to attract press coverage but also depended on the availability of statistical knowledge that could be weaponized to bolster political arguments.17 However, the knowledge base of these important debates and campaigns concerned with issues of equality has not yet been analysed in depth by historians. This chapter will demonstrate how the preoccupation with questions of class and inequality in 1970s Britain was underpinned by unprecedented efforts to overhaul the statistical system with a view to enabling a more enlightened public debate. This reform drive grew out of the dissatisfaction with the deficiencies of official statistics on poverty, income, and wealth inequality that had left many questions unanswered during the preceding decades. At the same time, it was also linked to political ideas about social justice and redistributive policies that gained new currency on the British Left. Envisioning a fairer society and bringing existing inequalities to light chimed with the ferment of political ideas that characterized the decade. It produced visions of a better future that contrasted markedly with popular narratives about the 1970s as a period of crisis, decline, and gloom.18 In recent years, the declinist narrative has been challenged by historians. Jim Tomlinson has deconstructed Britain’s oft-cited ‘decline’ as a political myth, and Black and Pemberton’s reassessment of the 1970s has

      

Black and Pemberton, ‘Introduction: The Benighted Decade?’, 7. Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-War Britain’, 281. Ibid.; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class. Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-War Britain’, 278, 286. Ibid. 290. Thane, ‘Equalities in Britain’. Black and Pemberton, ‘Introduction: The Benighted Decade?’

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inspired more positive views of the decade as ‘a decade of possibility’.19 As Black and Pemberton have noted, the 1970s witnessed an intellectual crisis in political economy, and one of the possibilities on offer in the emerging ‘marketplace of ideas’ was that of a more egalitarian social and economic order. This vision was advanced powerfully by the Labour party, which won the general election in 1974 on a more progressive platform than ever before. In contrast to previous decades when the parliamentary Labour party had been dominated by its right wing, the 1970s saw the coming of age of the party, as it developed an ambitious and thought-through programme that brought social democracy in Britain to the fullest bloom ever, as David Edgerton has argued.20 The heyday of social democracy under the incoming Labour government also opened up the possibility of creating a new kind of knowledge regime in the field of economic inequality. Most notably, the transformative moment was embodied by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW) that was set up under Harold Wilson in 1974: it was intended to serve as a permanent body for monitoring trends in inequality, overseen by experts and representatives from all sides of the political debate. At the same time, parallel efforts to engineer information systems for more knowledge-based policy-making in the social field were pursued in the civil service, in a programme titled the Joint Approach to Social Policy (JASP). These developments defied the popular myth of the 1970s as a period when the country was becoming increasingly ‘ungovernable’. In fact, the period was characterized by sustained efforts to modernize the government machinery and to introduce innovative techniques of governance in collaboration with outside bodies and experts. Furthermore, the drive towards more knowledge-based social policies was coupled with progressive policies that achieved undeniable successes in tackling poverty and other social issues.21 For various reasons, however, the reform drive lost momentum in the latter half of the decade. This chapter will consider both the opportunities and the backlash that social democracy engendered during these years, and will reaffirm the significance of the mid and late 1970s as a transformative phase in post-war British history.

The Politics of Inequality Knowledge Under the Heath Government, 1970–1974 The crisis in political economy that gave new prominence to issues of inequality and distributive justice during the 1970s was not a purely intellectual crisis.22 It was rooted

 Ibid.; Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization Not Decline’; Robinson, et al., ‘Telling Stories about PostWar Britain’.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 407, 413–15, 499.  Piachaud, ‘Poverty and Inequality’; Artis and Cobham, Labour’s Economic Policies.  Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, review of James Vernon, Modern Britain, 265–7.

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in a complex set of interlocking long-term and short-term developments in the national and global economy that had serious social and political repercussions: deindustrialization; rising unemployment; rising inflation; declining profitability; and sluggish economic growth. The oil shock of 1973 precipitated a sharp rise in inflation and exacerbated the economic downturn, ushering in a period of stagflation. The crisis of profitability that haunted British capitalism in the late 1960s and 1970s went hand in hand with a crisis in industrial relations. Economic elites in finance and industry forged a new coalition to press for changes in the social and economic order, pushing for less state intervention, lower taxation, controlling inflation, and curbing trade union power.23 The trade union movement, in turn, reached its high point in strength and militancy – contrary to Conservative narratives, there was more strike activity under the Heath government of 1970–74 than under Labour in the latter half of the decade.24 Rising inflation pitted workers not only against employers but also against the government: the Heath government relied on incomes policies to restrict wage growth as a central part of its strategy to bring down inflation. Initially this was pursued on a voluntary basis, but after the failure of the tripartite talks in autumn 1972, the Heath government resorted to statutory measures.25 For the justification of incomes policies, accompanying government publicity stressed the social injustices associated with inflation that reduced the value of real wages and hit the poorest hardest.26 At the same time, the buzzword of social justice was evoked in controversies over the Heath government’s social and fiscal policies, which signalled a break with the post-war settlement: the expansion of selectivity in social security, tax cuts for top earners, and other free-market reforms foreshadowed some of the neo-liberal policies of the Thatcher governments of the 1980s – the policies drew heavy criticism that forced the Heath government into a series of ‘U-turns’ in 1972.27 This was the context in which questions of economic inequality figured more prominently in public discourse in Britain than ever before. The political salience of distributional questions increased the demand for statistical knowledge in the public arena as well as inside the government. In the preparation of new budget measures announced in autumn 1970 and 1971, for example, the Treasury urgently required statistical analyses of the redistributive effects of the Heath government’s social policies, as a Treasury paper noted in late 1971: ‘The policy of the new Government for making social security benefits more selective and charging for the services of the welfare state gave rise last year to an urgent demand for information about the impact of the proposed policy changes on families of different

    

Davies, The City of London and Social Democracy; Daunton, Just Taxes, ch. 10. Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 407–8. Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 189–91. Ibid. Sloman, Transfer State, 129–32.

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sizes and at different levels of income.’28 Questions about the distributional effects of Heath’s social and fiscal policies were also raised in public debates. Opposition politicians, activists, and experts pressed the government about the poverty figures, the number of families caught up in the ‘poverty trap’, and the impact of tax policies. The ‘marginal tax effect’ of the ‘poverty trap’ was even ‘becoming politically quite as serious as [. . .] the number of families in poverty’, as was observed at the Treasury in 1972.29 To be sure, the issue of family poverty continued to attract much political attention. At the same time, however, the discussions also reflected the widening scope of the public debate – this was demonstrated, among others, by controversies about the effects of the government’s incomes policies on the relative growth of earnings across the whole pay pyramid. The growing concern with inequality at large was much in evidence, as critics demanded answers and were determined to find out the overall impact of the Heath government’s policies on the distribution of incomes. The debates centred on the allegation that Heath’s policies benefited top earners at the expense of the low-paid and thus widened the gap between rich and poor. Powerful interventions backed up by sophisticated statistical analyses were delivered by Labour’s inequality expert Michael Meacher. In a newspaper article in January 1973, for example, he explained that the present differential in earned incomes between top and bottom stood at ‘roughly 20:1’ – and suggested a ‘7:1 income ratio between rich and poor as the limit for tolerance’. Attacking the government’s endorsement of widening pay differentials as a strategy for invigorating economic growth in Britain, Meacher instead proposed ‘a deliberate reduction of differentials throughout the pay pyramid’ and other interventions in the labour market such as a national minimum wage.30 In a whole number of articles and interventions in parliament that were taken up by other politicians and pressure groups such as the Child Poverty Action Group, Meacher forensically dissected the government’s policies on incomes and wages, social security, and taxation. Furthermore, he presented detailed statistical analyses of the overall distributional effects that showed how ‘this government has favoured the rich to an extent unprecedented in this century’, as Meacher concluded in a letter to the Chief Secretary at the Treasury, Patrick Jenkin, in autumn 1972.31 Meacher wrote the letter to reject arguments made by Jenkin in a heated dispute about statistics during a recent debate on poverty in the House of Commons. In the debate, Meacher had accused the government of presiding over ‘an all-time high’ in poverty in the country and recited statistical figures to remind the House of the ‘ugly truth [. . .] that there has not been a single social and economic measure introduced by this Government applying to the population as a whole to have benefited the poor

 TNA, CAB 184/48, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Requirements of the Treasury, Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue, 9 Nov. 1971.  Sloman, Transfer State, 131.  Michael Meacher, ‘Bridging that Gap’, The Guardian, 16 Jan. 1973.  TNA, T 328/1008, M. Meacher, MP, to P. Jenkin, HMT, 17 Nov. 1972.

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more than the rich’.32 Jenkin dismissed the figures out of hand, mocking Meacher as someone who ‘does not cook the figures, he positively stews them’. Jenkin’s reply is given at length here to demonstrate the level of detail that was required and how high emotions ran when it came to statistical questions over inequality and redistribution during this period:33 I must return to the hon. Member for Oldham, West, because his figures do not even pretend to be valid. For instance, his most recent articles have omitted altogether any of the cuts in purchase tax and selective employment tax. Yet at the same time the hon. Gentleman assumes five years of rent increases under the Housing Finance Act. The hon. Gentleman manages to allocate the whole of the corporation tax cuts to those individual taxpayers with incomes over £5,000. This is utterly ridiculous. It is wholly at odds with the weight of respectable academic opinion as to the effect of this. It entirely ignores the huge portfolios of the insurance companies, the pension funds, the trade unions, the unit trusts, and other institutional investors. The hon. Gentleman’s methodology suffers from even more fundamental flaws. He purports to allocate the benefit of tax cuts and the burden of charges on a basis which is no more than pure hypothesis, and I think he would acknowledge that. The detailed statistics of income and expenditure patterns simply do not exist to enable this to be done. [. . .] I could go on; but honestly the hon. Gentleman just is not worth powder and shot.

In the face of growing criticism over the government’s record in poverty and inequality, ministers and officials had to step up their public relations efforts. Consequently, they engaged in a great deal of political spin when it came to interpreting and using statistical figures in public statements. To begin with, Jenkin’s assertion that precise statistical analyses of redistributive effects of government policies were not even available was not the whole truth to say the least. While it was true that the statistical machinery for gauging the distributional impact of social and fiscal policies was ‘still very much in its infancy’, existing statistical tools allowed Treasury officials to confidently assess the statistical claims made by Michael Meacher and other commentators.34 Again and again, however, they came to the conclusion that Meacher’s calculations were more or less correct or at least reflected larger trends accurately. Consequently, Treasury officials advised ministers to avoid any more public discussions of the statistics in question. In an exchange with the Department of Health and Social Security, one Treasury official warned that ‘there are dangers in getting involved in disputes with Meacher on particular figures, and we would advise against this’. The official was frank in his assessment that any independent analysis would only prove Meacher right:35

 Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, col. 728.  Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, col. 746.  See Chapter 3, section on ‘Redistribution’; TNA, CAB 184/48, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Requirements of the Treasury, Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue, 9 Nov. 1971.  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, J. S. Beastall to J. P. Fawkes, DHSS, Debate on Poverty (6 Nov. 1972), 22 Nov. 1972.

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The problem about suggesting an impartial examination is that there is little doubt that it would show that those at the very top of the income scale have done considerably better than anyone else since 1970, and this is more marked if you include the effects of the unified tax system from April 1973.

At the same time, Treasury officials sought ways to get on the offensive. While the Treasury adopted a ‘policy over Meacher letters’ that was ‘to maintain a low profile [rather] than enter into detailed arguments’, officials exploited other channels and methods to undermine Meacher’s claims and to strengthen the government’s narrative in the public eye.36 To this end, officials began work on an ‘anti-Meacher article’ that was planned to be published in The Times and for which a Conservative backbench MP was sought ‘to lend his name to the article’.37 Interestingly, the first draft attempted a detailed rebuttal of Meacher’s statistical analysis, but this approach was subsequently abandoned as too defensive; instead, special adviser Brendan Sewill from the Conservative Research Department suggested producing ‘a much shorter and more positive article’, in which ‘the dreary Meacher’ would be mentioned only briefly and dismissed ‘in a few words’.38 The new version was redrafted by Sewill to propagate Conservative trickledown economics. Sewill hoped to get the message across that ‘the policy of reducing taxation’ would achieve ‘a more dynamic economy, a faster rate of growth and “a better tomorrow” for all’ – without spelling out the inevitable effect ‘that you cannot improve incentives without making the rich richer’.39 The finished article was finally published under the name of Conservative MP Timothy Raison, while any reference to the involvement of the Treasury was carefully avoided.40 However, the article was on shaky ground with its strong claims about the ‘striking’ rises in earnings and living standards achieved under the Conservatives ‘at all levels’ of society, in particular for ‘those with the lowest incomes’. The claims were based on extrapolated results from the 1971 New Earnings Survey (NES) that were also published in Hansard in December 1972, although the latest but as yet unpublished results from the 1972 NES showed a different picture. Far from suggesting that low earnings increased faster than the average under Heath, the latest figures pointed in the opposite direction, as one Treasury official warned in a critique of an earlier draft of the Raison article:41 I gather that DEP have just estimated that the 1972 NES will show that the low paid seem to have lost this improvement between 1971 and 1972. The movements in the relative position of the low paid 1970–1971 and 1971–1972 have been very small and probably not statistically significant.

     

TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, M. J. Folger to T. R. Hornsby, 5 Dec. 1972. Ibid.; TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, D. J. Howard to Mr Middleton, 21 Nov. 1972. TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, B. Sewill to Mr Howard, 27 Nov. 1972. Ibid. Timothy Raison, ‘How the Tories Have Raised Living Standards’, The Times, 30 Jan. 1973. TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, M. S. Levitt to Mr Symons, 16 Nov. 1972.

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Apart from this kind of covert government PR, the claim about the rising living standards for all was also propagated more openly by ministers. In August 1973, the Conservative Chief Secretary at the Treasury, Patrick Jenkin, boasted in a letter to the Guardian that ‘it is those on the lowest incomes who have achieved the fastest rise in their living standards’ under Heath. The government tried hard to be seen to improve the incomes of the low-paid: this was not only a central justification for Conservative trickle-down economics but also an official aim agreed during the tripartite talks of autumn 1972. However, when an academic from Birkbeck College asked the Treasury for statistical evidence for Jenkin’s claim, it turned out to be baseless.42 As internal enquiries showed, the statement went back to suggestions made by the Conservative Central Office and special adviser Brendan Sewill; however, the suggestions were based on recently published material that on closer inspection did not support the claim.43 Help arrived from the expert in earnings statistics at the Department of Employment who confirmed that the period from mid 1970 to mid 1972 saw aboveaverage increases in gross earnings on the lowest levels. Gross earnings were a different matter from living standards in the sense of real incomes, but officials thought that they could use this information to ‘just about justify the CST’s sentence’.44 The episode demonstrated once more that ministers and other figures in the Conservative party were quick to use statistical figures to bolster their political arguments, while, conversely, they accused their opponents of using statistics in misleading ways. In early February 1973, for example, Treasury officials briefed the Chancellor, who was due to stand in for Heath at Prime Minister’s Questions, to dismiss the claims made by Michael Meacher about the growing gap between rich and poor on the grounds that ‘the sort of analysis which he claims to provide is not possible’ because ‘the necessary statistics are not available’.45 Accordingly, when the Chancellor, Anthony Barber, was challenged by Meacher in parliament over the allegation that the average executive had gained at least five times as much in income than the average wage-earner under Heath, he simply brushed off the question by stating that Meacher’s ‘figures are grossly misleading [. . .] and his conclusions practically meaningless’.46 The politics of statistics in the early 1970s left many questions open, an outcome that was in part the deliberate result of the government’s tactics in public relations. For the remainder of Heath’s premiership officials struggled to defend the government’s narrative against the sustained attacks from inequality experts such as Michael Meacher; all the while, officials stuck to the guiding principle not to engage in statistical arguments that could potentially lay bare the weakness of the government’s

 TNA, T 328/1008, Letter by John Muellbauer, Birkbeck College / Department of Economics, 6 Aug. 1973.  Hansard, House of Commons, Written Answers, 3 May 1973, vol. 855, col. 349.  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, A.J.C. Edwards to Mr Gracey, 10 Aug. 1973.  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, J. S. Beastall, Mr Meacher—Notes for Supplementaries, 31 Jan. 1973.  Hansard, House of Commons, Oral Answers to Questions, 1 Feb. 1973, vol. 849, col. 1604.

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case. In contrast to the stonewalling in the public arena, officials inside the Treasury meticulously examined Meacher’s calculations. The attention that officials devoted to monitoring and scrutinizing the statistical claims made by opposition politicians and academics once again testified to the increased significance that numbers had gained in the contemporary political culture. Apart from some ‘dubious assumption’ and ‘arithmetic errors’, Meacher’s analyses were often found to be ‘broadly right’. Officials, among others, conceded that ‘it is true that there has been a considerable increase in the value of stocks and shares (even if allowance is made for inflation) since June 1970 and that this has benefited the rich much more than the poor’ – capital gains derived from share ownership were highlighted by Meacher as an important source of growing inequality under Heath.47 Admitting this point in public was not an option, though, as the Treasury official attending to the matter made clear: ‘Here again, I am sure we should avoid giving Mr Meacher further publicity by commenting on his figures in detail.’48 This pattern kept repeating itself in 1973 and into 1974. When the miners triggered the biggest industrial dispute of the Heath years, Meacher intervened on their behalf to figure out that the government offered the miners a deal that made them ‘only slightly better off in real terms than a year earlier’.49 Only a few weeks later, Meacher launched another attack on the government’s record in living standards when he presented a calculation showing that the last year of statutory incomes policies had left the ‘man on average earnings’ even slightly worse off.50 Again, officials concluded in internal briefings that Meacher’s main arguments were correct and that ‘the government would not be on strong ground in seeking to challenge Mr Meacher’. Instead, ministers were ‘advised simply to say that Meacher’s arithmetic is based on conjecture’.51 Nevertheless, it did not escape government officials and Conservative MPs that Meacher’s analyses were widely received and made a mark. Leading Labour figures such as Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle were known to rely on Meacher’s research. In parliament, he was mocked from the benches opposite as ‘the social administrator whom we have come to know so well from reading him in the newspapers and elsewhere’, while his colleagues lauded him as someone ‘who has done so much to improve people’s understanding about these problems’.52 The activism of Meacher and others reinforced the political salience of statistics and kept the government on the defensive. Ministers and officials responded by adopting a more tactically oriented

 Michael Meacher, ‘It’s the Poor Man’s Freeze’, New Statesman, 22 Dec. 1972; TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, J. S. Beastall to Mr Gracey, Reply to Mr Meacher, 1 Jan. 1973.  Ibid.  TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, H. M Griffiths to Principal Private Secretary, 4 Jan. 1974.  TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, H. M Griffiths to Private Secretary of Chancellor of Exchequer, 21 Jan. 1974.  TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, M. S Levitt to Mr Griffiths, 21 Jan. 1974.  Hansard, House of Commons, 21 Jan. 1974, vol. 867, col. 1304; Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, col. 745.

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approach to handling public relations. This was also noticed by John Leonard Nicholson who observed in late 1973:53 It is fair, however, to say that there has recently been a tendency to ‘fight shy’ of discussing the redistributional effects of policies – in public at least; and requests for information (e.g. in PQ’s) have sometimes been side-stepped. Since we have steadily been improving our methods to provide estimates more flexibly and promptly, I think this attitude may become difficult to maintain.

The relentless questioning by opposition figures such as Meacher placed government departments at a disadvantage, and they were often caught on the back foot. When critical articles appeared or ministers requested information about distributional effects of government policies, officials often had to work out assessments and responses on an ad hoc basis – they could not draw on pre-prepared sets of figures or computer models, and some estimates were even made with pen and paper. The public debates about trends in living standards were a sharp reminder of the lack of statistical tools, and provided strong incentives for departments to seek improvements. In early 1974, for example, one Treasury official contacted the Department of Employment for advice in this matter, explaining the ‘many limitations’ of the calculations usually prepared at the Treasury to illustrate ‘how the richer and the poorer sections of the community have fared under the present government’: most importantly, the government tables showed income growth at various percentages of average earnings but revealed ‘nothing about any changes in the dispersion of gross earnings’.54 If it were possible ‘to obtain on a regular basis up-to-date figures for the dispersion of gross earnings on (say) a quintile or decile basis’, the official concluded, ‘this would obviously enable us to get much closer to a picture of the relative changes in the living standards of different sections of the community over time’. Statistical work programmes under the Heath government were consequently geared to cater for the need for better information on the redistribution of income. To this end, in 1970/71, the Treasury’s Fiscal and Incomes Policy (FI) Division stepped up the work on the development of a computerized simulation model, the so-called Household Incidence Model. However, the initial versions of the HMT could only provide a partial picture of processes of redistribution in Britain.55 In subsequent years, the FI Division received extra resources, put in ‘a lot of effort’, and was able to make ‘good progress’.56 By the time of Heath’s resignation in spring 1974, the FI Division was in a position to carry out a range of analyses that had not been possible a year earlier, and work was approaching a stage where officials could simulate the incidence of

 TNA, PIN 34/364, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to E. A. Johnson, 17 Dec. 1973.  TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, A. J. C. Edwards to D. J. Sellwood, DEP, 9 Jan. 1974. See e.g. the published table in Hansard, House of Commons, Written Answers, 3 May 1973, vol. 855, col. 349.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Redistribution’.  TNA, T 328/1227, HMT, M. S. Levitt to Mr Jones, 2 Apr. 1974; HMT, F. Jones to Mr Ham, 9 Apr. 1974.

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the whole package of taxes and benefits on the incomes of households at different income levels. However, certain problems associated with the basic data from the Family Expenditure Survey and other issues remained unresolved. Most notably, the fact that ‘very few’ low-income households were ‘caught’ in the FES meant that any analysis about the distributional impact of fiscal and social measures on this key group was ‘subject to enormous margins of error’. This and other persisting problems reflected the limited progress made under Heath in key areas of statistics on poverty and income and wealth inequality. Despite various initiatives such as the Family Poverty Research Programme and the review of the Family Expenditure Survey, the Government Statistical Service failed to develop a consistent strategy for closing the large gaps in this field – statistics on income distribution were not given high priority under Heath.57 In hindsight, it has become conventional wisdom that economic inequality rose under Heath in 1970/71, if only slightly, but this was far from clear to contemporaries.58 The exact extent and the trends in inequality remained bitterly contested. Many left-wing politicians, experts, and anti-poverty activists nevertheless had little doubt that the gap between rich and poor was widening. The Child Poverty Action Group, for example, had found evidence for this trend in two recent local surveys carried out by Molly Meacher in Islington in 1971 and Michael Young and Lucy Syson in Bethnal Green in 1973.59 Wildly differing claims appearing in the media, in turn, left experts such as LSE economist Alan Day ‘bewildered by the statistics on wealth and income distribution which are confidently quoted’ by some commentators – Day also went on record to criticize the calculations of Michael Meacher and was frequently cited by ministers to dismiss Meacher’s arguments.60 The trend towards greater income inequality was not even picked up by leading government statisticians. In late 1973, John Leonard Nicholson offered this reading of the latest figures in a paper prepared for the Secretary of State at the DHSS, Keith Joseph:61 The evidence does not suggest that the distribution of final income was more unequal in 1972 than in 1970. [. . .] Thus, if anything, the distribution of final income may have become slightly more equal between 1970 and 1972, although the evidence, being drawn from comparatively small samples, is far from conclusive.

The inconclusiveness of the evidence left all the more scope for what was sayable in public discourse about economic inequality in Britain. In a debate in the House of Commons in early 1974, for example, Keith Joseph could claim that ‘the inequalities of wealth have been dwindling historically fast’ and that ‘the inequalities of income are

 See Chapter 3, section ‘Income Inequality’.  Johnson, ‘Inequality, Redistribution and Living Standards in Britain since 1945’, 21–3.  TNA, T 328/1227, CPAG, Memorandum to the Chancellor, 25 Mar. 1974.  Alan Day, letters to the editor, The Guardian, 9 Aug. 1973 and 9 Jan. 1974; Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, col. 747.  TNA, T 328/1227, DHSS, J. L. Nicholson to Secretary of State, 7 Dec. 1973.

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far too exaggerated by most observers’, while Labour politicians such as Michael Meacher and Michael Foot protested against the persisting ‘class divisions’ and the ‘massive redistribution from wages to capital’ under Heath.62 In this political climate of claims and counterclaims even some supporters of the government thought there was much to be gained from getting the facts straight; however, such voices were largely ignored by the Cabinet. This is demonstrated by the repeated efforts of one of Heath’s personal friends, the political economist Thomas Wilson, who attempted to convince the Prime Minister to set up a committee for an ‘inquiry into the distribution of income and capital’.63 Wilson was of the opinion that much of the ‘widespread feeling of discontent with our social system’ flowed from ‘misunderstanding about the facts’ and ‘a quite inadequate recognition of the limits of vertical distribution’. By presenting the available evidence ‘in factual terms’, the proposed committee would not only facilitate the rejection of ‘the propaganda of the wreckers’, Wilson argued, but could also ensure a more informed political debate: If such a body had already been at work and we now had at our disposal even its preliminary findings, it would be easier to rebut some of the nonsense reported by the mass media. [. . .] The alternative to a serious inquiry and appraisal is likely to be the persistence, and indeed the inflation, of ignorance and myth on the Left and also, indeed, on the Right.

However, little followed from Wilson’s proposals. When he first advanced his idea shortly after Heath came to power, it was rejected not only by the Prime Minister, but also by Keith Joseph and others. A renewed attempt by Wilson in early 1972 was referred to the Central Policy Review Staff who agreed on a meeting with Wilson to discuss his idea; at the time, the CPRS was hoping ‘to make some proposals of our own in this field’. But when Wilson approached Heath again in late 1973, there were still no concrete plans to take any action, even if senior officials thought ‘there is a good deal to be said for the proposal at the right time’. The time for a commission on the distribution of income and wealth did not come until Heath lost the general election and Harold Wilson replaced him as Prime Minister in spring 1974.

Building a Social Democratic Knowledge Regime: 1974–76 The mid 1970s were a pivotal moment in British politics. Alongside a deepening economic and financial crisis, it saw the high point of social democracy under an unusually progressive Labour government; at the same time, it witnessed the ascent of the New Right, in particular after Margaret Thatcher’s rise to the leadership of the Conservative  Hansard, House of Commons, 21 Jan. 1974, vol. 867, col. 1304; Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, col. 1216, 1221, 1302.  TNA, PREM 15/2189, Correspondence between Thomas Wilson and Edward Heath / No. 10, 1972–1974.

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party in 1975.64 As David Edgerton has observed, the political programmes and ideological stances of the two main parties partly evolved in reaction to each other,65 a dynamic that was further fuelled by the starkly differing philosophies regarding the salient issues of redistribution and economic inequality. It was of course the management of the national economy that was regarded as the most pressing political issue of the time. Inflation, in particular, was later identified by Thatcher as the ‘foremost issue’ during these years, an issue that was not only described as potentially catastrophic for the economy and society at large, but also formed a central element in Conservative narratives of national decline.66 Another important building block in this narrative was the Conservative critique of the expanding British welfare state. According to Thatcher and her followers, the pursuit of equality through redistributive policies was harmful for the national economy because high levels of taxation reduced incentives for ‘wealth creators’ to invest and generate growth; furthermore, Thatcher posited, redistribution also harmed the moral fabric of society by undermining self-reliance and responsibility among the population.67 The welfare state thus created a ‘culture of dependency’ that contributed to the decline of the nation, the argument went, and the ‘progressive consensus’ that nurtured this attitude rested on the overblown concern with redistribution and equality on the Left. This theme also occurred in Thatcher’s 1975 landmark speech ‘Let the Children Grow Tall’ that propagated ‘the right to be unequal’ and set the tone for the New Right’s evolving political thought on issues of inequality:68 For many years now there has been a growing awareness of injustice and inequality in our society. In the beginning, much of it was genuine, today some of it is artificial. It has been cultivated by some philosophers, politicians, propagandists in the media and by social commentators. Associated with it is the proposition that it is the job of Government to intervene to put unsatisfactory situations right.

Raising awareness for issues of economic inequality was thus associated with the much maligned ‘progressive consensus’. From the point of view of Thatcher and her followers, the fallacious concern with inequality was not only embodied by the pressure groups and social experts behind the ‘poverty lobby’, but also by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth that had been set up by the incoming Labour government under Harold Wilson in 1974. In the right-wing press, the RCDIW was vilified as a ‘socialist warhorse’ that stood for ‘one of the most malignant and destructive trends in British public life’, the alleged obsession with ‘the  Geppert, Thatchers konservative Revolution.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 444.  Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 191–2.  Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality’, 508–13; Hickson, ‘Thatcherism, Poverty and Social Justice’.  Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let the Children Grow Tall’, speech to the Institute of SocioEconomic Studies, New York, 15 Sept. 1975; at [https://www.margaretthatcher.org/docu ment/102769], accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

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distribution of wealth’ that threatened to undermine the creation of wealth.69 At the same time, Thatcher herself made extensive use of official statistics on income and wealth distribution to bolster her political narrative. In her landmark speech on her philosophy of inequality in September 1975, she presented ‘facts about economic inequality’ that boiled down to the assertion that ‘the rich are getting poorer and the poor are getting richer’.70 While the tables published a few weeks earlier in the first official report of the RCDIW in July 1975 did indeed show a slight fall in the incomes of the top 10 per cent and an even smaller increase in the incomes of the bottom 10 per cent in recent years, the report warned against taking these findings ‘at face value’ because a number of deficiencies, e.g. the deduction of mortgage payments, understated higher incomes.71 Furthermore, results from the Family Expenditure Survey even showed a slight increase in top incomes while lower incomes stagnated.72 The data from the RCDIW report were also used by Thatcher in her inequality speech, but in a very selective way. This was the conclusion reached by the staff of the RCDIW when they checked the figures presented by Thatcher in her speech:73 As you will see from the enclosed table all the percentage shares of income and wealth quoted have come from our report. But they have been carefully selected (SPI instead of Blue Book to show lower figures at the top and larger at the bottom) and rounding and error are all in the ‘right’ direction!

The Blue Book tables that Thatcher chose not to use were regarded by the RCDIW as ‘the best source’ available, while the Inland Revenue’s Surveys of Personal Incomes (SPI) only covered taxable incomes and understated the degree of income inequality, a fact that had been forcefully exposed, among others, by Richard Titmuss in his 1962 critique of official statistics.74 Similarly, Thatcher took the liberty of making unsubstantiated statistical claims about the distribution of income to promote her anti-class message. Recognizing the growing inclination of voters to disassociate themselves with class identities, Thatcher appealed incessantly to what she envisioned as a classless constituency of ‘ordinary people’, claiming that the ‘income groups have become all muddled up’.75 The suggested dealignment of socio-economic class status, occupational groups, cultural identities, and money income, was echoed by some contemporaries;76 however, it remains unclear what kind of statistical findings underpinned this claim.77 Thatcher may have referred to the  ‘Worthless’, Sunday Telegraph, 3 Aug. 1975.  Margaret Thatcher, MP, ‘Let the Children Grow Tall’, speech delivered in New York, 15 Sept. 1975.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 36–8.  Ibid. 41.  TNA, BS 7/561, RCDIW, E. Jones to Mr Bayliss, 23 Sept. 1975.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Income Inequality’.  Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, 141–2; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, introduction and ch. 3.  Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories of Post-War Britain’, 287–8.  TNA, CAB 108/755, CSO, Distributional Effects of Social Policies, Annex B, 19 Nov. 1976.

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much discussed rise of the ‘affluent worker’ and their anticipated ‘embourgeoisement’ that she hoped to advance.78 But neither the RCDIW reports nor any other official statistical series contained any cross-sectional tables of income distribution by social class or occupations over time that could have supported this narrative. If anything, the published RCDIW tables showed far-reaching stability in the distribution of incomes; by various measures, the share in income taken by the bottom 50 per cent had hardly changed since the early post-war years.79 In the economic populism of the Thatcherites, there was no place for the RCDIW’s measured statistical assessments of social change in Britain. This was demonstrated once more by Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumption’s 1979 pamphlet on ‘Equality’ that drew heavy criticism from experts such as Anthony Atkinson: in the pamphlet, the authors ignored much of the available statistics and pretended that hardly any reliable statistical knowledge on trends in income and wealth distribution existed.80 Thus, even if the statistics compiled by the RCDIW carried more weight than any previous publication and despite the best efforts of the Commission to present the available knowledge in the most factual terms, none of this helped to take the heat out of the partisan debate about economic inequality in Britain, quite the contrary: the Commission was not only attacked by the Right but also came under fire from the Left. A damning verdict was delivered by Peter Townsend at a Fabian seminar that was held in spring 1976 to evaluate the work of the RCDIW. Among others, Townsend found fault with the Commission’s failure to take Richard Titmuss’ 1962 critique of official income distribution statistics on board: despite acknowledging the deficiencies of the underlying tax statistics from the Inland Revenue, the Commission still reproduced them in their reports instead of building a new purpose-designed survey. The press and the Tories ‘made capital out of the alleged fall in top incomes’, Townsend argued, but the respective tables were misleading because they excluded certain income components such as fringe benefits and therefore overstated the reported reduction in inequality: ‘A few hastily concocted and politically misleading tables can wipe out the cumulative value of hundreds of pages which have been patiently compiled. The Commission appears to have nurtured myths convenient to the rich.’81 Even greater disappointment was expressed by speakers at another Fabian Seminar in late 1978. Chris Pond, a campaigner and research officer at the Low Pay Unit, saw the RCDIW not so much as an instrument for promoting redistributive policies than

 Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, 135–41.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 49.  Anthony Atkinson and D. Hitchens, ‘Review of Joseph and Sumption, Equality’, New Statesman, 13 July 1979.  TNA, BS 7/560, Peter Townsend, ‘The Social Meaning of Income and Wealth Data’, Paper to the Fabian Seminar on the Diamond Commission, 6 Mar. 1976.

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as a means for frustrating them: while acknowledging its ‘educational role’, Pond criticized the Commission for abstaining from all discussions of policy options and for adopting all too readily the traditional views of the Central Statistical Office.82 Despite the establishment of the RCDIW, knowledge on economic inequality remained politically contested. While, in previous decades, the lack of reliable statistics had allowed myths about the ‘affluent society’ to flourish, the more authoritative statistics that were made available by the RCDIW in the mid 1970s became the subject of the culture war between the emerging New Right and ‘Old’ Labour. The contemporary critique chimes with ambivalent verdicts in the modern literature. While some have described the RCDIW as a futile episode, others have emphasized the contribution made by the Commission in providing the most comprehensive analysis of economic inequality in Britain to date. The tables compiled by the RCDIW were widely received and have been used to the present day as a historical source on trends in income and wealth distribution in post-war Britain.83 In fact, some of the achievements of the RCDIW were not fully recognized by contemporaries, and few historians have tapped into the several hundreds of historical files left by the RCDIW to assess the Commission’s work in greater detail. The records demonstrate that the RCDIW provided new and up-to-date statistical knowledge, including some myth-destroying findings, attracted media attention for issues of inequality, and effected changes and improvements to the measurement and the public presentation of statistics on income and wealth distribution. When the RCDIW was finally shut down by the incoming Thatcher government in 1979, Commission staff looked back at the past five years. At the top of the list of their main achievements was the development of ‘a single integrated system’ of statistics that ‘gives a rounded picture of the distribution of income and wealth’, complete with new forms of presentation: ‘There is now, as there was not before, a systematic way of presenting this material that is more or less generally accepted.’84 However, the RCDIW also suffered setbacks and was unable to realize some of its key projects, most notably, their plans to close some of the persisting gaps in the statistics on wealth distribution.85 Thus, the untold story of the RCDIW not only opens a window on the evolution of contemporary states of knowledge on economic inequality but also on changing practices, structures, and power relations in the production of statistical knowledge in Whitehall. First of all, the RCDIW was not an independent academic body free to choose its own research agendas and modes of operation. It was part of the government machineryand attached to the remit of a parent department, namely the Department

 TNA, BS 7/421, Chris Pond, ‘The Policy Implications of the Lower Incomes Report’, Fabian Society, Conference on Income, Wealth and the Diamond Commission, 11 Nov. 1978.  Futile episode: Toynbee and Walker, ‘Social Policy and Inequality’, 111; no policy influence: Sandford, ‘Diamond Commission’; comprehensive analysis: Tomlinson, ‘Distributional Politics’, 175–6; use of RCDIW data in modern literature: Gazeley, ‘Income and Living Standards, 1870–2010’, 171–5.  TNA, BS 7/278, RCDIW, N. S. Forecast, A Memoir, 14 Nov. 1979.  Ibid.

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of Employment under Labour grandee Michael Foot. In this institutional context it operated in one of the most contentious and protracted policy areas of the time: from its inception it was closely linked to the ongoing conflicts over industrial relations, and the idea of a large-scale enquiry into issues of economic inequality was in many ways inspired by the experiences and debates over distributional issues and fairness during the preceding years under Heath. Fittingly, the idea for the establishment of a royal commission came from the prominent trade unionist Jack Jones, as Harold Wilson mentioned in internal correspondence during the early stages of planning for the Commission in spring 1974.86 Contrary to popular narratives of overbearing influence of trade unions during this period, the idea was not imposed on the Labour party by the TUC. The Labour leadership did however consult TUC leaders over the election manifesto that contained the proposal of a royal commission, and, once in office, the Labour government invited views from trade unions on the suggested terms of reference; in the consultation process, Jack Jones emphasized again that ‘the proposal for a regular (we suggest at least yearly) factual analysis of changes in the distribution of income and wealth in the community is long overdue’.87 But there was little disagreement over the future role of the Commission in the discussions between Labour and Union leaders at the TUC–Labour party liaison committee, and there was great overlap in the ideas about social justice and redistributive policies developed by the TUC and the Labour party in opposition during the Heath years.88 Outraged by Heath’s treatment of the miners as ‘national enemies’ and other social and economic policies of the Conservative government that seemed to privilege the rich at the expense of the rest of the community, the Labour movement was of one mind over the idea of an official enquiry.89 The incoming Labour government set out ‘to make the country demonstrably a much fairer place to live in’, among other things, through the planned introduction of a new wealth tax. Furthermore, the aim ‘to set Britain on the road towards a new social and economic equality’ was bound up with Labour’s ‘fresh approach’ to tackling the economic crisis and the soaring inflation: achieving ‘a much fairer distribution of the national wealth’ was presented as a key requirement for convincing workers and unions to agree to Labour’s signature proposal of a ‘social contract’, which was

 Kelsey, An Unexpected Cut, 7.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/40.2LPMR/1, TUC–Labour Liaison Committee, Meeting, 4 Jan. 1974; MSS 292D/110.47/1, DEP, R. J. Dawe to D. Lea, TUC, 4 June 1974; Transport and General Workers Union, J. Jones to L. Murray, TUC, 26 June 1974.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/40.2LPMR/1, TUC–Labour Liaison Committee, Meeting, 24 June 1974.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/40.2LPMR/1, TUC–Labour Liaison Committee, pamphlet ‘Economic Policy and the Cost of Living’, 29 Jan. 1973.

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effectively a voluntary incomes policy by another name.90 Thus, the newly established RCDIW was supposed to serve the twin goals of the social contract and social justice. The political and institutional context imposed constraints on the work of the RCDIW. Most importantly, the terms of reference stipulated that the Commission was ‘invited to consult with the Government Statistical Service’ on necessary reforms to the statistical system. In other words, the Commission was not vested with any executive powers but could only make recommendations, and for their implementation it had to rely on the co-operation of the GSS.91 Consequently, Commission staff felt they had to tread carefully and sought to build good informal relations with the Central Statistical Office for the CSO to act on the proposals made in the first RCDIW report in July 1975. When the implementation of the proposals was under discussion in early 1976, Commission staff were generally ‘pleased that the GSS is so co-operative’ and reckoned that ‘the close contact which we have fostered with the CSO has paid off’.92 On the other hand, a potential conflict arose over the CSO’s suggestions of longer timetables in the work programme that threatened to delay key projects, but the RCDIW’s chief statistician, Elfryn Jones, reckoned the Commission was not in a position to pressurize the CSO. In early 1976 he advised his colleagues to back down: ‘I am very doubtful about the advisability of putting pressure on CSO to speed up the timetable because I do not think they can do much better; so pressure might have an adverse effect on our good relationships.’93 The power imbalance between the RCDIW and the GSS was regarded as the main reason why the commission had not chosen a more radical approach to the reform of the statistical system – this was at least the view of Peter Townsend who voiced his criticism in 1976. For a response to Townsend, Commission staff suggested the following argument in a briefing for the Commission’s chairman, Labour peer Jack Diamond:94 It can be argued that given its terms of reference and its limited powers the Commission would lose in a confrontation. The achievement so far by the step by step method is admittedly limited; it would be fairer to judge it in a couple of years’ time. Even so, there is now more information available than ever before, the CSO and other Departments are doing more work on income and wealth and the Commission has caused new approaches like a survey of wealth to be considered.

The Commission’s powers were also limited by its political impartiality that was partly self-imposed and partly dictated by the incumbent Labour government. The Commission had been committed to steer clear of all political debates even before it had started any work: in the discussions over the terms of reference of the future

 Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/40.2LPMR/1, Labour Party, RD 970: Labour’s first five years, Jan. 1974; Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 192.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, p. v.  TNA, BS 7/286, RCDIW, F. J. Bayliss to E. Jones, 27 Jan. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/286, RCDIW, E. Jones to F. J. Bayliss, 28 Jan. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/470, RCDIW, F. J. Bayliss to Mr Gottlieb, Mr Jones, 3 May 1976.

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Commission, ministers had insisted that all matters pertaining to policies on taxation and social security should be categorically excluded from its remit.95 The Cabinet wanted to stay in control of its own policies and ‘not give hostages to fortune’, as Harold Lever put it in a note to Michael Foot in May 1974: ‘I feel that we should be very careful about how far we let this body lay down norms which the government should observe in relation to the distribution of income and wealth’.96 The commitment to political impartiality became a guiding principle that manifested itself in the practices, the publications, and not least the composition of the RCDIW: the government appointed commissioners from all sides of the debate, including representatives of employer organizations, trade unionists, and academics, while the Commission staff consisted of seconded government statisticians and other civil servants. The Commission carefully avoided any value judgements and meticulously edited out all political remarks made by invited witnesses during the oral hearings that were published as part of the official reports. Similarly, the Commission was particularly anxious not to be associated with political bodies such as the parliamentary select committee on the wealth tax.97 This approach was not accepted unquestioned within the Commission, though. On several occasions, various commissioners advanced controversial topics such as pay ceilings for discussion or made other proposals that were subsequently rejected by the chairman and the Commission staff as too normative and outside the terms of reference.98 Such discussions provoked internal musings about the role of the Commission,99 but senior Commission staff were clear about what was best for ‘the integrity and the authority of their reports’: ‘the more factual and the less controversial the better’.100 While some commissioners, such as social policy expert John Greve, wanted to see the RCDIW take a stand on important issues such as the controversy about the Commission’s study on higher incomes, other commissioners thought it was more prudent to let the facts speak for themselves.101 However, the facts did not speak for themselves. On the contrary, the factual tone of the published reports did not necessarily increase their authority but made them rather more vulnerable to political exploitation. As commissioners learnt from the media response to the first official RCDIW report in 1975, the information presented was open to wildly diverging readings by commentators from Left and Right: while The Sun interpreted the RCDIW report to the effect that ‘the rich get poorer as our  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/40.2LPMR/1, TUC–Labour Liaison Committee, Meeting, 24 June 1974.  TNA, PREM 16/115, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, H. Lever, to M. Foot, DEP, 29 May 1974.  TNA, BS 7/586, RCDIW, Correspondence with the select committee on the wealth tax, 1974–75.  TNA, BS 7/284, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 17th Meeting, 26 June 1975; Chairman’s Brief, 19th Meeting, 15 July 1975.  TNA, BS 7/284, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 24th Meeting, 29 Sept. 1975: special meeting to discuss the role of the RC.  TNA, BS 7/284, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 19th Meeting, 15 July 1975.  TNA, BS 7/293, RC(75) 24th Meeting, 29th Sept 1975, The Role of the Royal Commission.

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wealth is more evenly spread’, The Guardian reported that ‘the rich stay rich, the rest stay poor’.102 The wide scope for interpretation resulted from the reluctance of the Commission to clarify their own interpretation. The report not only contained many elucidating tables, but just as many caveats, qualifications, and conflicting evidence – with its academic style and the high level of detail it was certainly not designed to enlighten a mass audience. The downsides of this sort of presentation did not escape commissioners. This point was raised at a meeting of the Commission in mid 1976:103 As regards presentational aspects some Commissioners felt that there would be advantage in going somewhat further in the direction of commentary and drawing conclusions on the statistical material in order to widen public understanding of the subject. Experience with earlier reports showed that if the Commission did not do this other commentators would fill the gap with a risk of misleading conclusions being drawn.

The opportunity to close this gap had been forfeited when the Commission dropped existing plans to produce a shorter and more comprehensible ‘popular version’ to accompany the full report in 1975. The idea had received support from David Lea from the TUC, in particular, but not from the Commission staff. In mid July 1975, they briefed the chairman, Jack Diamond, that ‘officials advise against a “pop” version mainly on the grounds that the material in the report simply does not lend itself to a “pop” interpretation’.104 On the one hand, officials admitted that a ‘pop version’ could ‘employ the full range of graphic techniques to present the main summary figures in a more easily assimilable way’ to ‘reach a wider audience’, but on the other hand, officials did not think that ‘popularising without oversimplifying and trivialising’ the presented information was possible at all: ‘By its nature, the material in the report cannot be separated from the necessary detail and qualifications.’ It was not until four years later that the RCDIW finally agreed to produce a simplified short report that summarized its main findings in easily comprehensible graphical forms that became a model for other reports. However, by the time the commission’s A to Z of Income and Wealth eventually appeared in 1980, Thatcher had already dissolved the RCDIW – it came too late to make a contribution to a more informed debate during the 1970s.105 The RCDIW, with its reluctance to provide stronger guidance and with its self-imposed impartiality, left the field to political commentators. This allowed rightwing politicians, journalists, and think tanks to misrepresent its findings to make the case for an anti-egalitarian turnaround in British politics.106 In a remarkable parallel, the more or less voluntary political neutrality of the poverty research industry in the  TNA, BS 7/553, RCDIW, M. A. Parsonage to Mr Bayliss, Mr Jones, 13 May 1976.  TNA, BS 7/566, RCDIW, Meeting of the Commission, 3 May 1976.  TNA, BS 7/284, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 18th Meeting, 7 July 1975.  RCDIW, An A to Z of Income & Wealth. The presentational techniques used in the RCDIW’s A to Z were later emulated in a similar report prepared by economist Thomas Stark, A New A to Z of Income and Wealth.  Kelsey, Unexpected Cut, 19–22.

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Fig. 6: A crisp but belated answer to a long debate: the history of income inequality in the UK according to the RCDIW’s A to Z of Income and Wealth, 1980.

United States helped Conservative and libertarian networks to dominate the public debate during the 1980s.107 In key political debates of the time, the RCDIW’s work could thus be turned against the incumbent Labour government – to the extent that Conservatives such as Norman Lamont ridiculed the Commission as a ‘boomerang that backfired and hit the Government firmly on the nose’.108 To begin with, the falls in the shares of top wealth owners that could be derived from the RCDIW reports undermined Labour’s signature policy of a wealth tax. Consequently, the plans drew criticism not only from the Conservatives on the select committee but also from Treasury officials, who pointed to the trend of decreasing wealth inequality; in 1976, the policy proposal was finally shelved.109 Similarly, the RCDIW’s findings on the spread of dividends among the population weakened the government’s case for continuing the policy of dividend controls.110

   

O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. Kelsey, Unexpected Cut, 23. Glennerster, ‘Why Was a Wealth Tax for the UK Abandoned?’, 245. Kelsey, Unexpected Cut, 21–2.

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Most importantly perhaps, the RCDIW refrained from intervening in the public debates about the alleged erosion of incentives for top managers and entrepreneurs, a claim that was of central importance for Conservative narratives of national decline brought about by ‘crippling’ taxation, overbearing union power, and redistributive policies gone too far. According to leading figures of the New Right and other Conservative voices, the compression of pay differentials between workers and executives precipitated a veritable ‘crisis’ of ‘the middle classes’ as ‘the deterioration in the living standards of top management’ threatened to drive the most talented managers out of the country.111 The RCDIW reports seemed to substantiate this narrative, as the main statistical source, the New Earnings Survey, showed ‘a big drop’ in the highest decile and percentile of non-manual men since 1970.112 The RCDIW’s report on ‘Higher Incomes’ in early 1976, in turn, put some of the political claims about the erosion of incentives in perspective by demonstrating that international comparisons showed similar trends in other Western countries, contrary to suggestions of a genuinely British disease.113 In contrast to the sanitized presentation in the published reports, there were differing views on this matter inside the Commission. In internal discussions over the vexed issue of pay differentials, some pointed to results from an alternative survey commissioned by the RCDIW that suggested a less dramatic compression of earnings. Furthermore, the chairman, Jack Diamond, even favoured the idea of including a statement in the forthcoming report arguing against a policy of increasing differentials.114 After clashes between trade unionists and industrialists on the Commission, however, the group could only agree on the most neutral position.115 Finally, the chairman also objected to a proposal advanced by David Lea and the TUC for an investigation into the possible effects of a pay ceiling for top salaries set at 20,000 pounds – on the grounds that the proposal was too political and outside the terms of reference.116 To what extent this cautious approach also guided the selection of commissioners and academic experts for appointment to the Commission is open to speculation. Nevertheless, it seems conspicuous that the strongest candidates and the most visible public figures among the community of experts in this field did not end up serving as commissioners in the RCDIW even if they were considered for selection by some in the government. Among others, the Secretary of State at the DHSS, Barbara Castle, suggested Frank Field, the Director of the Child Poverty Action Group and one of the most prolific

 Tim Congdon, ‘The Middle Classes: A Crisis that Cannot Be Helped?’, The Times, 24 May 1976.  RCDIW, Report No. 5: Third Report on the Standing Reference, 42.  RCDIW, Report No. 3: Higher Incomes from Employment; and RCDIW, Background Paper to Report No. 3.  TNA, BS 7/285, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 17th Meeting, 26 June 1975; TNA, BS 7/284; Chairman’s Brief, 27th Meeting, 20 Oct. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/293, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 33rd Meeting, 8 Dec. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/284, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 27th Meeting, 20 Oct 1975; TNA, BS 7/293; Chairman’s Brief, 17th Meeting, 26 June 1975.

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activists in the social policy arena of the time, adding ‘it would be useful for the Commission to contain someone who had a background of representing the poverty groups’.117 Another Cabinet minister, Shirley Williams, proposed Anthony Atkinson, who was in her view ‘the strongest of the listed economists for the purpose’; furthermore, Williams noted that ‘his views in this area are certainly more in accord with ours than at least one of the others’ – indeed, Atkinson even had formal links to the Labour party and had acted as an adviser to the party’s Social Policy Sub-committee.118 Michael Foot had circulated the initial list of possible names in late June 1974 and invited proposals from colleagues in the Cabinet but warned that ‘the membership needs to be such as to command public confidence in the objectivity of the commission’. Foot’s list featured only three women and made no mention of some of the biggest names.119 While Brian Abel-Smith was not included because he was needed as a senior policy adviser to Barbara Castle at the DHSS, there were serious reservations about the possible inclusion of Peter Townsend, as Castle’s private secretary explained: ‘Professor Townsend is a rather controversial figure who can I understand be a difficult committee member; Professor Greve would not be open to that objection.’120 Eventually, John Greve, a social policy expert at Leeds University, was included among the appointees from the academic ranks, alongside Henry Phelps-Brown, a specialist for earnings statistics at the LSE, and Dorothy Wedderburn, who had worked with Townsend in the 1960s.121 Sitting on the RCDIW finally gave academics a seat at the table in overseeing official statistical work programmes, in a marked departure from practices of previous decades when the GSS had remained firmly in control of the statistical machinery.122 As an institution that brought together scholarly experts, civil servants, and social partners, the RCDIW could be seen as part of a movement towards the creation of a ‘British version of corporatism’; it fitted the narrative of the 1970s as the heyday of social policy-making and social research in the country that saw closer relations between academics, ministers, officials, journalists, and activists than ever before.123 This positive account requires some qualification, though. According to David Donnison, the chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission and a former colleague of Richard Titmuss in Social Administration at the LSE, a veritable ‘movement’ with a

 TNA, PREM 16/115, DHSS, B. Castle to M. Foot, DEP, 8 July 1974.  TNA, PREM 16/115, DPCP, S. Williams to M. Foot, DEP, 27 June 1974; LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson, Personal Papers, ATKINSON/07/08, Atkinson’s correspondence as a member of the Labour Party’s Finance & Economic Affairs Sub-Committee / Social Policy Sub-Committee Joint Working Party on Tax Credits, 1972/73.  TNA, PREM 16/115, DEP, M. Foot to PM, 27 June 1974. The list was arranged by sections on ‘trade unionists’, ‘industrial employers’, ‘economists’, ‘social administration’, ‘financial expertise’, ‘building societies’, and ‘women’.  TNA, PREM 16/115, DHSS, G. A. Hart to R. J. Dawe, DEP, 25 June 1974.  TNA, BS 7/279, Correspondence about the initial appointments to the RCDIW in 1974.  See Chapter 3, section ‘The Circulation of Knowledge and the Politics of Statistics’.  Toynbee and Walker, ‘Social Policy and Inequality’, 110.

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new collaborative spirit existed in education, but not in the social policy field; in particular, he singled out the DHSS as a barrier to closer co-operation, but also diagnosed, probably unfairly, a ‘lack of an effective intelligentsia in social security’.124 Commissioners and staff at the RCDIW certainly felt the heat from academics and activists who criticized the Commission not only in statistical questions but also for the political implications of its work and for some of the reports.125 Most notably, severe criticism was levelled at the RCDIW’s report on lower incomes in 1978, which seemed to countenance behaviouralist explanations for poverty; this and other disputes over the report also caused a schism within the Commission and led to the publication of a minority statement by three dissenting commissioners.126 Relations with the academic world outside the Commission remained somewhat ambivalent. RCDIW staff regularly held research seminars with leading academics but the exchanges at times led to disappointment as experts like Anthony Atkinson seemed more interested in imposing their own views than in assisting the Commission staff with the specifics of the statistical work.127 Nevertheless, the RCDIW drew heavily on scholarly experts and the academic literature. Academics were invited to give evidence in oral hearings and were frequently consulted in statistical questions. Some economists such as Thomas Stark were also commissioned with work in particular areas, some of which was later incorporated into the published RCDIW reports. But, then again, the Commission was criticized for not outsourcing even more work to external academics.128 The former Commission secretary, Nigel Forecast, rejected this allegation in his account of the RCDIW’s history from 1979, in remarks that smacked of a somewhat belittling attitude towards the academic community:129 There was no other unit in existence specialising in this field: the number of individual academic students in the field was very small and could not possibly have made more than a small contribution to reports produced with the speed and regularity which the government demanded. There was no choice, therefore, but to set up a sizeable staff with a strong professional element (statistics being the main discipline) to do most of the work. [. . .] If a new thrust has been felt in the field of income and wealth distribution studies it is the RC that has provided nearly all the horse power.

The work of the RCDIW undoubtedly provided important impetus for the revival of political and academic interest in economic inequality in the mid 1970s. Importantly, the establishment of the Commission and the noticeable increase in the demand for statistical knowledge in this area prompted the Government Statistical Service to put

 Donnison, Politics of Poverty, 134, 138–9, 141, 157–8.  TNA, BS 7/566, RCDIW, Annex on Comments and Criticisms of Report No 1, RC(76)24, 21 June 1976.  TNA, BS 7/421, C. Pond, ‘The Policy Implications of the Lower Incomes Report’, Fabian Society, Conference on Income, Wealth and the Diamond Commission, 11 Nov. 1978; Chris Pond, New Society, 29 Mar. 1979; ‘Group Split over Low Pay Report’, The Guardian, 10 May 1978.  TNA, BS 7/286, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, 4th Meeting, 3 May 1976.  Bulmer, Social Research and Royal Commissions.  TNA, BS 7/278, RCDIW, N. S. Forecast, A Memoir, 14 Nov. 1979.

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the topic back on the agenda after years of inactivity. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, work on income and wealth statistics in the GSS had virtually ground to a halt; in a briefing session with RCDIW staff in autumn 1974, the Director of the Social Statistics Division in the CSO, John Boreham, had to concede that the CSO had no strategy in place for improving official statistics on income distribution.130 Subsequently, however, the CSO took up work again. In a project led by government statistician Deo Ramprakash from the CSO’s Social Statistics Division, the CSO relaunched attempts to merge the two main sources on income distribution, the Family Expenditure Survey and the Survey of Personal Incomes, to produce more reliable overall estimates in the Blue Books. This approach had been first suggested in the late 1950s but was only implemented half-heartedly and could not save the Blue Book tables from being scrapped in 1970.131 By contrast, the work undertaken in 1974–75 made a real difference. What the GSS had failed to achieve for more than a decade, was worked out by CSO statisticians in a matter of months and ready for publication in the first RCDIW report in July 1975. Ramprakash presented the improved methodology in an article in Economic Trends in August 1975, a contribution that he would still brag about many years later: in 1990, he referred to his article in a note to a colleague, explaining the advantages of the methodology that was ‘developed sixteen years ago by the (still) leading British expert on income distribution statistics’ and emulated not only by distinguished academics such as Anthony Atkinson but also by international organizations.132 It also became the methodology of choice of the RCDIW. The tables published in the RCDIW reports and in Economic Trends were still accompanied by caveats warning of the limitations of the statistics.133 But government statisticians were confident that the new methodology now produced reliable results on trends in overall inequality and also communicated this to the outside world.134 The RCDIW regarded the reformed Blue Book tables as the best available source on income distribution and defended them against the criticism of Peter Townsend and others, who contended that the Family Expenditure Survey still offered a more realistic picture of trends in inequality and poverty. Reinstating the Blue Books was one of the recommendations made by the RCDIW and consequently carried out by the CSO. The CSO even agreed to reconstruct tables for all years going back to 1970 where the old series had left off – up to this point, the CSO had had no plans to close the existing gap in the Blue Book series.135 The rationale for  See Chapter 3, section ‘Income Inequality’.  Ibid.  D. Ramprakash, ‘Distribution of Income Statistics for the United Kingdom, 1972–73: ‘Sources and Methods’, Economic Trends, 262 (Aug. 1975), 78–96; TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to G. Harris, 21 Nov. 1990.  CSO, ‘Income Distribution in the United Kingdom: 1974–75’, Economic Trends, 282 (Apr. 1977), 99–102.  TNA, CAB 108/703, CSO, Review of Activities since 1975, 12 Mar. 1980; CSO, Statistics of Poverty, Basic Needs and Social Consumption, 27 Feb. 1980, Paper to the Ninth Conference of Commonwealth Statisticians.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Income Inequality’.

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resuming the series was explained by Ramprakash in his 1975 article with reference to the ‘demand for information’ that followed from the political salience of the issue and the creation of the RCDIW.136 The work of the RCDIW also transformed the visual presentation of statistics on income distribution, which became much more accessible for a wider readership. In contrast to the more complicated design in the old Blue Book series, that had shown the absolute numbers of tax units in fifteen different income ranges, the new presentation was broken down by income quantiles from the top 1 per cent down to the bottom 10 per cent – up until this point, analyses by percentiles had only been used in the Inland Revenue’s series on wealth distribution. Government statisticians were well aware that this type of presentation enabled meaningful analyses that could be easily understood by a general audience. In the RCDIW’s reports, readers were advised that quantile shares ‘provide a particularly effective means of summarising and comparing distributions’, and government statisticians explained to audiences at international conferences that looking at quantile shares was a useful method to capture trends in income inequality over time.137 In fact, government departments in Whitehall were already using this method for internal purposes. In the late 1960s, the Department of Health and Social Security routinely requested information on the lowest quintile from the CSO, where the method was even considered for adoption in published reports. John Leonard Nicholson and his team floated the idea of showing results for the first and fifth quintile of each household type in future articles in Economic Trends, but the proposal was not implemented.138 While the analyses published in Economic Trends usually concentrated on horizontal inequalities between households of different sizes and composition, the presentation introduced by the RCDIW shifted attention to the vertical distribution from top to bottom. In the latter half of the 1970s, this mode of presentation was finally introduced to the reports published in Economic Trends: from now on, all articles on income distribution included tables showing changes in the shares of quantiles that allowed readers to grasp trends in inequality at a glance – similar to the tables published in the RCDIW reports.139 Thus, it was not an exaggerated boast when the former RCDIW secretary, Forecast, stated in his historical account of the Commission’s achievements that the standards set by the RCDIW reports in the ‘presentation of the facts’ became ‘more or less generally accepted as the way to do it’.140

 D. Ramprakash, ‘Distribution of Income Statistics’, 78.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 20; TNA, CAB 108/676, CSO, ‘Problems of Measurement in the Field of Levels of Living, including Distribution of Incomes and Expenditure’, Paper prepared for the seventh conference of Commonwealth statisticians, 26 June 1970.  LSE Archive, Personal Papers of John L. Nicholson, Box 118, CSO, Note of an Informal Meeting, 22 Sept. 1969.  E.g. CSO, ‘Income Distribution in the United Kingdom: 1974/75’, Economic Trends, 282 (Apr. 1977), 99.  TNA, BS 7/278, RCDIW, N. S. Forecast, A Memoir, 14 Nov. 1979. Italics in original.

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Fig. 7: The new language of percentiles: presentation of statistics on income distribution in the CSO journal Economic Trends, 1977.

The RCDIW reports helped to popularize statistical knowledge about economic inequality on the back of a noticeable increase in media coverage. Anthony Atkinson, who was appointed to the Commission in 1978, regarded this as one of the main achievements of the RCDIW: alongside ‘stimulating the CSO and other bodies’ to undertake new work, Atkinson recalled in 1979, the Commission was ‘quite successful in securing press coverage’.141 Indeed, the impressive assemblage of press clippings collected by the Commission staff over the years testified to the considerable media response: dozens and dozens of articles discussing the findings of the RCDIW appeared in journals, broadsheets, and the popular press.142 The press coverage reflected how statistical terms and measurements filtered into the public debate and shaped the political language of inequality in Britain. Many newspapers, including tabloids such as the Daily Mirror, reported on trends in income and wealth distribution by citing from RCDIW publications the changing income shares of various percentiles.143 The coverage further familiarized a mass audience with the figure of the ‘top one per cent’ as a key indicator and political metaphor of inequality – and as a way of looking at the

 TNA, BS 7/273, A. B. Atkinson to M. Bulmer, LSE, 19 Apr. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/448 and BS 7/422, Press reactions to the work of the RCDIW.  E.g. ‘For Richer, for Poorer: How the Money Rolls in for a Lucky Few’, Daily Mirror, 31 July 1975.

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social structures of British society at large. The rise of the political rhetoric of the ‘top one per cent’ is usually associated with later events, in particular, with the activism of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 in the wake of the global financial crisis.144 But while it is true that media coverage in the 2010s surged to levels that were not seen in the 1970s, there was a measurable increase in press attention for issues of income and wealth distribution that was clearly associated with the activities of the RCDIW and informed by its statistical measurements.145 Focusing attention on quantile shares transgressed the language of class that was encapsulated in the cruder statistical measurement of the wage share: previously, even statistics-savvy Labour politicians such as Michael Meacher had frequently invoked the division of labour and capital in the debates during the Heath years.146 The RCDIW clearly made a difference. The sheer amount of statistical information that became available through the RCDIW contrasted starkly with previous and later decades. In 1979, Thatcher scrapped the RCDIW and also cut back other statistical series – subsequently, the absence of regular, up-to-date statistics became a characteristic feature of the neo-liberal social and economic order of the 1980s.147 Originally, the RCDIW was meant to be a permanent body – had it been allowed to continue its work, the monitoring of trends in inequality might have become a fixture in British society and political culture. The social democratic moment of the mid 1970s opened up avenues for a more informed political debate, and this was recognized even by left-wing critics of the RCDIW. Chris Pond, for example, welcomed the Commission’s 1978 report on lower incomes and the accompanying witness statements as ‘one of the most comprehensive reviews of existing knowledge of poverty ever to be carried out by an official body’.148 His detailed critique of the RCDIW, in turn, was a reminder of the power accruing to the Commission and associated government statisticians in shaping the forms and contents of the presented knowledge. Larger projects such as the Lower Incomes Reference were commissioned by the government but the implementation was largely left to the discretion of the Commission and the members of staff who directed research and drafted the reports.

 Ramos Pinto, ‘Inequality by Numbers’.  Database research in ProQuest Historical Newspapers: in the The Guardian and The Observer, the phrase ‘distribution of wealth’ appeared in 73 items during the 1960s and in 213 items during the 1970s; ‘distribution of income’: 74:224; ‘income distribution’: 115:194; ‘rich and poor’: 264:565; ‘inequality’: 639:1718.  Hansard, House of Commons, 21 Jan. 1974, vol. 867, col. 1302.  See Chapter 5.  Chris Pond, ‘The Poor and the Pundits’, New Society, 29 Mar. 1979.

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Intersectional Inequalities: Gender and Race In putting together reports and work programmes, commissioners and staff at the RCDIW made choices that reflected their views and interests. Inevitably, this also meant that they routinely prioritized some research areas over others. While much work was devoted to improving key statistical sources such as the Blue Books and the Inland Revenue’s series on wealth distribution, a number of topics that had already suffered from neglect in previous decades received considerably less attention. Most notably, the RCDIW invested relatively few resources to address gaps in knowledge about intersectional inequalities of class, gender, race, and space, despite the political salience of questions of equality and the activism of civil rights groups during these years. To begin with, the Commission made little progress in developing more precise statistical tools to analyse gender imbalances. The published RCDIW reports mostly relied on the results from the New Earnings Survey that documented the dispersion of earnings between men and women in manual and non-manual occupations. Published findings from this source did not fail to make an impression on the public: the media response to the RCDIW’s final report in autumn 1979 was dominated by headlines about persisting inequalities in pay even though the 1970 Equal Pay Act was said to have brought about faster growth in earnings for women than for men.149 However, Commission staff and government statisticians were well aware that the NES provided only a rough picture. Officials at the Department of Employment were clear that existing statistical sources were hardly suitable for monitoring the implementation of the Equal Pay Act: ‘Earnings figures are generally a poor guide; they give an aggregate picture, but do not reveal what is happening in individual firms, nor how individual women are benefitting (or not) from the Act.’150 Studying the effects of the Equal Pay Act was an important concern for feminists and became the subject of empirical academic research, although RCDIW staff noted in 1976 that ‘the literature in the UK on equal pay / equal opportunities is still at manageable proportions’.151 By the mid 1970s, research projects were underway at various universities that were partly sponsored by government departments and the SSRC: a research team led by Nancy Seear, a feminist and social scientist at the LSE, surveyed the practices in twenty-five different firms across the country, and a similar project was planned by economist Peter Sloane

 RCDIW, Report No. 8: Fifth report on the Standing Reference; ‘Girls Trail in Pay Race’, Daily Mirror, 25 Oct. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/626, DE, J. Williamson, Paper ‘Equal Pay: Monitoring and Future Research Needs’, 11 June 1976.  TNA, BS 7/668, RCDIW, J. F. Gilhooly, Background Note for Meeting with Professor Sloane, 27 Aug. 1976.

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at the University of Paisley.152 Officials at the Department of Employment (DE) concurred that this was the right approach to obtain a more fine-grained picture of the situation of women in the labour market; however, they also agreed that data was needed on a much larger scale. The DE had already explored the possibility of carrying out a large-scale survey in co-operation with the OPCS in 1974, responding to calls from the TUC and pressure from ministers who were keen to see quick results. Eventually, however, officials failed to find agreement on the technicalities of the implementation. In 1976, DE officials attempted to resurrect the plans for a new survey on equal pay and sent their proposal not only to the Equal Opportunities Commission but also to the RCDIW for consideration.153 The RCDIW failed to throw its weight behind the idea, though: Commission staff arranged for Peter Sloane to write a research paper about equal pay in connection with the Lower Incomes Reference, but there was no sign that the Commission seriously considered a new survey on equal pay for inclusion in the work programme.154 Furthermore, earnings were just one component of women’s incomes among others that were even less well documented in official statistics. This was also acknowledged by the RCDIW in its initial report in 1975: in a section discussing ‘major subjects of future work’, the report addressed necessary improvements to the Inland Revenue’s income statistics and stated in this context that ‘a separate analysis of women’s income is needed’.155 This and other lacunae in existing statistics were also highlighted by activists of the feminist movement. In a memorandum submitted by the Women’s Liberation Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence to the RCDIW in early 1976, it was pointed out that separate analyses for men and women were required not only in statistics on income and wealth distribution but also in studies on redistributive effects of the tax/benefit system: in these and other areas, existing inequalities between men and women were masked in official income statistics by the underlying unit of analysis that treated married couples as a single ‘tax unit’.156 Only on the wealth side did Inland Revenue statistics give information for women and men separately, but as wealth assets were routinely attributed to husbands, married women were often recorded as ‘paupers’.157 Feminist campaigners demanded that these issues ‘should be given high priority’ by the Commission. In fact, however, the subject was dealt with by the RCDIW only after long delays and not with the necessary vigour to achieve noticeable improvements. It was not until autumn

 TNA, BS 7/626, DE, D. Eacher to S. Jacob, RCDIW, Note on Current Research on Equal Pay, 19 July 1976.  TNA, BS 7/626, DE, J. Williamson to S. Jacob, RCDIW, 11 June 1976.  TNA, BS 7/668, RCDIW, S. Moylan, Note of a Meeting with Professor Sloane, 31 Aug. 1976.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 149.  TNA, BS 7/448, Women’s Liberation Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence, D. M. Barker, Memorandum to the RCDIW, 5 Jan. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/690, RCDIW, Planning Paper: The Economic Position of Women, Dec. 1977.

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1977 that the RCDIW initiated even preliminary work on the subject: in October 1977, the Commission staff were requested to prepare a planning paper for a possible project on ‘the economic position of women’.158 The work that was subsequently undertaken showed how much extra research and data was required to gain new insights into the effects of the Equal Pay Act, insights that were not readily available from existing earnings statistics. In order to gauge the causes of differences in earnings between women and men, it was necessary to compare occupational patterns, hours worked, and the age distribution in the labour force.159 The work undertaken by RCDIW staff in this area suffered ‘to some extent from the bottleneck in availability of statistical support’, though, and was still in progress in early 1979. In July 1979, the second to last RCDIW report announced a ‘special study of the economic position of women’, but in the end the research was not completed in time to be incorporated into the final RCDIW report before the Commission was dissolved.160 Similarly, the RCDIW failed to make any contribution whatsoever to improving the sparse information on the economic position of ethnic minorities in Britain. Although there was no shortage of commentary and controversies about community relations and racial equality in public discourse in contemporary Britain, no mention was made of this topic in the list of ‘major subjects of future work’ suggested in the first RCDIW report in 1975. While the report held out the promise that ongoing ‘work in hand’ – in particular, the tabulations from the 1971 Census follow-up survey – would soon allow more thorough analyses of ‘distributions of income between and within occupations, regions, generations, and sexes’, the issue of race was conspicuously absent from the research agenda.161 That was despite a growing body of academic scholarship and social activism concerned with the living conditions of immigrants in Britain.162 The need for more information on the economic circumstances of ethnic minorities was eventually driven home to the RCDIW by representatives of the Community Relations Commission in their witness statement delivered in connection with the Lower Incomes Reference in 1976.163 The Lower Incomes Reference asked whether ‘membership of an ethnic minority’ was a contributing factor to the incidence of low incomes.164 But when Commission staff began to explore the subject, they soon realized that ‘income data on ethnic minorities’ was indeed ‘clearly limited’.165 It was not that Whitehall departments entirely neglected research in this area. For example, researchers at the Department of Employment completed a substantial

       

TNA, BS 7/690, RCDIW, Note by the Secretary, 8 Dec. 1977. TNA, BS 7/690, RCDIW, H. J Smith to N. Forward, Progress Report, 22 Jan. 1979. RCDIW, Report No. 7: Fourth Report on the Standing Reference, 55. RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 150–1. See Chapter 3, section ‘Intersectionality’. TNA, BS 7/208, RCDIW, Lower Incomes Reference, Evidence: Community Relations Commission. TNA, BS 7/667, RCDIW, Note of Meeting with Home Office, 21 Oct. 1976. TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, S. Moylan to Mr Gottlieb, 22 Oct. 1976.

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study of ‘immigrants in the labour market’ in late 1976, and a previous investigation into disadvantaged groups undertaken by the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) in 1973 had also looked into the situation of ethnic minorities.166 However, existing literature and government research on living conditions of the immigrant population relied mainly on proxy indicators derived from the Census and employment statistics. In other words, living standards of immigrants were estimated on the basis of their housing and economic activity rates, while the available information on their earnings, let alone their incomes, remained ‘patchy’ at best.167 Existing government sources did not even allow statisticians to precisely identify and locate the immigrant population. By the mid 1970s, there was still ‘no standard statistical classification of ethnic groups in this country’, although government statisticians were holding talks about the possibility of including a new question on ethnic origin in the 1981 Census.168 The only government survey that collected basic information on incomes as well as data on the ‘country of birth’ and the ‘parents’ country of birth’ was the General Household Survey – according to the OPCS, the GHS was ‘a unique source of information on the coloured population’.169 Even the GHS suffered from methodological difficulties in obtaining representative sub-samples of the immigrant population, although technical solutions were available to overcome some of these problems.170 The OPCS, for example, combined several years of GHS data to obtain large enough samples to investigate ‘immigrant fertility patterns’ and other demographic questions.171 However, neither the OPCS nor any other government department seemed to have used this methodology to analyse how ethnic minority groups fared in terms of incomes compared to the white majority. The Home Office, for example, had expressed interest in obtaining ‘tables on colour’ from the GHS but subsequently abandoned this line of enquiry because of ‘the smallness of the sample size of the groups of interest’.172 Government statisticians had placed great hopes in the 1971 Census follow-up survey but due to methodological concerns the OPCS eventually advised the RCDIW against using the results.173 Furthermore, RCDIW staff had no great expectations of obtaining more representative data from the follow-up survey to the

 TNA, BS 7/666, DE, Draft report ‘The Role of Immigrants in the Labour Market’, Oct. 1976. The study was published by the DE in 1977 under the same title.  TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, Note on Meeting with Ms Lomas, 29 Oct. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/755, CSO, Distributional Effects of Social Policies, Annex B, 19 Nov. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/774, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Report of the Review of the General Household Survey, 27 Apr. 1977.  TNA, CAB 108/774, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Sampling Immigrants, 24 Mar. 1976.  TNA, CAB 108/774, CSO, Report of the Review of the General Household Survey, 27 Apr. 1977, and annexes on the uses of the GHS by government departments.  Ibid.  TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, Gibbins to Banfield, OPCS, 23 Dec. 1976.

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GHS that was outsourced to a team of researchers led by economist Richard Layard at the LSE in connection with the Lower Incomes Reference.174 Surprisingly perhaps, the RCDIW invested very little to close these gaps. In autumn 1976, Commission staff held talks to explore the possibility of a collaborative research project with Gillian Lomas and Elizabeth Monck, two researchers whose work highlighted the lower social status and the economic disadvantages faced by ethnic minorities in Britain. Following an agreement made during the discussions in October 1976, Lomas prepared a paper reviewing the existing literature for the Commission. However, in early 1977, RCDIW staff decided that no further work should be commissioned. A reminder of the outstanding work in this area came from outside the Commission when discussions at a Fabian seminar held in November 1978 concluded that the RCDIW should also include the incomes and wealth of ‘racial minorities’ in its work programme.175 Around the same time, RCDIW representatives noted their interest in analysing the incomes of ethnic minorities at an interdepartmental meeting about the possible continuation of the Census follow-up survey.176 All in all, however, the topic was seldom brought up in the internal discussions of the Commission – and it was effectively left out of the work programme. In the published RCDIW reports, it was not even mentioned as a subject that required more research in the future.177

Spatialized Inequalities: Local Knowledge in London and Islington Another subject area where little progress was made under the aegis of the RCDIW was the analysis of regional variations in income and wealth distribution. The topic was flagged in the initial RCDIW report for further investigation ‘in later reports’ but still appeared on the list of future work in 1979. Although information on regional differences was available not only from statistical series such as the New Earnings Survey and the Survey of Personal Incomes but also from a number of recent local surveys, the RCDIW made little use of this material. The countries of the United Kingdom represented the lowest level of regional disaggregation for which the published RCDIW reports offered some information, presented in separate tables on wealth distribution for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, experts, activists, planners, and politicians required data for much smaller geographical areas. This was pointed out to Commissioners repeatedly in the witness statements and oral hearings that were held to survey the views and needs of stakeholders from various sides during the preparation of the initial report in 1974/75. Representatives of the Greater London Council, for example, emphasized the importance of obtaining information on    

TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, Gottlieb to S. Moylan, 31 Dec. 1976. TNA, BS 7/421, RCDIW, Note by Smith on the Fabian Seminar, 24 Nov. 1978. TNA, BS 7/476, CSO, Minutes of Meeting, 24 Oct. 1978. RCDIW, Report No. 7: Fourth Report on the Standing Reference, 160–1.

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income and wealth distribution down to borough level. As a major local authority and employer, the representatives explained, the GLC was responsible for many policies with redistributive implications but had no precise information about the possible distributional effects.178 When the GLC was invited again to submit evidence for the Lower Incomes Reference in late 1976 it also pointed out the need for a geographical index of deprivation precise enough to locate pockets of poverty in urban areas. The efforts of local authorities to investigate urban deprivation went hand in hand with strong policy interest in central government, notably in the Home Office and the Department of the Environment. Following the launch of the Urban Programme in 1968, the key policy issue of the ‘inner city’ became more prominent in the 1970s. It highlighted social problems that were understood to be rooted in a combination of racial discrimination, multiple deprivation, and spatialized inequalities.179 As has been noted above, the Urban Programme raised questions and created demands for statistical knowledge that existing government statistics could only meet to a limited extent. Even the General Household Survey was far too small in size to allow any cross-sectional analyses of income distribution at the level of smaller local areas. In autumn 1975, the problem was raised in discussions at the official Working Group on the GHS. Various participants stressed the need to obtain better data from the GHS on regions and sub-groups such as ‘coloured immigrants’ and ‘the poor’; officials from the Scottish and the Welsh Office even pressed for a fourfold increase of the sample size in the GHS, which was otherwise of ‘little local use’ in Wales and other regions.180 In response, government statisticians from the CSO and the OPCS explained to their colleagues that these suggestions ‘would require an annual sample of 80,000 households and a five-fold increase in costs’. The discrepancies between what was needed and what was available were also noted with some disillusionment at the Central Policy Review Staff, where officials were formulating requirements for ‘better statistical evidence’ in connection with the ‘Joint Approach to Social Policy’. Ideally, what was needed were distributional analyses by income deciles that could be cross-referenced with a combination of axes, mainly ‘region, socio-economic group and ethnic group’. However, CSO officials dampened expectations that such a system could become available anytime soon: ‘Although analyses by a combination of axes may be possible in a small number of cases we have certainly not reached the point – if we ever shall – where Ministers could be offered analyses of distributional effects of policies based on every combination of the axes.’181 Locating the places of residence and investigating the living conditions of ‘young West Indians’ in smaller urban areas, for example, seemed all but impossible.

   

TNA, BS 7/32, RCDIW, Oral hearing and written evidence by the GLC, Feb. 1975. Rydin, Urban and Environmental Planning in the UK, 38–9, 44. TNA, CAB 108/773, CSO, Working Party on the GHS, Meeting, 1 Oct. 1975. TNA, AT 72/104, CSO, Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals, 18 Apr. 1977.

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At the local level, however, the Urban Programme and the growing policy interest in issues of multiple deprivation sparked a wave of research that provided many new insights. Research units at the Home Office and at the Department of the Environment were in the process of developing an index of deprivation for purposes of social mapping, mostly based on the Census of Population; furthermore, the DoE sponsored local research as part of the department’s series of ‘inner cities studies’.182 The studies were usually initiated and overseen by research units of local authorities, often in cooperation with research institutes and academic poverty experts. In London, for example, the GLC’s prolific ‘Intelligence Unit’ embarked on a ‘Deprived Areas Project’ in 1973 in which GLC research officers collaborated with their counterparts from councils at borough level. The programme produced a plethora of reports on social conditions in the capital. The results of this multi-faceted research provided a counterweight to the prevailing picture of diminishing inequalities that many commentators derived from national statistics. During the oral evidence session with the RCDIW, the GLC’s representative also highlighted the plight of immigrant communities of West Indian heritage and other disadvantaged sub-groups:183 Mr Harrington said that the most worrying feature of the GLC’s evidence was the extent of poverty demonstrated and the unfavourable trends which existed. The level of income below which the bottom 25 per cent of the population were found had been falling in London, while it had remained stable in the rest of the country and had increased in the rest of the South East. He hoped that the Royal Commission report would produce definitions of poverty, measures of its extent and positive recommendations for its removal which would together provide a major step forward, equivalent to that made by the Beveridge Report.

Impetus for research on income distribution in London had been provided by observations about growing social polarization in the city, observations that caused controversies within the GLC in 1970. The GLC’s own publication ‘Tomorrow’s London’ ascribed the trend to the growth of the service economy that entailed a growth of low-paid jobs; a second, related discussion revolved around the question of how the Greater London area was faring in terms of incomes compared to the rest of the South-East and the nation as a whole – the Intelligence Unit found evidence that London’s advantage was shrinking.184 Inside the GLC, the findings were disputed by other officials: regional estimates derived from the Inland Revenue’s Survey of Personal Incomes seemed to suggest that the hypothesis of growing inequality was invalid and that trends in London were broadly similar to the rest of the country.185 At the same time, the discussions brought the deficiencies of the SPI and other data sources to the attention of city planners and prompted calls for better coordination of research on

 See Chapter 3, section ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.  TNA, BS 7/199, RCDIW, Note of oral evidence from GLC, 3 May 1977.  London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/DG/ISG/5/68, GLC, D. E. C. Eversley, Changes in Incomes in GLC Area, 1964–69, 7 Sept. 1970.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/5/68, GLC, D. T. Cross, Income Studies: Working Paper No. 1, 1 Dec. 1970.

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incomes within the GLC – it was even suggested that the council should set up a new ‘income section’ for this purpose.186 The efforts contrasted markedly with previous years when the GLC had engaged in little research in this area, as was noted in connection with the internal discussions in 1970:187 Most work seems to have been focused on expenditure rather than income, or with income ‘available’ to certain classes of expenditure; there does not seem to have been any systematic review of the available data, no critique of income definitions, or comparisons of sources of data; and with no overall strategy for the use of income material there has been no consistent demand for improved data – apparently even the new LTS contains little of direct use to economic and social studies for this reason. Thus far there seems to have been little attempt to review the literature on incomes, and no attempt to look at the generation of income.

The research efforts bore fruit: in 1971, the GLC used the Greater London Transport Survey (GLTS) to collect income data on a large scale – the enquiry created a unique source of statistical information on spatialized inequalities in the capital. On the one hand, results from the survey showed that incomes in London had grown as fast as in the rest of the South-East since 1962; on the other hand, it also showed that incomes grew at different rates in various parts of the city: in the inner areas of London, the survey found more households on lower incomes than had been expected.188 The GLTS opened up new perspectives on unequal living standards in the capital. Previously, it had already been possible to measure changes in the income distribution in London as a whole, but the sub-samples covering the capital from the Family Expenditure Survey and the General Household Survey were too small to be broken down to the level of smaller areas within London.189 By contrast, the GLTS for the first time enabled analysts to zoom in on the distribution of income in London’s boroughs. An analysis of the GLTS by Richard Berthoud documented the dispersion of rich and poor across London: while there were no completely poor wards, there were wards that exhibited higher relative rates of poverty than others.190 However, the 1971 GLTS was a synchronic snapshot, which limited its analytical potential. The survey could not reveal any trends over time and remained a one-off exercise: the collected income data was not comparable with the information gathered in the first round of the GLTS in 1962 or with any other statistical sources, and the 1971 GLTS was not repeated in this form.191 As was pointed out in

 LMA, LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/5/68, GLC, A. T. Gore, Income Research and Statistics, 30 Nov. 1970.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/5/68, GLC, G. M. Lomas, Note on Meeting on Income Analysis, 2 Dec. 1970.  LMA, Official Publications, vol. 75, GLC, Research Report No. 18, Greater London Transport Survey: Initial Results (London: GLC, 1974).  LMA, Official Publications, vol. 209, GLC, Research Memorandum: Measurement of Changes in Income Distribution (London: GLC, Feb. 1971).  R. Berthoud, ‘Where Are London’s Poor?’, Greater London Intelligence Bulletin (London: GLC, 1976).  LMA, Official Publications, vol. 212, GLC, Research Memorandum No. 350: Surveys of Personal Incomes (London: GLC, 1972).

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a GLC research memorandum in 1972, the GLTS would remain the only source on incomes at borough level in London unless alternative statistical sources were developed. The only potential candidate that could fill this gap was the 1971 Census income followup survey, but given the uncertain future of this survey at the time and the long intervals between Censuses of Population, the GLC needed to take action if it was interested in obtaining a continuous statistical source for more fine-grained income data.192 In the event, however, no such statistical series were developed. When officials from the GLC’s Intelligence Unit looked back in a conference paper in 1977, the 1971 GLTS appeared like a solitary light surrounded by statistical darkness.193 Alternative statistical indicators of deprivation were developed by central government departments and research units in connection with the Urban Programme and the earlier initiative on Education Priority Areas. These and other policy programmes were aimed at positive discrimination of deprived areas and were ‘based on an assumption that the location and extent of deprivation could be identified without great difficulty’, but, as Nick Deakin of the GLC’s Intelligence Unit explained in a conference paper in 1975, ‘this assumption proved to be false’.194 Attempts to construct a statistical index of deprivation were frustrated by the complexities of social realities that at times defied existing theories: a number of studies in London and elsewhere suggested lower degrees of geographical concentration and weaker links between different dimensions of deprivation than could be expected from the concept of multiple deprivation.195 Nonetheless, by the time of writing, attempts to develop indicators of deprivation based on the Census of Population, the Census of Employment, and other sources continued in a joint effort by the Home Office’s Urban Deprivation Unit and the Department of the Environment.196 Even if none of these sources provided any information on incomes, the usefulness of proxy indicators such as housing conditions was also acknowledged by the GLC in their evidence to the RCDIW: data on housing conditions and other variables from the 1971 Census revealed even higher degrees of deprivation at ward level than the income data from the GLTS, a finding that could be easily verified by ‘a walk around an area such as Spitalfields’ in East London.197 Housing conditions were a visible sign of social disadvantage and were widely regarded as a key indicator in contemporary descriptions of social life in London and elsewhere. The links between deprivation and poor housing were demonstrated by a

 Ibid.  LMA, GLC/DG/PUB/01/361, GLC, N. Deakin et al., Assessing London’s Social Problems, Conference Paper, 16 May 1977.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/08/30, GLC, N. Deakin, ‘Aspects of Deprivation in London’, Seminar on 5 Mar. 1975.  Ibid.  DoE, 1971 Census: Extraction of Indications of Deprivation.  TNA, BS 7/199, RCDIW, Note of oral evidence from GLC, 3 May 1977.

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survey on housing conditions carried out by the GLC in 1967; furthermore, the London sub-sample from the General Household Survey indicated that low-income households in overcrowded housing included a large percentage of ‘new Commonwealth immigrants’.198 Housing also dominated perceptions of the city among local authority officials at borough level. In Islington in North London, for example, the council referred to this variable as a major marker of difference in a portrayal of the borough’s social geography in the late 1970s. While ‘the most pleasant parts’ were located in ‘Central Islington’, where the two main districts, Barnsbury and Canonbury, were ‘characterised by late Georgian terraces and Victorian terraced and villa style housing’, a different picture emerged beyond the railway line in North Islington: here, in ‘a poor residential environment’, ‘three-storey terraced housing’ predominated with ‘almost all dwellings’ lacking certain amenities.199 Furthermore, data on housing and other variables derived from the 1971 Census were used by the GLC in key publications to document social and economic conditions in London down to the level of wards.200 Nonetheless, there were clear limitations to the existing sets of statistical indicators. This was also recognized by local councillors and research officers in Islington. As ‘a typical Inner City area’ with ‘a rapid decline in population’, ‘a loss in manufacturing jobs’, and signs of widespread deprivation, the Borough of Islington, alongside the neighbouring Borough of Hackney, was designated a ‘partnership area’ in 1977, as part of an urban aid scheme run in co-operation between the government and local authorities.201 For the statistical monitoring of progress in the ‘Hacklington’ partnership, the Department of the Environment suggested a list of ‘core statistics’: alongside measures of housing, unemployment, and other key areas, the list also featured ‘the number and type of recipients of supplementary benefit’ as a proxy indicator for income.202 At the GLC, however, there were grave doubts about ‘the lack of reliability of the indicators suggested by the DoE’, and they were criticized in discussions ‘because they could not be measured with adequate precision at a LA level’.203 Within the DoE, in turn, officials decided to go ahead with the proposed ‘core statistics’ because they lacked viable alternatives or held the view that existing statistics were adequate ‘to assess developments in partnership areas’.204 In order to convince the DoE of the inadequacy of this  TNA, BS 7/199, GLC, Written Evidence to the RCDIW, 23 Nov. 1976.  Islington Local History Centre, Borough of Islington, Planning Department: Islington Development Plan (London: Islington Council, Sept. 1978).  LMA, Official Publications, GLC, 1971 Census: Demographic, Social and Economic Indices for Wards in Greater London, 1976.  Islington Local History Centre, Borough of Islington, Planning Department: Islington Development Plan (London: Islington Council, Sept. 1978); Islington Development Plan: Written Statement and Proposals Map (London: Islington Council, Apr. 1982).  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/5/6, DoE, Inner City Partnerships: Basic Statistical Indicators, Jan. 1978.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/5/6, GLC, E. K. Gilje to M. Myers, 14 Mar. 1978.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/9/95, GLC, J. Jenkins to N. Deakin, 5 Apr. 1979.

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approach, the head of the GLC’s Social Strategy Division, John Jenkins, suggested that they should emphasize the advantages of the GLC’s own research activities: ‘I think we should demonstrate to DoE that we are assessing trends in London and that their core indicators approach has a somewhat narrow role within the framework of our activities.’205 Indeed, the GLC’s ‘Deprived Areas Project’ produced much detailed statistical knowledge on social conditions in the capital that was not available from national data sources. GLC research officers not only used Census data to map concentrations of deprivation in various boroughs but also collected their own data in collaboration with local councils, for example in studies on the Spitalfields area in the borough of Tower Hamlets and in a pilot sample survey on multiple deprivation that was carried out in the Hanley Road area in North Islington in 1976. In Islington, the local council even designed a social survey specifically for the borough. In early 1975, a total of 1,232 Islington residents were interviewed, including on their income.206 In combination with the GLTS in 1971, research officers at the council were thus able to build a tentative time series of trends in income distribution in the borough. The results indicated increasing social polarization both among the population within the borough and relative to the rest of the capital: Islington not only turned out to have ‘the lowest average household income in London’, but the survey also found ‘an increasing proportion of households living on very low incomes’. The findings were confirmed by another social survey conducted by the Council of Islington only three years later. Again, the survey revealed a relatively high proportion of residents on low and insecure incomes, although the enquiry also indicated that this proportion had stabilized: at the time of the survey in 1978, ‘one-third of Islington’s heads of households had incomes at or below £2,000’ per year.207 Local research such as the Islington social surveys provided rare snapshots of living standards at the lowest level of local government, but there were no data sources that could have provided a similarly detailed picture of London as a whole – an equivalent to Charles Booth’s highly detailed poverty maps of nineteenth-century London did not exist. London-wide trends in income inequality could be derived from national statistical sources but could not be further disaggregated: at the end of the 1970s, the Family Expenditure Survey and other sources suggested that the tendency of the bottom 25 per cent to become relatively poorer in relation to the rest of the London population had been halted; however, income growth in the lowest quartile had been noticeably slower than the median or in any other quartile over the previous

 Ibid.  Islington Local History Centre, Borough of Islington, The Islington Community Plan. Part 2: Background Study Report (London: Islington Council, Jan. 1978), 57, 47, 81.  Islington Local History Centre, Borough of Islington, Planning Department: Islington Development Plan: Written Statement and Proposals Map (London: Islington Council, Apr. 1982).

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fifteen years, between the early 1960s and the late 1970s.208 GLC research officers were in no doubt that ‘in some locations in inner London pockets of serious deprivation exist’. However, existing statistical sources were ‘insufficiently detailed for the location of the poorest areas to be identified’.209 Even though there were ‘severe problems with data’, staff in the GLC’s Social Strategy Division attempted to take on the task of regularly updating and monitoring statistical information on low incomes and other social issues in London.210 It was even suggested that ‘something along the lines of a GLC version of Social Trends’, the CSO journal for the public presentation of social statistics in the United Kingdom, could be produced.211 On financial poverty, in particular, the Division was working on a new research proposal in early 1979 that envisaged ‘an examination of the circumstances of low income households and low paid workers’ in cooperation with local councils in the boroughs of Hammersmith and Hackney.212 Improving statistical knowledge on spatialized economic inequality was a key concern that the GLC had already communicated to the RCDIW: when the GLC submitted written evidence in connection with the RCDIW’s Lower Incomes Reference in late 1976, it urged the Commission to develop a new statistical ‘index of deprivation’ that ‘should include not only household income but also other relevant characteristics such as employment, housing conditions, physical environment and availability of community facilities’.213 Furthermore, the GLC suggested that the Commission should commit to a definition of poverty so that official poverty rates could be calculated – in London, the proportion of the population living below the poverty line was estimated to comprise about a quarter of all households at the time.

The Survey Gap In the event, the RCDIW neither agreed on a definition of poverty nor developed an index of deprivation. The first suggestion was contemplated only briefly. In spring 1977, there were informal discussions among Commission staff about whether the RCDIW should ‘go firm’ on adopting the long-term supplementary benefit rates as an official poverty line.214 As one RCDIW official pointed out, this would not only be useful for the Commission’s own work but would also help to build a bridge between the Commission’s

 LMA, Official Publications, GLC, Research Memorandum No. 561: Incomes in London, by Malcolm Carmichael (London: GLC, Sept. 1978).  Ibid.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/9/95, GLC, Social Strategy Division, Note of Meeting, 18 Sept. 1979.  LMA, GLC/DG/ISG/9/95, GLC, Social Strategy Division, Development Plan, 7 Feb. 1979.  Ibid.  TNA, BS 7/199, GLC, Written Evidence to the RCDIW, 23 Nov. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/245, RCDIW, K. R. Mears to Mr Gottlieb, 27 Apr. 1977.

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research and the academic work of leading poverty experts such as Peter Townsend. Setting an official poverty line would have signified a dramatic departure from the stance of British governments of all colours who persistently refused to commit to any definition of poverty. In subsequent discussions, however, Commission staff took the view that setting a cut-off point was ‘a matter of judgement’ and that it was ‘not necessary’ for the RCDIW to opt for one of the alternative poverty lines that were used by scholars such as Peter Townsend and Wilfred Beckerman.215 Definitions of poverty were used by the RCDIW only in the sense of pragmatic working definitions. Commission staff regarded low incomes as something in the area of ‘say about the lowest 25 per cent of income recipients’: in a follow-up survey to the General Household Survey commissioned by the RCDIW in connection with the Lower Incomes Reference in 1976, the target group was defined as either the bottom 30 per cent or as households with incomes at 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit rate.216 The 1976 GHS follow-up survey was the single biggest project undertaken by the RCDIW to improve statistical knowledge on low incomes, but it did not even get close to resolving the long-standing deficiencies of British poverty statistics. As has been noted above, the small size of the main household surveys, the FES and the GHS, made it difficult to obtain representative sub-samples of low-income households, a problem that not only hampered investigations into poverty but also precluded more meaningful analyses of cross-sectional inequalities and the mechanisms of multiple deprivation.217 Therefore, individual government statisticians, notably John Leonard Nicholson, pressed for a continuous purpose-designed sample survey on low-income households; by the mid 1970s, however, there were still no concrete plans to include this matter in the government’s statistical work programme. Options for such a survey were perused by the RCDIW when it embarked on the Lower Incomes Reference in 1976. In talks with OPCS officials, Commission staff learnt that the OPCS had been in discussions with the DHSS ‘for a number of years about the possibility of a fairly large survey of low income families’; the failure to implement the proposal was ascribed to unresolved sampling problems.218 Instead of attempting to construct a new large-scale poverty survey, the OPCS recommended a more limited and less expensive solution, a follow-up survey of low-income respondents from the existing Family Expenditure Survey: even if such a survey ‘might not be regarded as representative’ it could serve as ‘a good basis’ for studying causes and factors associated with low incomes, officials argued.219

 TNA, BS 7/288, RCDIW, Chairman’s Brief, Meeting on 13 Feb., 27 Feb. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/637, RCDIW, K. R. Mears to Mr Gottlieb, 19 May 1977; OPCS, Survey on Attitudes to Employment and Finances: Technical Report, Oct. 1976.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.  TNA, BS 7/634, RCDIW, Note of Meeting with OPCS, 31 Mar. 1976.  Ibid.

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The RCDIW eventually opted for this compromise solution – except that it chose the General Household Survey as a sampling frame and not the Family Expenditure Survey, although the latter was recommended by the CSO as the best available statistical source on low-income households.220 The aims and the potential of the GHS followup survey were clearly limited. In 1976, OPCS interviewers revisited the households with incomes in the bottom 30 per cent of the 1975 GHS; in order to gain insight into the circumstances and characteristics of these low-income households, the recorded information was updated and extended with a particular focus on employment histories.221 However, the results from the 1,999 responding households not only took very long to process but were also ‘disappointingly meagre’, an outcome that Commission staff blamed on the OPCS: in a ‘process of attrition’, OPCS officials had ‘whittled down’ the original proposals, rejecting as unviable a number of questions on savings and the takeup of benefits, among others.222 Some of the findings from the survey caused considerable controversy, though. The RCDIW had outsourced the analysis of the GHS follow-up survey to a team of researchers led by economist Richard Layard at the LSE, and the group subsequently produced a RCDIW background report that found a weak link between poverty and low pay in the GHS data.223 This result reignited earlier debates about the causes of poverty because it seemed to corroborate the view that low wages were not a major factor. Accordingly, the finding was vigorously rejected by campaign groups such as the Low Pay Unit, and the RCDIW stood accused of ignoring much evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, Layard’s RCDIW report underpinned the increasingly influential neoclassical view that poverty should be tackled through social security and not through minimum wage legislation or any other intervention in the labour market.224 At last, the RCDIW included a recommendation in favour of a ‘large-scale, more frequent household survey’ in its final report in 1979 – by this time, the Commission had already been notified about its imminent dissolution by the incoming Thatcher government.225 When the window of opportunity was still open during the previous five years of the Commission’s existence, however, this objective had not been given high priority and was rarely brought up at meetings.226 The inactivity in this matter was, firstly, rooted in the Commission’s clear preference for administrative data over survey data:  TNA, BS 7/286, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, Meeting on 5 Oct. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/637, OPCS, Survey on Attitudes to Employment and Finances: Technical Report, Oct. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/637, RCDIW, K. R. Mears to Mr Gottlieb, 11 July 1977; TNA, BS 7/288, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, Meeting on 13 Feb. 1978.  RCDIW, The Causes of Poverty.  Chris Pond, ‘The Poor and the Pundits’, New Society, 29 Mar. 1979; Low Pay Unit, Bulletin, June 1979; Sloman, Transfer State, 161–2.  TNA, BS 7/289, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 26 June 1979.  A rare occasion of a brief mention was in spring 1975: TNA, BS 7/283, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 5 May 1975.

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the Commission regarded the reformed Blue Book series as the most reliable source and rejected Peter Townsend’s suggestion that the Family Expenditure Survey was solid enough to be used as a major source on income distribution in its own right.227 Neither did the Commission act on demands from other experts and activists who decried the small sample size of the FES and urged the government to build a new purpose-designed survey on low-income households.228 Secondly, Commission staff were hoping that some of these purposes would be served by the Census follow-up survey on incomes for as long as it was still under discussion. The future of this survey remained in limbo for most of the existence of the RCDIW. After the data was collected in 1972, results did not become available until 1976/77, and while some in the Commission were determined to press the Central Statistical Office to step up the work and make provisions for a repetition of the survey, others took a more cautious view.229 As the Commission depended on the CSO’s co-operation, it was pointed out that it might be unwise to exert too much pressure – and that it was a matter of judgement whether ‘the Commission will get more done by gently pushing willing allies like CSO a little more quickly than they wish to go, or by making firm recommendations which go so counter to the advice of CSO that they run a serious risk of being rejected’.230 The RCDIW’s inability to speed up progress on the Census follow-up survey was a reminder of the power imbalances at play in the contemporary knowledge regime. In the changing political climate within and outside Whitehall during the second half of the decade, it became even more difficult for the RCDIW to advance projects in the face of resistance from the CSO and other government departments. As a result, the long-standing problems that severely limited the quality of the knowledge that existing household surveys could provide on fundamental questions about poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom remained unresolved by the time Thatcher entered Downing Street.

Government Propaganda: Statistics on the ‘Social Wage’ The wider political context of the time not only influenced decisions about the allocation of scarce resources in the Government Statistical Service, it also framed the political uses of statistical knowledge in government public relations. The Labour government’s strategy for the management of the national economy in the midst of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s centred on the key concern of combating inflation. While inflation peaked at a record level of 27 per cent in 1975, counter-inflation policy gained new

 TNA, BS 7/470, RCDIW, Bayliss to Jones, 3 May 1976.  Chris Pond, New Society, 19 Jan. 1978; TNA, BS 7/648, RCDIW, Note on FES workshop with Townsend, Beckerman and other participants, SSRC Survey Archive, 6 May 1977.  TNA, BS 7/476, CSO, Note by D. Ramprakash, 19 Oct. 1978; TNA, BS 7/283, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, Meeting on 22 Apr. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/283, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 5 May 1975.

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urgency and was inseparably bound up with other important policy issues. In particular, it was linked to Labour’s ambitious claim that it could improve the economy and reduce unemployment without risking industrial unrest as had been the case under Heath in the early 1970s.231 At the heart of this strategy was the ‘social contract’ with the trade union movement. To win support for this kind of ‘incomes policy by another name’ the Labour government embarked on a massive publicity campaign.232 Government propaganda was couched in the moral language of ‘fairness’ and distributive justice but was also based on economic arguments.233 As so often, government PR relied heavily on statistical artefacts to bolster the arguments, and in this case, ministers and officials revived the concept of the ‘social wage’ that had already been used by the previous Wilson government in 1964–70 to tout its achievements and to urge wage restraint at the same time. In the late 1960s, the Labour government had argued that government expenditure on public services and infrastructure from social security to education to health amounted to a ‘social wage’ that wage-earners received on top of their take-home pay; in return, unions and workers were expected to pay the ‘inevitable price’ for the progress achieved ‘on the social front’ by exercising restraint in demands for higher earnings.234 In other words, increasing government spending on public services was advertised as strong evidence of the government’s commitment to social progress. This was the closest the Labour governments under Wilson came to a PR campaign over redistribution and this line of reasoning was taken up again after 1974. Contrary to suggestions of a monetarist conversion,235 Wilson and his ministers created a positive narrative of public spending to set themselves apart from the Conservatives under Thatcher who branded excessive public spending, alongside the unions, as a major cause of inflation. In his speech to the Labour party’s conference in 1975, Wilson juxtaposed his government’s record on the ‘social wage’ with the Conservatives’ endorsement of inequality:236 We have been told, on impeccable and undeniable authority, that the pursuit of inequality for its own sake is now to become an end in itself. It is now to become the altar, the deity, before which they seek to prostrate themselves – and the country. The hard-faced doctrine – proclaimed last week – is that to get taxation down we have got to cut spending on the social wage – now £20 for every family in Britain. What is this social wage? It is the Health Service, the kids’ education, the people’s housing, the help for those in greatest need, including the unprecedented provision we have made for the disabled and those least able to help themselves.

 Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 192–5.  Ibid.  Ibid. 194, 204.  Quotations from the Labour Party’s document ‘Britain’s Progress and Change’ quoted in: ‘Labour’s Mid-Term Manifesto’, The Guardian, 30 Sept. 1968.  Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 204.  British Political Speech, Harold Wilson, Leader’s Speech, Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, 30 Sept. 1975; at [http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=173], accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

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Expressing the benefits of public spending in a single number was a public relations manoeuvre that was set in motion by the Chancellor, Denis Healey. While DHSS officials were still looking for a ‘popular slogan’ to sell the notion of the ‘second wage’ to the public, Healey used the opportunity of a BBC radio interview in early February 1975 to put a figure on the ‘social wage’.237 The idea of ‘publicising some aggregate and calling it the social wage’ had been put forward by TUC staff who were ‘anxious’ to sell the ‘social contract’ to their members, and the TUC initiative subsequently prompted the Retail Price Index Advisory Committee to propose the construction of a statistical social wage index.238 The idea of a more sophisticated statistical index met with little enthusiasm at the Treasury, but it was recognized that the concept had ‘some modest propaganda value’ if it was phrased in more simple ‘terms of £x a week’.239 Treasury officials included the figure of ‘£15 a week’ in the speaking notes for Healey’s radio interview, although Healey eventually used the higher figure of ‘£19 a week’ that resulted from the inclusion of capital projects such as new hospitals and schools.240 Following Healey’s speech, the figure of £19 gained a ‘good deal of publicity’ and was also taken up by the TUC.241 As a Treasury official observed at the time, the attention attracted by Healey’s speech helped to establish the concept of the social wage ‘pretty firmly’ in ‘ministerial thinking’.242 In hindsight, however, the episode appeared in a different light. In summer 1977, another Treasury official reviewed the history of the ‘social wage’ and concluded: ‘The concept seems [to] have been conceived in some haste and regretted thereafter.’243 By this time, the ‘social wage’ had already turned from a powerful number into ‘a millstone’.244 Doubts about the accuracy and political wisdom of the ‘£19 a week’ claim emerged almost immediately after Healey’s speech. Senior officials regarded the ‘social wage’ as a ‘dubious source of support for propaganda in favour of restraint in wage bargaining’ because it potentially raised expectations of more increases in public expenditure, at a time when the Treasury was looking to curb government spending.245 As the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, put it, defining the social wage in money terms created ‘a hostage to fortune’.246 Hunt warned that it would ‘open the door for questions in the future about the value of the social wage’ and provide ‘a powerful handle’ for both pressure groups outside the government and spending departments inside the government to

 TNA, BN 13/519, DHSS, Meeting on 4 Feb. 1975.  TNA, T 338/343, HMT, K. E. Couzens to D. Wass, 28 Feb. 1975.  Ibid.  Michael Nally, ‘“Keep to Contract”—Healey’, The Guardian, 9 Feb. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/679, TUC, Economic Review, 1974–75; TNA, T 374/69, HMT, Brown to Brown and PS/ Chief Secretary, 16 Dec. 1977.  TNA, T 338/343, HMT, K. E. Couzens to D. Wass, 28 Feb. 1975.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, G. M. Noble to Mr Burr, 26 Aug. 1977.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, Brown to Brown and PS/Chief Secretary, 16 Dec. 1977.  TNA, T 338/343, HMT, B. Hopkin to D. Wass, 28 Feb. 1975; P. Baldwin to B. Hopkin, 25 Feb. 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/350, Cabinet Office, J. Hunt to K. R. Stowe, No. 10, 30 June 1975.

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make the case for more expenditure: ‘Last year the social wage was £20. It is now worth £20 – x. Clearly we must increase it by at least x+y.’247 This argument carried particular weight in light of the looming ‘dark times’ that signalled more economic pain; for the same reason, Treasury officials also expressed reservations about a draft propaganda pamphlet prepared by the DHSS to promote the ‘social wage’.248 The ‘£19 a week’ claim was not only challenged for political reasons, it was also called into question on methodological grounds by senior government statisticians. The CSO director, Claus Moser, found that the ‘statistical treatment’ of the social wage in government PR was ‘very hard to defend’.249 In a note to the Prime Minister’s office in July 1975, Moser explained: ‘The main statistical objection is to the whole concept of Mr Average who gets “a second wage”. The essence of the social wage is that it redistributes income: it does not add to it.’250 Expressing the ‘social wage’ in terms of an average not only brushed over the distributional effects of public expenditure but also involved double-counting: social security benefits, for example, counted both as a component of personal incomes and as an item of government expenditure on social services included in the ‘social wage’. Furthermore, it was a matter of judgement – if not downright arbitrary – to decide what kinds of public expenditure were included in the ‘social wage’: while expenditure on prison services were included as if this item somehow added to the living standards or real incomes of anyone outside the prison walls, expenditure on royal parks and palaces was excluded ‘to avoid contention’.251 The hollowness of the concept was also reflected in the ways in which it was constructed: expenditure on public services such as education was simply added to the total value of the ‘social wage’ on a costs per head basis.252 However, in the calculation of the social wage per head, the Treasury used the working population as a divisor, although the benefits of public expenditure on the NHS or any other item obviously accrued to anyone outside the labour market as well.253 In fact, allocating the benefits of public expenditure to particular sub-groups in the population or income ranges was technically feasible only to a limited extent.254 When the RCDIW expressed interest in estimating the ‘social wage’ for different sub-groups, in particular, low-income households, the CSO explained that no precise methods existed to calculate the social wage ‘other than in the most general forms’.255 The CSO’s more detailed redistribution analyses published in Economic Trends further undermined the government narrative by  Ibid.  TNA, BN 13/519, DHSS, Radford to Rogers, 1 May 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/350, CSO, C. Moser, 4 July 1975.  TNA, BN 13/519, CSO, C. Moser to R. Butler, 10 July 1975.  TNA, T 371/447, HMT, R. Willis, Background Note, 23 Nov. 1977; TNA, T 374/69, HMT, P. D. R. B. Hoffman to Ms Brown, 30 Apr. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/679, RCDIW, Stephenson to Gottlieb, 10 May 1977; Gilhooly to Steele, Oct. 1976.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, G. M. Noble to Mr Burr, 26 Aug. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/679, RCDIW, Mears to Gottlieb, 7 Dec. 1977; CSO, Westcott to Mears, RCDIW, 11 Jan. 1978.  TNA, BS 7/679, CSO, Flaxen to Gottlieb, RCDIW, 8 Mar. 1977.

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casting doubt about the progressivity of the ‘social wage’.256 As the RCDIW noted in early 1976, the ‘social wage of £20 per week in 1974–75 has apparently vanished in the CSO adjustments’ that reduced its value to £-0.8 per week per household, partly by deducting social security benefits that were contained in the official social wage calculation.257 Initially, ministers and officials cast all these objections aside and pressed ahead with their propaganda effort. When a RCDIW official enquired with the Treasury about the calculation of the ‘social wage’ in autumn 1976, he gained the impression that the Treasury did ‘not appear to be interested in obtaining the most accurate or representative figure possible but merely providing a crude estimate of something akin to a “social wage”’ because they were ‘interested in an index largely for political means’.258 The concerns raised by Claus Moser and other government statisticians over ministers’ use of the ‘£19–20’ claim were dismissed by Barbara Castle at the DHSS who retorted that ‘if propaganda is to be effective the message must be conveyed in simple and easily understood terms, as well as being accurate’ – Castle posited that it was defensible if government publicity lacked ‘the refinement of a PhD thesis’.259 A similar view predominated in Downing Street where the Prime Minister approved Castle’s pamphlet. The decision was based on advice from his principal private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, who argued that Moser’s ‘appropriate criticism’ imported ‘too precise a meaning into a phrase (the Social Wage) which is primarily conveying a political message’.260 In the face of attacks from Margaret Thatcher and other Conservatives such as Norman Tebbit who questioned the value of the ‘social wage’ and exploited the weaknesses of the concept, government ministers were determined to defend the claims and stick to their narrative.261 In September 1975, for example, Barbara Castle used a radio broadcast to urge unions to observe the ‘social contract’ and show wage restraint or face cuts to their ‘second wage’, the ‘social wage’, which was ‘worth another £20 a week in benefits’.262 However, the propaganda was subsequently toned down, apparently in anticipation of planned cuts to public expenditure that were expected to have an adverse effect on the value of the ‘social wage’. In light of the spending cuts announced in the government’s White Paper on Public Expenditure in February 1976, Treasury officials were keen to avoid the topic. As one Treasury official put it in a note in April 1976, ‘the concept of the social wage is one to which we ourselves are not now trying to draw

 Rudolf Klein, ‘The Will o’the Wisp of Social Justice’, New Society, 25 Mar. 1976; CSO, Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income 1974, Economic Trends, Feb. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/286, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 29 Nov. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/679, RCDIW, Steele to Mr Gilhooly, 22 Oct. 1976.  TNA, BN 13/519, DHSS, N. R. Warner to C. W. Frances, HMT, Oct. 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/350, No. 10, K. R. Stowe to PM, 15 July 1975.  TNA, BN 13/519, DHSS, Higgs / Warner to Hulme, Social Wage, 7 Oct. 1975.  TNA, T 374/69, DHSS, Press Notice, 3 Sept. 1975.

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attention’.263 When analyses by Treasury officials suggested that, contrary to expectations, it could ‘be argued that the social wage is being maintained’ and would remain fairly stable over the next few years, interest in the concept was briefly revived, and some officials even contemplated changes to the definition to mitigate some of the adverse effects of the spending cuts.264 However, given the dissatisfaction with a concept that was known to have ‘little economic justification’, officials came to the conclusion that it was more ‘convenient to let it fall, as soon as maybe, into desuetude’.265 In government propaganda, the concept all but disappeared. The decision to publish Castle’s social wage pamphlet was overturned and calculations of the value of the social wage in 1975/76 were only published on demand in response to a parliamentary question – according to the Treasury it had risen to £25 that year.266 The rise of the ‘social wage’ was finally reversed, however, when the 1976 financial crisis prompted the government to introduce more cuts to expenditure. Consequently, the concept not only lost its ‘propaganda value’ but even became a liability for the government. In a background note to a parliamentary question in 1977, a Treasury official noted:267 The social wage was originally devised as a rhetorical figure and it is not suitable as an instrument of social analysis, as Mr Tebbit’s Questions demonstrate. There is much therefore to be said for answering the Question in a way that will discourage further use of the concept, particularly as it does not show a polemically useful increase since 1974–75 (when it rose sharply with the large social security upratings and food subsidies of that year).

Consequently, the ‘social wage’ was increasingly seen as ‘seriously embarrassing or confusing’, and it remained Treasury policy to ‘just let sleeping dogs lie’ – hoping that references by other bodies such as the RCDIW would ‘not prompt further unwelcome interest in this unfortunate statistic, which might otherwise be expected to die a natural death’.268 The short life of the social wage index is a telling example of how state bureaucracies attempted to turn statistics into powerful numbers for government PR purposes. The ‘educational’ impetus of the RCDIW did not discourage leading Labour figures from weaponizing official statistics for their political aims: high-ranking members of the government, from the Prime Minister to various Cabinet ministers to senior civil servants, sported a highly dubious and practically meaningless figure until it became disadvantageous. The episode demonstrates that statistical key indicators do not necessarily take on a life of their own, as is often suggested in the literature – indicators need to be developed and promoted in concerted ways by influential actors to gain traction, and they can disappear again from the political scene when circumstances  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, P. V. Dixon to Mr Pliatzky, 27 Apr. 1976.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, P. D. R. B. Hoffman to Mr Downey, 30 Apr. 1976.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, C. J. Riley to PPS, 16 July 1976; B. C. Brown to PPS, 16 July 1975.  TNA, BS 7/679, RCDIW, Steele to Mr Gilhooly, 22 Oct. 1976.  TNA, T 371/447, HMT, R. Willis, Background Note, 23 Nov. 1977.  TNA, T 374/69, HMT, Brown to Brown and PS/Chief Secretary, 16 Dec. 1977; G. M. Noble to Mr Burr, 26 Aug. 1977; TNA, T 371/447, HMT, P. M. Rayner, 23 May 1978.

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change. Furthermore, the episode reveals once more the sensitivity of key actors in the state bureaucracy to the power implications of statistical knowledge. In the words of the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, officials operated on the assumption that publicizing knowledge can open the door to demands for ever more knowledge, and certain knowledge can function as a ‘powerful handle’ to build up political pressure. Finally, the episode highlights the increasing concerns over public expenditure and the 1976 financial crisis that set the scene for the second half of the decade when public and administrative support for the production of knowledge on economic inequality began to wane.

Checks to the Transformation of the Knowledge Regime, 1976–79 While the Labour government’s short-lived publicity campaign on the ‘social wage’ touted the benefits of social expenditure and an interventionist state, their opponents on the New Right rejected the idea of the social wage for the very same reasons. Conservatives contended that ‘everyone [would] prefer to have lower taxation and a lower social wage’ and claimed to speak for all people who ‘would rather have more choice about how they spend their money than have the Government choose for them’.269 The idea that the welfare state had gone too far and was somehow associated with the alleged decline of the British nation seemed to resonate with an increasing proportion of the population. As David Edgerton has argued, ‘sometime in the 1970s’ parts of the British middle and upper classes ‘said enough is enough’ and turned against the vision of a society with strong unions and a comprehensive welfare state.270 The declining public support for progressive politics was already being noticed by contemporaries. In early 1976, David Donnison, the chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, observed a change of mood in the general public: the fear of inflation and economic collapse made many resent the idea of paying taxes to help the poor.271 Listening to the new Prime Minister and Labour leader, James Callaghan, in July 1978, Donnison also gained the impression that the party ‘had lost its convictions about poverty and the redistribution of incomes. Or perhaps the voters at large had lost those convictions, and the Labour party was afraid to remind them.’272 Anti-egalitarian sentiments were popularized by proponents of the New Right, and the right-wing media hammered home the message that British society should be more concerned with the creation of wealth than with its distribution. Right-wing attacks were not only directed at left-wing political agendas, but also at research efforts that were associated with egalitarian policies. Consequently, Conservative newspapers vilified the RCDIW who embodied the allegedly harmful preoccupation with income    

Hansard, House of Commons, 15 July 1976, vol. 915, col. 887. Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 444–5. Donnison, Politics of Poverty, 48, 132. Ibid. 156.

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and wealth distribution in the country. The growing resentment towards the RCDIW was also reported from Social Survey interviewers on the doorstep. As an OPCS official explained to his colleagues in autumn 1978, the ‘unpopularity of the Royal Commission with the public was a view fed up from interviewers in the field and not just his own assessment of the situation’.273 Inside the state bureaucracy, this political context was mirrored by the government’s diminishing commitment to redistributive policies that were increasingly tempered by the overarching aim to rein in public expenditure, especially after the financial crisis of 1976. The social democratic moment of the early and mid 1970s faded away, a development that was not conducive to statistical programmes associated with redistributive policies. The fading enthusiasm for statistical work in this area was embodied by the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson, a trained statistician, in April 1976. Soon after entering Downing Street, Callaghan received proposals for statistical work on income distribution from the CSO and offered a telling response that set the tone for his premiership: he not only expressed ‘very considerable doubt’ about the proposed studies but also admitted freely that ‘I shall be taking less interest in statistics than Mr. Wilson did’.274 The changing atmosphere did not escape those officials and statisticians who depended on political and administrative support in their work. Looking back on the unfinished business of the RCDIW in summer 1979, a member of the Commission staff noted that ‘the climate in Whitehall was not favourable to the proliferation of surveys’.275 In the face of resistance from ministers and civil servants, the RCDIW suffered a series of setbacks that halted progress in key areas of the statistical reform agenda. At the same time, the initiative of the CPRS to improve the knowledge base for devising social policy, the Joint Approach to Social Policy (JASP), ran into similar problems in Whitehall. The increasingly unfavourable climate that hampered the production of knowledge on economic inequality during the latter half of the 1970s foreshadowed the rollback of official statistics under Thatcher. To begin with, the Callaghan years sealed the fate of the protracted attempts to develop better statistical sources on poverty and other social topics. The well-known deficiencies of the existing household surveys had hampered social analyses for many years, and various ideas had been advanced for obtaining more representative data on low-income households and other sub-groups in the population. Perhaps the most promising effort to fill this gap was the idea of using the Census of Population for this purpose, a project that went back to the late 1960s and almost spanned a decade.276 Even before 1976, however, work on this project was beset by difficulties and delays. As the OPCS had rejected the inclusion of an income question in the 1971 Census, the

   

TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, M. Tan to Mr Forward, 10 Oct. 1978. TNA, PREM 16/1130, No. 10, J. Callaghan to N. Wicks, 20 Apr. 1976. TNA, BS 7/550, RCDIW, Forward to Smith, 13 June 1979. See Chapter 3, section ‘Income Inequality’.

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so-called Census income follow-up survey (CFS) was carried out belatedly as a postal survey in 1972. After the completion of the fieldwork, the OPCS took a long time to process the results. By early 1976, the RCDIW had received only a fraction of the requested tabulations, and Commission staff expressed disappointment about not getting more from the OPCS after about a year had passed since the initial request.277 The actual results seemed good enough to inspire cautious optimism among Commission staff that the CFS could be a very useful source to cover some of the questions the RCDIW hoped to answer.278 Initial doubts over the quality of the data collected in the CFS were largely disproved by cross-checks with established statistical sources such as the Blue Books, even though certain parts of the data were considered to be unreliable, for example, the information on immigrants.279 Furthermore, the OPCS was confident that the relatively low response rate of around 50 per cent was sufficient, as the Census offered enough information about the characteristics of nonrespondents to impute their incomes.280 While the RCDIW made only limited use of the CFS data, as certain reliability issues remained unresolved, the Commission expressed strong interest in further developing the CFS as a major source for cross-sectional analyses and to repeat the survey at the next round of the Census.281 After plans for a mid-term Census in 1976 were cancelled, the next possible opportunity was the 1981 Census. However, when the question of repeating the CFS was discussed at an interdepartmental meeting in October 1978, it turned out that there was little support for this idea in Whitehall.282 Few departments, not even the CSO or the DHSS, had made any use of the data from the 1971 CFS, and, apart from the Department of Education and the RCDIW, no other departments demanded another round of the CFS in 1981. The meeting concluded that the case for an income follow-up survey in 1981 was not strong enough to justify the expenditure – a simple majority vote killed off the project, and the voice of the RCDIW counted for no more than that of any government department. Another promising proposal for a new large-scale survey suffered a similar fate. In early 1972, the OPCS had advanced the idea of devising a continuous annual interview survey covering as much as 1 per cent of the population, with a possible start date in 1974.283 A survey of these proportions could serve a range of purposes, the OPCS argued: it could, for example, help to identify minority groups and provide a regular flow of information that was needed at shorter intervals than the five or ten

 TNA, BS 7/476, RCDIW, Note by E. Jones, 13 Jan. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/476, RCDIW, E. Jones to N. Davis, OPCS, 12 Jan. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/476, CSO, D. Ramprakash to E. Jones, 24 Nov. 1976; TNA, BS 7/666, RCDIW, Gibbins to Banfield, OPCS, 23 Dec. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/476, CSO, Minutes of Meeting, 24 Oct. 1978.  TNA, BS 7/476, RCDIW, Johnson to E. Jones, Should the CFS be Repeated, 6 June 1978.  TNA, BS 7/476, CSO, Minutes of Meeting, 24 Oct. 1978.  TNA, CAB 108/749, OPCS, Proposals for Censuses and Surveys in the Mid 1970s, 18 Feb. 1972.

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years between Censuses. Furthermore, it could have covered topics that were considered too sensitive for inclusion in the compulsory Population Census, in particular, questions on income. Thus, a possible 1 per cent survey was expected to significantly improve the measurement of poverty and the calculation of redistributive effects of changes to the tax/benefit system. Even if a 1 per cent sample was still too small to cover smaller geographical areas below the regional level with sufficient precision, it would have meant a large improvement on the existing household surveys – the GHS, by contrast, only covered about 0.1 per cent of the population. Initially, the idea received broad support. The CSO suggested ‘further study and testing on a limited scale’, and the CSO director, Claus Moser, even described the proposed 1 per cent survey as potentially ‘the most valuable vehicle of all for getting information of the kind’ that was needed for initiatives such as the Social Affairs programme of the CPRS.284 After a first feasibility study was carried out by the OPCS in 1973, the concept of an annual 1 per cent survey was also advanced in the 1975 Programme and Analysis Review (PAR) of interdepartmental needs for social statistics, which recognized that such a survey could meet ‘the need for more statistics on social groups, and, to a lesser extent, for more statistics on the distribution of incomes’.285 Following the recommendations of the PAR, another feasibility study was undertaken in 1977. It concluded that it seemed feasible indeed to achieve ‘an acceptably high level of response and reasonable quality of data’ and to deliver first results ‘within 8 to 10 weeks’.286 The feasibility study was eventually discussed at the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy at the end of May 1979, only a few weeks after Margaret Thatcher had won the general election.287 This time, only the Department of Employment ‘strongly’ supported the proposal, while all other government departments expressed interest in the survey but ‘did not feel able to give it any great support’: some questioned the reliability of the income data or pointed to the inability of the survey to cover smaller local areas, while others still opposed the idea on cost grounds. Tellingly, ‘in the present climate’, the Committee also felt unable to ‘justify devoting resources’ to another PAR similar to the 1975 exercise that could have helped to establish the requirements for social statistics in the 1980s – participants were hoping ‘that the climate will presumably change at some time’ and ‘that Ministers may become more receptive’, but this hope was unduly optimistic. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the incoming Thatcher government was not very keen to

 TNA, CAB 139/776, CSO, Proposals for a Population Census and Surveys in Mid 1970s, 22 May 1972; TNA, CAB 184/156, CSO, C. Moser to Lord Rothschild, CPRS, 29 May 1974.  TNA, CAB 108/758, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Report by the OPCS on the 1977 Feasibility Study for a Continuous 1% Survey of Households, 17 May 1979.  TNA, CAB 108/758, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting on 31 May 1979.  Ibid.

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expand work on social statistics, on the contrary; it not only abolished the RCDIW but also cut back other official statistical series on income and wealth distribution. It was also left to the Thatcher government to abandon the work on yet another survey project that had been long in the making: in 1977, after years of discussions about how to obtain data on a sufficiently large number of low-income households to allow ‘policy-oriented analyses’ of poverty-related issues, government statisticians at the Department of Health and Social Security finally embarked on a feasibility study for such a survey: the so-called Family Finances Survey was planned to deliver similar information as the FES but with a much larger sample size, including about 3,800 families from the bottom 20 per cent of the income spectrum.288 Fieldwork for the survey was still underway when Thatcher came to power, and in government publicity the survey was billed as ‘probably the largest “living standards of the poor” survey ever mounted in this country’.289 However, after the first official report on the survey was published in 1981, it was discontinued.290 Other statistical projects that had begun life under the Callaghan government never even got that far. In 1976, Callaghan himself stopped a major effort begun by the RCDIW to link hitherto unconnected government statistics for more precise measurements. Attempts to get more out of existing statistics through this method went back many years; by linking different statistical data sources held in various government departments or kept separate within the same department, their diagnostic potential could be increased. In the late 1950s, for example, statisticians at the CSO and the OPCS were hoping to convince the Inland Revenue to match Family Expenditure Survey datasets with IR records in order to obtain information about the characteristics of non-respondents. In this case, the link was supposed to offer a solution to the problem of response bias that was inherent in the FES data: people from different social groups participated in the survey at varying rates, and had these rates been known, it would have been possible to gross up the missing population in the survey more precisely.291 In the early 1970s, more attempts followed to connect FES data with various other sources ranging from DHSS records to the Census to IR earnings data, but both the OPCS and the IR raised objections that were usually explained with reference to possible adverse effects on response rates and confidentiality issues.292 A task force was set up by the CSO with authorization from the Prime Minister in 1973 to

 TNA, BS 7/631, DHSS, J. B. Dearman to D. Ramprakash, 5 July 1977.  TNA, CAB 108/506, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, FES Research: Progress Report, 9 July 1979; TNA, BN 89/338, DHSS, A. C. Palmer to Mr Sutton, Brief for Ministers on ‘Poverty’, 7 Nov. 1979.  DHSS, The Family Finances Survey; TNA, BN 82/107, DHSS, Correspondence on the Family Finances Survey, 1974–1980.  TNA, CAB 139/378, OPCS, L. Moss to J. L. Nicholson, CSO, 26 Nov. 1957.  TNA, CAB 108/517, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting, 9 Nov. 1970; TNA, CAB 108/503, CSO, Sub-Committee on Family Expenditure Surveys, Meeting, 15 Dec. 1971.

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explore possibilities for record linkages, but it was not successful in bringing about significant changes to the ways in which statistical information was collected and exchanged between government departments.293 Even the links between different types of data that were held within individual departments were as yet largely unexplored, although statisticians in the DHSS and elsewhere were beginning to address this issue.294 Hence, record linkages were included as a major item in the reform agenda proposed by the RCDIW. In its first official report in 1975, the RCDIW emphasized that there was ‘still a great deal to be extracted from existing statistics’ and that it attached ‘particular importance to the linking of data from a number of sources so that the usefulness of each can be enhanced’.295 This recommendation also followed suggestions by academic experts such as Anthony Atkinson who, in his submission of evidence to the RCDIW in early 1975, advocated merging existing surveys and income tax statistics in a unified database on income distribution, modelled after the so-called ‘MERGE’ file prepared by the Brookings Institution in the US.296 It was widely recognized that record linkages could help to improve statistical measurements and address a broad range of questions. Theoretically, they could even help to overcome the artificial division of income and wealth that still persisted in official statistics despite the interconnectedness of earnings and assets through components such as investment income and other effects.297 After the need for record linkages was also confirmed by the 1975 PAR on social statistics, the CSO proposed a feasibility study that was approved by the relevant committees but questioned by the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. When the CSO sought approval for a public announcement of the study in spring 1976, the Prime Minister raised doubts whether the project ‘could be justified [. . .] at this time of public expenditure stringency’.298 Wilson’s successor was even less enthusiastic about this idea. Soon after entering Downing Street and seeing the paperwork on the proposal, Callaghan decided that the feasibility study ‘should not be commenced’.299 In a subsequent meeting with the CSO director, Claus Moser, Callaghan explained that ‘a generalized study to test the feasibility of data linkage was politically unacceptable’ but left open the possibility for the CSO to undertake a smaller study on a more specific area of data linkage.300 In response, the CSO prepared a revised proposal for a more limited study linking DHSS records and IR data, which would allow a fresh look at patterns

 TNA, CAB 108/751, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting, 7 May 1973.  TNA, CAB 108/749, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Note by DHSS on Family Poverty Research Programme, 20 June 1972.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 151.  TNA, BS 7/26, RCDIW, Evidence by Anthony Atkinson to the Standing Reference, Jan. 1975.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 75–6, 149.  TNA, PREM 16/1130, No. 10, N. K. Wicks to K. R. Stowe, Prime Minister, 12 Apr. 1976.  TNA, PREM 16/1130, No. 10, N. L. Wicks to C. Moser, CSO, 27 Apr. 1976.  TNA, PREM 16/1130, No. 10, K. R. Stowe to C. Moser, CSO, 3 Aug. 1976.

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of social mobility in and out of poverty.301 Even this project was rejected by the Prime Minister with reference to ‘the current tight constraints on public expenditure’, although the proposal received support from the Treasury and other departments.302 At the RCDIW, this decision was regarded as ‘a considerable blow to the Commission’s strategy for the longer term improvement of the basic data on incomes’.303 Another significant blow was dealt to the RCDIW in connection with its work on the distribution of wealth. The work of the RCDIW in this crucial subject area remained unfinished, although the Commission’s activities led to ‘considerable improvements’ in the applied methods and the quality of the resulting estimates: following the Commission’s recommendations from the 1975 report, the CSO restarted work on so-called sector balance sheets, a statistical method designed for estimating national wealth holdings pioneered by Cambridge economist Jack Revell in the 1960s, but, to his disappointment, not taken up by the CSO.304 The new balance sheets provided the CSO with more accurate base figures of total wealth in Britain, and, in combination with recent research undertaken at the Inland Revenue, allowed a more fine-grained breakdown of the quantile shares in official tables on wealth distribution: while IR tables in previous RCDIW reports only gave percentile shares for the top 20 per cent and showed no subdivisions in the bottom 80 per cent, the new tables extended the area where wealth could be allocated to specific ranges down to the top 50 per cent.305 However, even the improved estimates still excluded more than half of the British population and provided no clues to a range of significant research questions, among others, on the size of inherited wealth compared to accumulated wealth from lifetime savings. The ‘only possible way’ of filling this ‘very large gap in information about the distribution of wealth’ was a new sample survey of wealth, the RCDIW argued in its initial report in 1975.306 Constructing a new wealth survey became one of the most important projects of the RCDIW but it ended in defeat: in 1979, the Commission left the field empty-handed, and, in retrospect, the failure to reach this goal was the first thing that sprang to mind when Commission staff reflected on the ‘disappointments’ they had experienced during the five years of the RCDIW’s existence.307 From the start, the proposal of a wealth survey had met with scepticism in government departments. At the CSO, previous experiences with sample surveys of personal wealth in the 1950s and early 1960s were remembered as a failure despite partly encouraging results, and the topic had remained on the inactive agenda ever since. Consequently, CSO representatives expressed serious reservations about the

      

TNA, PREM 16/1130, CSO, C. Moser to K. R. Stowe, PPS/PM, 30 Sept. 1976. TNA, PREM 16/1130, No. 10, N. L. Wicks to C. Moser, CSO, 9 Nov. 1976. TNA, BS 7/287, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 28 Feb. 1977. See Chapter 3, section ‘Wealth Distribution’. RCDIW, Report No. 7: Fourth Report on the Standing Reference. RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference. TNA, BS 7/278, RCDIW, N. S. Forward, A Memoir, 16 Nov. 1979.

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RCDIW’s recommendation, in particular, because of the expected difficulties in securing enough participation in a voluntary wealth survey, especially among the wealthy elites.308 Concerns about the reliability of sample surveys on wealth were also shared by other witnesses and bodies who submitted evidence to the RCDIW, among others, the TUC and Anthony Atkinson. On the other hand, the latter also conceded that a sample survey could yield valuable information about the wealth of the missing population that was excluded from the estate duty statistics.309 Nonetheless, the CSO agreed to accommodate the RCDIW, and in early 1976, it was decided to carry out a pilot survey. However, the Commission was far from satisfied with the way in which the CSO and the OPCS handled the project. The protracted discussions about the project saw more frictions and passionate exchanges between the different sides than in any other project of the RCDIW. To begin with, the CSO repeatedly delayed the project and apparently failed to pursue it with the kind of urgency that had been demanded by the RCDIW in its initial report.310 The anticipated feasibility study was not carried out by the CSO until about a year after the publication of the initial RCDIW report and was poorly coordinated. Symptomatically, the CSO even failed to consult the RCDIW over the particulars of the pilot survey, a move that caused a complaint from the Commission, which had a different sort of approach in mind than that implemented by the CSO. What the RCDIW had intended was a limited test of selected aspects, but what the CSO carried out was a simulated full-scale survey with an overly complicated questionnaire that ‘horrified’ the commissioners; furthermore, despite its complexity the questionnaire still left out certain questions that were regarded as important by the Commission, including questions on inheritance.311 In the event, the pilot survey achieved only a disappointing response rate of 43 per cent, and the accompanying OPCS report on the feasibility study came ‘down very hard against the idea of doing a full-scale survey’.312 Nevertheless, the CSO agreed to another feasibility study in spring 1977 with a view to conducting a full-scale survey in autumn 1977 and producing results in spring 1978.313 At the RCDIW, the CSO was credited with ‘a considerable retrieval of the situation’ while frustration grew about the inability of the Inland Revenue to devote resources to the proposed linkage of income tax data and estate duty records within their own department, a project that was considered to be essential for analysing the interrelations

 TNA, BS 7/47, RCDIW, oral hearing and evidence from the CSO on the standing reference, Feb. 1975.  TNA, BS 7/491, RCDIW, Proposals for a Survey of Wealth, 17 Mar. 1975.  RCDIW, Report No. 1: Initial Report on the Standing Reference, 153–4.  TNA, BS 7/491, RCDIW, F. Bayliss to E. Jones, 16 June 1976; RCDIW, Note by the Secretary, Wealth Survey, 20 Oct. 1976; F. Bayliss to J. Boreham, CSO, 2 Nov. 1976.  TNA, BS 7/491, CSO, J. Boreham to F. Bayliss, 10 June 1976.  TNA, BS 7/491, CSO, J. Boreham to F. Bayliss, RCDIW, 22 Oct. 1976.

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between income and wealth.314 However, when the results from the second OPCS feasibility study became available in August 1977, the future of the whole project seemed uncertain, as the second pilot survey had again only achieved a response rate of 56 per cent, despite a simplified questionnaire and better coordination with the RCDIW.315 The response rate became the make-or-break issue in the subsequent discussions that pitted RCDIW representatives against government statisticians from the OPCS and the CSO. While OPCS officials regarded the response rate as ‘unacceptably low’ and had ‘serious reservations’ about going ahead with the survey, the RCDIW chief statistician, Elfryn Jones, insisted that he was still ‘keen to see the main stage mounted’, arguing that ‘the data would be good enough to provide orders of magnitudes in an area of complete ignorance’, by which he meant the wealth of the large proportions of the population that were excluded from the existing estate duty statistics.316 After an initial ‘confrontation’ between the OPCS and the RCDIW at a meeting on the feasibility study in mid August 1977, Commission staff learnt that opinion at the CSO, too, was turning against the project; ‘strong worries’ were expressed, in particular, by the CSO’s expert on income and wealth distribution, Deo Ramprakash – despite his acknowledgement that ‘the UK is already lagging in this field and could continue doing so for another twenty years if we fail on this occasion’.317 RCDIW chief statistician Jones was unimpressed by the criticism. In his view, ‘any information of even only moderate quality would be an advance on the present position’, given the ‘glaring gaps’ in the existing wealth estimates, and even OPCS officials admitted in informal talks that the response rate might gradually improve once the survey was established – in fact, this was what had happened in the case of the Family Expenditure Survey, where the initial response rate of only 59 per cent had increased in subsequent years.318 This view was also shared at the Inland Revenue, which sided with the RCDIW in this debate. In a strongly worded note from early September 1977, the Inland Revenue’s Anthony Dunn refuted Ramprakash’s arguments sentence by sentence. In particular, it seemed ‘very strange’ to Dunn that the proposed wealth survey should be treated differently from other statistical series that were beset by problems and errors but were still continued by the GSS – this applied, in particular, to the National Income statistics, where ‘even after 30 years’ not all issues had been solved: ‘It seems difficult to understand why estimates for the 20 million excluded population should be subject to a set of gruelling conditions such as

 TNA, BS 7/491, RCDIW, F. Bayliss to J. Boreham, CSO, 29 Mar. 1977; TNA, BS 7/492, CSO, J. Boreham to F. Bayliss, RCDIW, 1 Apr. 1977; RCDIW, Note of 4th Meeting held on 26 Apr. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/492, CSO, D. Ramprakash to E. Jones, RCDIW, 12 Aug. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/492, CSO, Note of a meeting to discuss the wealth survey feasibility study, 22 Aug. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/492, RCDIW, Note by E. Jones to the Chairman, 18 Aug. 1977; CSO, D. Ramprakash to E. Jones, 22 Aug. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/492, RCDIW, Note by E. Jones to the Chairman, 18 Aug. 1977.

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are not apparently applicable to certain other fields.’319 Given that there was ‘no present information’ on the wealth of ‘20 million’ in the adult population, Dunn could hardly conceal his frustration about the CSO’s reluctance to invest the estimated costs of £100,000 to close this gap:320 In view of the fact that the CSO have half a division, headed by a Chief Statistician, devoted to subjects such as the distribution of wealth, redistribution of income and distribution of income, it would seem strange if the wealth of these 20 million individuals was considered of no importance and that the present state of ignorance should continue and this viewpoint would seem even stranger because of the existence of the RCDIW let alone its specific requests in this field.

In the end, the passionate pleas of the RCDIW and the IR failed to convince the CSO. Here, the final decision not to go ahead with the proposed survey eventually fell to a few senior civil servants. In yet another episode that reflected the power imbalances at play, the RCDIW was informed in September 1977 that the CSO director, Claus Moser, had reached this conclusion in a meeting with John Boreham, the head of the CSO’s social statistics division: the two men found that it was ‘irresponsible to proceed to the main stage as planned’ and decided to plan another feasibility study instead.321 The Commission, in turn, reacted with disappointment to the decision but had no other choice than to accept it.322 What made things worse was that the decision was not followed up at the CSO: subsequently, nothing much happened for almost a year, despite the announcement of a third feasibility study. While the OPCS and the CSO struggled to allocate sufficient resources to the project, deliberations over possible solutions to the technical problems encountered in the process so far were not resumed until summer and autumn 1978.323 From the point of view of the RCDIW, the slow progress and the discouraging news from the CSO were ‘depressing’, and Commission staff felt ‘that OPCS could solve the sampling problem if they would only stop seeing the difficulties and get down to undertaking hard work to overcome the problems’.324 While the OPCS was unable to commit to carrying out a feasibility study at an earlier point than sometime in the first half of 1979, the interdepartmental discussions in autumn 1978 produced a number of new ideas so that it seemed that ‘new life has been breathed into the proposal’ of a wealth survey.325 The most promising idea was the proposal to use an established survey such as the Family Expenditure Survey or the General Household Survey as a vehicle; even senior officials at the OPCS were ‘reasonably

 TNA, BS 7/492, IR, A. T. Dunn to D. Ramprakash, CSO, 2 Sept. 1977.  Ibid.  TNA, BS 7/493, CSO, J. Boreham to F. Bayliss, 22 Sept. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, F. Bayliss to Boreham, 3 Oct. 1977.  TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, Tan to E. Jones, 30 May 1978; CSO, Ramprakash to Jones, RCDIW, Note of meeting between CSO and OPCS on wealth survey, 3 July 1978.  TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, E. Jones to Johnson, 13 July 1978; RCDIW, Johnson to E. Jones, 16 Aug. 1978.  TNA, BS 7/493, OPCS, F. Whitehead to D. Ramprakash, CSO, 15 Sept. 1978; RCDIW, N. Forward to D. Ramprakash, CSO, 7 Nov. 1978.

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optimistic’ that it could be possible to obtain the desired information on wealth distribution by means of a follow-up survey to the GHS.326 In early 1979, however, both the OPCS and the CSO changed their stance. For reasons that failed to convince staff at the RCDIW, the option of a GHS follow-up survey was eventually rejected and the plans for a third feasibility study were taken off the table.327 When the CSO communicated the decision to the RCDIW in mid March 1979, the news came like a ‘bolt from the blue’; from the point of view of the Commission staff, this turn of events was both ‘disappointing’ and ‘mystifying’.328 Moreover, the RCDIW had been shut out from the decision-making process: no RCDIW representatives had been invited to attend the crucial meetings in early February and March 1979 where officials from the CSO and the OPCS settled the issue.329 In retrospect, the RCDIW secretary noted with regret that the CSO ‘have chosen to use “adversary” tactics by excluding us from all the many interdepartmental discussions that there have been until a consensus had been arrived at’.330 Even another intervention from the Inland Revenue could not help to avert this outcome. In February 1979, John Walton from the IR had written to the CSO to complain about the exclusion of the RCDIW from the latest meeting; furthermore, he reminded his colleagues that ‘even very crude estimates’ that could be obtained from a sample survey on the distribution of wealth in the bottom half of the population were better than the alternative, which was ‘pure imagination’.331 If the Government Statistical Service could not find resources to undertake a limited feasibility study comprising 400 cases for a topic of such importance, Walton continued in dramatic fashion, it ‘might be difficult to justify the maintenance of our present standards’. Both Walton and the Commission staff also noted critically that the CSO had not come up with ‘any alternative’ proposals to tackle the large gaps in knowledge on the distribution of wealth.332 Furthermore, both at the IR and the RCDIW, officials had little doubt that much of the resistance encountered in the attempts to introduce a new wealth survey emanated from the CSO’s Branch 13 and its head, Deo Ramprakash.333 In internal discussions, Commissioners expressed ‘concerns’ about the CSO’s ‘change of

 TNA, BS 7/493, OPCS, F. Whitehead to N. Forward, RCDIW, 26 Oct. 1978.  TNA, BS 7/493, CSO, Ramprakash to N. Forward, RCDIW, 28 Mar. 1979; RCDIW, N. Forward to Chairman, 4 Apr. 1979.  Ibid.; TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, N. Forward to the Chairman, 21 Mar. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/493, IR, John Walton to Barry Wakefield, CSO, 23 Feb. 1979; CSO, Forecast to Forward, RCDIW, 16 Mar. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, N. Forward to Chairman, 4 Apr. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/493, IR, J. Walton to W. B. Wakefield, CSO, 23 Feb. 1979.  Ibid.; TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, N. Forward to Chairman, 4 Apr. 1979.  TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, N. Forward to M. G. Tan, 4 June 1979; IR, J. Walton to W. B. Wakefield, CSO, 23 Feb. 1979.

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heart’, but, as the RCDIW depended on the CSO’s co-operation, they stopped short of criticizing the CSO in their published reports.334 The gloomy predictions that some had voiced in the negotiations were vindicated: the failure of this project precluded the introduction of a new wealth survey for several decades. It was not until 2006 that a regular sample survey on personal wealth was finally introduced in the United Kingdom, with response rates that were not higher than those achieved by the pilot surveys of the 1970s.335 The technical problems with non-response and underreporting in sample surveys on wealth were as pertinent in the 2000s as they were in the 1970s; both the staff of the RCDIW and the experts of the 2000s were in agreement that a sample survey could not deliver reliable results on its own but could yield valuable insights when combined with other sources and methods, in particular, with estate duty data, which, on its own, also offered only a partial picture. Hence, aborting the proposed wealth survey not only meant that the wealth of the bottom half of the population remained in the dark, it also hampered the production of knowledge on other key questions and projects that the RCDIW had hoped to advance, including questions on patterns of inheritance, the distribution of house ownership, and the idea of producing a joint distribution of income and wealth. Opposition against the proposed wealth survey in the CSO and the OPCS was undoubtedly motivated by genuine concerns over methodological problems and reliability issues, but at the same time it followed a larger pattern that was also on display in other discussions on possible new surveys and statistical projects, as has been noted above: after 1976, investing resources in statistical work programmes concerned with distributional issues clearly dropped down in the list of priorities among ministers and senior civil servants. In 1978, ministers of the incumbent Labour government even seemed to question the very existence of the RCDIW itself, and the following year, Prime Minister James Callaghan made an unsuccessful move to ‘reconsider’ the planned publication of the Commission’s Low Incomes Report, as the report included some unfavourable results, revealing falls in real incomes in 1975/76.336 This difficult political climate also affected other projects that were concerned with distributional questions elsewhere in the civil service. In this vein, an interdepartmental group set up by the Treasury in mid 1975 for the study of poverty came to the conclusion in 1976 not to commission any more research in light of the economic situation and the pressure on resources.337 Similar constraints impeded progress in the Central Policy Review Staff’s ambitious Social Affairs programme that offered a real possibility of reforming the policy-making process in the social field in Britain.

 TNA, BS 7/493, RCDIW, Minutes of Meeting, RCDIW, 9 Apr. 1979; RCDIW, Report No. 7: Fourth Report on the Standing Reference, 116–17.  Atkinson, Alvaredo, and Morelli, ‘The Challenge of Measuring UK Wealth Inequality in the 2000s’.  TNA, BS 7/288, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 5th Meeting, 5 June 1978; TNA, T 371/447, HMT, J. Bacon to N. Wicks, No. 10, May 1978; Kelsey, Unexpected Cut, 8.  TNA, CAB 108/756, CSO, Memorandum on the Joint Framework for Social Policy, 14 Mar. 1977.

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Visions of Knowledge-based Policy-Making: The Joint Approach to Social Policy The JASP was a remarkable initiative that went back to the late 1960s when civil servants began to see the severe lack of coordination and information in the making of social policy as a major problem in Whitehall.338 JASP was an attempt to remedy this situation. It was aimed at creating central machinery for better interdepartmental cooperation and systematic use of relevant statistical knowledge in the policy-making process – JASP represented the high-water mark of the faith in rational political planning in Britain.339 After the first initiative by the newly created Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) was rejected as overly ambitious by ministers and civil servants under the Heath government in 1972/73, a renewed effort by the CPRS flourished under the succeeding Labour government, but eventually lost momentum even before Thatcher came to power. ‘Whatever happened to JASP’ later became the subject of historical accounts that have been written mainly from the perspective of former officials and other contemporaries. They had witnessed how the more realistic approach in ‘JASP Mark II’ that followed in the footsteps of the overly ‘optimistic model’ of ‘JASP Mark I’ led to the creation of new interdepartmental discussion forums and prompted the Central Statistical Office to engage in work to develop better statistical tools. In the event, however, the CPRS failed to bring about lasting changes to existing practices in Whitehall. The protagonists were unable to overcome the resistance of government departments without sufficient support from ministers, who began to lose interest in the project as the overall economic situation deteriorated.340 A more detailed picture emerges from the archival records that have survived from the programme. The contemporary discussions show how critical distributional questions at the heart of the programme were bound up with the commitment to knowledge production on social inequalities – the episode demonstrated once more how the politics of equality in post-war Britain were pervaded by the inextricable entanglements of knowledge and power. JASP shone a light on the partial blindness of the existing government machinery to the distributional implications of social policies. The ‘scandalous absence of information upon which to base policy’ had already drawn criticism from Labour minister Richard Crossman and others in the late 1960s, and even in the mid 1970s, and despite various attempts to tackle the problem in the intervening years, the statistical knowledge available to policy-makers was ‘often much too crude’ to allow meaningful analyses of social issues and policy options.341 When the CPRS prepared a draft paper outlining the proposed initiative, the present ‘defects in social policy-making’ became    

See Chapter 3, section ‘Redistribution’. Challis et al., Joint Approaches to Social Policy, 90. Ibid. 78–9, 100–1. TNA, CAB 184/242, CPRS, Paper by C. P Davies on Joint Framework for Social Policies, 10 July 1975.

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all too clear. According to the CPRS, there was ‘too little systematic thinking in central Government about broad social policy issues’, and government departments seemed all too often more concerned with ‘matters of tactics than with matters of strategy’; as a result, policy-making was beset by a gaping lack of ‘relevant information about the relative social needs of different groups, about the distributional effects of social programmes and policies and about the connections between the two’.342 Moreover, the CPRS found that the links between social policy-makers and social statisticians were ‘weak’. Resuming the work on a joint approach to social policy had been agreed by an interdepartmental meeting of the permanent secretaries in June 1974. However, when it was suggested that the critical analysis of the state of the government machinery could be published, the idea led to disputes that gave a taste of the sensitivities among government departments over the release of potentially compromising knowledge. At the Treasury, in particular, senior officials were concerned that some of the assertions made in the paper were ‘pretty damaging’ and showed ‘the existing practice in an unnecessarily bad light’, even though it was recognized that the lack of knowledge about distributional effects of social policies was a ‘fair point’.343 More concretely, Treasury officials attempted to get certain references to planned government studies such as the periodic ‘forward looks’ deleted from the paper so as to ‘avoid embarrassing demands for publication of the results of some of the proposed studies’.344 In the event, the draft paper was slightly amended and the strength of the criticism reduced so that ‘it no longer invites the criticism that government takes only ill-informed and shortterm policy decisions’.345 Nonetheless, there was no way the publication of the document could be averted. This was not just because senior CSO statistician John Boreham unwittingly leaked the draft paper to the journalist John Gretton, a personal friend of his.346 The publication of the CPRS document was also expressly endorsed by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and received ‘strong support’ from Cabinet ministers at the first meeting of the newly created ministerial strategy group for the joint approach to social policy.347 Consequently, the programmatic CPRS paper was officially launched in August 1975.348

 TNA, T 227/4394, CPRS, draft paper, JASP, 12 Feb. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4396, HMT, P. Baldwin to K. Berrill, CPRS, draft letter, 2 June 1976.  Ibid.  TNA, AT 72/88, DoE, P. G. Faith to A. H. Pollington, 27 Aug. 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/664; T 227/4396, No. 10 / HMT, Correspondence about the leak. In an internal investigation, Boreham admitted to having disclosed the paper to John Gretton who was researching the JASP initiative at the time; in his defence, Boreham explained that he did not expect Gretton to publish the material, but he was officially reprimanded over the incident.  TNA, T 227/4396, MISC 78, Ministerial Group on a Joint Approach to Social Policies, 1st Meeting, 13 May 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/429, CPRS, Press Notice on Government Publication of A Joint Framework for Social Policy, 18 Aug. 1975.

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While JASP fitted the progressive agenda of the incumbent Labour government, there were also more pragmatic and tactical reasons for ministers to endorse the programme. The CPRS tried to sell JASP as a useful rationing device that would help the government to set priorities in social policy and target scarce resources more efficiently at a time of serious public expenditure constraints. However, this line of reasoning failed to convince officials at the Treasury who were concerned that JASP would tend to produce a ‘shopping list’ for more social spending rather than finding economies.349 Furthermore, officials feared that JASP might shift control over social expenditure away from the Treasury by granting too much influence to the CPRS and the CSO.350 For similar reasons, the Treasury even proposed a new PAR on the distributional effects of public expenditure because presiding over a PAR in this field would allow the Treasury ‘to take a positive line’ in the development of social monitoring ‘without letting the matter get out of hand’.351 The same rationale was behind the Treasury’s willingness to get involved in JASP.352 As deputy secretary Peter Baldwin argued in a related discussion, ‘the more that the Treasury retains at the centre of the stage in consideration of the financial aspects of social policy [. . .] the better’.353 Abstaining from this and other programmes would not serve Treasury interests, Baldwin explained, but would only leave the field to other departments and bodies such as the DHSS, the CSO, and the CPRS. Staying in control of the policy process was a concern that was also shared by other government departments, not least with regard to social activists and other critical voices outside the government. As participants at the first meeting of the new ministerial strategy group agreed, the proposed improvements to social monitoring were ‘highly desirable’ because ‘social monitoring appeared to be carried out more comprehensively, although not necessarily more accurately, by outside pressure groups, which as a result might sometimes influence Government decisions to an unjustified extent’.354 In other words, taking back the lead in the production of statistical knowledge was associated with the power to define social issues and shape political thinking. Finally, the power implications of knowledge as a political resource and JASP in particular were also obvious to the CPRS itself. Working on JASP gave the CPRS a seat at the table in social policy and provided them with access to intimate knowledge that was not available otherwise. CPRS officials were clear that without

 TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, H. A. Copeman to P. Baldwin, 18 Feb. 1975; TNA, T 227/4394; HMT, Note by P. Baldwin, 27 Feb. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4396, HMT, Baldwin to Henley, 11 Mar. 1975; TNA, T 227/4395; HMT, H. A. Copeman to P. Baldwin, 9 June 1975.  TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, I. C. R. Byatt to Mr Widdup, 11 Mar. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, P. Baldwin to D. Henley, MISC 78, 14 Apr. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, P. Baldwin to D. Henley, MISC 31, 14 Apr. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4396, MISC 78, Ministerial Group on a Joint Approach to Social Policies, 1st Meeting, 13 May 1975.

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this sort of expertise they could not compete in discussions with departmental officials, in particular, in negotiations with the typical ‘influential briefer’ in Whitehall, the ‘hard-nosed, old fashioned Deputy Secretaries and Under Secretaries’.355 This concern was expressed by CPRS official Dick Ross with remarkable clarity in a note to his director, Kenneth Berrill, in late 1976 when the future of JASP was already in limbo: ‘If we let JASP die, we shall lose both our power-base and our information-base for a lot of what we do and say about social policy.’356 Thus, knowledge played a crucial role in the interdepartmental wrestling over influence in social policy-making that accompanied the talks on JASP from the start. The production of statistical knowledge on distributional issues was a key plank of JASP. The 1975 CPRS paper announced a package of measures and sub-projects that broadly fell into two main parts: first, the reform of the decision-making process through more coordination and better information, and second, a series of concrete ‘attacks on specific problem areas’.357 At the heart of the first part of the programme was the improvement of ‘social monitoring’ as an essential tool for ministerial decisions on policies, priorities, and expenditure: to this end, the report not only announced a new unit in the CSO, the so-called ‘social group’, but also proposed a new series of regular statistical reports on social problems; this included more work on monitoring the living standards of various sub-groups in the population and the distributional impact of government policies on these. Much space in the paper was devoted to a specific idea for ‘building social statistics more firmly into the policy-making process’, although it was acknowledged that implementing this idea posed ‘some real technical problems’, as the necessary information was ‘often not available’. The idea was that ‘policy papers’ outlining new expenditure proposals should always contain ‘some estimate – however crude at first – of the distributional effects’ of the proposed policies on different income groups, differentiated by socio-economic status, household type, race, or region. While the CPRS paper did not dwell on the origin of this idea, everyone involved in the discussions knew that it went back to one of the intellectual heavyweights in the Labour party, Anthony Crosland. Crosland had advanced this idea in his capacity as Secretary of State for the Environment in a paper delivered to a Cabinet meeting on government strategy at Chequers in November 1974.358 In his paper, Crosland had argued that every single government decision had implications for Labour’s equality agenda, but no information was available about what these were and how they impacted on the distribution of welfare in the population; hence there was need for reforms:359

 TNA, CAB 184/323, CPRS, W. Plowden, Note on JASP, 27 Jan. 1977; TNA, CAB 184/324; CPRS, R. Ross to Battishill, 21 Apr. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, R. Ross to K. Berrill on JASP, 8 Nov. 1976.  CPRS, A Joint Framework for Social Policies.  TNA, CAB 130/769, MISC 52(74)10, The Strategy of a Labour Government: Paper by the Secretary of State for the Environment, A. Crosland, 11 Nov. 1974.  Ibid.

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If we are to maintain an effective egalitarian strategy, policy papers should always contain some estimate – however crude at first – of the effect of every proposal on equality (just as papers presently contain estimates of their PESC implications). We need a monitoring system to measure our progress in the field of social policy. There are already innumerable economic indicators, accounting techniques and annual reports; equivalent social indicators are urgently needed and an annual Social Report to test our performance in reducing poverty and inequality.

For the implementation of this package, Crosland’s proposal was designated as a key subproject in JASP labelled ‘distributional effects of policy proposals’ (DEPP). Of all the measures proposed in JASP, Crosland’s idea was widely seen as one of ‘the most important tools for potential improvement in political decision-making’.360 This opinion was also shared by Harold Wilson’s personal adviser in No. 10, Bernard Donoughue, who briefed the Prime Minister in May 1975 to the effect that ‘it is altogether unsatisfactory that decisions on, for examples, British Rail subsidies, road building, food subsidies, and student grants have to be made with almost no information on their distributional effects. Crosland’s suggestion that policy papers should include estimates of distributional effects is a necessary step for any improvement in public expenditure decision-making.’361 Nevertheless, protagonists were not ready yet to take this ‘necessary step’, which signalled a first departure from central ideas of the project. In fact, the main effort in JASP initially concentrated on other areas of the work programme, above all on the preparation of fact sheets that were supposed to provide policy-makers with up-to-date statistical information on selected social policy issues. Fact sheets were given a prominent place in the Central Statistical Office’s planning for their own contribution to JASP, and work was subsequently pursued under various headings from ‘Social Topic Notes’ to ‘Social Briefs’ to the ‘Social Commentary’.362 Discussions about contents, styles, and procedures took up a considerable amount of time and resources in the first phase of JASP, although there were questions about the usefulness of this approach. The first prototypes of the new factsheets received mixed feedback from departmental statisticians. While some regarded the Social Commentary as ‘a good stab at what is required’ for the limited purposes of the factsheets, others were more ‘sceptical’.363 At the DHSS, officials criticized the Social Commentary as too superficial and lacking in detail on important issues such as the real incomes of low-income groups; Brian Abel-Smith, in particular, found that it compared unfavourably with the department’s own Social Monitoring Report that had been established by the Economic Advisers Office under John Leonard Nicholson. A similar picture emerged when the CPRS surveyed opinion among government departments about the

 TNA, CAB 184/238, Lord President of the Council, V. Kidd to Mr Short, CPRS, 9 Dec. 1975.  TNA, PREM 16/429, No. 10, Bernard Donoughue to the PM, 12 May 1975. Emphasis in the original.  TNA, T 227/4395, CSO, A Possible CSO Contribution to the Joint Approach to Social Policy (JASP), CSO / Branch 14, 11 Mar. 1975.  TNA, MH 148/704, Correspondence between the CPRS and the DHSS, DE, and others, Dec. 1975 / Jan. 1976.

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usefulness of the Social Briefs and the Social Topic Notes in summer 1979. Apart from the Treasury, where the factsheets were regarded as ‘useless’, the overall reaction was ‘mildly positive’ but hardly enthusiastic and some treated them almost as an irrelevance – in many cases the factsheets were not even seen by the most senior officials in the departments.364 Likewise, it was observed that Private Offices did not always pass the Social Briefs on to their ministers.365 A CPRS official thought it was ‘rather a pity that so much energy is being channelled into the Social Commentary, which although quite a useful document, I suspect will not be given much attention by those for whom it is designed’.366 The starkest criticism of the new factsheets came from officials at Anthony Crosland’s Department of the Environment. Even if it was recognized that ‘a regular flow of simplified relevant information clearly has a role to play’ in ministerial decision-making, one of Crosland’s officials argued, the Social Briefs were ‘not all that much use to Ministers because the gap that lies between the basic statistics selected and the major policy questions is too wide’.367 In other words, the information presented in the Social Briefs was not concrete and relevant enough, and the aforementioned official was even ‘worried’ that senior officials at the CSO would think that such information could ‘help a great deal in the formulation of policy’.368 Furthermore, Crosland’s officials were concerned that the preoccupation with the factsheets distracted from the implementation of their Secretary of State’s own ideas, in particular, Crosland’s ‘proposals for work on the distributional effects in the field of social policy, which gave rise to the concept of social monitoring in the first place’. His officials saw these proposals as ‘one of the main purposes’ of the whole exercise, but were rightly worried that they were ‘getting pushed into the background or out on a limb’ while discussions concentrated on the Social Commentary.369 Meanwhile, work on the DEPP proposal was delayed again and again. While it was recognized by CPRS officials and others that developing a conceptual framework for DEPP was a challenging task, the long delays were not primarily caused by the technical difficulties involved in the project. When the project finally approached the implementation stage in late 1977, officials looked back on a ‘tortuous history’ of what was clearly a ‘rather messed-up piece of administration’.370 The fact that opportunities were missed to launch DEPP sooner had a lot to do with the failure of the Central Statistical Office to devote resources to this task. After Crosland’s proposal was taken up by the CPRS in the draft blueprint for JASP in March 1975, the CSO did not act on

 TNA, CAB 184/476, CPRS, Correspondence about the ‘consumer review’, June 1979.  TNA, AT 72/91, DoE, CPPU, N. W. Summerton to Mr Hannigan, 13 Oct. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/280, CPRS, T. Blackstone to J. Crawley, 19 Jan. 1976.  TNA, AT 72/90, DoE, H. J. D. Cole to I. Bancroft, 27 Nov. 1975.  Ibid.  TNA, AT 72/90, DoE, A. H. Pollington to Mr Whybrow, 28 Aug. 1975.  TNA, CAB 184/355, Cabinet Office, J. Hunt to K. Berrill, CPRS, DEPP, 7 Dec. 1977; CPRS, K. Berrill to J. Hunt, DEPP, 6 Dec. 1977.

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this important item in the work programme for almost a full year. In July 1975, CPRS officials were informed that the CSO would start initial work on the idea of a ‘distributive paragraph’ in policy papers and assign one of their statisticians to this task on a full-time basis as soon as possible.371 By the end of the year, however, the CSO had still not begun any work on this project, which was blamed on a ‘lack of staff’.372 The delay was also noted with ‘some concern’ by the Prime Minister’s advisor Bernard Donoughue who urged the CPRS ‘to make a start’ in ‘assessing distributional effects’, the sooner the better.373 CPRS officials were at a loss to explain the situation. When a new meeting of the ministerial strategy group was approaching in late 1975 and there was ‘a real chance’ of Crosland asking about the progress of his proposal, William Plowden wrote to the CSO in desperate search for answers: ‘What should we say? Is anything in fact in hand? If not – which I think is the case – should we confess or conceal? If we confess, how should we explain? If we conceal, how do we do that?’374 The CSO promised to start work in January but, again, failed to meet this timeline.375 Finally, CSO statistician Jane Peretz put together a first preliminary draft report on the feasibility of DEPP in April 1976 – the study came to the conclusion that it was ‘generally’ possible to produce at least ‘crude’ assessments ‘fairly quickly’ on ‘whether a policy has significant distributional effects, and if so in which direction they operate’.376 Following more refinements and consultations with departments, the finished report was not ready for submission to ministers until December 1976, though.377 The report recommended distributional analyses by deciles differentiated by various social and demographic axes as suggested in the original 1975 JASP blueprint; where the perennial data limitations did not allow such sophisticated analyses, policy papers should at least contain verbal descriptions of the expected distributional effects.378 As CPRS sage William Plowden posited, even crude estimates would mean a significant improvement on current practice, which was ‘usually to ignore the problem altogether’.379 The long delays forfeited the possibility of progress on this front before the historic turning point of 1976, after which it became even more difficult to win support for publicly funded statistical exercises on distributional issues. But the delays did not end there: it took almost another year of interdepartmental discussions to clear the CSO report before DEPP was eventually approved by the relevant ministerial committee

        

TNA, MH 148/704, CPRS, J. Crawley to G. G. Hulme, DHSS, 31 July 1975. TNA, CAB 184/238, CSO, Mrs Nissel to W. Plowden, CPRS, 5 Dec. 1975. TNA, CAB 184/238, No. 10, B. Donoughue to K. Berrill, CPRS, 28 Nov. 1975. TNA, CAB 184/238, CPRS, W. Plowden to E. Thompson, CSO, 28 Nov. 1975. TNA, CAB 184/322, CSO, J. Peretz to J. Crawley, CPRS, 24 Feb. 1976. TNA, T 371/447, CSO, J. Peretz, Draft Report: Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals, 9 Apr. 1976. TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, W. Plowden to C. R. Ross, 16 Dec. 1976. TNA, AT 72/104, CSO, Report: Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals, 18 Apr. 1977. TNA, CAB 184/322, CPRS, W. Plowden to Flaxen, CSO, 11 Oct. 1976.

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and the Prime Minister in autumn 1977. In August 1977, CPRS director Kenneth Berrill thus pleaded with the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, to refrain from any more consultations at the official level and go straight to ministers: ‘Ministers asked for this to be done two years ago. The draft paper was available in February and we have already spent six months clearing it at Under Secretary level. [. . .] The longer we delay getting this JASP distributional paper up to Ministers the less likelihood there will be of this happening.’380 The negotiations over the DEPP paper in 1977 revealed the reservations about the proposal in government departments. The resistance encountered in the talks did not come as a surprise to CPRS officials who were well aware that senior civil servants would ‘be intellectually sceptical of, and instinctively resistant to, any such proposal’.381 There were understandable reasons for the reluctance of departmental officials to agree to proposals that entailed extra work in the preparation of policy papers, given that mandatory requirements already existed to include statements about finance, manpower, and EEC implications in such papers; hence, it could be expected that ‘they will not like it’.382 CPRS director Kenneth Berrill thought it was ‘pretty predictable’ that the permanent secretaries would respond to the proposal by stressing the difficulties involved, the extra workload, and the uncertain results.383 On the other hand, the consultations over DEPP also elicited more encouraging reactions from departments that signalled growing awareness of distributional issues among civil servants. There was much agreement that, as one official put it, ‘in principle the distributional effect of major policy changes is no doubt something Ministers should be made aware of before they make the decisions, and this ought to be the normal practice already’.384 An official at the Department of Education even reassured the CPRS that it already had ‘become more or less normal practice over the year or so to comment on distributional effects in papers advocating new policies’.385 However, few departments were enthusiastic about the extra administrative burden that had to be met from existing resources; the Department of Employment even admitted that it had ‘only marginal interest in the proposals’, implicitly rejecting Crosland’s proposition that distributional effects should be considered in any policy initiative, not just in the social field.386 When the proposal was discussed at the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, participants warned that the exercise ‘could prove to be extremely expensive in manpower terms’.387

 TNA, CAB 184/323, CPRS, K. Berrill to J. Hunt, 3 Aug. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/323, CPRS, Ross to Battishill, 21 Apr. 1977.  Ibid.  TNA, CAB 184/323, CPRS, K. Berrill to J. Hunt, 3 Aug. 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, DoE, J. Peeler to N. W Summerton, JASP / DEPP, 21 July 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, DEd, E. C. Appleyard to A. M. W. Battishill, CPRS, 7 July 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, Civil Service Department, D. Bowie to A. M. W. Battishill, CPRS, 18 July 1977; DE, E. G. Whybrew to A. M. W. Battishill, CPRS, 12 July 1977.  TNA, MH 148/707, CPRS, JASP, Note on meeting of interdepartmental working group, 19 Jan. 1977.

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The wrangling over the particulars of DEPP once again brought out the waning interest in analytical work on distributional issues in Whitehall after 1976. The writing on the wall was also noted by the CPRS, among others, when the Treasury-led PAR on distributional effects of public expenditure petered out. The short-lived PAR brought together an interdepartmental group of statisticians and economists who produced a lengthy paper on the subject in April 1976, but Treasury officials subsequently came to the conclusion that it was no longer needed as the work could be further pursued in the framework of the DEPP initiative.388 As William Plowden, the brains of the JASP initiative at the CPRS, observed in early 1977, ‘the long-bruited PAR on the subject seems quietly to have expired before being born’, and he concluded that the interdepartmental JASP group should try ‘to find out if Ministers are still interested in the subject’.389 What complicated matters further was the fact that the new Prime Minister, Callaghan, took ostensibly less interest in the JASP programme than his predecessor, Wilson.390 The DEPP initiative did receive support from other Cabinet ministers, such as Shirley Williams, who belatedly attempted to speed up the ratification of the DEPP paper without further consultations in autumn 1977.391 However, the programme lost its ‘keenest advocate’ when Cabinet minister Anthony Crosland passed away unexpectedly in February 1977.392 Overcoming the resistance to DEPP at the official level would have required stronger leadership by ministers. The CPRS director, Kenneth Berrill, learnt this lesson from the experimental implementation of DEPP in 1978: that the exercise ‘will need pushing to be effective’, a lesson that equally applied to the preceding stage of the discussions when the conceptual framework of DEPP was laid down.393 In the interdepartmental negotiations over the terms and the remit of DEPP in 1977, ministers allowed their officials to push the programme in directions that clearly strayed from the original proposal. In the discussions during spring and summer 1977, the proposals were gradually trimmed and watered down. Prompted by the ‘anxieties’ of departments who expressed ‘alarm’ over the extent and the ‘mandatory’ character of the programme, more and more restrictions were imposed in agreement with the CSO director, Claus Moser, and the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt: to begin with, DEPP was downgraded from a permanent procedure to an ‘experiment’ that was limited to

 TNA, T 371/447, ‘The Distributional Effects of Public Expenditure Programmes: A Report by a Working Group of Economists and Statisticians’, Apr. 1976; HMT, Note of a Meeting on 13 Dec. 1976.  TNA, MH 148/707, CPRS, W. Plowden to G. G. Hulme, DHSS, 13 Jan. 1977.  TNA, MH 148/707, DHSS, G. G. Hulme to Benner, Jan. 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, Correspondence between Shirley Williams and other Cabinet ministers, Sept. 1977.  TNA, T 227/4395, HMT, P. Baldwin to D. Henley, MISC 78, 14 Apr. 1975.  TNA, CAB 184/416, CSO, Note by J. Boreham to J. Hunt, 20 Nov. 1978, with handwritten comments by K. Berrill, 1 Dec. 1978.

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an initial period of two years.394 Instead of a cut-off point set at £5m worth of expenditure that required departments to provide estimates of distributional effects, departments were to be given more discretion.395 Furthermore, the exercise was to focus on public expenditure only, while taxation was excluded. Most importantly perhaps, DEPP was expressly limited to a narrow definition of social expenditure: contrary to Crosland’s original suggestion at Chequers that each and every government decision had distributional implications and should be monitored accordingly, all non-social expenditure, such as Transport and Education, was left out, even if such clear-cut definitions were disputable.396 From the point of view of the CPRS, certain limitations were acceptable to kick off the programme ‘on a modest basis’, but this latter restriction in particular narrowed ‘the whole experiment in such a way as to make it scarcely worth undertaking’.397 The exclusion of such ‘broad issues’ from the remit of DEPP was also criticized outside the CPRS. A sympathetic official at the Department of Transport posed this rhetorical question in August 1977: ‘Would that exclusion have been tolerated by our late Secretary of State, to whose initiative and concern in this field the present proposals are I would think largely owed?’398 Nonetheless, the guidance for the implementation of DEPP that was eventually sent out by Downing Street in December 1977 emphasized that departments should take ‘a commonsense and flexible approach’ and that ‘it would be up to each Minister’ to decide if distributional analyses should be undertaken.399 The start date was set on 1 January 1978. The way in which the launch of DEPP in December 1977 was handled by the Prime Minister and his closest advisors was indicative of the limited enthusiasm for the project at the highest level of government. First of all, Callaghan refrained from throwing his weight behind DEPP. Despite suggestions that he should send out the instructions on DEPP to ministers under his own name, the Prime Minister instructed the Cabinet Secretary, Hunt, to circulate the directive.400 The low-key communication followed from a decision not to publicize the initiative. Officials had prepared a defensive press briefing that depicted previous government practices in an overly positive if not misleading way, claiming ‘it has always been the practice of Ministers’ to take distributional effects of policy changes into account.401 In the event, however, the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister’s advisors recommended that ‘no announcement should be made’ whatsoever; one of the advisors remarked somewhat sheepishly that ‘most people would

 TNA, AT 72/104, DoE, Report of Meeting of the Committee on Statistics for Social Policy on 7 Jan. 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, DoE, CPPU, Summerton to Cole, 21 July 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/355, Cabinet Office, J. Hunt to PM, DEPP, 9 Nov. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/355, CPRS, Bridgeman to Ross, DEPP, 1 Dec. 1977.  TNA, AT 72/104, Department of Transport, F. W. Girling to E. B. C. Osmotherly, CPPU, 1 Aug. 1977.  TNA, PREM 16/1461, Cabinet Office, J. Hunt to PermSecs, 9 Dec. 1977.  TNA, PREM 16/1461, No. 10, N. Wicks to Mr McCaffrey, 9 Dec. 1977.  TNA, PREM 16/1461, Cabinet Office, Defensive Briefing for Press Office, 9 Dec. 1977.

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believe that this is already done’ and warned that DEPP was ‘a Peter Hennessy type story’.402 Peter Hennessy was a well-known political journalist in Westminster, who also researched the JASP initiative at the time, but, ironically, did not seem to take much interest in DEPP when it was mentioned to him by CPRS official William Plowden in an interview for The Times in late 1976.403 Consequently, DEPP remained in the dark. The episode was yet another case of officials trying to protect meta-knowledge about the production and uses of government knowledge in order to avoid closer scrutiny and possible demands for the release of even more knowledge. This was also the line taken by the Prime Minister. Callaghan’s instructions for the launch of DEPP were passed on by his private secretary as follows:404 The Prime Minister has said that he is quite content for guidance of this sort to be given to departments, but he would prefer the guidance to be given at official level, i.e. by Sir John Hunt writing to Permanent Secretaries. The Prime Minister takes this view because like Sir John he sees possible disadvantages, in terms of Parliamentary Questions demanding to know the distributional effects whenever policy decisions in the social field are announced, with criticisms if they have not been measured or are not disclosed. It is also just the sort of story that Mr. Peter Hennessy might focus on.

Surrounded by secrecy, the DEPP experiment eventually began as planned in January 1978 but got off to a bumpy start. CSO officials who were tasked with monitoring the experiment had to intervene repeatedly to urge compliance with the new procedures. In connection with a policy proposal on charges for school meals, for example, officials at the Department of Education and Science failed to consult with anyone about the distributional implications, and the Scottish Office warned the CSO that it was ‘not at present clear’ whether the department ‘would have either the data or the resources to do the necessary work’ in case any relevant proposals should be put forward in the foreseeable future.405 CPRS officials attributed the ‘slow start’ partly to the fact that the experiment happened to fall in the ‘dog days’ of the Labour government that saw relatively few new policy proposals being developed and advanced in the first place.406 Furthermore, as one official observed, the difficulties were not ‘very surprising’, given that ‘the calculation of distributional effects does take time’ and departments needed to adapt to the requirement of closer collaboration between policy divisions and departmental statistics divisions; on the other hand, the same official was baffled and ‘surprised by the ignorance shown by policy and finance divisions in non-social departments (e.g. Transport, Energy)’

 TNA, PREM 16/1461, No. 10, N. Wicks to Mr McCaffrey, and handwritten comments by the latter, 11/15 Nov. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, Note by W. Plowden to K. Berrill on discussion with Peter Hennessy, 9 Dec. 1976.  TNA, PREM 16/1461, No. 10, Private Secretary to Mr Vile, Cabinet Office, 16 Nov. 1977.  TNA, CAB 184/355, Correspondence between the CSO, D. Ramprakash, and the DES, Scottish Office, DHSS, Jan.–Mar. 1978.  TNA, CAB 184/416, CPRS, J. Bridgeman to J. Crawley, DEPP, 10 Apr. 1979.

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about the new procedure.407 By autumn 1978, the results so far seemed ‘disappointing’. This was also noted by the CSO in a detailed review of the implementation of DEPP in government departments during the first seven months of the experiment: ‘in many cases’, the report concluded, the required assessments of distributional effects were ‘inadequate or non-existent’.408 The problems encountered in the implementation of DEPP were partly due to the limitations of the main data source, the Family Expenditure Survey, but the review report identified departmental procedures as the ‘main reason’ for the disappointing outcome: the report found that departmental statisticians were often ‘only called in at the last moment’ to provide the required estimates. CPRS officials were under no illusions that departments regarded DEPP ‘as a tiresome chore’.409 On the other hand, there were also some encouraging findings. In rare cases where basic assessments were made, distributional effects were subsequently brought up in discussions at the relevant policy committees; conversely, where the required assessment had been omitted, it seemed clear that it ‘would undoubtedly have helped the discussion’ had such data been provided.410 The CPRS also claimed that ‘distributional effects were even more now in the minds of Ministers than when the experiment commenced’.411 When the CSO reviewed the progress of DEPP again in the run-up to the general election in spring 1979, the result was no less disappointing than in 1978, as ‘no improvement in the response to the experiment had been achieved since the earlier review’; however, there were also ‘some minor successes’, where ‘distributional effects were given detailed consideration’ in Cabinet discussions.412 Thus, officials at the CPRS were ‘still of the view that the experiment was a step in the direction of more rational analysis of policy proposals’, despite ‘the resistance’ encountered in the implementation.413 As it happened, however, DEPP ‘technically lapsed’ when the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won the general election in May 1979.414 By this time, the umbrella initiative of the Joint Approach to Social Policy had already lost its momentum. Suggestions to ‘wind things down’ were even advanced from within the CPRS. In early 1977, the architect of JASP at the CPRS, William Plowden, argued that it was time to ‘de-institutionalize’ by dissolving the interdepartmental group that had been set up for JASP at the Under Secretary level and to reduce the CPRS’ engagement in the programme – he even recommended that no more talks should be  TNA, CAB 184/416, CPRS (?), C. Mark Dadd to J. Bridgeman, DEPP, 28 Nov. 1978.  TNA, CAB 184/416, CSO, Report: Interim Review of the Experiment to Measure the Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals (DEPP), 30 Oct. 1978.  TNA, CAB 184/416, CPRS, J. Bridgeman to J. Crawley, 10 Apr. 1979. On the FES see section ‘The Survey Gap’.  TNA, CAB 184/416, CSO, Report: Interim Review of DEPP, 30 Oct. 1978.  TNA, CAB 108/757, CSO, Committee on Statistics for Social Policy, Meeting on 6 Nov. 1978.  TNA, CAB 184/642, CSO, G. Jackson, Chairman’s Brief for CSO(S) Meeting on 11 Mar., 6 Mar. 1980.  Ibid.; TNA, CAB 184/416, CPRS, J. Bridgeman to J. Crawley, 10 Apr. 1979.  TNA, CAB 184/642, CSO, G. Jackson, Chairman’s Brief for CSO(S) Meeting on 11 Mar., 6 Mar. 1980.

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given about JASP, and use of the acronym should cease.415 Plowden reassured his colleagues that this was neither an admission of failure nor a suggestion that the interdepartmental approach should be abandoned. But there was a strong sense that JASP had hit a wall. The impression ‘that JASP has probably reached a watershed’ had prompted CPRS deputy director Dick Ross in autumn 1976 to initiate a ‘major stock-taking’ about what the initiative had achieved and how it should be developed in the future.416 Reflecting on the impact of JASP since its inception in mid 1974, Plowden’s ‘own feeling’ in early 1977 was that ‘so far the concrete results of JASP are few’, even if the likely influence of the programme on ‘departmental thinking’ and ‘conventional wisdom’ was hard to measure. But his experience with JASP was dominated by the difficulties encountered in any attempt to ‘make headway against departments’ defence of the status quo’. The slow progress in JASP was also noted outside the CPRS. At the CSO, John Boreham shared the impression that ‘it took a long time to get Ministers to look at what was being produced’ and that ‘it has clearly been hard at times to keep up interdepartmental enthusiasm and impetus on JASP’.417 What the CPRS attempted to achieve in the JASP initiative amounted to a reform of current practices in the production, circulation, and uses of statistical knowledge. The ‘tortuous’ history of this attempted reconfiguration of the knowledge regime demonstrates once again the extent to which such practices hinged on social and institutional contexts, infrastructures, and power relations. Bringing about changes to existing configurations required powerful interventions and support networks that the CPRS struggled to mobilize in an increasingly unfavourable political climate. As CPRS deputy director Dick Ross rightly predicted in late 1976, this was not attempted again for many years after JASP petered out:418 I am quite clear in my own mind: (a) that JASP is on to something; (b) that if we do not pursue that something (whatever it is) no-one else will: we have a hard enough job to keep Ministers and Departments on the ball; no-one else has the influence, the persistence or the intelligence to keep the show on the road at all.

The social democratic moment of the mid 1970s went hand in hand with a far-reaching transformation of the knowledge regime pertaining to economic inequality in the United Kingdom. Academic and public interested shifted from poverty to overall inequality; alongside the political rediscovery of inequality and egalitarian policies on the British Left, a wave of local surveys, scholarly work, social activism, and government programmes changed the landscape and created new research infrastructures, from the Urban Programme to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth to the Joint Approach to Social Policy. The expansion of research activities and statistical programmes faced increasing ideological and administrative resistance in the    

TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, W. Plowden, Memorandum on JASP, 27 Jan. 1977. TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, C. R. Ross to K. Berrill, 8 Nov. 1976. TNA, CAB 184/324, CSO, J. Boreham to J. Bridgeman, CPRS, 15 Apr. 1977. TNA, CAB 184/324, CPRS, C. R. Ross to K. Berrill, 8 Nov. 1976.

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changing political climate of the latter half of the decade – much work remained unfinished and many glaring gaps in knowledge could not be closed. Nonetheless, on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s win in the general election of May 1979, the Government Statistical Service and the RCDIW produced more statistical knowledge on poverty, income, and wealth distribution than ever before. Inadvertently, however, the statistics published by the RCDIW underpinned right-wing narratives of the rich getting poorer and the poor getting richer, even though the reported trend towards greater equality was largely restricted to slight falls in the shares of the top 1 per cent – which benefited other income groups in the top half of the population, while the income shares of the bottom half stagnated during the 1970s. There were questions about the validity of the underlying Blue Book data, though, and the reported trends masked more fine-grained disparities between regions and sub-groups, as local surveys in London and elsewhere indicated. Furthermore, official observations about the relative stability of the income spectrum and the small size of year-to-year movements in inequality seemed to corroborate older conceptions of the temporality of long-term social change. It seemed to confirm the idea that the distribution of income changed very slowly and was in fact ‘one of the more stable features of economic life’: for example, a report by the Economic Advisers Office in the DHSS from autumn 1979 concluded that there had been hardly any movements in income inequality during the 1970s, apart from some improvements at the lower end in 1973/74.419 During the 1980s, the notion of far-reaching stability in the distribution of income served as an argument for the Thatcher government to cut back the production of statistical knowledge in this field, as the following chapter will demonstrate. In the course of the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s, however, ideas about the allegedly slow rate of social change in Britain were dramatically disproved.

 TNA, CAB 184/476, DHSS, EAO, Social Monitoring Report, Oct. 1979.

V The Rise and Fall of the Thatcherite Knowledge Regime, 1979–1991/99 The first few weeks of the incoming Thatcher government already gave a taste of what was to come.1 In June 1979, the government presented its first budget, which delivered on the Conservatives’ pledge to increase ‘incentives’ for ‘wealth creators’ through tax cuts, a package that was paid for through increases in indirect taxes and other measures that shifted the tax burden disproportionately onto lower-income groups. The budget was hailed by the Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, as ‘a new beginning’ that would help to reverse Britain’s alleged ‘decline’.2 Indeed, the budget epitomized the imminent change of course in British politics and the far-reaching effects it would have on society. Moreover, it provided an early example of how the Thatcher government would handle public relations – and how it would deal with sensitive statistical knowledge that potentially posed presentational problems. In the public debate, the suspected regressive effects of the budget drew harsh criticism from anti-poverty campaigners such as the Child Poverty Action Group and from opposition MPs in parliament; the government response was simply to deny that neither VAT increases nor the budget as a whole had any regressive effect at all.3 In the House of Commons, accusations from the opposition benches to this effect were brushed off by the Secretary of State for Trade, John Nott, who lectured his colleagues that such a ‘bald statement’ could not be made without ‘going much deeper into a whole host of surveys, such as the family expenditure survey’.4 Yet that was exactly the kind of information that the government had had at its disposal since earlier in the 1970s, when the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Security had developed computerized simulation models for assessing the distributional effects of government policies based on household survey data .5 The distributional effects of the June 1979 budget were routinely assessed in a confidential report by the Economic Advisers Office at the DHSS. It showed that Thatcher’s first budget inflicted losses on most households, except at the very top of the income spectrum: while the bottom 10 per cent lost 2 per cent of their income, the top 10 per cent gained 2.4 per cent.6 The report concluded that the regressive effect of the budget was hard to deny. For the

 This chapter is an extended version of my article ‘Poverty, Inequality, and Knowledge Politics under Thatcher’, which was published in The English Historical Review in April 2022. I am grateful to the editors at OUP and the EHR for granting permission to reuse the material presented in the article.  Hansard, House of Commons, 12 June 1979, vol. 968, cols. 236–40.  Hansard, House of Commons, 18 June 1979, vol. 968, col. 955; Stuart Holland, ‘Budget that Sells Seed Grain for Next Decade’, The Guardian, 18 June 1979.  Hansard, House of Commons, 18 June 1979, vol. 968, col. 955.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Redistribution’.  TNA, CAB 184/476, DHSS, EAO, Social Monitoring Report, Oct. 1979. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-005

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defence of the budget in the public, it was recommended that it should be portrayed as a one-off measure that would transform the system to deliver higher living standards for the whole population in the future. This prophetic assessment anticipated a major public relations dilemma that government ministers and officials continued to struggle with throughout Thatcher’s tenure in Downing Street: proving that increased ‘incentives’ for top earners would invigorate ‘wealth creation’ and benefit everyone through wealth trickling down to the rest of the population turned out to be all but impossible, since much of the available evidence pointed to the contrary. Under Margaret Thatcher, economic inequality and poverty in the United Kingdom rose dramatically to high levels that have remained one of the lasting legacies of her premiership, with far-reaching implications for social cohesion and the political culture in the country. As later analyses have shown, the reversal of the secular trend towards greater equality in post-war Britain had already begun under the preceding Callaghan government, but it accelerated markedly once Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979.7 Economists and historians have established that the inequality boom that accompanied Thatcher’s premiership from the start was not only driven by exogenous factors, global events, and market forces such as the recession in 1980–81, but also owed much to her government’s own decisions: it has been estimated that about half of the rise in income inequality under Thatcher can be attributed to her government’s social and economic policies:8 changes to the tax/benefit system benefited top earners at the expense of low-income households, and monetarist policies accelerated the process of deindustrialization that caused record levels of unemployment, the rise of in-work poverty, and the spread of multiple deprivation that has marred local communities across the country to this day, in particular, in the worst-hit areas in North England and Wales. Not surprisingly perhaps, government propaganda painted a quite different picture of Thatcher’s performance in the management of the national economy: after the country returned to economic growth in the period from 1982 to 1987, and considerable proportions of the working population saw rises in earnings and real incomes, the government claimed to have brought about nothing less than an ‘economic miracle’.9 Thatcher’s record in government has been the subject of much research that has presented a more realistic picture of the social costs of her economic policies. The rise in poverty and inequality under her premiership is commonly treated as an uncontroversial fact in modern textbooks. This has only become commonly accepted in hindsight, though. It is telling that where existing historical accounts have touched on this subject, the narrative usually relies on retrospective statistical analyses from the 1990s that were not yet available to contemporaries who lived through the Thatcher  Johnson, ‘Inequality, Redistribution and Living Standards in Britain since 1945’, 21–3.  Johnson and Webb, ‘Explaining the Growth in UK Income Inequality: 1979–1988’; Clark and Leicester, ‘Inequality’.  Green, Thatcher, 6; Layard and Nickell, ‘The Thatcher Miracle?’.

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years.10 It has often been overlooked in the historical literature that during the 1980s existing knowledge about movements in poverty and inequality was much less certain, and was subject to political battles over statistical policies, measurements, and figures. As this chapter will demonstrate, this was to a large extent the result of deliberate knowledge politics on the part of the government designed to transform the social democratic knowledge regime inherited from the 1970s. In the process, the government cut back established statistical series on income and wealth distribution and introduced new statistical measures in concerted attempts to steer the debate away from relativist measures and overall inequality. Avoiding discussions of economic inequality was an essential element in the Thatcherite project of recasting the social and economic order towards a neo-liberal vision of a market-driven enterprise society. To win support for this project, the government waged PR campaigns and made extensive use of statistical artefacts for government public relations purposes. In 1988, a new statistical series produced the striking finding that the poorest 10 per cent of the population had enjoyed above average increases of 8.3 per cent in real incomes under Thatcher – subsequently, this figure became the new cornerstone of government narratives about the success of Thatcher’s policies and the trickle-down effect. Up until her resignation as Prime Minister in 1990, Thatcher relied on this statistical series to maintain that even the poorest were benefiting from the ‘massive rise in our living standards’ under her premiership.11 However, the measurement was riddled with errors, some of which never became public knowledge, as this chapter will show. It was not until after Thatcher’s resignation that more reliable figures became available: in the early and mid 1990s, independent and official analyses concurred that the bottom 10 per cent, in fact, experienced losses in real incomes (after housing costs) of up to 14 per cent under Thatcher.12 From the start, the statistical policies of the Thatcher government prompted accusations of ‘fiddling with the figures’.13 Some of the themes of this chapter were thus already familiar to contemporaries who witnessed arguably the most heated and prolonged public debate about the integrity of government statistics in modern British history.14 But a more nuanced picture of government practices and communication strategies in the management of statistical knowledge about economic inequality now emerges from recently declassified government records from the 1980s and 1990s.

 Vernon, Modern Britain, 494–7; Veldman, Margaret Thatcher, 134ff, 146–7; Walker, ‘“Don’t Cut Down the Tall Poppies”: Thatcherism and the Strategy of Inequality’, 282–305; Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism, 33; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, ch. ‘Serious Money’; Green, Thatcher, 70, 196.  Hansard, House of Commons, 22 Nov. 1990, col. 448.  Department of Social Security, Households Below Average Income, 1979–1990/91; Jenkins, ‘Income Inequality and Living Standards: Changes in the 1970s and 1980s’; Goodman and Webb, For Richer, for Poorer; Hills, ‘Introduction: After the Turning Point’, 4; Evans and Letwin, A Generation of Change.  Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, 105–41.  Fenton and Haßdenteufel‚ ‘Umkämpfte Zahlen’.

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Shedding new light on the political battles over statistical knowledge under Thatcher complements recent research about the government’s public relations strategies and Thatcherite efforts to recast public discourse on society, class, and welfare.15 As Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite have demonstrated, Thatcher and her followers strove to convince society of their social vision, the imagination of a classless political constituency of ‘ordinary people’ who shared the Conservative values associated with the ‘enterprise economy’. Their anti-class message was reinforced by knowledge politics in the form of attacks on sociological class analysis and its public funding.16 The knowledge politics described in this chapter were part and parcel of this broader strategy to minimize public discourse on social class divisions. It was driven not only by senior party figures, Conservative party organizations and neoliberal think tanks, but also by the state bureaucracy. Government ministers and civil servants constructed and disseminated political narratives, which were interwoven with constructed knowledge and statistical artefacts, sometimes in manipulative ways, as in the well-known case of the unemployment statistics under Thatcher.17 During the Thatcher years, government ministers and officials found themselves under pressure to defuse opposition to market-driven reforms and to burnish the government’s social credentials.18 This chapter will analyse how the Thatcher administration used ‘government propaganda’ (Tomlinson) to marginalize economic inequality as a political issue and to legitimize the Thatcherite project by promoting the narrative of the trickle-down effect. An understanding of government propaganda under Thatcher also contributes to recent discussions about political thought in the Conservative party and ‘Thatcherism’ as an analytical category.19 Historians have called for less Thatcher-centric analyses and cautioned against the blanket labelling of policies and developments during the 1980s as ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘Thatcherite’.20 This chapter decentres Thatcher in that it puts the spotlight on her ministers and civil servants, and it places the Thatcher years, between 1979 and 1990, in a wider chronological context. However, it reaffirms Thatcherite ideology as an analytical category with respect to the significance of the political philosophy of inequality as a central tenet of Conservative thinking. Conservatives of all factions endorsed inequality and rejected egalitarianism as a matter of principle, but within this consensus the proponents of the New Right held markedly more radical

 Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality’; Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’; Welshman, Underclass.  Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, 146.  Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, 151.  Sloman, ‘Redistribution in an Age of Neoliberalism’, 12–13.  Saunders, ‘The Many Lives of Margaret Thatcher’, 650–5.  Hilton, Moores, and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘New Times Revisited: Britain in the 1980s’; Vinen, ‘War of Position’; Jackson, ‘Currents of Neo-Liberalism’.

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views than One Nation Tories or traditional liberals.21 They engineered a distinctive anti-egalitarian discourse that mythologized ‘wealth creators’ and the trickle-down effect, while blaming poverty on individual failure and denying any structural explanations.22 Furthermore, the New Right rejected the concept of relative poverty, which had been introduced to the academic and political debate in the United Kingdom through the scholarly work of Peter Townsend, Brian Abel-Smith, and others during the 1960s.23 The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ established the view that poverty should be conceptualized and measured in relation to living standards in society as a whole, a principle that was accepted by One Nation Conservatives throughout the 1980s and beyond. By contrast, the New Right insisted on the concept of absolute poverty, where the poverty threshold was defined by a subsistence minimum with no regard for relativities. While the intellectual history of these distinctions in Conservative thought is well researched, less attention has been paid to the means by which New Right ideas about inequality and poverty were implemented by the state bureaucracy under Thatcher. This chapter will offer a detailed account of the Thatcher government’s efforts to abandon the concept of relative poverty as a guiding principle in the construction of official poverty statistics and to gear them towards the concept of absolute poverty.

Transforming the Knowledge Regime After Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, the existing knowledge regime in the field of economic inequality in the United Kingdom was gradually reconfigured on various levels, from statistical and political norms to practices in the production of knowledge to institutional structures. The transformation of political norms pertaining to inequality and poverty had begun while the Conservative party was still in opposition. As has been noted above, the rise of the New Right coincided with the ‘social democratic moment’ of the mid 1970s, and the Labour Party’s advocacy of greater equality went hand in hand with the hardening of the Thatcherites’ anti-egalitarian stance.24 Defending inequality as an individual right may also have offered an opportunity to make political capital of the emerging popular individualism during the 1970s.25 Nonetheless, denouncing egalitarian policies as harmful to the national economy and the moral fabric of society at large was deeply rooted in Conservative

 Dorey, ‘British Conservatism’; Dorey, ‘A Farewell to Alms: Thatcherism’s Legacy of Inequality’; Hickson, ‘Conservatism and the Poor’.  Römer, ‘Boris Johnson, Thatcherism and the Rhetoric of “Wealth Creators”’.  Gazeley et al., ‘The Poor and the Poorest’.  See Ch, 4, section ‘Building a Social-Democratic Knowledge Regime’.  Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, 152; Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-War Britain’, 279–80; Davies, Freeman, and Pemberton, ‘Everyman a Capitalist’.

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political thought, and the defence of inequality became a signature position of the party after Thatcher won the leadership in 1975.26 The ideological shift in the latter half of the 1970s was much in evidence in the speeches and writings of leading progenitors of Thatcherism. Keith Joseph, for example, had not denied the existence of poverty and fully endorsed the concept of relative poverty while he was Secretary of State for Social Services under Heath in the early 1970s.27 But by 1979 his views had markedly changed: in his co-authored 1979 pamphlet on ‘Equality’ he not only rejected any relativist notion of poverty but also claimed that there was ‘very little poverty in Britain’ by absolute standards.28 In a similar vein, Thatcherites reacted to the narratives of the ‘poverty lobby’ and the scholarly works of leading experts. A serious challenge to the orthodoxy of the Thatcherites was posed by sociologist Peter Townsend, who published his seminal book Poverty in the United Kingdom in autumn 1979. The book was based on a sizeable household survey carried out by a research team led by Townsend in 1968/69. It assessed the incidence of poverty based on various measurements, including Townsend’s innovative concept of relative deprivation that focused on subjective and objective forms of lacking access to a range of amenities and goods. It came to the conclusion that, measured by the deprivation standard, around a quarter of the population were living in poverty in the late 1960s, and the evidence suggested that these proportions did hardly change during the 1970s.29 Townsend’s findings contradicted the narrative of a secular trend towards greater equality in Britain, a narrative that had been taken up by the New Right and Thatcher herself who famously contended that the rich were getting poorer, while the poor were getting richer.30 Furthermore, when Townsend launched his book in October 1979, he used the opportunity for a public attack on ‘Thatcher’s failure to grasp poverty’.31 In December 1979, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Social Security, Patrick Jenkin, responded to this challenge with a major speech, in which he not only dismissed the concept of relative poverty and deprivation, but also launched a personal attack on Peter Townsend as an academic expert.32 Literally, Jenkin said: ‘I reject Professor Townsend and all his works.’ Admittedly,

 Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let the Children Grow Tall’, Speech to the Institute of SocioEconomic Studies, New York, 15 Sept. 1975; at [https://www.margaretthatcher.org/docu ment/102769], accessed 19 Aug. 2022; TNA, BS 7/561, RCDIW, Mrs Thatcher’s Speech in New York, 23 Sept. 1975.  Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Nov. 1972, vol. 845, cols. 652, 657.  Joseph and Sumption, Equality, 27–8; Garnett and Hickson, Conservative Thinkers, 98.  Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom, 895, 909.  Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let the Children Grow Tall’.  Peter Townsend, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Failure to Grasp Poverty’, The Guardian, 22 Oct. 1979.  TNA, BN 82/363, DHSS, draft speech ‘A Tory View of Poverty’, 1 Dec. 1979.

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Townsend’s theory of relative deprivation as an objective definition of poverty was questioned even by like-minded experts such as David Piachaud, but the concept of relative poverty as such was exempt from the academic critique,33 in sharp contrast to the approach of the Thatcherites, right-wing newspapers, and Conservative think tanks.34 Newspapers such as The Sunday Telegraph vigorously supported the attack on the poverty lobby and peddled the view that ‘poverty has an absolute meaning’.35 What the ideological outlook of the incoming Conservative government meant for statistical work programmes on distributional issues was a question that concerned senior government statisticians. When they entered into internal discussions about the future strategy of the Government Statistical Service (GSS) in anticipation of expected budget cuts in autumn 1979, they were well aware that the Thatcher government was intent on a ‘radical programme’ that would lead to substantial ‘redistribution between groups in society’. In light of the predictable controversies over distributive issues, officials argued, the availability of detailed statistics as a knowledge base for monitoring social change and gauging the distributional effects of government policies was all the more important. In this vein, the draft strategy paper produced by the GSS in late 1979 proposed to maintain the ongoing work on income and wealth distribution at least at current levels.36 However, consultations with the government in this matter quickly showed that ‘ministers were sceptical’ about the need for income and wealth statistics, except for purposes of ‘defensive briefing’.37 In other words, from the point of view of Thatcher’s ministers, statistics on income and wealth distribution were only needed as a quarry of information that could be used to rebut criticism or to promote government policies in the public eye. By this time, while the discussions about the future strategy of the GSS were still ongoing, the government had already begun to dismantle the statistical system in this particular area. In a series of cuts to existing statistical series and work programmes, the anti-egalitarian ideology of the Thatcher government translated into a systematic reduction of knowledge production on economic inequality. In July 1979, only a few weeks after Thatcher’s accession to the premiership, the government shut down the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW). In official statements, ministers explained that the functions of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth could be assumed by the GSS without any losses in quality, but in internal discussions, the rationale behind the decision sounded quite

 David Piachaud, ‘Peter Townsend and the Holy Grail’, New Society, 10 Sept. 1981.  Jonathan Sumption, ‘Wrong Way of Pleading Poverty’, Sunday Telegraph, 15 July 1979; ‘Poverty Lobby has a Point: Of Sorts’, Sunday Telegraph, 27 Oct. 1991; Policy Studies Institute, Discussing the Welfare State.  Jonathan Sumption, ‘Wrong Way of Pleading Poverty’, Sunday Telegraph, 15 July 1979.  TNA, CAB 139/834, Correspondence about the draft paper ‘A Strategy for the Government Statistical Service’, Oct.–Dec. 1979.  TNA, CAB 139/833, CSO, Lane to Calder, 16 Nov. 1979.

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different: Thatcher and her ministers denounced the RCDIW as an institution that was more concerned with the distribution of the ‘cake’ than with its enlargement, and they anticipated that any future work of the Commission would only generate more controversies over inequality, which was not deemed desirable.38 Meanwhile, senior government statisticians were under no illusions that the discontinuation of the RCDIW left a large gap in the existing body of statistical knowledge on economic inequality that could not be met by the GSS under the current arrangements.39 Next in line was the main set of poverty statistics in Britain, the annual Hansard tables that showed the numbers of families with incomes at various multiples of the Supplementary Benefit (SB) level. This was a statistical series of great symbolic and practical importance. First introduced in 1974, it was modelled after the measurements used in Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith’s seminal book that ushered in the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in 1965 and established the SB level as an unofficial benchmark of poverty in the United Kingdom.40 Thus, the Hansard tables implied the use of a relative poverty line and were based on the concept of relative poverty, a concept that was rejected by the proponents of the New Right. Consequently, the Thatcher government decided to cut back the production of the Hansard tables from annual to biannual publication. In an announcement in the House of Commons in November 1979, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, Patrick Jenkin, reiterated the government’s refusal to accept ‘that a simple poverty line can be drawn’ and explained the decision with reference to the methodological weaknesses of the statistical measurement that rendered the tables vulnerable to misinterpretation.41 To some extent, this line of reasoning followed in the footsteps of previous governments. Neither Labour nor Conservative governments had ever accepted any official definition of poverty, let alone an official poverty line; furthermore, ministers from both parties disputed the validity of the SB level as a benchmark on the grounds that upratings in benefits had the paradoxical effect of increasing the poverty count.42 The criticism was also recognized by the more sympathetic officials at the Supplementary Benefits Commission even if they still believed that the SB level could serve a purpose as a poverty measure.43 The technical critique of the poverty line based on the SB level was clearly not of a Thatcherite pedigree alone, however, under Thatcher it was coupled with an antiegalitarian political philosophy and the rejection of the concept of relative poverty. This

 TNA, LAB 112/255, Correspondence between the PM and the SoS / Department of Employment, July 1979.  TNA, CAB 139/834, CSO, draft paper, ‘A Strategy for the Government Statistical Service’, 11 Oct. 1979.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.  Hansard, House of Commons, 13 Nov. 1979, vol. 973, col. 565; Hansard, House of Commons, 11 July 1980, vol. 988, col. 347.  David Ennals, ‘The Labour Government and Poverty’, The Tribune, 12 Feb. 1970.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Poverty and Deprivation’.

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was not only demonstrated by Patrick Jenkin in his speech on poverty in December 1979 but also by later events in the mid 1980s when the government set out to scrap the relativist Hansard tables altogether, as this chapter will show.44 The annual Hansard tables, the so-called Low Income Families Tables (LIFT), were not only rejected for ideological reasons; they also posed problems from a public relations standpoint as they attracted much public attention and unfavourable commentary. As one official at the DHSS observed in November 1979, ‘the annual statements produced by SR3 from the Family Expenditure Survey data are highly prized by the poverty lobby. They provide, of course, ammunition to fire at whatever government is in power.’45 The DHSS estimates were not only used by Peter Townsend in his recent book Poverty in the United Kingdom, but also by campaign groups: within a week after the publication of the LIFT in December 1977, for example, the Low Pay Unit had produced a pamphlet lamenting that ‘one in eight’ in Britain lived in poverty.46 Reducing the frequency of the LIFT clearly helped the government to avoid such headaches in public relations. Similarly, an alternative source was shut down early on under Thatcher: in summer 1979, the government decided to dissolve the Supplementary Benefits Commission, whose annual reports had offered a plethora of information about Supplementary Benefits recipients.47 Consequently, the output of statistical knowledge on this subject was much reduced. In combination with the time lag in the production of the poverty tables in Hansard, the switch to biannual publication meant that the first edition of LIFT covering the period after 1979 was not published until October 1983. It showed an increase of 20 to 30 per cent in the numbers on low incomes during the first two years of the Thatcher government.48 In other words: there were no official estimates on the incidence of poverty in Thatcher’s Britain for more than four years after she came to power. The retrenchment continued when the government implemented its April 1981 White Paper on Government Statistical Services, which was based on the recommendations of the so-called Rayner review in autumn 1980.49 The Rayner review not only set out to find economies in statistical programmes but also dictated a new philosophy.50 While the incoming Central Statistical Office (CSO) director, John Boreham, had declared in 1978 that the public should have the same access to official statistical information as the government, Rayner held that official statistics should be reduced to a

 TNA, BN 82/363, DHSS, draft speech ‘A Tory View of Poverty’, 1 Dec. 1979.  TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, F. Sutton to Parliamentary Clerk, 8 Nov. 1979.  Ibid.  Donnison, Politics of Poverty, 35, 57, 168–9, 172.  Hansard, House of Commons, 24 Oct. 1983, vol. 47, col. 51. Hansard, House of Commons, 15 Nov. 1983, vol. 48, cols. 705–6; TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, Note by R. C. Churchill, 5 Nov. 1983.  Hoinville and Smith, ‘The Rayner Review of Government Statistical Services’.  TNA, PREM 9/1, Review of Government Statistical Services. Report to the Prime Minister by Sir Derek Rayner, Dec. 1980.

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Families with or without children, with income at specific levels and number of children in those families  average thousands Great Britain

Below Supplementary Benefit level

In receipt of Supplementary Benefit

Above Supplementary Benefit level but within  per cent. of it

Families Per cent. of all families in Great Britain Children

. 

. 

. 



.

.

Fig. 8: Repeatedly delayed and eventually scrapped: the rising poverty count in Thatcher’s Britain according to the Low Income Families Tables, October 1983.

minimum and serve the government instead of society at large.51 As John Boreham subsequently explained in public appearances, the task of providing information to society would be left to a large extent to political parties, pressure groups, and the media in the future.52 Critics regarded the ‘Rayner doctrine’ as a critical turning point that eroded the integrity of government statistics and betrayed ‘a fundamental shift in attitude towards research in general’.53 The shift clearly marked a departure from the drive towards a more knowledge-based approach to policy-making that had been pursued by previous governments during the 1970s. The White Paper also announced concrete cuts to individual statistical programmes. Most importantly, it instructed the Central Statistical Office to stop its work on the distribution of wealth and to scale down the work on the distribution of income: the regular CSO estimates on income distribution in the official journal Economic Trends were cut back from annual publication to a three-year interval.54 This was a significant cut: the CSO analyses in Economic Trends carried similar weight to the earlier Blue Book tables previously published by the RCDIW and were widely regarded as the most authoritative source on trends in income inequality. CSO director John Boreham reassured critics that the reduced frequency was sufficient because year-to-year changes in the distribution of income were usually small, but this idea was soon proven wrong by the fast pace of social change during the 1980s.55 In practice, the decision meant that the first

 Ward and Doggett, Keeping Score, 82.  TNA, CAB 139/840, CSO, John Boreham, Speech to the International Statistical Institute, Madrid, 18 Oct. 1983.  Hansard, House of Commons, 2 July 1981, vol. 7, cols. 1127 ff; Rosie Waterhouse, The Independent, 9 Oct. 1989.  TNA, PREM 9/2, Review of Government Statistical Services. Report on the Central Statistical Office, Oct. 1980; Boreham, ‘The Central Statistical Office’.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/800.3/3, TUC, Note of Meeting with J. Boreham, CSO, Oct. 1981.

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official CSO analysis of income distribution covering the Thatcher years did not appear until December 1984; it showed a marked increase in the Gini coefficient after tax from 33.5 to 36.0 per cent between 1978/79 and 1981/82.56 This analysis was followed up by only one more CSO estimate in 1987 before Thatcher resigned; this time, the Gini coefficient increased before tax, but remained at 36 per cent after tax. The Thatcher government not only actively intervened to reduce the output of official statistics on distributional issues, it also discouraged the civil service from considering any such work in the first place. In the changed political climate in 1979, officials who were committed to government research and evidence-based policies, such as David Donnison at the Supplementary Benefits Commission, felt ‘like a voice from another world’. As Donnison observed, ‘there was no more talk about the redistributive effects of Government programmes’ in Whitehall; neither was there any suggestion to take such considerations into account in policy-making.57 Previous reform efforts that had aimed at a more informed decision-making process now seemed like a thing of the past – the work of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) on the Joint Approach to Social Policy (JASP) hit a roadblock when Thatcher came to power. The sub-project on Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals (DEPP) was launched as a two-year experiment in early 1978 but after Thatcher’s win in the general election in May 1979 it lapsed into ‘suspended animation’.58 When the change of government interrupted the experiment, CPRS officials did not even attempt to convince ministers of resuming the DEPP project. At the time of the general election, it had been ‘intended that a case would be made to an incoming Conservative government that the experiment should be allowed to run its full two-year course’, but several months later, CPRS officials ‘still did not consider that the time was opportune to raise the subject with ministers’. Eventually, DEPP was quietly given ‘the funeral rites’ in spring 1980.59 The last concrete results of the JASP initiative disappeared when the Thatcher government also discontinued the new fact sheets on social issues that were meant to help policy-makers in the decision-making process. The so-called Social Topic Notes were scrapped a few weeks after the general election, while the Social Briefs were initially continued, but finally also dropped in summer 1980, after the Prime Minister and other ministers questioned whether they bore any relevance to government decision-making

 CSO, ‘The Distribution of Income in the United Kingdom 1981/82’, Economic Trends (1984), 97–106; ‘The Distribution of Income in the United Kingdom 1984/85’, Economic Trends 409 (1987), 94–105.  Donnison, Politics of Poverty, 165–7.  See Chapter 4, section ‘Visions of Knowledge-Based Policy-Making: The Joint Approach to Social Policy’; TNA, CAB 184/642, CSO, G. Jackson, Chairman’s Brief for the CSO(S) Meeting on 11 Mar. 1980.  Ibid.; TNA, CAB 184/416, CPRS, Note by J. Crawley on Meeting between CPRS and CSO, 24 Apr. 1979; TNA, CAB 184/476, Correspondence between CPRS and CSO on future of DEPP, Nov. 1979–Jan. 1980.

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or merely duplicated the content of the official CSO journal Social Trends.60 Abandoning the efforts to improve the government machinery as had been proposed in the JASP initiative meant that the Thatcher government was content to accept the current state of affairs where the possible and actual effects of social policies were routinely ignored.61 While the Thatcher government generally showed little interest in the pursuit of more evidence-based policies, there was one notable exception, and that was the statistical assessment of the distributional effects of budget measures. When the analytical tools for this purpose were still under development in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the calculations usually took too long to be fully incorporated into the decisionmaking process, but due to further improvements this situation changed by the early 1980s. Treasury officials were now in a position to deliver faster results and to present ministers with detailed tables showing the effects of alternative policy options on incomes, the poverty trap, and other factors.62 In other words, the Thatcher government knew what it was doing when it took decisions on budget measures that could be expected ‘to benefit the (very much) better-off’, as in the 1984 budget.63 Ministers were not necessarily interested in such analyses for their own sake, though. One of the main reasons why the practice was continued under Thatcher lay in considerations of public relations. Ministers and officials wanted to be prepared for the ‘presentational and defensive problems’ that such budget packages posed for the government in public discussions.64 This was in fact not a completely novel idea. During the early 1970s, the aim of maintaining an advantage in knowledge had at least partially motivated the Treasury to develop computerized simulation models in the first place. In the early 1980s, however, this concern became even more urgent, as outside bodies and academic researchers caught up with the government, helped by technological advances in computing.65 In late 1983, a Treasury official raised the alarm over the fact that the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had developed a statistical tool to identify regressive effects of government budgets and was ready to use this information as ‘ammunition’ in the public debate.66 Starting in 1982, the Institute for Fiscal Studies had used its computer models of the tax/benefit system to produce assessments of the impact of the budget for the House of Commons library.67 Furthermore, in 1984, Anthony Atkinson and  TNA, CAB 184/476, CPRS, Note by J. Crawley on Consumer Review and Future of the Social Briefs, June 1979, Feb. 1980; TNA, CAB 184/642, CPRS, Note by J. Crawley, 25 July 1980.  TNA, CAB 184/322, CRPS, W. Plowden to Flaxen, CSO, 11 Oct. 1976.  See Chapter 3, section ‘Redistribution’; e.g. TNA, T 470/186, HMT, R. H. Aaronson to B. A. Mace, IR, 15 Feb. 1984.  TNA, T 470/186, IR, T. J. Painter to Mr Monger, 1 Feb. 1984.  Ibid.  See Chapter 4, section ‘The Politics of Inequality Knowledge under Heath’.  TNA, T 470/188, HMT, Smith to Monger, 7 Dec. 1983; Sloman, Transfer State, 162.  TNA, T 470/186, House of Commons Library, Background Paper no. 115, 17 Mar. 1983.

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Holly Sutherland’s new computer model at the LSE, TAXMOD, became operational – it allowed researchers to estimate the proportions of gainers and losers in reforms of the tax/benefit system.68 These innovations allowed new insights into government policies that were previously largely hidden from public view, a development that later also extended to other statistical fields and redressed the balance of power between the government and outside bodies. As the new computer models relied on the Family Expenditure Survey, they were not yet in a position to replicate the more comprehensive government statistics on income distribution and poverty that also included data from other sources, though; these statistical series could not be verified or deconstructed by anyone outside the government before the end of the decade. The government’s monopoly on inequality knowledge was not conducive to the quality of relevant statistical series – quite the reverse. Research and development in official statistics on income and wealth came to a near standstill during the 1980s. The government not only cut back key statistical series but also failed to invest in necessary improvements and innovations. Much of the work developed during the previous decades remained unfinished, and many long-standing gaps and deficiencies remained unaddressed in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Most of the recommendations made by the RCDIW were not followed up. On the subject of wealth distribution alone, the RCDIW had singled out a whole number of topics for future work, including patterns of inheritance and links between income and wealth accumulation, but following the Rayner review in 1980/81, the CSO was instructed to stop its work on wealth distribution altogether. Not surprisingly perhaps, the government’s statistical policies also prevented much more work on the incomes of top earners and the selfemployed, who were venerated by the Thatcherites as ‘wealth creators’ and poster boys for the envisioned ‘enterprise society’.69 That was despite the well-known deficiencies of existing statistics on the incomes of the self-employed, in particular. In light of these gaps in knowledge about the self-employed, it even seemed difficult to tell whether they represented ‘tax dodgers or wealth creators’, as one commentator observed in the mid 1970s.70 The RCDIW had not been able to make much progress in this area, either: the topic had been excluded from the remit of the Higher Incomes Reference in 1976, and although a smaller study undertaken by Commission staff in 1977 yielded some results, the economic position of the self-employed was still considered to be ‘one of the major gaps in our work to date’, as was observed at the RCDIW a few months before its dissolution in 1979.71 After 1979, there was little prospect of improvement. Ten years down the line, the information on the self-employed that

 TNA, T 470/186, IR, P. D. R. B. Hoffman to Mr Calder, 20 Feb. 1984; LSE Archive, Anthony B. Atkinson, Personal Papers, Atkinson/04/64.  Römer, ‘Boris Johnson, Thatcherism, and the Rhetoric of “Wealth Creators”’.  Graham Bannock, ‘Higher Incomes and the Market System’, The Banker, 20 Apr. 1976.  TNA, T 371/447, DE, A. Booth to D. Healy, HMT, Jan. 1978; TNA, BS 7/287, RCDIW, Chairman’s Steering Brief, 17 Oct. 1977.

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could be derived from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) was still regarded as ‘very unreliable’.72 The shortcomings of the FES were significant because it was the main data source for the computer models on the tax/benefit system that were used in Whitehall to analyse distributional effects of government policies, including the budget. The gaps in knowledge about higher incomes in Britain persisted throughout the decade. While earnings statistics left little doubt that top earners gained disproportionately during the 1980s, it was widely acknowledged that their income shares were understated in the FES due to lower response rates among the wealthy elite and widespread underreporting of investment incomes and other income components. Furthermore, the ‘very rich’ were known to be underrepresented in the underlying survey data – to the point that it seemed ‘probable that the very extreme of the distribution is missing altogether’ in the FES, as a statistician in the Department of Social Security concluded in autumn 1989.73 What was not known to the public was that the problem was exacerbated by certain practices in the computation of the statistics within the CSO: government statisticians arbitrarily deleted extreme earnings such as ‘large City bonuses’ from the datasets, as they were regarded as outliers.74 When government statisticians discussed the problem in 1990, they were aware of the ‘political significance’ of the issue in light of ‘the growing inequality apparent in the FES data’, and one of them wondered: ‘Where does removal of implausible cases end and doctoring the data begin’?75 Government statisticians had been aware of this problem for several years at least, but tackling the underlying causes was not a priority for the GSS under Thatcher. Similarly, the GSS under Thatcher made hardly any progress on statistics on regional disparities and statistics on the economic situation of ethnic minorities. Both subjects had been identified as major gaps in statistical knowledge during the 1970s, and both represented critical dimensions of growing economic inequality in the United Kingdom during the 1980s.76 But, again, there were no attempts to close these gaps while Thatcher was in power. By the end of the decade, the Department of Social Security still resisted calls to include regional analyses of the incidence of low incomes in the department’s new statistical series, Households Below Average Income (HBAI). Internal discussions in 1992 showed that it was technically possible to break down the income data by deciles and regions, but the department’s policy was ‘blanket refusal to produce regional data at any level’.77 In the event, the department did not begin to include regional analyses in the HBAI series until 1994/95. The same HBAI

     

TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, C. Kent to Mr Bell, 27 Oct. 1989. TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, K. Sear to R. U. Redpath, 24 Oct. 1989. TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, K. Sear to W. Barron, 29 Jan. 1990. Ibid. Hudson, ‘Thatcherism and its Geographical Legacies’. TNA, JB 4/262/1, DSS, Adkin to Ray, 4 Sept. 1992.

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edition also introduced ethnicity as an analytical category in the low-income statistics for the first time. This topic, too, had been neglected throughout the 1980s. By the end of the decade, the Department of Social Security had not even started to collect any data on ethnic minorities in its administrative statistics.78 An underlying cause for these long-standing gaps in British official statistics lay in the relatively small sample sizes of the principal household surveys, which severely limited the possibilities of breaking down the data by different variables and smaller sub-groups.79 Increasing the sample sizes and obtaining more representative subsamples of low-income households and other sub-groups had been a major concern for experts and government statisticians for many years, but even the RCDIW had missed the opportunity in 1974–79 to address this critical issue as it gave preference to administrative data.80 After 1979, the Thatcher government not only chose not to devote any resources to this issue, but even exacerbated the problem by imposing further cuts. The so-called Family Finances Survey which was hailed as the largest poverty survey ‘ever mounted in this country’ was discontinued after the first edition in 1981.81 Furthermore, the 1980 Rayner review recommended substantial reductions in the expenditure on the main household surveys, the FES and the General Household Survey.82 As this chapter will demonstrate, this policy eventually backfired at the end of the decade when government statisticians discovered fundamental sampling errors in the official low-income statistics. Ironically, this episode finally convinced departmental statisticians at the DSS to develop a new large-scale income survey, the Family Resources Survey, which has remained the basis of low-income statistics in the country until the present day. The cuts to statistical programmes under Thatcher significantly reduced the amount of statistical knowledge on economic inequality that was available to the public. Researchers outside the government were able to compensate for the dearth of official figures from large-scale government surveys only to a certain extent. Unofficial social surveys that were carried out by various activists and researchers during the decade were no match for the main British household survey, the FES, which was based on a sample of about 7,000 households. One of the largest independent investigations undertaken in the early 1980s was the ‘Breadline Britain’ survey with a sample size of 1,174

 TNA, BN 82/363, DHSS, I. Williams, draft reply to PQ, 4 Mar. 1988; TNA, JB 4/108, DHSS, Correspondence concerning ‘research on ethnic minorities/ urban problems’, 1981–3.  TNA, AT 72/104, CSO, Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals, Apr. 1977; on the problems flowing from the limited sample size of the British household surveys see Chapter 3, section ‘The Production of Knowledge on Economic Inequality’, and Chapter 4, section ‘The Survey Gap’.  Chris Pond, New Society, 19 Jan. 1978; Hansard, House of Commons, 23 Feb. 1982, vol. 18, cols. 347–8.  See Chapter 4, section ‘Checks to the Transformation of the Knowledge Regime, 1976–79’.  TNA, PREM 9/2, Review of Government Statistical Services. Report on the Central Statistical Office, Oct. 1980; TNA, PREM 9/1, Review of Government Statistical Services. Report to the Prime Minister by Sir Derek Rayner, Dec. 1980.

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persons.83 Modelled after Peter Townsend’s concept of relative deprivation, the survey set out to measure disparities in living conditions and access to amenities; the findings were presented in a headline-grabbing television series in 1983. In 1985/86, Peter Townsend was also commissioned by the Greater London Council to direct a survey of living standards in the capital, which collected income data from 2,700 interviewees: the survey provided a rare London-wide snapshot, but as a stand-alone enquiry it could not capture trends over time, although follow-up surveys were planned.84 The same limitation applied to borough-level analyses such as the large social survey carried out in Islington in 1987, again in co-operation with Townsend.85 Research officers at the GLC constructed time series on overall changes in income distribution in London between 1961 and 1981 based on the FES, but after 1981 the size of the sub-sample covering London fell below acceptable levels.86 Other local surveys were even smaller in scale or measured poverty by non-financial proxy indicators such as unemployment or the number of children entitled to free school meals.87 In the absence of a regular flow of reliable income statistics for smaller geographical areas, local authorities mostly relied on proxy indicators from the Census to pinpoint spatialized inequalities, an approach that was developed by the Inner Cities Directorate at the Department of the Environment in connection with the Urban Programme of the 1970s.88 In London, for example, the Intelligence Unit of the GLC used data from the 1981 Census to calculate an index of deprivation for each and every London ward.89 The index was based on seven different indicators including housing conditions, economic activity, and ethnic origin. It yielded a map of London that showed broad patterns of deprivation across the GLC area, with Spitalfields in Tower Hamlets reaching the highest ‘Z-score’ of social disadvantage.90 Another proxy indicator

 TNA, BN 149/16, DHSS, Press reactions and briefings; booklet Breadline Britain: The Findings of the Television Series (London, 1983).  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/S/14, Townsend, Corrigan, and Kowarzik, Poverty and Labour in London; Peter Townsend, Application to Peabody Trust, project ‘The London Monitor’, Oct. 1988.  Islington Local History Centre, Islington Council, ‘Service Provision and Living Standards in Islington’ (London, 1987).  In 1982, the size of the London sub-sample was 853, but the previous sample of 1,300 was considered ‘just large enough’: GLC, London: Facts and Figures (London, 1984), fig. 17; London Metropolitan Archive, Official Publications, vol. 160; LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/ S/14, GLC, Low Incomes in London: Evidence from the Family Expenditure Survey (London, 1983), 5.  ‘ILEA Report Paints Picture of Poverty’, The Times Educational Supplement, 1 Mar. 1985.  See Chapter 4, section ‘Spatialized Inequalities: Local Knowledge in London and Islington’.  London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/DG/PUB/01/149, Peter Congdon, ‘Social Structure in the London Boroughs: Evidence from the 1981 Census and Changes since 1971’ (GLC Intelligence Unit, London, 1984); London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/DG/ISG/08/30 and GLC/DG/ISG/9/95, Correspondence on past and planned deprivation studies in the GLC, 1974/75.  London Metropolitan Archive, Official Publications, vol. 160, GLC, Working for London. Annual Report 1983/84, 30.

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for income suggested by the Department of the Environment was the number of Supplementary Benefit recipients that could be obtained from local DHSS offices.91 Apart from local authorities, DHSS statistics on the numbers of families on SB were also an indispensable source for anti-poverty campaign groups that lacked sufficient resources to engage in social investigations of their own. The Child Poverty Action Group relied heavily on ‘official statistics and other studies’ in their campaigns and publicity, while the group could only undertake ‘small-scale research’ themselves.92 For example, in the 1987 edition of CPAG’s booklet ‘Poverty – The Facts’, the main source cited to trace the incidence of poverty up to 1983 were the official 1986 DHSS Low Income Families Tables.93 This was a reminder that there were few alternative sources that carried enough weight to allow stakeholders outside the government to challenge or substitute for official statistics on income distribution and poverty in Britain. Given the scarcity of alternatives, the impact of the government’s cuts to these statistics was all the more severe, even though certain statistical series that had a bearing on distributional issues were left unscathed. In particular, the government made no attempt to cut back official statistics on earnings, a move that had presentational advantages. The Department of Employment continued to publish the results from the New Earnings Survey as usual: the statistics reflected the widening dispersion between top earners and the low-paid but also showed overall increases in average pay, a fact that the Thatcher government used extensively to score political points.94 Furthermore, the CSO’s analyses on the redistributive effects of taxes and benefits in Economic Trends were continued on an annual basis as before 1979. However, this series could not replace the CSO’s income distribution estimates because it did not include any information on trends in income inequality or redistribution over time. Finally, information on social inequalities was available in some of the issues of the CSO journal Social Trends, although critics noticed that the journal put less emphasis on distributional questions than before 1979.95 The overall effects of the retrenchment of the statistical system were considerable. Compared to the latter half of the 1970s when the RCDIW and other bodies provided a steady flow of authoritative statistics on trends in inequality, such information was sporadic during the 1980s.  London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/DG/ISG/5/6, Department of the Environment, Inner City Partnerships: Basic Statistical Indicators, Jan. 1978.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/19, CPAG, Paper for Executive Committee Meeting on 3 June 1988: CPAG’s Longer Term Strategy.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/EF/1987–89, CPAG, Poverty: The Facts, 1987.  E.g. London Metropolitan Archive, Official Publications, vol. 156, GLC, Comparative Economic and Financial Statistics: On London and the Rest of England (London: GLC, 1984).  Peter Wilsher, ‘Who is More Equal than Whom?’, Sunday Times, 11 Dec. 1983; Joe Rogaly, ‘A Kinder, Gentler Budget Surplus’, Financial Times, 20 Jan. 1989; Steve Platt, ‘Poor Statistics’, New Statesman and Society, 18 Jan. 1991; CSO, Social Trends, 16 (1986), 91.

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The retrenchment of the statistical system created a situation where no authoritative official figures about Thatcher’s record on poverty and income inequality were available until 1983/84. The situation was exacerbated by the government’s frequent interventions in unemployment statistics: in the years up to 1989, the government made a total of 30 changes to statistical definitions, of which 24 lowered the unemployment count.96 The changes were associated with modifications to benefit rules and bureaucratic procedures in the administration of unemployment-related benefits, but officials at the Department of Employment were ‘anxious’ to analyse the effects of the proposed changes on the unemployment count before they were announced.97 In some cases, lowering the unemployment count was at least a subsidiary goal of the changes. In 1987, for example, officials at the Department of Employment discussed ‘a number of possible procedural changes affecting the way benefits are paid to the unemployed which would both ease administration, and, in some cases, remove from the benefit claimant count groups who, arguably, should not be there’.98 Officials at the department were conscious of the ‘weaknesses in our statistical system’. In a confidential note in October 1987, the director of the statistics division at the department, Paul Dworkin, conceded that although some of the public criticisms of the department’s statistics ‘have been overstated, there is no doubt that there is an element of truth in them’.99 To address these issues, Dworkin and his colleagues proposed major improvements to one of the main statistical sources in this field, the Labour Force Survey, but to their disappointment, the Secretary of State decided in autumn 1987 not to introduce ‘an enhanced LFS’, a decision that was regarded as ‘a major setback’ by Dworkin.100 The developments even prompted him to conclude that ‘we have reached the stage [. . .] where the question of statistical integrity needs to be addressed’.101 In other words, insiders such as Dworkin thought that the objectivity of official statistics was seriously compromised by political manipulation on the part of the government. The government’s handling of the statistics not only rendered the unemployment count less reliable as an indicator for economic hardship in a period of re-emerging mass unemployment and related poverty; the interventions in the statistics also hampered the ability of officials ‘to understand what is happening in the real economy’ and in the labour market.102 Finally, the manipulations fatally undermined the credibility of official statistics in the public eye for years to come.

 Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, 151; Rieger, ‘Making Britain Work Again’.  TNA, LAB 17/523, DE, A. Wheatcroft to A. Cleveland, DHSS, 18 Nov. 1987; TNA, JB 4/265, DHSS, draft paper ‘Unemployment Statistics: The Facts behind the Figures’, undated [1991].  TNA, LAB 17/523, DE, M. E. G. Fogden to Mr Lee / SoS, 26 Oct. 1987.  TNA, LAB 17/523, DE, Note and Paper by P. D. Dworkin, Statistical Monitoring of Employment and Unemployment, 7 Oct. 1987.  Ibid.  Ibid.  TNA, LAB 17/523, DE, P. D. Dworkin to Mr Fogden, 22 Sept. 1987.

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For the remainder of Thatcher’s premiership and beyond, the government faced frequent allegations of ‘fiddling with the figures’. To some extent, similar controversies over statistics and figures were familiar from past debates under previous governments. During the 1960s and 1970s, governments of both colours drew criticism from academic experts such as Peter Townsend for delays and omissions in official reports as well as for allegedly misleading statistical definitions that wilfully lowered the poverty count. Similarly, the Child Poverty Action Group had attacked both Labour and Conservative governments over their records on poverty.103 However, the allegations raised against the Thatcher government were of a different quality. The accusations were clearly more serious and sparked considerably more outrage. Labour’s antipoverty champion Frank Field and fellow Labour MP Jeff Rooker wrote a letter of protest to the Prime Minister, accusing the government of deliberately reducing the volume of information on poverty in the country – even the Heath government had not attempted to suppress statistics on low incomes or unemployment despite unfavourable findings, Field and Rooker pointed out.104 In spring 1982, the Trade Union Congress, supported by Frank Field and Peter Townsend, even mounted a public campaign to ‘save our statistics’.105 The general thrust of the campaign was directed against the cuts to statistical services across the board that were imposed in the wake of the Rayner review, but the TUC was ‘particularly concerned about the impact which cuts in the statistics on incomes and wealth, employment, and earnings will have on informed public discussion of these important issues’.106 Thatcher and her ministers were unimpressed by the criticism and gave short shrift to all allegations of statistical manipulation. In a prepared response to Frank Field, Thatcher asserted that the ‘charge that it is our policy to cut down on information about the poor for ulterior motives is utterly groundless’.107 Consequently, the government pressed on with the implementation of the Rayner review, and some in the Cabinet even urged a faster pace in trimming spending on social statistics.108 The Rayner review led to cuts to statistical programmes in the magnitude of 20 per cent of the total budget of the GSS, but the GSS director made assurances in public speeches that the previous level of ‘quality has been maintained’.109 In internal

 Child Poverty Action Group, Poverty and the Labour Government (London, 1970); LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/E/7 and CPAG/EF 1978–9, Press releases and pamphlets, e.g. ‘Children Worse Off Under Labour?’, Feb. 1978.  TNA, JB 4/3, Frank Field and Jeff Rooker to the PM, 30 Oct. 1980.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/800.3/3, TUC Press Release, 1 Mar. 1982; Report of meeting with the head of the GSS, 11 Feb. 1982.  Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS.292D/800.3/3, TUC, Press Note: TUC Backs Campaign to Defend Statistical Services, 1 Mar. 1982.  TNA, JB 4/3, Prime Minister to F. Field, 19 Nov. 1980.  TNA, CAB 164/1723, Lord Gowrie to Prime Minister, 30 June 1983.  TNA, CAB 139/840, CSO, John Boreham, Speech to the International Statistical Institute, Madrid, 18 Oct. 1983.

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discussions, however, the impact of the cuts appeared in a very different light. In his annual report on the GSS to the Cabinet in June 1983, John Boreham warned about the ‘adverse effects’ of the cuts on the quality of official statistics, a warning that was swiftly brushed off by one of Thatcher’s Cabinet ministers.110 In the subject area of income and wealth statistics, the reduced capacities of the GSS became apparent on various levels. To begin with, the government could not be held to account as parliamentary questions on the subject went unanswered. When Labour’s anti-poverty champion Michael Meacher enquired in spring 1982 how the distribution of income had changed since Thatcher came to power, he got the reply that ‘definitive figures’ were ‘not available for years beyond 1978/79 – an internal background note attributed the lack of information to the cuts imposed in connection with the Rayner review.111 The impact of the cuts also constrained the GSS’s ability to engage with existing work programmes of international organizations, even if ministers and officials were not very keen to participate in such programmes anyway. For example, when the UN Conference of European Statisticians advanced a programme on international comparisons of income distribution in summer 1983, the British delegation was reluctant to commit to the proposal: the ‘main difficulty in co-operating’ was the ‘lack of resources devoted to income distribution work as such’ in the United Kingdom, which was currently ‘only carried out every three years post-Rayner’.112 Most importantly perhaps, the cuts also affected public discourse on poverty and inequality. In parliamentary debates, both sides of the house continued to use a ‘torrent of statistics’, but as authoritative figures on trends in income inequality were unavailable, MPs resorted to proxy indicators that were more limited in their diagnostic potential and carried less weight. Consequently, the lack of official income statistics transformed what was sayable about inequality during the early 1980s. This was demonstrated, for example, in a major debate in the House of Commons on 28 June 1984 when the opposition used an allotted day to bring up the topic of ‘the rich and the poor’.113 Both sides quarrelled over earnings statistics and other figures but in the absence of definitive information about recent movements in the distribution of final incomes, the basic question of the direction of social change in the country remained open to interpretation. While Labour MPs cited anecdotal evidence from their local constituencies that illustrated the ‘widening of the gap between the rich and the poor’, their counterparts on the government benches plainly denied that this was actually the case. The Conservative MP for Horsham, Peter Hordern, claimed in his contributions to the debate to have ‘demonstrated that there was no growing inequality’.

 TNA, CAB 164/1723, GSS, Annual Report, 1982/83, 21 June 1983; Lord Gowrie to Prime Minister, 30 June 1983.  TNA, T 470/146, Draft reply and background notes to parliamentary question from Michael Meacher, 11 Mar. 1982.  TNA, CAB 108/707, CSO, Briefing for Conference of European Statisticians, 1 June 1983.  Hansard, House of Commons, 28 June 1984, vol. 62, cols. 1174–260.

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There was clearly a vacuum of knowledge that caused uncertainty over basic trends in inequality and allowed completely contradictory claims to coexist. The clashes over the government’s record on inequality and living standards cut right to the heart of the Thatcherite agenda and posed a serious challenge for government public relations. Thatcher and her ministers claimed to reverse Britain’s ‘longterm decline’ by ‘creating more wealth and more jobs’ and by strengthening ‘incentives’ so that ‘hard work’ would pay off.114 The problem was that a range of social and economic statistics indicated that this approach did not work. As an internal memorandum pointed out in June 1984, the ‘widening gap between rich and poor’ was ‘hard to defend unless you can show (a) that incentives have been restored at the bottom as well as at the top, and (b) that the safety net’ and ‘living standards at the bottom have gone up since 1979’.115 Even after more than four years in office, Thatcher had yet to deliver on her promises of rising living standards through increased incentives. The hollowness of this narrative was also noticed at the Treasury, where officials struggled to provide ministers with convincing defensive arguments for public debates. In the preparation of briefing material for the forthcoming parliamentary debate on ‘the rich and the poor’ on 28 June 1984, one official found only ‘weak-ish’ evidence of ‘positive aspects’ that needed to be ‘worked up a bit’ for an effective defence of the government’s narrative:116 There is very little positive we can say on this, since, frankly, this Government has never seriously pretended to be interested in improving the distribution of income – rather au contraire if anything; its (implicit) policy has been one of trying to improve the lot of the poorest sections of the community not by allocating them a larger chunk of a static national cake (in the style of earlier administrations) but by providing the incentives necessary to enlarge the national cake, and hence improve the standards of living for all. Unfortunately, the policy has yet to show substantive results.

Given this presentational dilemma and in light of increasing attacks from the opposition, the stance of government ministers and officials became noticeably more defensive. This became apparent in practices of public relations work across Whitehall. Alongside the Treasury, responsibility for policies pertaining to poverty and inequality rested with the Department of Health and Social Security, which was also responsible for the main statistics on poverty, the so-called LIFT. In contrast to the environment at the CSO, the production and communication of the LIFT was placed in a more political context at the DHSS, where departmental statisticians collaborated with civil servants from policy divisions – whose views on statistical matters were not impartial because it was part of their job to defend their ministers’ policies in the public. Both branches

 Hansard, House of Commons, 12 June 1979, vol. 968, col. 240; Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 12 Oct. 1979, at [https://www.margaret thatcher.org/document/104147], accessed 20 August 2022.  TNA, BN 149/26, DHSS, Note by Hermione Parker, 24 June 1984.  TNA, T 470/188, HMT, R. Smith to G. P. Smith, 21 June 1984. Emphasis in the original.

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worked together in the preparation of briefings for the Cabinet and the Prime Minister: the departmental records contain countless elaborate dossiers and briefings discussing possible responses to new academic studies, newspaper articles, broadcasts, and parliamentary questions on poverty and inequality. Before the briefings were used in parliament or in other public appearances, they were further edited in meetings between officials, ministers, and their special advisers, but the narratives about statistical questions were mainly developed by civil servants, while special advisers usually only ‘sexed up’ the language.117 Briefings on social security matters were also produced by other government departments and external partisan bodies, notably the Conservative Research Department (CRD), but the CRD input was not as strong on statistical details as the DHSS briefings.118 Even Thatcher’s personal advisers in the Policy Unit turned to the specialists in the DHSS or the Treasury when they required advice on statistics and how to spin them.119 In other words, departmental officials played a crucial role in constructing the government’s narratives in this subject area. In comparison to similar briefings and discussions on presentational issues in the DHSS and other government departments during the 1970s, the DHSS / DSS briefings during the 1980s were more professionally organized, with sections on ‘lines to take’ or ‘defensive lines’ that often contained ready-made political sound-bites.120 Sections on ‘bull points’ with statistical ammunition for the public debate were often followed by sections on ‘elephant traps’ that warned ministers and officials about evidence that contradicted the claims advanced under the ‘bull points’, and other pitfalls. The records also reveal a growing inclination to political spin. While the Treasury under Heath often decided ‘to maintain a low profile rather than enter into detailed arguments’ in public debates on poverty and inequality during the early 1970s,121 the DHSS briefings in the 1980s betray greater preparedness to advance ‘bull points’ despite numerous ‘elephant traps’. The heightened concern with public relations partly reflected a more general trend in British society.122 On the other hand, it can also be explained

 Interview by the author with Melinda Gilbert (née Libby), special adviser to John Moore in 1988–9, London, 8 Aug. 2019.  E.g. Bodleian Library, Conservative Party Archive, CRD B/27/6, CRD, Briefing for the Debate in the House of Commons on the Disparity between the Rich and the Poor, 27 June 1984; TNA, BN 82/363, CRD, Notes for the Debate on the Opposition Motion on 28 Jan. 1981.  TNA, T 470/188, Andrew Turnbull to Kerr, Treasury, 4 Oct. 1983; TNA, BN 149/44/1, Brian Griffiths to John Moore, 28 June 1989; TNA, JB 4/59/2, Andrew Dunlop to David Allsop, 6 Mar. 1990.  E.g. TNA, T 338/1008 and T 328/1227, HMT, Correspondence about parliamentary questions on inequality and poverty from the early 1970s; TNA, JB 4/20, DHSS/DSS, Correspondence about antipoverty campaign groups, 1976–89. See Chapter 4, section, ‘The Politics of Inequality Knowledge under the Heath Government’. In July 1988, the DHSS was split, and the social security side renamed the Department of Social Security (DSS).  TNA, T 328/1008, HMT, Folger to Hornsby, 5 Dec. 1972.  Miller and Dinan, ‘The Rise of the PR Industry in Britain’.

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by the pedagogic impetus of the Thatcher government.123 Educating the public seemed even more imperative as Thatcher’s premiership wore on. As one of Thatcher’s personal advisers, Brian Griffiths, put it in an internal memorandum in 1987, it seemed necessary to ‘launch formidable campaigns to inform and convince the public’ and to prove to their opponents ‘that they are wrong and that we are right’.124 By this time, many Britons associated Thatcherism first and foremost with ‘selfishness and a lack of concern for those in genuine need’, Griffiths argued, and the government needed to tackle the ‘fundamental task’ of convincing the public that Thatcherism also stood for ‘fairness’.125 The more aggressive style in public relations became apparent in the handling of parliamentary questions in the DHSS. As the government systematically reduced public access to statistical knowledge about poverty and inequality, the opposition increasingly relied on parliamentary questions as a means to extract statistical information from the government, a technique that was also advocated by the Child Poverty Action Group.126 In order to challenge the government narrative of ‘a successful economy’ and ‘better living standards for all’, opposition MPs tabled more and more parliamentary questions about the relatively slow increases of earnings at the bottom of the distribution. In early 1984, DHSS officials observed that ‘the questioning has become more sophisticated and asked for the real take-home pay of those on the top and bottom deciles’.127 In response to the increased questioning, DHSS officials adopted a ‘slightly more rigorous approach to answering some statistical PQs’, as an internal note put it, and in early 1980, they sought ministerial approval for adopting an even ‘more rigorous approach’.128 This meant that officials treated the preparation of replies to parliamentary with greater caution. Subsequently, they tended to phrase the replies in ways that gave away as little statistical information as possible. In response to a parliamentary question by Labour MP Gordon Brown about women’s incomes in 1988, for example, officials provided figures that were deliberately ‘hard to interpret’, as an internal note explained: they only represented average incomes, which had the effect of ‘obscur[ing] differences’ between women in various status groups; tables detailing ‘these differences’, which proved to be ‘very large’ in parts, were withheld by the department.129 Such methods evoked criticism even from within the department. In October 1986, one of the departmental statisticians, Nick Kew, complained about the ‘deliberate opacity’ in replies to parliamentary questions that seemed to have the ‘intended effect’ that ‘the questioner is so confused

 Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People, 83.  TNA, PREM 19/3494, Policy Unit, Griffiths to the PM, 10 June 1987.  Ibid.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/11, CPAG, Guidance Notes for Branches, 1979.  Hansard, House of Commons debate, 28 June 1984; TNA, BN 149/24, DHSS, Dewsbury to Smith, 13 Feb. 1984.  TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, Note of meeting to discuss detailed statistical PQs, 1 Feb. 1980.  TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, Williams to Allsop, 21 Nov. 1988.

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that he cannot work out what, if anything, the figures are saying and ceases to try’. From the point of view of this government statistician, nothing less than the integrity of official statistics was at stake:130 I accept that if Ministers wish to exploit to the maximum any latitude that the wording of a PQ allows, then that is their prerogative. I also accept that providing the answer remains factually correct and not too grossly misleading, then no overriding issue of statistical integrity arises. However a Ministerial policy of deliberate opacity in the presentation of statistics (which certainly seems to be operating with the current batch of LIF [Low Income Families] PQs) is not one that most statisticians, including myself, could feel happy about let alone positively support.

In the construction of government narratives about poverty and living standards, ministers and officials were increasingly creative with the facts. The briefings put together by civil servants at the DHSS revealed a growing gulf between what they knew about recent social trends from internal government sources and how they presented these trends to the public in prepared statements. The government response to the public debates surrounding the publication of the Low Income Families Tables (LIFT) in 1983 was a case in point. The tables published in October 1983 showed a rise of 20 to 30 per cent in the number of families and individuals with incomes less than 40 per cent above the level of SB.131 Given that Frank Field and other commentators equated some measure of the SB level with ‘poverty’, as was noted critically at the DHSS, officials were in agreement that ‘we will continue to refute the credibility of this approach on the usual grounds including that it is paradoxical that improved benefits should increase the number of poor people’.132 Consequently, the ‘line to take’ recommended to ministers in the departmental briefing was to point out ‘the nonsensical effect of seemingly creating poverty by raising the supplementary benefit level and making people better off’.133 Officials were well aware that this was not the whole story. One official at the DHSS expressed ‘doubt’ whether upratings in SB rates for many families with children ‘played a significant part in the increase’ – instead, he was clear that ‘the major explanation of the increase is, of course, the growth in unemployment’, alongside the ‘increase in local authority rents in 1980’ as ‘another major contributing factor’.134 Tellingly, a briefing prepared by DHSS official Ian Williams in September 1986 listed seven different reasons for the increase in the SB count in 1979 to 1983, including rising unemployment, the fall in earnings for the lowest decile, increases in local authority rents, and various changes to the tax/benefit system; as Williams noted, however, ‘of the above reasons, only the

 TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, Kew to Williams, 31 Oct. 1986 (not sent). Emphasis in the original. LIF was an acronym for low-income families that was used for the Hansard tables on the numbers at or above SB.  Hansard, House of Commons, 15 Nov. 1983, vol. 48, cols. 705–6.  TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, Note by R. C. Churchill, 5 Nov. 1983.  TNA, BN 149/16, DHSS, Briefing on LIF tables, Nov. 1983.  TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, Note by R. C. Churchill, 5 Nov. 1983.

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real increase in supplementary benefit rates has been cited by ministers’.135 In other words: while ministers publicly dismissed the rise in poverty apparent in the LIFT as a statistical artefact, there were, in fact, real reasons that were rooted in government policies. Far from admitting any of these deeper causes, the government even sought to exonerate itself for the steep rise in unemployment. Instead, it laid the blame at the door of the unemployed themselves: in public relations, officials at the Treasury advanced the narrative that workers had ‘priced themselves out of jobs’ through overblown wage demands, implicitly suggesting that workers in Britain would have to accept much lower wage levels to avoid unemployment.136 The same arguments were rehearsed again when the next edition of the LIFT was published in summer 1986 and caused a new wave of public protests from campaign groups about the growing ‘poverty plague’ in Britain.137 In a briefing for the Prime Minister, DHSS official Ian Williams recommended the usual ‘line to take’: that the government had ‘a fine record in helping those worst off’ – ironically, Thatcher’s ministers even boasted about increases in overall welfare expenditure to boost their social credentials, despite their original intention to roll back public spending.138 On the question of rising poverty, Williams suggested the argument that ‘one of the main factors behind the growth in the low income statistics’ lay in real increases in SB rates.139 In fact, internal calculations showed that upratings in SB accounted only for up to a third of the rise in the incidence of low incomes, and in internal correspondence it was acknowledged that much of the press coverage was ‘correct’ in highlighting other factors such as growing unemployment and the widening gap between low-paid and better paid workers.140 Nonetheless, the government stuck to this defensive line throughout the decade – despite the fact that the real value of Supplementary Benefit ‘remained virtually static’ during the 1980s, as researchers at the IFS established in 1990.141 To a certain extent, the events and debates of the 1980s thus vindicated the much criticized SB level as an indicator of poverty: although it was subject to certain qualifications, these could be quantified relatively precisely, and even government officials found that increases in this indicator actually reflected mounting hardship in parts of the population. Alongside all the political spinning, ministers and officials at times even resorted to outright suppression of sensitive statistical figures. After the publication of the Low Income Family Tables in 1983, the next edition was due in 1985, but was delayed until 1986. In a much debated political move, the government eventually published

      

TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, I. Williams to A. Bowtell, 29 Sept. 1986. TNA, JB 4/3, DHSS, Note by R. C. Churchill, 5 Nov. 1983. TNA, JB 4/135, CPAG / Low Pay Unit, Joint Briefing: The Rising Tide of Poverty, 21 Oct. 1986. E.g. Hansard, House of Commons, 21 Oct. 1986, vol. 102, col. 936. TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, I. Williams to L. Maderson, 21 Oct. 1986. Ibid. Johnson and Webb, ‘Low Income Families, 1979–1987’, 61.

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the tables by placing them in the House of Commons library on 25 July 1986 – three hours after parliament had gone into recess. This obvious attempt to avoid public scrutiny caused ‘angry protests’ on the part of Labour MPs and anti-poverty activists, and the ensuing ‘cover-up row’ attracted considerable media attention.142 Government spokespersons explained the delay with reference to technical difficulties and denied any ulterior motives, but the departmental records corroborate contemporary suspicions that the delay was politically engineered. In late July 1986, one of the departmental statisticians, Nick Kew, criticized in an internal note that ‘ministers and officials did continue to ascribe the delay to “technical difficulties” months after this ceased to be the case – most notably in Tony Newton’s evidence to the Social Services Committee in June.’143 Internal enquiries in the DHSS showed that the tables had been ready for publication by April or early May 1986; after this point, the timing of the publication had been left to the discretion of two ministers and the Secretary of State, namely John Major, Tony Newton, and Norman Fowler.144 The delay between early May and late July eventually made a considerable difference because it was during this period that parliament debated the government’s landmark Social Security Bill – it passed both chambers in May and July.145 As a senior civil servant in the DHSS, Ann Bowtell, explained in an internal note, the delayed publication of the Low Incomes Families Tables prevented them from ‘becoming an issue’: ‘Had they been published they probably would have become an issue, and possibly made the Bill more difficult to get through.’146 Similar political considerations prevented the publication of key statistics in the run-up to general elections. Throughout the decade, no up-to-date statistics on poverty and income distribution were available during general election campaigns, neither in 1983 nor in 1987. In 1987, the latest available figures related to 1983. The LIFT for 1985 were due for publication in the autumn, but when civil servants in the DHSS discussed planning in late 1986, they already anticipated the political reasoning against timely publication: ‘Ministers may be wary about autumn 1987 publication of the 1985 figures depending on the timing of the election.’147 Subsequently, the publication of the statistics was delayed until May 1988. The same practice continued after Thatcher’s resignation: in the run-up to the general election in 1992, the main results of the new low-income statistics, ‘Households Below Average Income’, were expected to be  ‘Cover-up Row over Poverty Figures’, Daily Mail, 26 July 1986; ‘Outcry over “Cover Up” on Poverty’, Daily Express, 26 July 1986; ‘Report on Poverty too Late for MPs’, The Times, 26 July 1986; ‘More People Living in Poverty’, Daily Telegraph, 26 July 1986.  TNA, JB 4/134, DHSS, Kew to Scott, 29 July 1986.  TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, Bowtell to Chant, 1 Sept. 1986.  Hansard, House of Commons, 20 May 1986, vol. 98, cols. 263–92; Hansard, House of Lords, 24 July 1986, vol. 479, cols. 421–36; Howard Glennerster, British Social Policy: 1945 to the Present (Oxford, 2007), 183–7.  TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, Bowtell to Chant, 1 Sept. 1986.  TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, Walsmsley to Hickey, 18 Nov. 1986.

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available by March, but ministers decided against the release of ‘headline figures’ before the election date on 9 April, in order not ‘to become embroiled in a renewed debate about poverty and inequality’.148 This had not been imposed by ministers, but suggested by a civil servant in the DSS, David Allsop, who had warned in July 1991 that ‘we might be causing Ministers some embarrassment if we go for publication in April 1992’.149 Instead, he suggested that Ministers be asked ‘what priority they give to producing these figures and how they would feel if things slipped a bit.’ This sort of handling of official statistics was not an exception under Thatcher. Similar practices and strategies in the management of politically sensitive statistical knowledge can be observed in many other subject areas that had bearing on the larger question of how the government’s policies reshaped social life and the political economy in Britain. Officials had to come up with ‘lines to take’ on a broad range of difficult issues where statistics showed unfavourable developments. In the field of taxation, it was found that the government’s fiscal policies led to higher tax burdens for most taxpayers, contrary to Thatcher’s promises to bring down taxes and reward ‘hard work’. Analyses during the early 1980s showed that the aggregate tax burden as a share of GDP was higher under Thatcher than under the previous Labour government, and the share of personal income devoted to income tax and National Insurance contributions rose for all groups except the highest earners: those with earnings of five times the average were the only group whose tax burden was reduced.150 The credibility of Thatcher’s talk of increased ‘incentives’ was further undermined by findings about the worsening of the poverty trap. It cancelled out large proportions of earnings from employment when additional earnings beyond a certain threshold brought workers on low incomes into the income tax net and led to the cumulative withdrawal of their social security benefits – the poverty trap was therefore seen as a strong disincentive to work.151 Government officials were unable to deny these effects: the changes to and the effects of the tax/benefit system were brought out into the open through parliamentary questions by knowledgeable MPs such as Michael Meacher and analyses at the IFS and the LSE.152 Much less conclusive evidence was available to the public about the impact of the government’s major social security reforms of 1986 and 1988. The reforms were designed to rationalize social security and to reduce the effects of the poverty trap: Supplementary Benefit was replaced by a simpler system of Income Support, and rules and rates of various benefits were aligned.153 The reforms drew widespread criticism,

 TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, Harris to Boyle, 14 Oct. 1991, with draft letter to No. 10; DSS, Barron to Boyle, 16 Nov. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/267/1, DSS, Allsop to Harris, 18 July 1991.  TNA, T 470/188, HMT, A. N. Ridley to the Chancellor, Tax Burdens under Successive Governments, 16 May 1983.  TNA, T 470/186, HMT, S. A. Robson to Mr Moore, Family Support and the Budget, 15 Mar. 1983.  Christopher Huhne, ‘Higher Burden for Majority, Says LSE Study’, The Guardian, 15 Mar. 1984.  Sloman, Transfer State, 168–9.

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however. While experts at the IFS recognized that the reforms created a more rational and comprehensive system, anti-poverty campaign groups and other commentators decried not only some of the policy changes but also the secrecy surrounding the preceding social security reviews that were mostly conducted behind closed doors at the DHSS.154 Furthermore, the government faced angry protests and allegations of misleading the public about the distributive effects of the reforms. Ministers had already been fiercely challenged over this question during the consultation stage, when the Green Paper and White Paper for the reform act were debated. The debates were hardly ‘a good example of the sort of informed policy debate that had characterised social security since Beveridge’, as was suggested in the modern literature.155 On the contrary, the opposition accused the Secretary of State, Norman Fowler, of ‘fudging on the figures and denial of information’.156 The government claimed that there were far more gainers than losers in the reform. Thatcher insisted that as many as 88 per cent of the population would gain from the changes, a claim that was defended by DSS officials but caused outrage among anti-poverty activists who came to very different conclusions.157 The public woke up to the real impact of the reform when it was rolled out in April 1988.158 The government’s own version of the distributional effects that were presented in ‘impact tables’ were promptly called into question. Various researchers and organizations carried out smallscale surveys of social security recipients to gauge the actual cash effects of the changes, and the surveys indicated that more people lost out in the reforms than the government admitted.159 Government ministers did not accept the criticism, pointing to the ‘limited evidence available’ about the actual effects.160 On the contrary, the Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore, claimed that ‘overall, the changes have settled in extremely well’ and gave only vague assurances when he was pressed in parliament to commission a survey for the investigation of the impact of the reforms.161 The truth was that initially the government had deliberately chosen not to monitor the effects of the reforms, and when ministers subsequently changed their minds the results were withheld from the public. A provisional estimate of the numbers of gainers and losers in the reform had been included in the White Paper that was published in December 1985. The analysis was based on an administrative DHSS data source, the so-called Annual Statistical Enquiry (ASE), which was fed into a computerized simulation model to calculate the impact of the reforms. However, as it turned

 Ibid.  Glennerster, British Social Policy, 183.  Hansard, House of Commons, 16 Dec. 1985, vol. 89, cols. 25, 30.  ‘Researchers Allege Figures “Politically Manipulated”‘, The Independent, 9 Oct. 1989; TNA, JB 4/178/ 2, DSS, I. Williams to Parliamentary Clerk, PM’s Brief on the Independent article, 9 Oct. 1989.  Andrews, Punishing the Poor, 24–6, 43–5.  Ibid.  Hansard, House of Commons, 12 July 1988, vol. 137, col. 173–5.  Ibid.

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out later, this method produced an overly optimistic forecast.162 The viable option of collecting live data to monitor the reforms while they were being implemented was expressly excluded. During a departmental meeting held at the DSS to discuss the issue with the Secretary of State, John Moore, in autumn 1988, one of the participants referred to this decision in telling remarks:163 Decisions had been taken not to invite wide ranging reforms monitoring exercises including such topics as adequacy because of fears that these would be exploited in a wholly negative way by Government critics. Difficult questions of publication and presentation would arise with any research whoever carried it out.

In early 1988, however, ministers departed from their original decision and agreed to mount an analysis of the structural effects of the reforms, but decided to keep this secret – the department ‘never made public the fact that there was a special exercise collecting information on gainers and losers’.164 As opposed to the projections from the ASE data in 1985, the ‘special exercise’ was based on ‘real numbers’ drawn from a sample of actual casefiles of current benefit recipients. The overall results diverged from the forecast published in the 1985 White Paper by about 10 per cent. They showed that the reforms left about half of all benefit recipients worse off; among pensioners, the proportion was even higher with 58 per cent losers, while priority groups such as families with children saw higher than average gains of 68 per cent. Special attention was devoted to the workings of Income Support which was of central importance to the overall effects of the reforms. Contrary to Norman Fowler’s promises in parliament that ‘there will be no cash losers’ as a result of the switch from Supplementary Benefit to Income Support,165 the results showed that there were 45 per cent losers and only 29 per cent gainers – the original estimate that had predicted 46 per cent gainers was turned on its head by the secret analysis.166 In light of these results, it was obvious that the study would ‘be seized upon by the Opposition as evidence that the reforms were less generous than the Government claimed’. The delicacy of the results raised the question of whether there was any chance at all to avoid publication of the study. As one official pointed out, there were real ‘risks in trying to keep quiet the information collected in the special exercise’: there would be an ‘embarrassing’ climb-down if the information were to be ‘dragged out’ of the DSS through a series of parliamentary questions or if subsequent controversies ‘might prompt someone “to blow the whistle”’.167 In the event, however, ministers seem to have taken that risk.

     

TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, B. Brown, Draft Paper: Gainers and Losers in Income Support, 11 Jan. 1989. TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, Note of Meeting with SoS, R. D. Clark, 30 Nov. 1988. TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, B. Brown, Draft Paper: Gainers and Losers in Income Support, 11 Jan. 1989. Hansard, House of Commons, 16 Dec. 1985, vol. 89, col. 27. TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, B. Brown, Draft Paper: Gainers and Losers in Income Support, 11 Jan. 1989. Ibid.

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Academic experts in the field never became aware of the existence of the ‘special exercise’. When a group of scholars at the LSE undertook a distributive analysis of the 1986 social security reforms in the early 1990s, they explained that ‘quantitative research of the Act’s effects using income survey data [. . .] had not been carried out prior to this study’ – their study was ‘partly in response’ to the ‘absence of an official customised study of the effects’, which was described as ‘frustrating’.168 The LSE study combined an analysis of FES data with a hypothetical microsimulation of the effects of the reform. The first part of the study found that in the wake of the reform the incomes of affected benefit claimants fell by 15 per cent relative to average incomes, except for the priority group of those on Family Credit. However, the limitations of the underlying FES data and other methodological issues did not allow the researchers to isolate the effects of the reforms from other exogenous factors with any certainty.169 The comparison of old and new benefit schemes in the microsimulation, in turn, showed that 49 per cent in the lowest decile lost income in the reforms while only 41 per cent gained; the study concluded that ‘many of the poorest lost’, but, at the same time, it found ‘little overall effect in aggregate poverty’.170 This was also what the author of a widely cited account of the history of social policy in Britain took away from the study as the only available analysis of the impact of the reforms: the conclusion ‘that little changed’ after all.171 This was a very selective reading and did not reflect the serious caveats of the study that was ‘hedged with uncertainties’ as it relied on data sources that were not ‘ideal’ for the purpose.172 Thus, the government’s decision not to publish the findings of its purpose-designed special monitoring exercise has left an important gap in knowledge that later analyses were only partially able to fill. The absence of more authoritative assessments has contributed to the lasting confusion and uncertainty about the impact of the social security reforms of 1986 and 1988, and this influenced the ways in which the reforms have been remembered and portrayed in the relevant literature to this day.173 Another contentious social issue that sparked controversies throughout the decade was the changing structure of pay in Britain. From today’s perspective, the 1980s stand out as a transformative period that saw massive changes and growing inequalities in the labour market. Alongside the government’s market reforms, the changes were associated with the secular process of de-industrialization that accelerated markedly under Thatcher, partly driven by her own policies.174 The massive loss of skilled jobs in manufacturing led to record levels of unemployment and went hand in

      

Evans, Piachaud, and Sutherland, Designed for the Poor, 19–20. Ibid. 59, 71. Ibid. 80, 91. Glennerster, British Social Policy, 187. Evans, Piachaud, and Sutherland, Designed for the Poor, 71, 87. E.g. Hill and Walker, ‘Lasting Effects’; Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State. Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization not Decline’.

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hand with the growth of jobs in the expanding service economy. Within the service sector, the rapid growth of unskilled low-paid jobs contrasted sharply with the growth of highly-skilled jobs and earnings at the top. The widening earnings dispersion turned out to be a key driver of growing inequality during the 1980s. At the bottom of the pay scale, it manifested itself in the rising incidence of low wages and increasing in-work poverty: between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s, the extent of low pay doubled in Britain.175 In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars described the ‘bifurcation’ of ‘lousy jobs and lovely jobs’ in the service sector as a major trend that was neatly summarized in the notion of the ‘rising polarisation of work in Britain’.176 However, in earlier years, the trend towards wage polarization did not become apparent in official earnings statistics that focused on average wage rates in different sectors of the economy.177 Furthermore, the government insisted that there was only a weak link between low pay and poverty.178 This claim was not only supposed to take the sting out of the left-wing critique of ‘poverty wages’ but also served as a justification for addressing poverty through social security instead of interventions in the labour market.179 Consequently, low wages were increasingly compensated by the state through the payment of in-work welfare benefits, a mechanism that has effectively led to the creation of a system of large-scale subsidies to employers.180 The battle lines in this debate were already drawn in the 1970s. Campaign groups called attention to the fact that many low-wage earners lived in poverty. The Low Pay Unit attacked the government for allowing ‘poverty wages’ to be paid even in the public sector, let alone in the private sector.181 Even the Labour government under Harold Wilson tried to deflect the criticism with reference to the alleged weak link between poverty and low pay. The Treasury-led investigation into family poverty in the mid 1970s concluded that low pay was not a major factor in poverty because only a small proportion of the poor were in full-time work and even a worker with two thirds of average earnings was 20 per cent above the Supplementary Benefit level.182 This became the official line although it was recognized in internal discussions that the analysis was based on a ‘pitifully small sample’ from the FES.183 Neither was this sort of analysis accepted by anti-poverty campaigners. The Child Poverty Action Group pointed out in 1980 that ‘people in working families with children account for more than a half of all those in

 Ibid. 89–93.  Ibid.; Goos and Manning, ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs’.  Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization not Decline’, 90.  See Chapter 4, section ‘The Survey Gap’.  Sloman, Transfer State, 161–2.  Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization not Decline’, 98.  TNA, JB 4/20, Low Pay Unit, Low Pay Bulletin, Apr. 1976.  TNA, CAB 130/807, MISC 78(75)7, Interim Report on Financial Poverty, 8 Dec. 1975.  TNA, T 227/4606, Correspondence between HMT and David Piachaud, No. 10 / Policy Unit, Feb. 1976.

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non-pensioner families who are in or on the margins of poverty’.184 However, DHSS briefings on the ‘relationship between low pay and poverty’ continued to argue that only ‘a small proportion of the poor are in employment’ – departmental statistics showed that families with members in full-time employment made up ‘only 18.3%’ of all families with incomes below Supplementary Benefit level, although this calculation probably included pensioners.185 Measured against the overall income distribution, an analysis based on FES data at the DSS in 1989 came to the conclusion that by 1985 only 4 per cent of low-paid full-time workers were in the lowest income decile.186 DSS officials were at a loss, though, to counter the criticism of ‘benefits subsidising low wages’.187 On the contrary, Ian Williams at the B2 branch was aware of ‘anecdotal evidence of employers who say they could not stay in business were it not for FIS and it is open to employers to select employees who are likely to be eligible for Family Credit’.188 The Thatcher government never accepted any suggestions that there was a trend towards growing wage polarization even if evidence surfaced that indicated as much. The signs of this development certainly did not escape officials in Whitehall. In autumn 1990, a new analysis of FES data at the Department of Employment showed that the link between low pay and poverty seemed to be strengthening. In internal correspondence, officials warned that ‘this plank in our low pay briefing is about to become less robust’, but this acknowledgement was not reflected in government publicity, which sounded just as bullish as in earlier years. Based on the latest FES analysis from autumn 1990, a government statement claimed: ‘In 1987 only 8% of all full-time workers in the bottom tenth of the earnings distribution were in the poorest tenth of the population. 50% were in the richer half and 4% were in the richest tenth.’189 Similarly, government officials were aware that the inequality of earnings was increasing and that low earners were losing out in relative terms, but ministers were briefed to boast about rises in average earnings. The slogan went: ‘all in work are gaining in real terms’.190 The average earner was made the poster boy for economic success under Thatcher. Minister boasted about increases in average earnings in parliamentary debates, and the average earner was even used in political adverts during the general election campaign in 1987.191 Focusing selectively on the average earner was a useful device for the government to boost its image and fend off criticism in the public eye. However, this statistical figure

 TNA, BN 89/339, CPAG, Poverty Fact Sheet, July 1980.  TNA, BN 89/338, DHSS, A. C Palmer, Briefing for Ministers on Poverty, 7 Nov. 1979.  TNA, JB 4/178/2, DSS, Analysis on the link between low pay and low living standards, Nov. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/259/1, DSS, I. Williams to Mr Gault, 30 Nov. 1988.  Ibid.  TNA, JB 4/263, Correspondence between the DE and the DSS, Nov. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, Briefing for Secretary of State and Prime Minister, 9 Jan. 1989.  TNA, BN 149/24, DHSS, Briefings and draft speech for parliamentary debate on pay, 15 Feb. 1984; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, 163.

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obviously masked a much more complex reality and brushed over difficult questions about class differentials and growing inequalities within the distribution of earnings. The palpable uncertainties over the social costs of Thatcher’s market reforms prompted more and more accusations of statistical manipulation. The frequent clashes between the government and its critics over the alleged attempts to cover up the true state of social affairs in the country contributed to the increasingly adversarial political climate of the decade. This also became apparent in Whitehall. Compared to the 1970s, relations between government departments and academics and activists outside the government deteriorated noticeably. This applied not least to the Department of Health and Social Security, which was responsible for briefing the Prime Minister on poverty and other social issues. Officials at the DHSS seemed less open for exchanges and cooperation than in the 1970s. It was symptomatic that the DHSS decided in 1986 to conduct a major review of the main poverty statistics behind closed doors. Furthermore, the tone of DHSS briefings tended to be more aggressive, often couched in belligerent metaphors, for example, when ‘ammunition’ for public rebuttals was provided,192 or a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against critics was suggested.193 Internal discussions about how to rebut new academic research were sometimes accompanied by derogatory remarks about academic experts; Peter Townsend, for example, was denounced by DHSS officials in internal communication as a ‘socialist guru’.194 Public attacks on academic experts were led by Cabinet ministers. After the Secretary of State at the DHSS, Patrick Jenkin, castigated Peter Townsend in his speech on poverty in December 1979, one of his successors at the helm of the DHSS, John Moore, followed suit in a much criticized speech on poverty in May 1989, in which he derided ‘so called experts’.195 The mutual estrangement increased notably in the mid and late 1980s in a series of public scandals surrounding the government’s low-income statistics, as the following sections will show. Opposition politicians such as Labour’s inequality expert Michael Meacher accused the Thatcher government of ‘fact phobia’ and ‘fiddling with the figures’, and the government accused the critics of ‘misinformation’ and ‘abuse of statistics’.196 The Thatcher government’s statistical policies arguably led to the deepest crisis of public confidence in official statistics in modern British history. In light of the suspected manipulations of official statistics on unemployment and poverty and given  TNA, JB 4/179, DSS, Sear to Williams, 21 July 1989; DSS, Barron to Williams, 28 Apr. 1989; TNA, JB 4/ 59/2, DSS, Allsop to Hutchison, 24 Apr. 1990; TNA, JB 4/264, DSS, Buckley to Allsop, 27 June 1991.  TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, Williams to Hughes, 8 Mar. 1989; TNA, JB 4/259/2, DHSS, Hickey to Clark, 8 June 1988.  TNA, BN 82/363, DHSS, Sutton to Tully, 30 Jan. 1981; TNA, JB 4/179, DSS, Sear to Williams, 21 July 1989; TNA, BN 149/44/2, DSS, Williams to Barron, 27 Jan. 1989, notes on article in Sunday Times, 20 May 1990.  John Moore, ‘The End of the Line for Poverty’, speech delivered in London on 11 May 1989 (London: Conservative Central Office, May 1989).  Michael Meacher, ‘Questions to Ministers Meet Delay, Evasion and Cover-Up’, Tribune, 23 Nov. 1990; TNA, PREM 19/3494, Griffiths to Prime Minister, 14 Sept. 1990.

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the frequent delays in the publication of key statistical series, critics and commentators in the media began to question the integrity and impartiality of the GSS. Some commentators in the media even spoke of ‘intellectual corruption’ in the GSS under Thatcher: according to the The Guardian’s social services correspondent, the Rayner review set the GSS on a downhill path, and senior GSS officials were unable to fend off frequent ‘political interference’ with official statistics on the part of the government.197 In 1989, the allegations even prompted The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) to convene a working group to investigate the claims that the integrity of government statistics had been compromised.198 In the same year, the head of the GSS, Jack Hibbert, appeared before a meeting of the RSS to defuse the criticism and to restore confidence in government statistics ‘as an objective representation of the facts’, but his assurances met with ‘disbelief’ among many participants. At the same time, proposals advanced by the RSS for a more independent and centralized structure of the GSS were dismissed by the government.199 It is noteworthy that critics and campaigners such as Chris Pond of the Low Pay Unit first and foremost blamed government ministers for compromising the political independence of the GSS, while ‘the integrity of government statisticians’ seemed beyond doubt.200 This view was reminiscent of popular narratives of the civil services as a bulwark of progressive consensus politics that was instinctively opposed to Thatcherism. Thatcher herself was known to harbour deep reservations about the civil service, whom she suspected of ambitions to block her reform agenda in the style of Sir Humphrey from the TV smash hit Yes, Minister.201 Contrary to the notion of mutual antipathy between Thatcher’s ministers and civil servants, however, it turned out that they cultivated good working relations. This also applied to the governments revamping of the statistical system and the public relations work on issues of poverty and inequality. Many of the decisions and briefings discussed in this chapter were prepared and refined by civil servants, even if ministers provided strong leadership in many cases. Ministers and their officials worked in close partnership, a finding that chimes with recent observations in historical research about a ‘convergence between civil servants and politically appointed advisers’ during the Thatcher era.202 The transformation of the knowledge regime under Thatcher would not have been possible without the proactive support of civil servants. The government’s clamp-down on social research and class discourse admittedly also drew on partisan

 Melanie Phillips, ‘More than a Matter of Numbers’, The Guardian, 30 Aug. 1991.  Royal Statistical Society, Working party on Official Statistics, ‘Official Statistics: Counting with Confidence’.  Hibbert, ‘Public Confidence in the Integrity and Validity of Official Statistics’; Melanie Phillips, ‘More than a Matter of Numbers’, The Guardian, 30 Aug. 1991.  Chris Pond, Letter to the Editors, The Guardian, 1 May 1990.  Granville, ‘Downing Street’s Favourite Soap Opera’.  Vinen, ‘War of Position’, 130–1.

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bodies and followers outside and inside the government, but special advisers, think tanks, and Conservative party organizations left few traces in the extensive DHSS / DSS records in this matter.203 The main protagonists were career civil servants with special expertise in statistics, such as DSS official Ian Williams from the policy branch B2 who wrote many of the briefings cited in this chapter.204 Key officials even indicated their support for the political agenda of the Thatcher government in passing remarks that revealed their personal opinions. For example, Chief Statistician Deo Ramprakash ridiculed the idea of a European poverty line in an internal note as ‘Socialism through the back Delors.’205 Similarly, Jeremy Groombridge, who coordinated many briefings and decisions as private secretary to the Secretary of State at the DSS, scribbled the following comment in the margin of a newspaper article about the lack of ‘progress’ in the distribution of income since 1979: ‘what’s “progress” in this context? More equalising?’206 As a former special adviser at the department still recalled many years later, Groombridge once even approached a colleague in confidence with the unusual request to ask Margaret Thatcher to sign a book for him.207 Furthermore, two key officials in the policy branch B2, Ian Williams and Stephen Hickey, were known to have sympathetic political views that underpinned their efforts to defend the government’s narratives and ‘to make the statistics look good’.208 Thus, there appears to be some truth to the concerns harboured by Peter Townsend and other activists at the CPAG about government statisticians and civil servants ‘becoming more partisan’ during this period.209 Beyond the political leanings of individual civil servants who may have sympathized with the political goals of the incumbent government, however, the evidence is ambivalent on the critical question of the extent to which Thatcher precipitated an erosion of the traditional political impartiality of the civil service.210 In the DSS, there

 During the 1980s, the DHSS/DSS employed a total of five special advisers who were rarely involved in the discussions described in this article; database of special advisers, Constitution Unit, UCL at [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/research/government/special-advisers], accessed 18 Oct. 2022.  Interview by the author with Melinda Gilbert (née Libby), special adviser to John Moore in 1988/ 89, London, 8 Aug. 2019.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, Ramprakash to Maderson, 9 Nov. 1990. TNA, JB 4/59/1, DSS, Ramprakash to Allsop, 25 Jan. 1989; TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, Ramprakash to Barron, 1 May 1990.  TNA, BN 149/44/2, copy with handwritten comments of the article by Michael Prowse, ‘Why Britain’s Poor Deserve a Break’, Financial Times, 13 Aug. 1990.  Interview by the author with Melinda Gilbert (née Libby), special adviser to John Moore in 1988/ 89, London, 8 Aug. 2019.  Ibid.; Interview by the author with Bill Barron, former statistician at the DSS, by telephone, 17 Sept. 2019.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/36, CPAG, handwritten comments by Peter Townsend (1992).  Lowe and Pemberton, The Official History of the British Civil Service, vol. 2, 2, 42, 62–4, 276–7, 360; Lowe, Official History of the British Civil Service, vol. 1, conclusion; Evans, Thatcher, 66–71; Green, Thatcher, 195; Hennessy, Whitehall, 591–2.

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were few signs of attempts to influence recruitment processes to achieve a political shift to the right. Most notably, when Stephen Hickey transferred to another civil service posting in 1988, he was replaced in his former job at the B2 branch by David Allsop, who was regarded by colleagues as someone with rather centrist or even leftwing political leanings.211 In other words: at the height of the controversies over the government’s manipulations of the poverty figures, the government appointed a civil servant who was apparently not an ardent supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s policies; furthermore, he was appointed to succeed a more partisan official in a key post with direct bearing on the ongoing government’s public relations campaign to defend one of Thatcher’s central political messages. Political loyalties also seemed to play a subordinate role in the workplace culture, as recollections of former members of staff suggest. As Melinda Gilbert (née Libby) recalled, who served as a special adviser to the Secretary of State, John Moore, during the critical period in 1988/89, there was still a sense among civil servants at the department that it was inappropriate to openly discuss personal political opinions.212 In the final analysis, personal convictions were not a prerequisite for civil servants to assist in the implementation of Thatcher’s ideas. Even if officials differed in their political views, they still worked towards Thatcher’s policies and anticipated the government’s preferences. Thatcher made it very clear that she had little time for research, and officials soon realized that the climate in Whitehall became more ‘brutal’ and less open to impartial explorations of the facts under her premiership.213 The Thatcher governments’ attempts to reconfigure current practice even extended to institutional structures in Whitehall. The controversies over the government’s record on living standards and poverty prompted the DSS to engage in departmental empirebuilding that was supposed to strengthen its hand in statistical questions. From the department’s point of view, the efforts to control the political message in this debate were hampered by the decentralized statistical system in Whitehall, where the DSS was not the only department publishing figures relating to income inequality and living standards. Relevant statistical series were also published by the CSO, the Inland Revenue, and the Department of Employment (DE). The various statistical series differed in coverage, underlying concepts, and definitions, but they overlapped in certain areas, so that at times the results from different series seemed to be at odds with each other. In particular, figures published by the CSO and the DE repeatedly undermined the figures and narratives that were presented to the public by the DSS. Most notably, in summer 1988, DE statistics contradicted the results of the first edition of the new low-income statistics, ‘Households Below Average Income’ (HBAI), that was used by ministers to bolster the political claim that the poorest were benefiting from Thatcher’s policies. Consequently,  Interview by the author with Melinda Gilbert (née Libby), special adviser to John Moore in 1988–89, London, 8 Aug. 2019.  Ibid.  Challis et al., Joint Approaches to Social Policy, 102.

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the DHSS intervened and reached agreement in interdepartmental discussions that the HBAI statistics were the most authoritative source on living standards and should be used ‘whenever possible’; furthermore, ‘all future questions on this subject’ were to be transferred to the DHSS.214 Similarly, DSS officials tried to rein in the statistical output of the CSO in the official journals Economic Trends and Social Trends. In summer 1989, the DSS even initiated an interdepartmental working group to consider ‘the future of the Economic Trends article and how, if it is to continue, its estimate of income distribution can be made more consistent with this Department’s’.215 In internal communication, departmental officials were frank that these were ‘attempts to obtain a uniform approach to income measurement across Whitehall’ under the leadership of the DSS.216 The department even secured the support of the Prime Minister in this endeavour. When the CSO’s annual redistribution analysis in Economic Trends threatened to cause a public relations ‘fallout’ in early 1989, Downing Street intervened: following correspondence with the CSO, ‘the prime minister had made it clear that the same thing should not happen again’.217 Nonetheless, officials at the DSS were not optimistic that ‘without ministerial intervention’ they could ‘achieve a position where DSS was the sole department responsible for putting out figures which could be used to measure changes in the incomes of lower-income groups’.218 In the interdepartmental talks in 1989/90, the DSS secured recognition of the new HBAI series ‘as the most consistent and authoritative statistical series on living standards in Whitehall’, but was unable to acquire overall responsibility for income statistics; instead, the coordination of income distribution statistics was referred to a new interdepartmental forum.219 Furthermore, in autumn 1990, the DSS had to backtrack on the suggested scrapping of the CSO’s redistribution analyses in Economic Trends. As it turned out, other departments did not support this idea, and it seemed clear that such a move would cause a public backlash since the Prime Minister had given a guarantee not to scrap the Economic Trends articles in a letter to Frank Field in 1980. More importantly perhaps, DSS officials were under no illusions that the CSO would regard any such attempt ‘as an attack on their integrity and independence and would fight the proposal fiercely’; therefore and in light of various concessions made by the CSO in the discussions, DSS officials concluded ‘that we should not try to have the article suppressed’.220 The episode demonstrated how issues of knowledge production were bound up with considerations of power in Whitehall. On the other hand, it also showed the limitations of Thatcherite

 TNA, JB 4/259/2, Note of a Meeting: DHSS, CSO, HMT, 20 June 1988.  TNA, JB 4/274, DSS, N. J. Glass to J. Rintoul, 2 June 1989.  TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, K. Sear to Harris, 18 Oct. 1989.  TNA, JB 157/2, DSS, Note of a Meeting, 20 Jan. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/274, DSS, N. J. Glass to J. Rintoul, 2 June 1989.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, Final Report on the Comparison of Income Statistics, 23 Aug. 1989.  TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, N. Glass to Rogers, Report of the Interdepartmental Group on Comparisons of Income Statistics, 1 Sept. 1990.

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knowledge politics in official statistics on economic inequality: in the face of resistance from parts of the civil service, the attempts by government ministers and officials to change current practices and institutional arrangements in Whitehall only went so far. Similarly, the Thatcher administration was only partly successful in its efforts to remodel the main British poverty statistics to gear them towards their political philosophy of inequality.

The Attack on the Concept of Relative Poverty From the start, the Thatcher government set out to reduce the volume of statistical information on poverty and inequality in Britain, but the interventions in the statistical system did not end there. Thatcher’s ministers and officials also tried to reconfigure the construction of existing statistical series. Following the public scandal about the delayed publication of the Low Income Families Tables (LIFT) in summer 1986, ministers and officials made a move to scrap the traditional poverty count altogether – the episode offers a prime example of an ideologically-driven government intervention designed to rework the conceptual framework of official statistics, including the political norms embedded in them. The process was initiated by John Major’s announcement of a ‘technical review’ of the LIFT, which was carried out by a DHSS working group beginning in autumn 1986. The review was conducted without the participation of anyone outside the government and resulted in a report published in March 1988. It concluded that the Low Income Families Tables should be replaced by a more comprehensive new series titled ‘Households Below Average Income’ (HBAI).221 In response to the reform, both the Child Poverty Action Group and the parliamentary Social Security Select Committee under the chairmanship of Frank Field welcomed the introduction of HBAI as a more wide-ranging statistical series on low incomes, but demanded that the LIFT be continued because discontinuing the tables threatened to disrupt an established time series. Indeed, the new HBAI differed from the old LIFT not only in the choice of the data sources but also in underlying definitions and concepts, so that the two series were incompatible with each other and results were not comparable.222 In other words: the switch from LIFT to HBAI started a whole new time regime by cutting off all links to the past – with the LIFT discontinued, users would no longer be able to compare trends in the incidence of low incomes to the situation in 1979 or any other point in time before 1985, the last year covered by

 DHSS, Low Income Statistics: Report of a Technical Review; TNA, JB 4/258, DHSS, Correspondence on the report.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to Hibbert, CSO, Briefing for RSS meeting, Nov. 1989.

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the final LIFT edition.223 In a long-delayed response, the DHSS rejected the requests of the Social Security Select Committee, citing the usual argument that the use of Supplementary Benefit scale rates as a measure of poverty was ‘misleading’ and produced ‘ludicrous’ results.224 This meant that the fate of the LIFT was sealed. Consequently, the Low Income Families Tables for 1985 published on 19 May 1988 along with the first edition of the new HBAI series were announced as the final edition of the old LIFT series.

Percentile of the income distribution 

below % below % below % below % below % Total Popn.

Increase in real income – (all persons)

.

.

.

.

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Index of average income  (Popn=)

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.

.

.

.

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Fig. 9: Breaking with the past: the new statistical series Households Below Average Income (HBAI), 1988, with striking figures on income growth.

The decision-making process behind the scrapping of the LIFT was led by DHSS ministers and backed by Thatcher, but the groundwork was delivered by civil servants – the episode also sheds new light on ministerial–civil service relationships in the 1980s. Contrary to narratives of increasingly fractious working relations and mutual hostility,225 rifts emerged not so much between ministers and the civil service as a whole, but rather within the civil service. Instead of obstructing government plans in this field, civil servants proactively supported the process. In particular, ministers could rely on the support of officials from the DHSS’s Social Security Policy Group, Division B, while opposition was voiced by departmental statisticians in the Statistics and Research division (SR) and the Central Statistical Office. Even before the review process started, it was anticipated by some that the issue of the low-income statistics would pit departmental statisticians against those civil servants who advised ministers on policy. In July 1986, one of the officials in the SR division, Nick Kew, conveyed his concerns to a fellow statistician that the ‘administrative colleagues’ from the policy divisions paid only ‘lip service’ to statistical integrity: ‘in the final analysis they are inclined to subordinate it entirely to the avoidance of Ministerial embarrassment. This

 LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/S/14, CPAG, Correspondence with David Piachaud and Michael Portillo about the DHSS report, Mar./Apr. 1988; TNA, BN 149/92/2, Report of the Social Security Select Committee, 12 July 1988.  TNA, JB 4/208/2, DSS, Press Release, 9 Nov. 1988.  Vinen, ‘War of Position’, 129–30; Diamond, The End of Whitehall, 7–8; Benyon, Denver, and Fisher, Central Debates in British Politics, 246.

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does not fill me with confidence about the conduct and outcome of the technical review.’226 When the technical review started in September 1986, statisticians from the SR division did indeed clash with officials from the B2 subdivision of the Social Security Policy Group. The protagonists differed on three main issues that not only represented methodological questions, but also had political implications. From the start, B2 officials pressed for the abolition of the traditional threshold analysis, that is the measurement of the incidence of low incomes by the level of Supplementary Benefit. By contrast, statisticians from the SR division welcomed the review as an opportunity to make necessary improvements to the Low Income Families Tables, but regarded the plans to scrap these statistics as a political manoeuvre that ‘reflected Ministers’ preferences’.227 In a telling comment on the initial discussions, Nick Kew spelled out to his colleague in B2, Stephen Hickey, that he regarded the attempts to scrap the threshold analysis as a political move:228 Measurement of change in the incidence of low income is a valid instrument of policy monitoring and formulation (although perhaps not one favoured by present ministers) and is also of profound public interest. Nonetheless if ministers prefer to say as little as possible about changes in low income incidence then that is their prerogative. This would though be an essentially political decision which our technical review should not in any way pre-empt or anticipate. Nor should our review seek to confer a technical legitimacy on such a decision unless it is fully justified.

In the ‘threshold debate’, SR received support from the Central Statistical Office, while B2 was encouraged by the Treasury which expressed its ‘desire to drop the SB yardstick’.229 Similar debates and dividing lines emerged in discussions about the base year of the reformed statistical series, with SR favouring 1979 and B2 advocating 1981, the latter because of the ‘severe political problems created by a 1979 base year’ as it reflected the regressive effects of the recession of 1980–81.230 The third contentious issue was the possible return to annual publication of the low-income statistics, which was supported by SR and the CSO, but opposed by B2.231 All three matters remained unresolved in the discussions at the official level during autumn 1986 and much of 1987. The balance in the discussions was eventually tipped through a series of interventions by DHSS ministers with assistance from B2 officials in late 1987 and early 1988. Initially, junior minister Michael Portillo conveyed to the review team ‘that if we used 1979 as a base year “the PM would roast us alive!”’ – a telling comment, which revealed that Margaret Thatcher was overseeing

     

TNA, JB 4/134, DHSS, Kew to Scott, 29 July 1986. TNA, JB 4/134, DHSS, Kew to Scott, 8 Aug. 1986. TNA, JB 4/135, DHSS, Kew to Hickey, 16 Nov. 1986. TNA, BN 149/56/2, HMT, Lloyd-Williams to Hickey, DHSS, 13 Aug. 1987. TNA, BN 149/56/2, DHSS, Kew to Hickey, 10 Dec. 1987. TNA, BN 149/57/1, DHSS, Williams to Bowtell, 2 Sept. 1987.

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the proceedings and had strong views about the desired outcome.232 Furthermore, in a note prepared by Stephen Hickey of B2, Portillo argued against the plans to return to annual publication of the low-income statistics. Portillo was frank about the fact that he opposed the plans not only for reasons of economy: ‘Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced that the costs of more frequent publication would actually be negligible and I am concerned that it would mean that all the issues of “poverty” are simply raised more often.’233 After discussions with Portillo, Stephen Hickey also reinforced the critique of the threshold analysis in the draft report of the review team, and in early March 1988 the Secretary of State, John Moore, eventually decided that the LIFT were to be discontinued after the final edition in 1988.234 The decision to scrap the LIFT was motivated expressly by the aim to decouple the low-income statistics from the concept of relative poverty. This was openly discussed among officials as an overarching goal during the review process: ‘Can we get away from the relative approach to poverty?’235 Even at a late stage in the review process, the Secretary of State, John Moore, reminded his officials not to fall ‘into the same trap of looking at income and poverty in relative rather than absolute terms’.236 Moore was clearly disappointed by the preliminary results of the internal negotiations, as the plans for the new statistical series still included a number of relativist measures; therefore, he urged his officials ‘to examine more radical alternatives’. From Moore’s point of view, the predominance of the concept of relative poverty in the public discussion reflected the ‘debate lost when poverty was “rediscovered” in the ’60s’.237 Conversely, the scrapping of the LIFT was seen as a political victory over the ‘poverty lobby’. One of the most vocal proponents of the government’s views on this matter among the civil servants in B2, Ian Williams, struck a triumphant note when he described the strategy retrospectively to a colleague in the DSS. In a note from autumn 1989, Williams also explained that the recent methodological switch in the measurement of low incomes from personal incomes to equivalized incomes not only reduced the poverty count massively but also changed the terms of the debate in favour of the government:238 By adopting this approach the government shifted the basis of the ‘poverty’ debate on to grounds of their choosing. In the process, the Government also undermined the poverty lobby’s favourite concept – the ‘poverty line’ and took away the poverty lobby’s favourite propaganda instrument – the Low Income Families Statistics.

      

TNA, BN 149/57/1, DHSS, Williams to Hickey, 4 Sept. 1987. TNA, BN 149/56/2, DHSS, Michael Portillo, 22 Sept. 1987. TNA, BN 149/56/2, DHSS, Note of Meeting with SoS, 1 Mar. 1988. TNA, BN 149/57/1, DHSS, Birch to Rookes, 10 Feb. 1988. TNA, BN 147/57/1, DHSS, PS/SoS to Hickey, 1 Feb. 1988. Ibid. TNA, JB 4/178/2, DSS, Williams to Allsop, 13 Oct. 1989.

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Alongside the interventions in the construction of official statistics, the attack on the concept of relative poverty was mounted by DSS ministers and officials in government public relations. The most drastic intervention was delivered by John Moore on 11 May 1989 in a programmatic speech on poverty written by a civil servant in B2, David Allsop. In his speech at the Conservative St Stephen’s Club in Westminster, Moore dismissed relative poverty as ‘simply inequality’ and claimed that ‘those with lower incomes’ enjoyed living standards far above subsistence levels.239 Based on a plethora of material gathered by civil servants and statisticians at the DHSS, Moore argued that there was no such thing as poverty as it had existed in ‘Dickensian Britain’ – Moore’s use of the statistical material during the speech is captured in the picture on the front cover of this book.240 In particular, Moore emphasized the widespread ownership of consumer durables such as telephones, cars, and TV sets to substantiate his argument that those with lower incomes ‘are substantially better off than they have ever been before’. The draft speech had contained even stronger claims before they were edited out in the final version. Moore’s claim that absolute poverty no longer existed in Britain was publicly backed by Thatcher, but caused angry reactions from the poverty lobby and was followed by much criticism in the media.241 To put the speech in perspective, it is noteworthy that interest in the concept of absolute poverty was not only expressed by the Thatcherites but also by some in the academic world: even independent scholars such as Amartya Sen argued for retaining an ‘absolute core’ in the definition of poverty, though this proposition caused an academic battle with Peter Townsend.242 What distinguished such academic debates from the Thatcherite approach was that the government championed absolute poverty as a yardstick without engaging in any serious efforts to define or measure it. Incidentally, that was exactly what Moore initially had in mind to promote the concept of absolute poverty among the public. Moore saw the ‘technical review’ of the low-income statistics in 1986/88 as an opportunity to get ‘behind relative measures of poverty’. To this end, he requested his statisticians to produce data on ‘absolute levels of need’ and instructed them to ‘investigate on a confidential basis’ what information could be collected about ‘absolute adequacy of benefit rates’.243 Apparently, Moore was hell-bent on proving that the levels of social security in Britain were sufficient to ensure minimum levels of living. This endeavour chimed with political ideas about poverty and inequality that were shared by protagonists of the New Right and neoliberal think tanks. The setting of a minimum standard of living was also advocated by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which promoted the view that the state

 Moore, The End of the Line for Poverty, 11; TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, Correspondence and drafts relating to Moore’s speech.  On Moore’s speech and the picture see the introduction to this book.  Patrick Wintour, ‘Thatcher Rejects Poverty Line’, The Guardian, 1 June 1989.  Townsend, ‘A Sociological Approach to the Measurement of Poverty’.  TNA, BN 82/363, DSS, Birch to Gibbs, 10 Mar. 1988.

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should not be concerned with income relativities, but guarantee acceptable living standards among the poorest in society.244 However, this turned out to be a tricky and thorny issue, as Moore found out soon. The issue of the adequacy of benefit rates had been a bone of contention in debates on social security in the United Kingdom for decades, but the only official analysis undertaken by the state in the 1960s had been kept secret.245 Independent analyses such as the academic studies by David Piachaud from the early 1980s only reinforced the government’s ‘fear’ that such analyses ‘might lead to increases rather than reductions’ in expenditure, as one of the officials in B Division explained in response to Moore’s request.246 DSS officials warned that research on the adequacy of benefit rates carried the ‘real risk of evidence that some or all of the rates are not adequate with consequent political embarrassment and pressure’.247 Therefore, they asked for reassurance whether the Secretary of State wanted ‘an honest enquiry into whether benefit rates are adequate, or evidence that they are’. The officials proposed ‘to offer him a “menu” of objectives’ with options for analyses tailored to the desired outcome.248 In June 1988, the demand for a definition of minimum income was reinforced by a request for a government statement on this issue from Frank Field as the chairman of the Social Security Select Committee. However, Ian Williams and other officials from B Division advised ‘Ministers to think very carefully before commissioning any research whatsoever’ on this subject, as even confidential ‘in-house’ analyses ‘could inadvertently become public knowledge’.249 Eventually, ministers decided not to take this risk. Subsequently, the government reiterated the position taken in the 1985 White Paper on the major social security reform, where ministers had rejected calls to undertake research into the adequacy of benefit rates and had once again refused to agree on any definition of poverty. Instead, officials advised Moore to use his forthcoming speech on poverty to address this issue.250 In his speech in May 1989, Moore cited a plethora of statistics but steered clear of specifying the ‘absolute levels of need’ that he had hoped to determine during the ‘technical review’ in the previous year. The speech thus laid bare the inconsistencies in Thatcherite thinking on poverty: the Thatcherites rejected the concept of relative poverty and argued that living standards had been raised far above the subsistence minimum, but they refused to offer a precise definition of the subsistence minimum, let alone the concept of absolute poverty itself.

 Green, Equalizing People: Why Social Justice Threatens Liberty.  Veit-Wilson, ‘The National Assistance Board and the “Rediscovery” of Poverty’.  TNA, BN 82/363, DHSS, Birch to Gibbs, 10 Mar. 1988; TNA, BN 149/56/2, DHSS, Note of Meeting with SoS, 1 Mar. 1988; TNA, BN 149/57/1, DHSS, PS/SoS to Hickey, 1 Feb. 1988.  TNA, JB 4/179, DSS, Whippman to Bowtell, 20 July 1989.  Ibid.  TNA, BN 149/61, DSS, Williams to Edwards, 6 Oct. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/208/2, DSS, Whippman to Rintoul, 14 Nov. 1988.

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The Thatcher government took their campaign against the concept of relative poverty even beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, in sustained attempts to influence international discussions on the subject. As has been demonstrated above, these efforts followed in the footsteps of previous British governments of both colours who for decades had resisted the initiatives of various international organizations to establish a harmonized global system of statistics on income, wealth, and living standards. The Thatcher government was even more determined to fend off such initiatives. At the OECD, the British delegation joined forces with their American counterparts to promote the dissolution of the working party on social indicators, an international programme for establishing new social metrics that had already begun to lose momentum in the late 1970s.251 When the future of the working party was on the agenda of a meeting at the OECD in May 1981, the British delegate, DSS statistician Deo Ramprakash, ‘emphatically’ argued for ending the programme, and was supported by the American delegation.252 The British were all the more determined to kill off the programme after they had been surprised by yet another attempt by the OECD secretariat to initiate a new subproject in the working group, this time on the topic of earnings – from the point of view of the British delegation, the understanding was that the OECD council had instructed the secretariat ‘to give the whole exercise a decent burial’.253 At the British Treasury, the proposal of new work on earnings met with little enthusiasm; officials were resolved ‘to resist it like plague’. As with the government’s handling of statistics on low incomes, research on earnings was deemed undesirable because of the foreseeable public relations fallout, as a Treasury official explained in an internal note: ‘It can only cause you pain and grief at a time when UK real living standards are falling and will continue to fall’.254 The political climate of the 1980s, where neo-liberal ideas were on the rise in many countries across and outside Europe, was clearly not conducive to the transnational search for new social metrics. Similar initiatives by the OECD secretariat also met with opposition from other member states. In spring 1989, a proposal for international comparisons of poverty was given short shrift at a meeting at the OECD:255 There was no support at all, however, for the idea which had been (rather tentatively) put forward to the effect that the OECD should seek to establish an ‘OECD poverty line’ to compare poverty rates across countries in an authoritative way. The American delegate expressed particular satisfaction that this idea had been ‘kicked firmly into the long grass’!

 See Chapter 2, section ‘The Social Indicators Movement’.  TNA, T 447/447, DHSS, Ramprakash to Rayner, HMT, OECD WP on Social Indicators, 8 May 1981; OECD, MAS/WP1/M(81)2, Report on Meeting, May 1981.  TNA, T 447/447, HMT, Correspondence between Rayner and T. J. Burr, 7/8 May 1981.  Ibid.  TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, K. Sear to I. Williams, Report on Meeting of OECD Working Party, 13 Mar. 1989.

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The Thatcher government was less successful in its attempts to put a stop to the use of an international poverty line in the anti-poverty programmes of the EC, a programme that continued to enjoy support from a majority of member states in the early 1980s.256 Ministers such as Nigel Lawson and John Moore opposed the use of relativist measures of poverty not only for ideological reasons; the European poverty league tables published by the EC also posed a serious challenge for government public relations. In particular, the EC’s interim report that leaked out in spring 1989 showed the United Kingdom at the very top of the list of member states with the largest increases in poverty in the 1980s. The report fuelled much public criticism that Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore, tried to counter in his landmark speech on poverty in May 1989. In the speech, he lambasted the ‘Eurocrats in Brussels’ for ‘peddling their own brand of nonsense about poverty based on this kind of relativist approach’; he dismissed the European measure of ‘half average income per head’ as an ‘absurd definition’ on the grounds that someone defined as poor by this measure in Britain would not be ‘poor at all’ in ‘less wealthy European countries’, an argument that hardly did justice to the idea of conceptualizing poverty in relation to the living standards of the society in question.257 Instead, Moore advertised the new low-income statistics developed by his department, HBAI, as a much more ‘sensible approach to monitoring the position of lower-income families’. It is noteworthy that a previous draft of Moore’s speech had contained an even more bullish reference to the new HBAI statistics. To prove that the poor were not getting poorer but actually enjoyed rising living standards under Thatcher, the draft speech had included results from the first HBAI edition, published in May 1988. The new statistics showed spectacular increases in the real incomes of the bottom 10 per cent of the population that amounted to an above average 8.3 per cent.258 Eventually, however, officials had to backtrack on this claim. During the drafting of the speech, one of the departmental statisticians warned that they were ‘actually skating on very thin ice’ here because the claim was ‘not true for the period 1979–85’ and there was ‘every possibility that it will prove not to be true for later years’.259 Consequently, it was edited out of the final draft of Moore’s speech. Moore and some of his officials had hoped that the new HBAI statistics would help to overcome the predominance of relativist measurements of poverty in Britain, and, initially, it produced surprisingly favourable results that were exploited to great effect in government public relations. As it turned out, however, the statistics were riddled with errors, some of which have never become public knowledge.

   

See Chapter 2, section ‘The European Anti-Poverty Programmes’. Moore, ‘The End of the Line for Poverty’, 12–13. TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, R. D. Clark to D. Allsop, Draft Speech on Poverty, 22 Mar. 1989. TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, K. Sear to R. D. Clark, 29 Mar. 1989.

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Changes in the number of poor persons 1980-1985 (National criteria)

Fig. 10: The UK on top of the new European poverty league tables in Eurostat’s Rapid Report on Poverty and Inequality in Europe (1980–85), 1990.

Constructing a New Statistical Series and the Narrative of the Trickle-Down Effect The new HBAI statistics were hailed by John Moore as ‘the most comprehensive set of indicators of the standards of living of households with incomes below the average that has ever been published in this country’.260 Indeed, the new HBAI series comprised a range of different tables and measures that offered far more information than the previous low-income statistics, the LIFT, an improvement that was welcomed even by activists and experts who usually regarded the government’s actions in this field with suspicion. At the same time, HBAI soon assumed great political importance. In particular, the tables included on income growth by deciles were widely cited and attracted much public attention. As the statistician responsible for HBAI at the DSS, Bill Barron, still recalled many years later, the indicator of income growth in the lowest 10 per cent of the population

 Moore, ‘The End of the Line for Poverty’, 13.

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acquired the significance of a ‘make-or-break statistic’ for Thatcher’s narrative of the trickle-down effect.261 In the ensuing story of the construction, politicization, and deconstruction of HBAI all the different threads of the politics of poverty knowledge in the 1980s coalesced: the government’s interventions in official statistics, including the efforts to discard the concept of relative poverty; political spinning and weaponizing of statistical figures in government public relations, in particular, in connection with defensive manoeuvring in the controversies over Thatcher’s record in poverty and living standards; and finally, the shifting balance of power between government statisticians and outside bodies, a shift that was associated with questions of transparency, accountability, and control over the main poverty statistics in Britain. At first, the new HBAI statistics were not exactly what John Moore and other ministers had hoped for. The new statistical series resulted from the ‘technical review’ of the low-income statistics that had been initiated at the DHSS in 1986. At the end of the process, in March 1988, John Moore wrote to Margaret Thatcher to seek her approval for the proposals of the review team: while Moore stressed that the reformed statistical series would ‘get us away from using supplementary benefit as the yardstick’, he also conceded that it encompassed both ‘“relativist” measures’ and ‘“absolute” measures’.262 Among the relativist measures represented in the new series were tables showing the numbers of households with incomes below various fractions of average income, similar to the much criticized European measure of half average income that was used in EC reports. Moore had attempted to intervene against the continued use of relativist measures during the last stage of the ‘technical review’, but this did not lead to any more substantial changes – thus revealing the limits of what ministers could demand from their civil servants and what was deemed palatable to the public.263 Within these limitations, DSS officials used all existing options to design the new statistics according to the political preferences of ministers. As Ian Williams of B2 explained in an internal note, the ‘published statistics’ contained ‘only a limited number of examples of what can be done using the HBAI methodology’, while ‘other – possibly more revealing – analyses which can be produced using the HBAI approach’ were not included.264 Moreover, DSS officials arranged the order and the layout of the tables ‘with the aim of bringing the “absolute” measures to the front’.265 While not strictly an ‘absolute measure’, the measure of income growth over time was given the most prominent place. The first table showed percentage increases in real incomes between 1981 and 1985 by deciles in the bottom half of the population: it presented the striking finding of an above average increase of 8.3 per cent among the bottom 10 per cent.266

     

Interview by the author with Bill Barron, former statistician at the DSS, by telephone on 17 Sept. 2019. TNA, BN 149/57/1, DHSS, John Moore to Prime Minister, 22 Mar. 1988. TNA, BN 147/57/1, DHSS, PS/SoS to Hickey, 1 Feb. 1988. TNA, BN 149/61, DSS, Williams to Edwards, 6 Oct. 1989. TNA, JB 4/258, DHSS, Hickey to Clark, 11 Mar. 1988. DHSS, Households Below Average Income, 1981–85.

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The table was repeated in the same form or appeared in modified versions on subsequent pages, each time showing the largest gains among the bottom decile. The construction of the new HBAI series was overseen by Nick Kew at the department’s Statistics and Research division, a statistician who had repeatedly clashed with the policy branch B2 during the ‘technical review’ and on other issues where the integrity of government statistics seemed to be at stake.267 Nonetheless, the review team made a number of methodological choices that helped to produce more favourable results.268 Most notably, the switch in the unit of analysis from the benefit unit to a household basis and the choice of equivalence scales lowered the poverty count by about one million – a move that was described by Ian Williams of B2 as ‘presentationally advantageous’, but also ‘common sense’.269 Similarly, the DSS preferred to show incomes before the deduction of housing costs (BHC), while alternative tables based on incomes after housing costs (AHC) were given a less prominent place in the publication. As DSS statisticians pointed out, this choice could make ‘an enormous difference’, as an increase in BHC could become a fall in AHC.270 Consequently, government ministers insisted on using BHC values as ‘a single measure’ in public statements.271 Admittedly, all of these methodological choices were in keeping with statistical standards: for example, the method of equivalization had already been advocated by progressive statisticians such as John Leonard Nicholson during the 1970s.272 However, most of the changes tended to work in the same direction. In a characteristic comment, one of the departmental statisticians warned Ian Williams of B2 in a related context that ‘we must beware of getting into the business of treating HBAI and benefit unit analysis as alternatives from which we can choose whichever gives the best result on a particular occasion.’273 DSS statisticians were aware that the HBAI methodology tended to overstate the income growth in the bottom decile, not least due to the exclusion of the homeless in the underlying data.274 Consequently, when doubts about the reliability of HBAI results led to a review of the methodology in 1991, most of the recommended methodological changes tended to lower the income growth figures for the bottom decile.275 The income growth figures published in the first HBAI edition in May 1988 gained so much prominence and caused so much controversy that officials later referred to it

 Interview by the author with Bill Barron, who succeeded Nick Kew in this role in mid 1988, 17 Sept. 2019.  Johnson and Webb, ‘Counting People with Low Incomes’.  TNA, JB 4/178/2, DSS, Williams to Allsop, 13 Oct. 1989; TNA, JB 4/128, DHSS, Fiegehen to Hickey, 10 Apr. 1987.  TNA, JB 4/128, DHSS, Ferdinand to Todd, 3 Apr. 1987.  TNA, JB 4/59/2, DSS, Newton to Griffiths, 19 July 1990.  See Chapter 3, section ‘The Circulation of Knowledge and the Politics of Statistics’.  TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, Sear to Williams, 21 Apr. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/60, DSS, Harris to Arnold, 30 June 1992.  TNA, JB 4/262/1, DSS, Nicholls to Harris, 15 Apr. and 29 Apr. 1992; DSS, Barron to Nicholls, 21 Apr. 1992; DSS, Households Below Average Income, 1979–88/89, 146–52.

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as ‘the famous result that “the bottom decile did better than the average”’.276 Subsequently, the result was promoted by government ministers and officials as a big number to substantiate government narratives about the success of Thatcher’s social and economic policies: for the remainder of her third term and beyond, it was used by the government and its supporters to deflect criticism and presented as a proof that Thatcherism made ‘everyone better off’.277 The Conservative Research Department was determined to put these and other statistics ‘to the best possible use’,278 and right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph reported the figures unquestioned.279 However, the figure of 8.3 per cent income growth in the bottom decile only became possible with the help of a presentational trick: Thatcher and her ministers had ensured that the analysis was limited to the period dating back to 1981 so that 1979 was avoided as a base year. As an internal memorandum explained, ‘it was in fact a political decision not to publish 1979 data, because the figures looked unfavourable to the government. 1979 data were produced but DHSS policy side decided not to publish.’280 The more unfavourable results remained secret for only a few weeks, though: in June 1988, a parliamentary question forced the DHSS to release some of the 1979 figures, which showed that as many as 70 per cent of the population experienced losses in living standards between 1979 and 1981. As a consequence, the DHSS had to correct the income growth figure for the bottom decile to 6 per cent, but it withheld the information that this represented a smaller than average increase.281 This fact became public during the following year, but the DSS did not publish full results for 1979 until 1990 and did not adopt 1979 as a base year in the HBAI series until 1992.282 In order to defend the government narrative of better living standards for all, DHSS / DSS officials made concerted efforts to protect sensitive statistical knowledge. In March 1987, for example, the Economic Advisers Office in the DHSS produced an internal analysis that showed falls in the incomes of the bottom 40 per cent of families with children between 1979 and 1985, while the incomes of the top 40 per cent rose – subsequently, the analysis was given a security classification.283 Again, in late 1988 and early 1989, the EAO found clear evidence that the bottom two quintiles had seen falls in real incomes between 1979 and 1986.284 Internal discussions in the DSS came to the

 TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, Barron to Glass, 19 Jan. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/259/2, DHSS, Williams, Briefing for the PM, 24 May 1988; Treasury briefing for parliamentary debate on 16 June 1988.  Bodleian Library, Conservative Party Archives, CRD/L/4/21/1, CRD, Paul J. Gardener to Keith Joseph, 29 June 1988.  ‘Life-Styles of the Poor Improving’, Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1988.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, Barron to Ramprakash, 28 Nov. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/259/1, DSS, Williams, Briefing for the Prime Minister, 16 Oct. 1989.  Tim Miles, ‘Moore’s New Poor Lore’, The Guardian, 14 May 1989; HBAI 1990, HBAI 1992.  TNA, JB 4/128, DHSS, Smee to Booth / Policy Unit, No. 10, 27 Mar. 1987.  TNA JB 4/259/1, DSS, Sear to Williams, 10 Oct. 1988; TNA, JB 4/157/2, DSS, Todd to Groombridge, 7 Feb. 1989. The EAO analyses differed from the HBAI methodology in terms of the income definition.

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conclusion that this information should be kept secret. There were concerns that withholding the information might force the government into an embarrassing climbdown, but Ian Williams of B2 was confident that most external researchers still lacked the resources to replicate the analysis: ‘The direct threat in the immediate future of outsiders stumbling upon what the EAO has discovered is therefore limited.’285 In the summer of 1989, DSS officials briefed Keith Joseph about the ‘standstill in living standards for the lowest quintiles of families with children and actual (small) reductions in their incomes’ – and advised him that this was ‘not known publicly and could cause Ministers difficulty if it became known’.286 The living standards figures were just one example for this kind of management of statistical knowledge under Thatcher: similar discussions were concerned with the regressive effects of VAT, the Community Charge, and the social security reforms of 1986/88, as has been demonstrated above.287 The Thatcher government sought to uphold the narrative of better living standards for all despite growing evidence to the contrary. When conflicting findings emerged in an internal review of the income growth figures for the bottom quintile in January 1989, DSS officials realized that they should have suggested more ‘restraint’ to ministers in the use of the figures, but had ‘missed this particular boat’.288 An undeniable error in the HBAI figures was discovered by researchers at the IFS, Paul Johnson and Steven Webb, in March 1990: an error in the computation of housing costs meant that the income growth figure for the bottom decile after housing costs had to be corrected to a mere 2.6 per cent.289 But as the figures before housing costs remained unaffected, the DSS publicly defended the claim that the HBAI figures showed improvements in living standards ‘for people in all groups’ – and denied that the Prime Minister had ever misled parliament in this matter.290 Critics such as Frank Field claimed that the corrected figures debunked the trickle-down theory.291 Nevertheless, both the Thatcher and Major governments continued to make the claim about the ‘improvement in living standards at all levels’ since 1979.292 Even in Thatcher’s last speech as Prime Minister in parliament on 22 November 1990, she insisted that ‘all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979’, implying that even the poorest were benefiting from the ‘massive rise in our living standards’ under her premiership.293

 TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, I. Williams to J. Groombridge, 9 Jan. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/177/1, DSS, I. Williams to Lord, 14 June 1989.  TNA, T 470/188, HMT, Smith to Monger, 7 Dec. 1983; TNA, JB 4/259/1, DSS, Correspondence between Sear and Williams, Jan. 1989; TNA, JB 4/208/1, DSS, Brown to Fiegehen, 11 Jan. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/59/1, DSS, W. Barron to D. Ramprakash, 24 Jan. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, Steven Webb, IFS, to W. Barron, DSS, 14 Mar. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, J. Groombridge to Hutchison, 4 May 1990.  ‘Gap Between Rich and Poor Growing, Whitehall Admits’, Observer, 7 Apr. 1990.  Townsend, ‘Struggle for Independent Statistics on Poverty’, 39.  Hansard, House of Commons, 22 Nov. 1990, vol. 181, col. 448.

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By this time, government statisticians were already aware of serious errors in the HBAI statistics that were discovered more or less by chance – and were never made public. In late 1989, the DSS had commissioned three independent experts to conduct a feasibility study for a new income survey,294 and in the process the external consultants found substantial sampling errors in the HBAI statistics. The oft-cited income growth figures for the bottom decile turned out to be the ‘worst offenders’: due to the small sample size of the underlying Family Expenditure Survey data, the figures were subject to error margins of +/- 16 per cent, which meant that the reported increase of 6.6 per cent for the bottom quintile between 1981 and 1985 could have been ‘anywhere between a 10% fall and a 23% increase’.295 At the DSS, officials were shocked. The evidence was initially seen as ‘overwhelming’ and departmental statisticians agreed with the consultants’ assertion that the figures were ‘so inaccurate as to be worthless’. Deo Ramprakash, for example, lamented the ‘highly questionable figures’ and the ‘bad practice’ that led to their publication.296 He stopped short of openly blaming the errors on political interference on the part of the policy branch B2. In a note to B2’s David Allsop, Ramprakash proposed changes to the methodology and attached tables calculated on a new basis, which showed significantly lower income growth rates:297 On either presentation, the poor have done substantially less well than the average for 1981–87, which is the new message. The difference is large whichever presentation is used and there will be no escaping the political flack [sic] because of the past overemphasis on the reverse, favourable position for 1981–85 based on unstable figures.

The fact that the errors had not been identified earlier was due to the refusal of the DSS to carry out sensitivity tests on their statistics. Sensitivity testing was admittedly not yet done on a routine basis according to current practice at the time, but in this case there were strong arguments for using the technique, as the problems associated with the small sample size of the underlying Family Expenditure Survey were widely known and had preoccupied government statisticians for many years.298 Even the specialists at the IFS had to admit in a meeting on the robustness of the HBAI figures in June 1991 that they ‘haven’t really looked at this issue’.299 On the other hand, the Social Security Select Committee under the chairmanship of Frank Field had expressly requested that the DSS should subject their statistics to sensitivity tests. In response to the request, however, the DSS had declined on the grounds of disproportionate costs – in fact, on ‘fairly marginal “disproportionate cost” grounds’, as one of the departmental

 TNA, JB 4/186/2, Ruth Hancock to W. Barron, DSS, 7 Nov. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, W. Barron to D. Ramprakash and D. Allsop, 23 Jan. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to D. Allsop, 30 Jan. 1990.  Ibid.  See Chapter 4, section ‘The Survey Gap’.  TNA, JB 4/267/2, DSS, Meeting with P. Johnson, S. Webb, A. Dilnot, and paper by S. Webb, June 1991.

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statisticians, Bill Barron, admitted in an internal note.300 It is noteworthy that Barron’s account of the events was originally included in a draft paper that was prepared for circulation within the Government Statistical Service to respond to the public accusations over statistical integrity and to demonstrate that the GSS was ‘not as black as we are painted’.301 However, following an intervention by Jeremy Groombridge, the private secretary of the Secretary of State at the DSS, who was concerned that the paper might leak out and end up in the public domain, the passage about the ‘fairly marginal “disproportionate cost” grounds’ was deleted from the draft.302 In early 1990, the discovery of the wide error margins in the HBAI series caused a flurry of discussions about the handling of the issue in the DSS. On the one hand, arguments were advanced ‘for coming clean on this point in some low-profile way’, but officials also warned of the ‘political dangers’ involved in the admission ‘that the claim that between 1981 and 1985 the poorest groups did better than the average was based on a figure subject to wide random fluctuation’.303 The initial shock about the errors receded in late April 1990 when the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys checked the consultants’ analysis and found an error that reduced the gravity of the problem: it meant that the error margins in the HBAI income growth rates were considerably narrower than the original estimate of +/- 16 per cent; this correction was subsequently corroborated by one of the consultants who had discovered the errors in the first place, the economist Stephen Pudney, who conceded that the formula used in his calculations had contained a mistake.304 Pudney and his colleagues promised to deliver a revised analysis, while the investigation into the error margins continued within the DSS.305 The DSS analyses came to the conclusion that the error margins were still so wide as to render the figures unreliable: in fact, they ranged between +/5.3 per cent and +/- 8.8 per cent.306 In the ensuing search for a solution to the problem, departmental statisticians found that the error margins could be ‘considerably’ reduced when the figures were based on the decile median instead of the decile average: in the lowest decile this option

 TNA, JB 4/265, DSS, W. Barron to Cope, 15 Feb. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/265, DSS, W. Barron to N. Glass, D. Ramprakash, D. Allsop, Airs, 5 Sept. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/265, DSS, J. Groombridge to W. Barron, 17 Apr. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, W. Barron to N. Glass, 19 Jan. 1990; DSS, Harris to Ramprakash, 23 Jan. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, Stephen Pudney, Univ. of Cambridge, to David Elliot, OPCS, 30 Apr. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/618, Letter from Ruth Hancock, May 1991. The surviving DSS files contain no record of a new submission from Stephen Pudney or Ruth Hancock. Neither of them have responded to email enquiries from the author.  TNA, JB 4/266, DSS, Bill Barron, Report of a study by David Elliot of OPCS, Nov. 1990. In this report, the error margins for the income share of the bottom decile in a single year was calculated at +/3.8 per cent (before housing costs) and +/- 6.3 per cent (after housing costs), but the error margins for estimates of changes in income over time were larger than for a single year by a factor of 1.4; email from Bill Barron to the author, 6 Sept. 2019.

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narrowed the confidence interval to +/-3.6 per cent.307 Consequently, the next HBAI edition in July 1990 switched the methodology to the median and also presented the less favourable results based on decile averages in the annex. However, it contained only general information about the issue of the error margins – in the form of caveats in footnotes and in the annex about ‘random sampling variation’.308 Contrary to earlier suggestions by departmental statisticians, the DSS decided against the publication of the precise confidence intervals that would have made the scale of the problem transparent. The same tactic had been proposed by Deo Ramprakash in a similar discussion about the publication of a statistical analysis of pensioners’ incomes in early 1990: ‘Caveats about sampling errors should be attached but as general descriptive ones rather than a plethora of figures that, in effect, says: “Here are the figures. They are useless.”’309 As a consequence, it escaped commentators that the income growth figures in the 1988 HBAI statistics, which were at the heart of the government’s trickle-down narrative, were effectively baseless. Opposition politicians such as Michael Meacher continued to criticize the government’s ‘fact phobia’ and the ‘endemic’ manipulations of official statistics, but the issue of the unreliability of the figures never surfaced in the public debates.310 Meanwhile, the problem had not been fully resolved by the methodological changes to the HBAI series in the July 1990 edition.311 Consequently, the DSS initiated a ‘stocktaking’ review in early 1991 to address the lack of robustness in the figures and other methodological issues. In marked contrast to the ‘technical review’ in 1986/88, the DSS also invited external experts to participate in the stocktaking. The new-found openness was thought to be advantageous for winning back public trust, as a meeting of DSS statisticians concluded in autumn 1990: ‘The more people we could be seen to consult the better.’312 As a result of the ‘stocktaking’ review, the next HBAI edition in 1992 combined two years of Family Expenditure Survey data in order to increase the sample size and decrease the incidence of sampling errors.313 Furthermore, the episode helped to resolve one of the longest-standing problems in official British statistics on income distribution and living standards. It gave added impetus to departmental plans for a new income survey with a much larger sample

 TNA, JB 4/266, DSS, Bill Barron, Report of a study by David Elliot of OPCS, Nov. 1990; TNA, JB 4/178/ 1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to Dworkin, CSO, 3 May 1990.  DSS, Households Below Average Income, 1981–87, 5, 10, 26.  TNA, JB 4/178/1, DSS, D. Ramprakash to G. Harris, 14 Feb. 1990.  Michael Meacher, ‘Questions to Ministers Meet Delay, Evasion and Cover-Up’, Tribune, 23 Nov. 1990; Melanie Phillips, ‘The Ministers Have no Clothes’, The Guardian, 17 July 1992; David Piachaud, ‘Hopes that Turned to Dust’, The Guardian, 30 Sept. 1992; TNA, JB 4/265, Peter Townsend and David Gordon, Unfinished Statistical Business on Low Incomes. No. 3 in a Series of Reports from the Statistical Monitoring Unit (Bristol, 1992), 19; Banks and Johnson, How Reliable is the Family Expenditure Survey?  TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, G. Harris to N. Glass, 20 Feb. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, Note of Meeting, 22 Nov. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, G. Harris to Woods / PS/SoS, 22 Nov. 1991.

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size of at least 20,000 households. The project had initially met with little enthusiasm among some of the statisticians in the DSS, but the alarm over the discovery of the error margins in the HBAI finally convinced officials to support the idea. This led to the creation of the Family Resources Survey that was eventually piloted in 1992 and has remained the principal source for the analysis of economic inequality in the country ever since.314 Experts had urged the government to introduce a larger household survey for several decades because existing data sources were not representative enough to trace changes in the circumstances of smaller sub-groups or even a group as large as the poor. Ironically, the Thatcher government’s political interventions in the low-income statistics and the fallout from the ensuing public controversies helped to pave the way for the eventual solution to this perennial problem. Finally, the episode disproved much of Thatcher’s talk of the trickle-down effect. The internal discovery of the sampling errors debunked the main findings of the overly optimistic 1988 HBAI edition, and the ensuing ‘stocktaking’ review painted a very different picture of what had happened to living standards in the 1980s. Compared to the previous methodology, the technical changes made to the HBAI in the stocktaking review had the combined effect of lowering the income growth rates in the bottom decile by up to 5.8 per cent.315 All in all, the review team agreed on nine main methodological changes: among others, losses in incomes among the self-employed were factored in that had previously not been included; the geographical coverage of HBAI was extended from Great Britain to the United Kingdom; the BHC measure (before housing costs) was redefined. The latter change alone diminished the income estimate in the lowest decile before housing costs by 2.7 percentage points. All changes taken together cancelled out most of the income growth among the bottom 10 per cent that had been previously reported. Before the stocktaking review, the 1990 HBAI edition still showed an increase of 8.5 per cent in the incomes of the poorest before housing costs during the 1980s; after housing costs, the value was 0.1 per cent. Based on the revised methodology, however, the 1992 HBAI edition showed a mere 2 per cent before housing costs, while, after housing costs, the estimate fell to −6 per cent.316 In the following year, the HBAI even showed a fall of up to −14 per cent in the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent from 1979 to 1990/91.317 In other words, the revised HBAI exploded Thatcher’s claim of rising living standards for all. Many experts and commentators felt vindicated: ‘so much for the trickle-down effect’,

 TNA, JB 4/186/1 and /2, DSS, W. Barron to D. Ramprakash, 22 Nov. 1989; D. Ramprakash to Colledge, 29 Sept. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/262/1, DSS, W. Barron to Nicholls, 21 Apr. 1992; Nicholls to Harris, 15 Apr. 1992. According to the HBAI edition of 1992 (annex 6) the methodological changes only lowered the income growth figures by 3.9 per cent (BHC) and 3.1 per cent (AHC).  DSS, HBAI (1992) for 1979–88/89: 2 per cent before housing costs and −6 per cent after housing costs; HBAI (1990) for 1979–87: 8.5 per cent (BHC) and 0.1 per cent (AHC). For the year-to-year changes see Goodman and Webb, For Richer, for Poorer, table A5.  DSS, HBAI (1993).

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commented Chris Huhne, then a columnist at the Independent. As Huhne pointed out, the fact that the poor were getting poorer while the rich were getting richer was typical of all countries that had been affected by ‘the Reagan-Thatcher-Bug’.318 The history of the 1991 ‘stocktaking review’ demonstrated once again the technical complexities and power-laden questions of agency that pervaded the creation of ‘big numbers’: the construction of official statistics comprises a multiplicity of building blocks, definitions, and concepts that are contingent on methodological choices made by government statisticians, a process that heavily influences statistical results, but usually remains hidden from view – in official publications, the finished product often appears as a black box. When HBAI was first designed in 1988, the methodological choices remained the exclusive preserve of government statisticians at the DHSS, but by the time of the stocktaking review in 1991, DSS officials felt compelled to let outside experts in on the construction of the statistics. On the positive side, the improvements made in the stocktaking review helped to enhance the respectability of the HBAI statistics among the scholarly community. For example, Stephen Jenkins, a specialist at Swansea University College, applauded the DSS for addressing ‘previous reservations’ about the HBAI. Commenting on the revised 1992 HBAI edition, he posited that the reform had turned the HBAI into ‘the best quality source on trends in the UK income distribution’.319 During the consultations with outside experts, DSS officials even shared the issue of the sampling errors in the HBAI with researchers of the IFS.320 The involvement of the IFS ushered in another transformative phase in the knowledge regime pertaining to economic inequality in the United Kingdom.

Democratizing the Knowledge Regime: The Caesura of 1991 The late 1980s saw major shifts that prefigured many of the features of the present-day knowledge regime in the United Kingdom. Most importantly, outside experts eventually gained access to the black boxes of official statistics that had previously been accessible only to government statisticians. For most of the decade, independent experts and campaigners had been unable to verify official poverty statistics. This was most acutely felt in May 1988 when the government launched the new official low-income series, Households Below Average Income (HBAI), and immediately exploited the striking findings from these statistics for public relations purposes. The claim that the poorest had gained disproportionately under Thatcher met with widespread disbelief among the poverty lobby, and many experts and commentators ‘smelled a rat’ but were not in a position to disprove the figures.321 To a certain extent, even the statistical experts of the    

Christopher Huhne, The Independent, 4 July 1993. TNA, JB 4/262/1, S. Jenkins, University College Swansea, to N. Adkin, DSS, 15 Nov. 1992. TNA, JB 4/267/2, DSS, Note of Meeting with P. Johnson, S. Webb, A. Dilnot of the IFS, June 1991. Editorial, New Statesman, 13 Apr. 1990.

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Child Poverty Action Group had to accept government statistics as ‘facts’, however ‘unbelievable’ they seemed, as CPAG research officer Carey Oppenheim acknowledged in a newspaper article in 1990. Likewise, campaign groups could not fill the gaps left by the government’s cuts to official statistics as they lacked access to data that the DSS had ‘at its fingertips’.322 At the end of the decade, however, this situation began to change. To start with, this shift was made possible by technological advances in computing that enhanced researchers’ capabilities to replicate government statistics and peruse statistical claims made by government spokespersons. In the early and mid 1980s, this shift was heralded by the successful development of viable computer models by scholars at the LSE and researchers at the IFS that enabled them to provide authoritative independent analyses of redistributive effects of changes to the tax/benefit system.323 This was a significant development that was noted with some concern by officials at the DSS. The capability of independent researchers to gauge the distributional effects of government policies was expected to have important implications for the political debate. This became apparent in autumn 1989, when David Allsop of B2 warned the Secretary of State about the foreseeable presentational difficulties that would arise from the imminent introduction of independent taxation of husbands and wives. The problem was that ‘about 70% of the extra tax relief’ was estimated to benefit the top quintile, while there were ‘no gainers in the bottom quintile’:324 The Inland Revenue is (somewhat disingenuously) presenting the package as mainly benefitting those earning less than £10,000 a year; but this is on an individual basis. The great majority of these individuals (wives) have husbands with considerably larger earnings. Now that the LSE has the computing ability to do impact analysis very quickly, it is almost inevitable that the Opposition will present this as yet another budget for the rich.

Similar developments unfolded around the same time on the international stage. After British ministers and officials had resisted the initiatives of various international organizations to establish a system of international cross-country comparisons of income distribution for decades, a breakthrough on this front seemed imminent in the latter half of the 1980s. An independent research group, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), found a way to overcome the perennial comparability issues in this field by collecting raw data from national statistical offices and converting them to a unified standard.325 While the new system was still in its infancy and did not become fully operational until the LIS agreed on a large-scale collaborative project with the OECD in the early 1990s, officials at the DSS already anticipated the potential repercussions on the domestic debate. In early 1989, one of the departmental statisticians

 Carey Oppenheim, ‘Conjuring Tricks’, Social Work Today, 28 June 1990; Michael Prowse, ‘Why Britain’s Poor Deserve a Break’, Financial Times, 13 Aug. 1990.  See above, section ‘Transforming the Knowledge Regime’.  TNA, JB 4/209/1, DSS, D. Allsop to Hughes, 1 Sept. 1989. Emphasis in the original.  See Chapter 2, section ‘The Breakthrough: The Luxembourg Income Study’.

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sounded a warning note in light of the fact that the LIS was about to extend its programme to five more European countries by the end of the year: ‘Ministers can therefore expect international comparisons to become a much more important part of the debate about income levels, inequality, poverty and benefit adequacy.’326 In large part, the shifts in the knowledge regime resulted from the dynamic interactions and conflicts between the government on the one hand and external bodies and actors on the other. In the preceding years, the government’s statistical policies and bullish narratives had provoked increasing criticism and activism on the part of opposition politicians, campaign groups, academic experts, and others. In response to the controversies over the government’s social policies and its handling of official statistics on unemployment, poverty, and social security, new collaborations were forged and more independent research was initiated. Concerns over the government’s major social security reform of 1986, for example, led to the establishment of the so-called Social Security Consortium, a sizeable coalition of campaign groups and charitable organizations in the social field. As a spokesperson for the Consortium, CPAG director Fran Bennett pressed the government not only on the expected regressive impact of the planned reforms but also on ‘the way in which this impact has been disguised’ in replies to parliamentary questions and other public statements by government ministers.327 Similarly, the CPAG joined forces with the Low Pay Unit to produce their own estimates of recent trends in poverty in order to challenge the government over the suspected manipulations of the official poverty count.328 In statistical matters, the CPAG relied on expert advice from leading economists in the field, above all Anthony Atkinson, who acted as an adviser both to the CPAG and to the Labour Party on these and related issues.329 Other scholars advising the CPAG in statistical and econometric questions included Peter Townsend, John Hills, and David Piachaud. It was however a struggle for anti-poverty NGOs such as the CPAG to make their voice heard in Thatcher’s Britain, even on the British Left. From early on under Thatcher’s premiership, CPAG activists expressed dissatisfaction with the level of interest in issues of poverty displayed by members and bodies of the parliamentary Labour Party, and vowed to step up their lobbying efforts.330 CPAG activists looked on with mounting frustration as the Labour Party gradually moved away from left-wing  TNA, JB 4/157/2, DSS, Smee to Clark, 22 Feb. 1989.  TNA, JB 4/20, DHSS, Bennett to SoS John Moore, 7 Apr. 1988; Kay Andrews, Punishing the Poor, 24–6, 43–5.  TNA, JB 4/134, CPAG / LPU, Press Release, Poverty Groups Challenge Government on Suppression of Poverty Figures, 26 June 1986; DHSS, Note by I. Williams, 7 July 1986.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/11, CPAG, Executive Committee, Meeting, June 1979; CPAG/CV/1, Correspondence of the CPAG’s Anti-Poverty Working Group, 1981–6; People’s History Museum, LP-RD-41-1, Labour Party, Correspondence of the Economic Equality Policy Review Group, 1988.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/12, CPAG, Note on Labour Party Lobbying Work, Mar. 1980.

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positions and the commitment to redistributive policies – to the point that leading CPAG spokespersons such as Ruth Lister publicly complained that the Labour Party was more concerned with ‘wealth creation’ and the ‘winners’ than with the ‘losers’ of the new political and economic order in Thatcher’s Britain.331 Furthermore, leading figures in the CPAG’s executive committee were under no illusions that the wider political climate of the time was not favourable to their cause, with a government in charge that tolerated or even furthered increasing inequalities.332 On the other hand, CPAG activists also saw ‘evidence of growing awareness (both among individuals and organisations) of social injustice and poverty and the damage they are doing’.333 Educating the public, politicians and civil society organizations about these issues was not only a top priority in CPAG’s strategy ‘to tackle poverty effectively in the longer term’; the activism also served more pragmatic purposes, as the CPAG faced increasing ‘competition’ from other NGOs, campaign groups, and think tanks. The CPAG executive committee was clear that a key to securing the group’s position as the leading antipoverty campaign group in this field lay in maintaining their statistical expertise and improving the information base of their public campaigns.334 CPAG’s public interventions and campaigning materials, such as the regularly published pamphlets ‘Poverty – the Facts’, clearly made an impact. The commentary provided by CPAG and the figures reported in the pamphlets were frequently seized upon by the media and informed the thinking of other commentators and civil society organizations. For example, the CPAG’s activities and publications played a part in mobilizing British church organizations. In 1977, the British Council of Churches (BCC) issued a booklet on Understanding Inequality that was designed ‘for local churches’ and was mainly based on the CPAG’s 1974 publication Unequal Britain that had been put together by Frank Field.335 Alongside the activism of campaign groups such as the CPAG, the discussions among British church leaders also reflected the impact of new academic research on contemporary thinking. Most notably, the headline-grabbing book Poverty in the United Kingdom by long-time CPAG activist and leading poverty expert Peter Townsend galvanized attention on issues of poverty and inequality in 1979. While previous public statements by the British Council of Churches had been mostly concerned with poverty in developing countries and other world regions, the book now stirred church activists and officials to get involved in the domestic discussions.336 In 1980, the book  TNA, JB 4/207, DHSS, I. Williams to S. Hickey on a talk delivered by Ruth Lister at the LSE, Nov. 1987.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/19, CPAG, Executive Committee, Meeting, 3 June 1988.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Church of England Record Centre, Lambeth (CERC), BCC/10/5/215, British Council of Churches, Understanding Inequality. A Handbook for Local Churches (BCC, 1977).  Church of England Record Centre, Lambeth, BCC/10/5. The series of official publications lists more than four hundred publications, some of which addressed issues of ‘world poverty’. But very few were concerned with issues of poverty or inequality in Britain.

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inspired the establishment of a new Christian campaign group, Church Action on Poverty (CAP) in Manchester, whose organizers felt compelled to take action as church organizations showed ‘almost no awareness’ of questions of poverty and social change; CAP activists called on fellow Christians ‘to speak out and to tackle ignorance about poverty’. To this end, they also produced briefing material and leaflets that relied heavily on the statistical knowledge provided by CPAG pamphlets and Peter Townsend’s work.337 The publication of Townsend’s new book in 1979 also prompted fresh discussions and initiatives inside the BCC. In 1980, BCC bodies resolved to set up a working group to help promote a better understanding in the churches of issues of poverty.338 A first report of the working group was presented to the Assembly of the BCC in 1982, largely following the methodology and definitions developed by Peter Townsend.339 These discussions and activities provided the context and laid some major groundwork for one of the most notable political interventions by British church leaders in the 1980s, the ‘Faith in the City’ campaign of 1986 that was followed up by more criticism and another major ecumenical intervention in 1997.340 As usual, DSS officials prepared briefings to counter the allegations made by the churches about widespread deprivation and the failure of the trickle-down effect to materialize; Thatcher even disputed the very legitimacy of the interventions by religious leaders.341 Nonetheless, the interventions established a new tradition of social criticism and a more active political role on the part of the British churches that has continued to the present day.342 New collaborations also played out in parliament. Most notably, CPAG veteran and Labour MP Frank Field used his chairmanship of the Social Security Select Committee (SSSC) to scrutinize the government’s statistical policies and to demand more and better information on issues of poverty. The SSSC, in turn, drew on advice from leading academic experts. In June 1988, Frank Field enlisted the help of Anthony Atkinson as an adviser to the SSSC. Among others, Atkinson provided Field with a detailed critique of the government’s report on the ‘technical review’ of the DHSS’s lowincome statistics – Atkinson’s comments subsequently informed the SSSC’s response

 Church of England Record Centre, Lambeth, BSR/IND/T/POV/2, Church Action on Poverty, Annual Report, 1985–6.  Church of England Record Centre, Lambeth, BSR/IND/T/POV and BCC/DCA/2/1/7, British Council of Churches, Division of Community Affairs, Meetings of DCA Board, 13–14 May and 23 Sept. 1980; Minute of Autumn 1979 Assembly, 4 Dec. 1979.  Church of England Record Centre, Lambeth, BCC/10/5/262, British Council of Churches, Poverty (Working Party of the Division of Community Affairs, 1982).  ‘The Churches Set the Poll Agenda’, The Observer, 16 Mar. 1997.  TNA, BN 149/44/1, DSS, J. Groombridge to Hutchison / PS/SoS, Briefing on the Churches and Poverty, 7 Dec. 1989; Sebastian Hamilton, ‘Crossed in Faith’, Parliamentary Review (July 1996), 8–10.  Haroon Siddique, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury: I am not too political. Justin Welby defends his comments on inequality and backs UN report on UK poverty’, The Guardian, 2 Dec. 2018.

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to the proposed changes.343 In particular, Atkinson recommended that the SSSC should insist on the benefit unit as the unit of analysis used in the low-income statistics and should reject the proposed switch to a household basis, an ‘important point both in substantive and in political terms’ that had also been highlighted by researchers of the IFS.344 The involvement of the IFS in this field eventually made a decisive difference. Before the late 1980s, the IFS had not had any special expertise in the measurement of income distribution and poverty, although the institute was one of the leading organizations in computer simulations of the tax/benefit system. In 1988, however, the IFS embarked on a research programme that not only broke the government’s monopoly in low-income statistics but also helped to establish the institute’s standing as one of the most authoritative voices in this field to the present day. At the same time, the IFS’s activities provided an excellent example of the co-operation between various non-governmental bodies that joined forces to challenge the government over the low-income statistics: the IFS’s research programme received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and established collaborations with the SSSC under Frank Field. The research programme at the IFS was led by Steven Webb and Paul Johnson – Johnson was in the early stages of his career and later became the director of the IFS. The pair began their research by trying to understand how the main DSS low-income statistics were constructed. While the LIFT were based on a combination of data from the Family Expenditure Survey and administrative records from the so-called Annual Statistical Enquiry (ASE), the HBAI series was based on FES data only. However, the methodological steps required in the treatment of the raw data to arrive at the finished statistics were known only to government statisticians.345 The IFS researchers acquired this know-how through a series of initially minor technical enquiries with the DSS that officials found increasingly hard to decline.346 By the summer of 1989, Johnson and Webb had finally gained the capacity to replicate the HBAI statistics, a milestone that was noted in the DSS as a ‘very significant development’.347 It soon became clear that this meant more public scrutiny for the DSS. In autumn 1989, Johnson and Webb demonstrated their ability to reproduce the HBAI in a journal article that ‘for the first time’ offered a detailed assessment of the ways in which the DSS statistics had been constructed.348 It found that the methodological changes made during the ‘technical review’ had the effect of markedly decreasing measured

 LSE Archive, Anthony Atkinson, Personal Papers, Atkinson/07/10A, Correspondence between A. B. Atkinson, F. Field, and SSSC staff, June 1988.  LSE Archive, Anthony Atkinson, Personal Papers, Atkinson/07/10D, A. B. Atkinson to Helen Irwin, 13 Nov. 1989.  Johnson and Webb, ‘Counting People with Low Incomes’.  TNA, JB 4/259/1, DSS, W. Barron to N. Scott, 26 Oct. 1988.  TNA, JB 4/157/1, DSS, Sear to W. Barron, 6 June 1989.  Johnson and Webb, ‘Counting People with Low Incomes’.

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income inequality: in particular, the new methodology lowered the number of households with incomes below half the average by about one million. The researchers concluded that the lack of transparency in the DSS did ‘nothing to allay fears that the changes were made for “political” rather than “bona fide methodological” reasons’.349 Johnson and Webb’s findings attracted wide media coverage and even prompted parliamentary questions – their research clearly increased the political pressure on the DSS amid the ongoing public debate over the integrity of government statistics.350 In light of the IFS’s growing expertise in this field, the institute was commissioned by the SSSC in late 1989 to prepare a new edition of the LIFT, the traditional statistical series on the number of families at or below the Supplementary Benefit level that had been scrapped by the government in the previous year. This ‘formal link’ between the IFS and the SSSC reinforced the sense of DSS officials of ‘increasingly being pushed into a series of defensive reactions’.351 Officials such as Ian Williams of B2 were worried that the IFS ‘might find some things we don’t want them to’, especially with respect to the critical period between 1979 and 1981 when the majority of the population saw their living standards fall.352 However, DSS officials came to the conclusion that it was not an option to reject the IFS’s requests for assistance: officials not only feared the possible public backlash, but also the prospect of the IFS producing alternative figures if they were not given access to HBAI data. DSS officials who anticipated in late 1988 that the IFS would ‘sooner or later’ be able to ‘produce what we refuse to produce’353 were proven right, as the IFS went on to publish several analyses that the DSS had declined to publish. In October 1990, the IFS produced an analysis that brought the discontinued LIFT up to 1987 – the resulting analysis showed that poverty had soared under Thatcher.354 Again, in 1991, the IFS produced an analysis for the SSSC that filled the gap left by the biannual HBAI series by bringing it up to 1988.355 The DSS was clearly losing ground to the IFS. In subsequent discussions about how to respond to the challenge, it became apparent that the department’s room for manoeuvre was diminishing. In an attempt to defend their authority in the interpretation of the poverty figures, DSS statisticians even proposed to return to annual publication

 Ibid. 82.  E.g. David Smith, ‘Altered Figures Cut Poor by 1m’, The Sunday Times, 1 Oct. 1989; Andrew Culf, ‘“Million More” in Low Pay League’, The Guardian, 2 Oct. 1989; ‘Anxiety Grows over Integrity of Statistics’, The Independent, 9 Oct. 1989; TNA, BN 149/53/1, DSS, Correspondence on PQ in House of Lords, 16 Oct. 1989.  TNA, BN 149/53/2, DSS, D. Ramprakash to D. Allsop, 8 Dec. 1989.  TNA, BN 149/92/1, DSS, W. Barron to D. Allsop, 24 Oct. 1989.  TNA, BN 149/92/2, DSS, N. Scott to D. Allsop, 31 Oct. 1988, with handwritten comment by I. Williams, 1 Nov.  IFS, Poverty in Official Statistics: Two Reports; David Brindle, ‘Poverty Total Soars in Thatcher Years’, The Guardian, 12 Oct. 1990.  Johnson and Webb, ‘Low Income Families, 1979–1987’; Social Security Select Committee, Low Income Statistics; Johnson and Webb, UK Poverty Statistics.

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of the low-income statistics – because of the ‘danger’ that ‘other versions of what’s happened to living standards will in the meantime gain centre stage’.356 During the ‘stocktaking’ review, the DSS finally decided to reintroduce annual publication of the low-income statistics in 1992. Officials in the DSS were all too aware of the changing dynamics in the knowledge regime. In early 1991, Deo Ramprakash noted that it was no longer possible to be ‘complacent’ as the IFS remained ‘vigilant’.357 Consequently, work in the DSS was increasingly guided by the aim ‘to “keep ahead of the game” in relation to outside bodies’ – this was openly declared as one of the purposes of the ‘stocktaking’ review in 1991.358 At the same time, officials made efforts to rebuild the department’s credibility in the public eye and among academic experts, especially after the IFS’s discovery of the computation error in the HBAI series in March 1990.359 The public scandal over the error also ‘made it much harder’ for the DSS to refuse the IFS access to the data, as Bill Barron explained in a note in May 1991.360 DSS officials therefore agreed to treat ‘the IFS as a special case’ and suggested increased co-operation with the institute as ‘the best way forward’. Furthermore, despite deep reservations among officials about a general release of HBAI data,361 the DSS announced in December 1991 that they would grant access to HBAI datasets to external researchers after publication of each new edition.362 DSS officials were aware that their new-found openness boosted their public image, as it earned the department praise from the IFS.363 In autumn 1991 the DSS eventually agreed to a formal co-operation with the IFS. This was a transformative moment with far-reaching consequences for practices and power relations in the knowledge regime in this field, a shift that was also acknowledged in the media.364 It went back to a proposal advanced by Andrew Dilnot of the IFS in early 1991. Dilnot proposed that the institute could check the next HBAI edition prior to publication. When the publication date of the next edition approached in October 1991, the advantages and risks of this proposal were carefully weighed up in internal discussions at the DSS. Officials were under no illusion about what was at stake. Senior DSS statistician Gordon Harris anticipated a number of serious disadvantages in the proposed collaboration, concerns that cast a light on previous practices and mindsets in the department: according to Harris, the proposal meant that the IFS would become ‘privy to HBAI’ and the DSS would no longer be in a position to delay publication if necessary. Furthermore, Harris argued, the proposed extension of HBAI to cover the whole income  TNA, JB 4/179, DSS, W. Barron to Sear, 3 July 1989; Sear to D. Ramprakash, 22 June 1989.  TNA, JB 4/265, DSS, D. Ramprakash to N. Glass, 18 Jan. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, Minutes of Meeting, 1 Mar. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/264, DSS, W. Barron to G. Harris, 15 May 1991; TNA, JB 4/265, CSO, Wilkinson, Briefing for J. Hibbert, 29 May 1991; TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, Minutes of Meeting, 22 Nov. 1990.  TNA, JB 4/264, DSS, W. Barron to G. Harris, 15 May 1991.  TNA, JB 4/264, DSS, J. Groombridge to Dudley, 23 Apr. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/265, DSS, G. Harris to D. Ramprakash, 31 Mar. 1992.  Ibid.  ‘Poverty Data Ground Rules to be Revised’, 14 Dec. 1991, The Guardian.

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spectrum and not just the bottom half would reveal how inequalities had grown during the 1980s.365 In order to prepare the decision in this matter, DSS officials put together a long paper in which eight different options for a response to the IFS proposal were categorized as low, medium, or high risk – the document reflected the significance of the decision and the political pressures weighing on the department.366 The main arguments in favour of enlisting the co-operation of the IFS were pragmatic: ‘When they endorse our actions we gain considerably.’ In November 1991, the government eventually accepted the proposal, anxious to secure the ‘goodwill’ of the IFS – and to avoid the ‘worst-case scenario’ of alienating the IFS and driving it into a formal co-operation with the SSSC under Frank Field.367 This was a watershed moment: to this day, the DSS and its successor Department of Work and Pensions have co-produced the HBAI series in co-operation with the IFS and have shared control over the data with what officials in the DSS used to call ‘the outside world’. At the IFS, in turn, the collaboration was regarded as advantageous because it consolidated the institute’s position in the field and also brought in a continuous stream of funding as the DSS had agreed to finance the work.368 For the DSS and its statistics, the collaboration provided fresh legitimacy, but it also limited the government’s scope of action in knowledge politics and redefined what was sayable about economic inequality in the United Kingdom. All in all, the involvement of external experts was seen as unavoidable, but not necessarily greeted with enthusiasm in the DSS. When the proposal of ‘contracting out all the HBAI work to IFS’ was briefly floated in the DSS in the summer of 1991, one of the departmental statisticians admitted that the mere idea had the effect of ‘send[ing] shivers down my spine’.369 The knowledge politics described in this chapter did not follow any pre-conceived blueprint, but evolved in a dynamic and interactive process over the decade. Nevertheless, contemporaries perceived the government’s approach as a comprehensive strategy in which statistical policies were only one, albeit important, aspect among others. In June 1988, activists of the Child Poverty Action Group spoke of a ‘continuing government strategy to marginalise study and debate on poverty/equity issues’ that was not only associated with ‘increasing inequality’ and ‘increasing invisibility’ of the poor due to ‘fewer official statistics’, but also with ‘pressures on schools curricula; attitude to sociology in higher education; attacks on church leaders, etc.’370 As this chapter has demonstrated, this strategy was driven by Thatcher and her ministers, but implemented to a large extent by civil servants who phrased the ‘lines to take’, developed

 TNA, JB 4/268/2, DSS, Note by G. Harris, Aug. 1991.  TNA, JB 4/262/2, DSS, G. Harris to Boyle, 14 Oct. 1991.  Ibid.; TNA, JB 4/262/2, Potter, No. 10, to Woods, 18 Nov. 1991.  Interview by the author with Paul Johnson, Director of the IFS, London, 6 Aug. 2019.  TNA, JB 4/263, DSS, G. Harris to D. Allsop, 5 June 1991.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG/A/19, CPAG, Paper on strategy, 3 June 1988.

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narratives and prepared decisions in the management and communication of official statistics. Thatcherite knowledge politics were part and parcel of more wide-ranging efforts to recast public discourse on poverty, inequality, and social class. The impact of these efforts was noticeable, as IFS analyst Steven Webb observed in a BBC 4 programme on poverty in June 1996:371 The agenda has been shifted by the Conservatives over 15 or so years, and they have got across the idea that there is no such thing as poverty, that it’s all just relative poverty, that people are just further behind, but they’ve still got videos and cars and go on foreign holidays. And because that has become so widely accepted, the political pressure to do something about poverty has diminished enormously.

Furthermore, Thatcher’s attempts to marginalize discourse on social class aligned with wider trends of popular individualism and the substitution of class identities with notions of ‘ordinariness’.372 At the same time, the success of these narratives also depended on the reduced availability of official statistics that could have corrected Thatcher’s claims about the blurring of class divisions in Britain. The government’s narrative of the trickle-down effect was of course disputed by experts, opposition spokespersons, and NGOs throughout the 1980s, but it could not be immediately disproved.373 In the knowledge regime under Thatcher, the debate on poverty was filled with irreconcilable claims and counterclaims. Thatcherite knowledge politics introduced uncertainty into the public debate and thereby marginalized poverty and inequality as political issues. Knowledge politics arguably contributed to the global slump in interest in issues of economic inequality during the 1980s.374 Alongside other actors, discursive strategies and economic ideas that discounted distributive questions,375 knowledge politics helped to pave the way for neo-liberal reforms and the global rise of neo-liberal political economies. As Thomas Piketty has observed, inequality regimes in the present-day era of hypercapitalism have been associated with a lack of ‘democratic transparency regarding inequalities of income and wealth’. Further, he notes that ‘economic and financial opacity’ has increased in recent years and has been of ‘paramount importance’ in stifling public debates about rising levels of inequality around the world.376 This chapter has demonstrated how this type of opacity was politically engineered by governments and how it could be challenged by civil society.

 TNA, JB 3/43, Transcript of Radio 4 programme, ‘Absolute Poverty’, 2 June 1996.  Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Discourses of “Class” in Britain in “New Times”’.  LSE Archive, Records of the Child Poverty Action Group, CPAG A/19/Folder 2, CPAG, Meeting of Executive Committee, 16 Sept. 1988; TNA, JB 4/134, DHSS correspondence on media response to LIFT in 1986; Nicholas Timmins, ‘Doubts Over New Poverty Figures’, The Independent, 13 July 1988; Hansard, House of Lords, 25 May 1989, vol. 508, cols. 501–5.  Atkinson and Bourguignon, ‘Introduction: Income Distribution and Economics’, 2–3.  Aldred, Licence to be Bad.  Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 648–9, 656–61. The significance of public scrutiny is also highlighted by M. Savage, The Return of Inequality, 319.

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From Major to Blair to the Present: the Emergence of the Civil Society Knowledge Regime The denial of poverty did not end with Thatcher’s resignation. Nor did the ascendancy of the IFS as an independent watchdog put a stop to manipulative practices of political spinning of official statistics for government relations purposes. Thatcher’s successor as Prime Minister, John Major, set out to build a public image of a more caring Conservatism by promoting the idea of a classless society, while, in fact, continuing many of Thatcher’s policies.377 Furthermore, his rhetoric distracted from his previous role in social policy and the suppression of unfavourable statistics under Thatcher. As a junior minister at the DHSS, Major not only helped to engineer deliberate delays in the publication of the main poverty statistics and played a major part in abolishing them, he also acted as a spokesperson for the department and government propaganda in this matter. In a debate in the House of Commons in autumn 1986, for example, he brushed off arguments about rising poverty based on the SB count as ‘ludicrous’ and even accused Labour MP Michael Meacher of ‘crude abuse of statistics’ for suggesting otherwise.378 Similar practices continued after John Major entered Downing Street. To begin with, the publication of the main poverty statistics, HBAI, was deliberately delayed until after the general election in April 1992. The DSS also resisted calls for regional analyses of HBAI data even though they were technically feasible.379 Furthermore, both the new Prime Minister and his ministers went on record in TV and radio programmes to refute allegations that the poor had got poorer while the rich had got richer under the Conservatives during the 1980s. On the BBC’s Election Call, Major’s Chancellor, Norman Lamont, plainly dismissed any suggestions that the gap between rich and poor had increased and claimed that existing statistical figures showing this trend were ‘not correct’.380 Similarly, in an appearance on the BBC’s flagship political news show, Newsnight, John Major himself stubbornly insisted on Thatcher’s narrative of improved living standards for all. The exchanges between Major and the BBC’s inquisitive presenter Jeremy Paxman were described by The Guardian’s Melanie Phillips in a stinging critique of ‘the truth gap over the poverty gap’ as follows:381 On Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman asked him whether the gap between the rich and the poor had increased. The Prime Minister said: “The gap . . .,” then checked himself and said: “I think what we should really be looking at is what has happened to the net disposable wealth; at every level people have had more net disposable income.” Surely, Paxman pressed, he wasn’t disputing the gap? The Prime Minister dodged the question for the second time. Many people had done well by their own efforts, and people who were relatively poor had had their net disposable income

    

Hickson, ‘Thatcherism, Poverty and Social Justice’. Hansard, House of Commons, 13 Nov. 1986, vol. 105, cols. 207–8. TNA, JB 4/262/1, DSS, Correspondence between Ray and Adkin in ASD6, July 1992. Melanie Phillips, ‘The Truth Gap Over the Poverty Gap’, The Guardian, 3 Apr. 1992. Ibid.

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increased. And he dismissed the “envy factor” which led people to measure how they were doing against other people. Again Paxman pressed the point. Had the gap widened? And eventually the Prime Minister was forced to concede: “In some cases the gap has got bigger.” But again, he added, people at the bottom were better off.

The narrative of the trickle-down effect was finally sunk by new statistics that were, for the first time, co-produced by the government and an independent body, the IFS. When the latest edition of the official low-income statistics, Households Below Average Income (HBAI), was published in July 1992 – again, shortly before the House of Commons went into recess – commentators described it as the ‘most damning indictment of Thatcherism’ because it thoroughly disproved Thatcher’s claim that prosperity would ‘trickle down and benefit everyone’.382 The shattering of Thatcher’s myths was not effectively exploited by the opposition, though: it was indicative of the Labour Party’s ongoing shift away from left-wing positions during this period that Labour MPs including the Labour leader, John Smith, failed to challenge John Major over the sobering HBAI figures in parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions or on other occasions.383 Nonetheless, the government quietly changed the official line. Instead of insisting that everyone was better off, including the poorest, the new Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, only claimed credit for increases in income for certain parts of the population: ‘Since this government took office, prosperity has increased markedly, not just for top earners but also for a majority of those on middle incomes.’384 In stark contrast to the previous orthodoxy, the government now acknowledged the reported reductions in the incomes of the poorest, which were attributed to unemployment and rising numbers of self-employed.385 Public perceptions of rising poverty and the Conservatives’ record in the social field remained an important concern for the Major government. On the one hand, the mid 1990s turned out to be a period of far-reaching consensus with few controversies over key political issues, a development that has been attributed to the political convergence between the main parties, as New Labour under Tony Blair moved further to the right.386 On the other hand, the period also saw a stream of independent research that produced more and more evidence about the rise of inequality, spatialized deprivation, and child poverty under the Conservative governments during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1990, researchers repeated the ‘Breadline Britain’ survey of multiple deprivation that had made headlines in 1983. In 1992, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded a research programme on poverty and inequality that was led by John Hills at the LSE: the project continued the estimates on income and wealth distribution modelled after

 David Piachaud, ‘Poor Britain’, The Guardian, 30 Sept. 1992.  Edgerton, Fall and Rise, 501–2; Hansard, House of Commons, 24 Sept., 20 Oct. (PMQ), 22 Oct. (PMQ), 27 Oct. 1992 (PMQ).  David Brindle, ‘Huge Cut in Income for Poorest’, The Guardian, 16 July 1992.  Ibid.  Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 492, 507–8.

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the analyses of the RCDIW before it was abolished by Thatcher in 1979.387 On the subnational level, local research initiatives shed new light on deprived areas and unequal living standards in major cities. In the capital, the London Research Centre was set up in co-operation with London boroughs to continue the research previously undertaken by the abolished Greater London Council and its Intelligence Unit. In 1996, it published a detailed study that mapped poverty and social exclusion in London down to the level of individual boroughs and wards, based on the number of Income Support recipients and a plethora of other indicators – the study revealed ‘the dark side of the “coolest” city’, as the Evening Standard put it.388 Furthermore, anti-poverty campaign groups highlighted the surge of in-work benefits that signalled the stark rise in low pay and inwork poverty.389 At the same time, advances in official statistics threw persistent racial inequalities in Britain into sharp relief. The enlarged sample size of the newly introduced Family Resources Survey for the first time allowed analyses of income data by ethnicity, and the 1996 HBAI edition showed that two thirds of all families of Bangladeshi or Pakistani heritage had low incomes that were in the bottom quintile.390 The early 1990s also saw the first waves of the new British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), an innovation that was led by Anthony Atkinson at the University of Essex and filled the long-standing gap in longitudinal social data in Britain. Starting in 1995, BHPS data were also included in the HBAI to analyse income mobility.391 The advances in research in Britain coincided with the initiatives of various international organizations who finally made progress in their long quest for international cross-country comparisons of poverty and inequality during the 1990s.392 In late 1996, for example, social scientist Jonathan Bradshaw used authoritative data from the Luxembourg Income Study to demonstrate that out of nineteen countries investigated in the study, the rate of relative poverty in Britain was only surpassed by the United States and Russia.393 Given the technical advances in statistics and the new authority of international organizations and bodies such as the IFS in this field, it was no longer possible for the government to simply dismiss such findings. The possible political fallout from statistics on poverty and inequality was taken seriously by the Major government and prompted Downing Street to take action. In spring 1996, Major’s special advisers at the Policy Unit in Downing Street initiated discussions in Cabinet about how to respond to the public debates and the attempts to  E.g. Hills, New Inequalities.  TNA, JB 3/43, London Research Centre, The Capital Divided: Mapping Poverty and Social Exclusion in London, Nov. 1996; Geraint Smith, ‘Revealed: Dark Side of the “Coolest” City’, Evening Standard, 7 Nov. 1996.  TNA, JB 3/44, Low Pay Network, Press Release, Apr. 1997.  TNA, JB 3/44, DSS, Briefings and press release relating to the publication of HBAI, Nov. 1996.  Atkinson, Bourguignon, and Morrison, Empirical Studies of Earnings Mobility.  See Chapter 2, sections on ‘The European Anti-Poverty Programmes’ and ‘The Breakthrough: the Luxembourg Income Study’.  Bradshaw, ‘Poverty in the UK: A Comparison with Nineteen Other Countries’.

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brand the Conservatives as ‘the party of unemployment and of poverty’.394 To this end, the Policy Unit convened a policy seminar with Cabinet ministers in early March 1996 that was expressly concerned with ‘identifying ways of shifting the public debate from inequality to dependency and opportunity’.395 The basic dilemma was introduced to the seminar by the Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, who described ‘the presentational challenge facing the government’ as a matter of perceptions: despite the ‘increase in national prosperity during the 1980s’, the ‘statistics were widely perceived as showing the poor getting poorer while the rich got richer’, even though ‘the figures were highly tendentious’, Lilley declared. Furthermore, it was not an option to publicly own the reported increases in inequality even if they were consistent with Conservative philosophy: as Lilley explained, the government was not ‘likely to persuade people that a greater spread of earnings around the mean was an essential feature in an enterprise economy’. Instead, the following discussion identified a number of arguments that could be advanced to counter the criticism. Tellingly, the group would have preferred to stop the publication of the incriminating statistics altogether had it been possible: The statistics published by the Government had given credibility to public perception and left the Government on the defensive. Ideally, the Government might stop publishing the statistics, but this would go back on assurances to Parliament. The next best option would be to highlight the extra spending of the poor, the widespread ownership of luxury items and the style of holidays taken, while continuing to encourage more helpful analyses of the statistics. Another point to emphasise would be the rate at which people were able to move out of the bottom income levels.

These suggestions were also approved by the Prime Minister. After reading the minutes of the policy seminar, John Major endorsed the idea that Peter Lilley should convene a small team to look into possibilities for improvements in the public presentation of government policies on low incomes.396 In noteworthy comments on the minuted discussions on homelessness from the seminar, Major also remarked that ‘although great progress has been made in reducing the number of rough sleepers in London, the remaining 250 or so have a disproportionate effect on public perception of Government policy’; thus, the Prime Minister not only asked that the government’s ‘rough sleepers initiative’ should be stepped up, with a view to providing enough beds by the next winter, but also requested a note from the Home Office on ‘what the police can do in helping to remove beggars and rough sleepers from the streets’. Responding to the Prime Minister, Peter Lilley proposed that he should use the occasion of a speech he was scheduled to give at Southwark Cathedral to launch the suggested publicity campaign.397 In his speech on 13 June 1996, Lilley tried to explain to the public why the poor were not as poor as official statistics might suggest. First of all, expenditure data published in the

   

Hansard, House of Commons, 24 Sept. 1992, vol. 212, col. 101. TNA, JB 3/43, Cabinet Office, Note on Policy Seminar on Low Income Groups, 6 Mar. 1996. TNA, JB 3/43, No. 10 / PS, M. Wallace to P. Cohen, Lord President’s Office, 28 Mar. 1996. TNA, JB 3/43, DSS, P. Lilley to the PM, 23 May 1996.

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HBAI series demonstrated that those in the bottom decile were spending more while the statistics showed their incomes to have fallen; furthermore, data from the BHPS suggested that there was considerable social mobility in Britain in that a significant proportion of those in the bottom decile moved out of it the following year. Lilley’s critique of the main poverty statistics as a mere ‘snapshot’ did not convince experts, though. The economist Stephen Jenkins pointed out that as many as 30 per cent of those who escaped poverty were bound to return, and many unemployed and pensioners were stuck at the bottom for even longer periods.398 Nevertheless, these arguments became the new ‘lines to take’ for government ministers to counter statistical evidence of persistent poverty and inequality in public debates. Furthermore, the new HBAI edition in November 1996 suggested that the rise in inequality had come to a halt, as the number of households below half average income stopped increasing in 1993/94.399 The ratio of children in households below half average income still stood at 31 per cent compared to 8 per cent in 1979, though. The picture looked even less rosy by other measures. In late 1996, the Major government faced attacks from the Labour Party for presiding over a spectacular rise in poverty as measured by the rising number of people on Income Support since 1992.400 Using similar arguments to those deployed by the Thatcher government to refute the Supplementary Benefit level as a poverty measure, Major’s ministers rejected Income Support as a valid indicator. Indeed, some commentators were reminded of the Thatcher period when they considered what the current Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, had to say on the subject of poverty. In spring 1996, for example, a network of charities enquired from Lilley how he was planning to mark the United Nations’ International Year to Eradicate Poverty in the United Kingdom – in response, both Lilley and Major maintained that poverty was something that existed in developing countries but not in the UK; at worst, some people were on low incomes, which was mainly due to unemployment.401 In light of the government’s denial of poverty, The Guardian’s Social Services correspondent likened Lilley’s stance to Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore.402 Indeed, Lilley relied on similar arguments as his predecessor in pointing to the ownership of consumer durables among low-income households and the increases in the ‘prosperity of the population as a whole’ when he set out to reject the claims of the poverty lobby. The extended controversies over the extent and nature of poverty in Major’s Britain demonstrated

 Will Hutton, ‘Churning in and out of Poverty in Tory Britain’, The Guardian, 20 Oct. 1996; TNA, JB 3/43, DSS, R. Endean, Briefing on Press Release of Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 23 Oct. 1996.  TNA, JB 3/44, DSS, G. Harris to PSC(AM), Briefing on HBAI results, 25 Oct. 1996.  ‘Labour says Poverty has Soared since Election’, The Guardian, 16 Dec. 1996; TNA, JB 3/44, DSS, Briefing for No. 10, Dec. 1996.  TNA, JB 3/44, DSS, D. Tottey, Briefing on IYEP, 10 Oct. 1996; No. 10, PM to B. Boutros-Ghali, UN, 26 Jan. 1996; David Brindle, ‘Poverty, what Poverty? says Lilley’, The Guardian, 17 Apr. 1996.  David Brindle, ‘Welfare Groups Deny “End of Poverty”‘, The Guardian, 17 Apr. 1996.

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the continuities between the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. They were rooted in shared political ideas about poverty and inequality, and manifested in similar tactics and practices in public relations. The main difference lay in the changed configuration of the knowledge regime, as the involvement of the IFS after 1991 had led to more transparency and limited the government’s room for manoeuvre in this field. The question of the extent to which such continuities also extended to the New Labour government under Tony Blair after 1997 has been hotly debated among historians. On the one hand, New Labour has been described as a veritable ‘child’ of Thatcherism: according to this critical view, the Blairites did little to change the legislation and fundamental principles that had been introduced by the Conservatives since 1979, apart from certain ‘gestures’ towards an alternative programme such as the introduction of a national minimum wage.403 However, the portrayal of New Labour as a capitulation to Thatcherism has been refuted by other historians who have pointed to the differences in political ideas and social policies that were designed to combat poverty.404 These policies have won acclaim as an outright ‘war on poverty’, which achieved considerable reductions in child poverty rates, a success that was made possible almost entirely by increases in tax credits and other benefits.405 Blair launched this ‘war’ with his surprise announcement in March 1999 committing the government to eradicating child poverty in Britain over the next twenty years. Indeed, Blair’s announcement was extraordinary, as no previous British government had ever accepted any official definition of poverty, let alone a measurable policy target for the reduction of poverty. The origins of this remarkable policy have not yet been researched in depth. According to one account of the events of March 1999, Blair’s pledge was expressly ‘grounded in a commitment to social justice’ and was ‘consistent with the values of the Labour party’, although it was also pointed out that ‘no one really knows’ where the idea to eradicate poverty came from; according to that same account it was ‘most likely’ added at the last minute by a speechwriter to ‘jazz up’ an otherwise dry address.406 A less idealistic and more complex picture emerges from recently declassified records of the New Labour government. The records show that the New Labour administration at first adopted an approach to the poverty question that was surprisingly similar to that of the preceding Conservative government; subsequently, however, it was gradually

 Edgerton, Rise and Fall, 506–11.  Driver, ‘Poverty, Social Justice and the Labour Government’; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, 193–200. On the impact of the government’s social policies see Joyce and Sibieta, ‘Assessment of Labour’s Record’.  Waldfogel, Britain’s War on Poverty, 1–3; Sloman, Transfer State, 179; Dickens, ‘Child Poverty in Britain: Past Lessons and Future Prospects’, R7–R19, at R13, table 3.  Waldfogel, Britain’s War on Poverty, 34–6.

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nudged towards the introduction of an official poverty target by outside experts and organizations. Initially, ministers and officials of the New Labour government displayed a reluctance not dissimilar to that of the preceding governments when it came to statistical discussions of poverty, although there were fine differences in tone and content that signalled a break with the Conservative philosophy. In marked contrast to the government’s denial of poverty under Thatcher and Major, DSS briefings now acknowledged that poverty actually existed, and officials stopped putting the term ‘poverty’ in quotation marks as had been common under the previous Conservative administrations. Moreover, the new ‘lines to take’ included the commitment to tackling the stark inequality in incomes that had been allowed to widen under Thatcher and Major.407 At the same time, however, the New Labour government adopted the same stance on the measurement of poverty as previous governments. Ministers were briefed to declare that ‘our immediate priority is not to settle the difficult question of whether and how poverty should be defined’. Neither was the government ready to agree to an official definition of poverty on the grounds that ‘all definitions have inherent flaws’.408 Senior government statisticians at the DSS opposed the idea of adopting an official definition of poverty or a poverty line – and advised ministers accordingly. As Gordon Harris of the DSS explained to Blair’s Social Security Secretary, Harriet Harman, there was not much to be gained from such a move, which would have wide-ranging implications for a number of Whitehall departments.409 This stance was adopted even by more independent-minded ministers in Blair’s government. As it happened, Frank Field, the new minister for welfare reform and veteran anti-poverty campaigner, who had pressed Conservative governments over statistical questions of poverty for many years, was now conspicuously cautious when it came to discussions of these matters. In internal discussions over the government’s White Paper on International Development in August 1997, for example, Field warned against any references to definitions of poverty in an international context that could set a precedent for the domestic debate: ‘We have yet to determine whether a definition of poverty would be helpful in a domestic context.’410 Field also defended this position in public appearances during the government’s ‘welfare reform roadshow’ that was launched in spring 1998 to regain public trust lost in the row over a cut to benefits for lone parents in the previous autumn.411 Shortly before his resignation from the New Labour government, Field explained to an audience at a public event in

    

TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, M. Palmer to Mr Newman / SoS, Briefing on Poverty, 10 Sept. 1997. Ibid. TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, G. Harris / ASD3 to SoS, 24 July 1997. TNA BN 146/427, DSS, F. Field to C. Short / SoS for Int. Development, 11 Aug. 1997. Hills, ‘Thatcherism, New Labour and the Welfare State’.

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Lancaster in mid July 1998 why the government was not considering income as a viable statistical indicator to measure the success of planned welfare reforms:412 Because we are trying to get away from using data which I for a long time thought suspect which is just income data, it’s not unimportant but not everybody tells the truth about their income and that applies at the top end of the scale as it does at the bottom end of the scale. And one of the things I did previously [before] going to Parliament was to get, there were all these studies on the poor, family and kinship in East London and so on, and I got someone to do family and kinship on Eaton Square [in Belgravia, West London], which is the poshest area of London, and needless to say we didn’t get one interview. Either the butlers told us where to go or the intercoms said that we were not welcome, that we should move on, and I’ve always thought how appropriate it is that the privacy that the rich have is something which should actually be extended to the poor, so I’m not one that thinks we should endlessly go around putting our sticky fingers in the private lives of the poor and I am sceptical of the value of lots of the income data that we have.

While one of Labour’s most statistics-savvy spokespersons displayed such a dismissive attitude towards household surveys and the measurement of income inequality, others outside the government took a very different view. On the back of a new wave of research on poverty and inequality, there were growing calls from experts, campaigners, and organizations both from inside and outside the United Kingdom for the government to agree to official definitions and policy targets in the combat against poverty. Within the UK, these demands were advanced not only by poverty experts and campaign groups but were also taken up inside the Labour Party by left-wing backbenchers such as Jeremy Corbyn.413 In the EU, the Commission’s anti-poverty strategy gained new momentum when the Amsterdam Treaty of October 1997 provided a legal basis for a more coordinated approach to measuring and monitoring poverty across European member states, a development that prompted Eurostat to set up a task force to explore the collection and reporting of comparative statistics.414 On the global stage, the UN’s 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen agreed on a programme of action that required member states to tackle unemployment, poverty, and inequality. The Copenhagen summit and the ensuing International Year for the Eradication of Poverty in 1996 also resonated in the United Kingdom where more than a hundred local authorities, community organizations, and pressure groups were inspired to join forces in the newly formed UK Coalition against Poverty. In June 1997, the Coalition urged the incoming New Labour government to formulate a national plan for the eradication of poverty, including timetables and targets, a proposal that came close to what Blair would announce in March 1999, but that was still regarded as inconceivable by his government in this form at that point. Blair and his ministers argued that the government’s ‘New Deal’ to tackle unemployment would meet the same objectives; accordingly, DSS

 TNA, BN 146/431, DSS, Transcript of event with Frank Field at Lancaster and Morecambe College, 15 July 1998.  TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, G. Harris / ASD3 to SoS, 24 July 1997.  TNA, BN 146/429, DSS, Harris / ASD to Rookes / ISP, 10 July 1998.

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officials prepared a draft reply for the Prime Minister saying that ‘the government will not be producing a plan of the type you propose’.415 The fact that such a plan was not a completely outlandish idea was demonstrated across the Irish Sea, where the Irish government had responded to the UN initiative by developing a national anti-poverty strategy, complete with tools for the measurement of poverty and mechanisms for poverty proofing of proposed policies.416 All these international and domestic initiatives raised questions about the approach of the New Labour government. As officials at the DSS noted in summer 1997, ‘our ministers may eventually come under pressure for a definition’ of poverty.417 The government’s initial refusal to agree to a definition of poverty became a serious presentational issue because it seemed at odds with some of New Labour’s declared goals and principles. Firstly, it ran counter to the broader trend towards performance rating and monitoring that accompanied Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution and flourished under New Labour; among others, this took the form of so-called ‘public service agreements’ that were introduced for performance management in the public sector in 1998. Secondly, refusing to set clearly defined benchmarks seemed difficult to defend in light of Blair’s public pledges to tackle poverty and inequality.418 This problem was also recognized at the DSS. In July 1997, Mark Palmer from the Income Support policy division contradicted his colleague, Gordon Harris, from the departmental statistics branch, who had argued against the introduction of a poverty definition:419 Ministers are committed to tackling poverty, and they and commentators will expect some way of measuring their success. Announcing that there will continue to be no poverty line could present some difficult handling issues – if you acknowledge that poverty exists but have no poverty line, how do you define poverty? We would have to ensure that Ministers’ commitment in this area was affirmed in spite of having no poverty line. [. . .] We certainly want to avoid getting Ministers to reject a poverty line but then having nothing concrete and sustainable to offer in its place – whatever happens, we are probably looking at a ‘least bad’ solution here.

Nonetheless, senior civil servants and ministers continued to sidestep this problem, although officials were clear that the government needed to be prepared for public questioning about definitions of poverty and social exclusion. The creation of the Social Exclusion Unit in autumn 1997 and the Prime Minister’s announcement of an anti-poverty strategy with annual progress reports in his speech in Sheffield in

 TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, M. Palmer, Draft reply and briefing, June 1997; DSS, Briefing on Irish AntiPoverty Strategy and the UN World Summit, undated (July/Aug. 1997).  TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, Briefing and paper on Irish Anti-Poverty Strategy and the UN World Summit, undated (July/Aug 1997).  Ibid.  Hills, ‘Thatcherism, New Labour and the Welfare State’, 29.  TNA, BN 146/427, DSS, M. Palmer to G. Harris, 21 July 1997. Emphasis in the original.

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late January 1998 only increased the urgency of the issue.420 Finally, during the consultations over the government’s Green Paper on Welfare Reform in spring 1998, the possibility of introducing an official poverty line was ‘actively considered’ by ministers.421 However, DSS officials advised against including a statistical indicator on relative poverty in the list of ‘success measures’ in the Green Paper: at first, the draft list had specified ‘a reduced proportion of children living in households below average income’ as a success measure for ‘principle 5’, the pledge to end ‘the scourge of child poverty’ in Britain.422 However, including ‘measures relating to half average income’ was considered to be ‘inadvisable’ or even ‘dangerous’ both by officials at the departmental statistics branch and the policy branch responsible for Income Support at the DSS.423 The objection was based on the same old argument that had already been used by previous governments to reject the poverty indicator of half average income or by similar measures, positing that it could create the ‘ludicrous situation’ where increases in benefits and average income could increase the numbers living below average income – although, in fact, it was perfectly possible to imagine a society with no-one falling below the threshold of half average income, as Anthony Atkinson had already pointed out in the mid 1970s.424 A deeper reason lay in other factors that influenced fluctuations in average income and were outside of government control or deliberately excluded from government interventions for political reasons, most notably, the fact that ‘the government has forsworn soaking the rich’, as Gordon Harris pointed out in an internal note.425 In the event, the child poverty measure by half average income was dropped from New Labour’s draft Green Paper for Welfare Reform and replaced with the much weaker measure of the proportion of children in workless households. The final version included a total of 32 ‘success measures’, but none of them covered relative poverty. This did not go unnoticed, as officials at the DSS realized in the wake of the publication of the Green Paper in March 1998: ‘The Welfare Reform Green paper steered clear of any direct measure of low incomes in the “success measures” it put forward. This has attracted adverse comment.’426 The criticism of the Green Paper added to the pressure on the government to commit to an official poverty target, all the more so as preparations for Blair’s antipoverty strategy were underway at official level. An interdepartmental working group was scheduled to meet in mid July 1998 for the first time to discuss the key

 TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, C. Rookes to M. Palmer, 4 Mar. 1998; Prime Minister’s Speech, New Deal and Tackling Poverty, 30 Jan. 1998.  TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, M. Palmer to Mr Massey, 5 Mar. 1998.  TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, Draft paper: Green Paper: Success Measures, Mar. 1998.  TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, C. Rookes to M. Palmer, 6 Mar. 1998.  Atkinson, Economics of Inequality, 189.  TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, G. Harris to A. Woods, WRU, 6 Mar. 1998.  TNA, BN 146/429, DSS / ASD, Background Note No. 2 on Anti-Poverty Strategy, July 1998.

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elements of the strategy and how it could be delivered. From the start, officials were clear that ‘monitoring of progress will be crucial’, which raised the question, once again, of whether the government should define a policy target in statistical terms. While the Treasury was still wary of the ‘risks’ involved in such a commitment and recommended sticking to the success measures laid down in the Green Paper, opinion at the DSS had already shifted in the opposite direction.427 In May 1998, DSS officials considered reinserting the child poverty measure in the list of success measures for the welfare reform, and this time, the discussions came to different conclusions. A departmental discussion paper on the subject found that on balance there was ‘a very strong case’ for adopting a child poverty measure based on half average income, provided that ‘Ministers attach sufficiently high priority to child poverty’ and ‘be prepared to tie themselves to a commitment on this front’.428 Even Gordon Harris, who had previously opposed this idea, now seemed convinced that there was no way around it. As Harris explained, the government had little choice in light of the activism of external experts and organizations in this field:429 On child poverty, the issue is not whether we want a measure such as ‘the proportion of children below half average income’ to feature in public debate on the progress of welfare reform. It will feature, whether or not Ministers adopt such a measure, because of the attention given by outside bodies – including pressure groups, external researchers and EU reports. [. . .] While officials in ASD and Policy Group traditionally caution against the risks of adopting ‘poverty’ targets, there are strong arguments in favour of a success measure more directly related to poverty than those in the Green Paper.

Thus, New Labour’s child poverty target was long in the making. Blair’s announcement in March 1999 did not come like a bolt from the blue, as has been suggested in the literature.430 Committing to a statistical policy target had been under consideration inside the government for more than a year, and demands for a measurable goalpost from independent experts, campaign groups, and international organizations went back even further. After Blair and his ministers initially opposed this idea, growing public pressure proved instrumental in convincing the New Labour government to give in to the demands. This was no small feat, given that no previous British government had ever agreed to introducing an official definition of poverty. The history of New Labour’s child poverty target thus demonstrates the increasingly powerful position of non-governmental actors and organizations in the hierarchy of authority in the knowledge regime pertaining to economic inequality. Definitions and statistical knowledge of poverty and inequality have remained contested, though, as more recent events have shown. When the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, the pressure from the poverty lobby could not prevent ministers in the    

TNA, BN 146/429, HMT, Key Elements in an Anti-Poverty Strategy, July 1998. TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, B. O’Gorman, Child Poverty Success Measures, 5 May 1998. TNA, BN 146/428, DSS, G. Harris to C. Rookes, 5 May 1998. Waldfogel, Britain’s War on Poverty, 1–2, 35.

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Coalition governments from undoing the legislative and conceptual legacy of New Labour in this policy area. While the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, sought to distance himself from the more divisive parts of Thatcher’s premiership by expressly endorsing the concept of relative poverty and employing the rhetoric of One Nation Conservatism, his government pursued an austerity strategy that has drawn constant criticism for hollowing out public services and social security in the country.431 This strategy was accompanied by attempts to undermine the official child poverty target that had been introduced by New Labour, in particular, in interventions that were driven by Iain Duncan Smith at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In reports published by the DWP, New Labour’s approach to tackling child poverty was branded as a failure: New Labour had made little difference to the lives of low-income families, the DWP argued, because focusing on the child poverty target merely created a situation of ‘poverty plus a pound’. Instead, the DWP vowed to overcome the narrow focus on a single indicator of financial poverty and the reliance on income transfers to combat poverty. The language used in public statements from the DWP under Duncan Smith signalled a reorientation towards past concepts of poverty. In particular, this manifested in frequent references to the suspected ‘cycle of disadvantage’, a term that was associated with older notions of a culture of poverty in the 1970s and 1980s – and for which government research commissioned by Keith Joseph had found little empirical evidence at the time.432 The DWP under Duncan Smith was determined to take ‘a new approach to child poverty’ and to get away from relative income as a single statistical indicator of poverty.433 In a report published in 2011, the DWP suggested a range of alternative indicators for the measurement of poverty. In 2012, this was followed up by consultations with a number of non-governmental bodies, among others, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, to explore ‘how best to measure child poverty‘ – the DWP’s approach was premised on the argument that concentrating on income was ‘simplistic’.434 The Conservatives’ attempts to redefine poverty were eventually even enshrined in law. In July 2015, Duncan Smith announced that the government would scrap the child poverty target and replace the child poverty measure with regular reports on indicators focusing on worklessness, educational attainment, and addiction.435 The move prompted condemnation from antipoverty campaigners and poverty experts; social scientist John Veit-Wilson dismissed

 Hickson, ‘Conservatism and the Poor’.  Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/25/7/161–179, DWP and DEd, Child Poverty in the UK: The Report on the 2010 Target, June 2012; Welshman, Transmitted Deprivation.  Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/24/70/1521–1550, DWP and DEd‚ A New Approach to Child Poverty: Tackling the Causes of Disadvantage and Transforming Families’ Lives, Apr. 2011.  Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/25/64/1109–1153, DWP, Measuring Child Poverty: A Consultation on Better Measures of Child Poverty, Nov. 2012.  Patrick Wintour, ‘Government to Scrap Child Poverty Target before Tax Credits Cut’, The Guardian, 1 July 2015.

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Duncan Smith’s views on the definition of poverty as ‘egregious’, ‘unscientific’, and ‘worthless’.436 Repealing New Labour’s child poverty legislation took the country back to the situation that existed before 1999, but not much further, as annual updates on the child poverty measure continued to be available from government statistics as usual. The transformation of the knowledge regime in the 1990s established new practices and configurations that can be described as a civil society knowledge regime. In present-day Britain, governments are no longer in a position to suppress or deny official statistics on poverty and inequality without risking public protestations and potential humiliation at the hands of opposition politicians and non-governmental watchdogs. When the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pressed Theresa May in parliament over rising child poverty in 2019, the Prime Minister made no attempt to dispute the reported figures.437 Since the IFS broke the government’s monopoly on the poverty figures in 1991, and thanks to the statistical reforms of the early and mid 1990s, the British public has access to more detailed and more reliable statistical information than ever before and than is available in other countries. Whether statistical knowledge has any impact on political debates and public opinion is a different matter, especially since the rise of right-wing populism and post-truth politics in recent years. Conservative politicians such as Michael Gove have made political capital out of denouncing academic experts and scholarly opinion, similar to their predecessors in the 1980s, and Boris Johnson did not change his habit of scoring political points based on false information even during his tenure in Downing Street.438 During Prime Minister’s Questions in June 2020, Boris Johnson was pressed by the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, over the most recent rise in child poverty as reported in a government document published by the Social Mobility Commission. In response, Johnson not only plainly denied the increase in poverty but even came up with his own numbers that purportedly proved the contrary to what Starmer suggested.439 The episode may have made little difference to Johnson’s popularity with Conservative party members and voters, but the existing statistical infrastructure and the control mechanisms that distinguish the current knowledge regime from previous decades did at least ensure that Johnson’s claim was quickly exposed as a blatant lie.

 John Veit-Wilson, Letter to the editor, The Guardian, 2 Mar. 2014.  Rowena Mason, ‘Corbyn Attacks May at PMQs Over Rising Poverty’, The Guardian, 3 Apr. 2019.  John Crace, ‘Boris is the Emperor with no Clothes and it’s Not a Pretty Sight’, The Guardian, 22 July 2020.  Peter Walker, ‘Boris Johnson Wrong on Child Poverty at PMQs, Public Body Says’, The Guardian, 22 June 2020.

VI Conclusion Weaponizing statistics for political gain has certainly become more difficult in present-day Britain than in earlier decades. The days are gone when Thatcher’s Social Security Secretary John Moore could confidently claim that no poverty existed in Britain in the late 1980s: as depicted on the front cover of this book, Moore bolstered his claim by pointing to figures and charts which had been produced by his Whitehall department and which were hard to verify for anyone outside the government. The long-standing quasi-monopoly of the government over the most authoritative statistics has since been broken and more statistical data has become publicly available than ever before. However, readers could be forgiven for thinking that knowledge about economic inequality is an irrelevance in British politics in light of the developments in recent years. After all, the existing statistical knowledge about social trends under the Coalition and Conservative governments since 2010 did not seem to have made much of an impression on the electorate. The figures have shown the impact of the politics of austerity on the most vulnerable in British society: not only have real wages stagnated for many years; recent years have also seen a marked rise in homelessness that has been visible to anyone walking the streets of London and other cities in the United Kingdom. Moreover, there has been a steep surge in the use of food banks, which has probably somewhat masked the true extent of growing hardship and economic inequality that is reflected in statistics in present-day Britain. The statistical evidence suggests that the reductions in child poverty achieved under the New Labour government in the 2000s are beginning to be reversed. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree foundation has even found that some parts of the country have seen stark increases in extreme poverty over the past two decades.1 And yet, despite all this evidence, the country went to the polls in December 2019 and voted in a new Prime Minister who had almost nothing to say about any of these worrying social issues and whose rhetoric has frequently betrayed his ideological commitment to the current inequality regime.2 Given the absence in Johnson’s election platform of any discernible social policy ideas to tackle the social crisis, progressive think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation even made predictions in the run-up to the general election that a Conservative victory would probably lead to a further rise in poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom.3 Thus, even though there were other well-known reasons for Labour’s crushing defeat in the general election of 2019, the outcome

 Carla Cebula and Chris Birt, Deepening Poverty in Scotland – No One Left Behind? Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Briefing (London, April 2023).  Römer, ‘Boris Johnson, Thatcherism and the Rhetoric of “Wealth Creators”’.  Rowena Mason et al., ‘Fears Child Poverty May Rise to Record 60-Year High under Tories: Thinktank Resolution Foundation Predicts Social Crisis Will Worsen if Boris Johnson Wins General Election’, The Guardian, 26 Nov. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-006

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seems to suggest that the majority of voters ‘don’t care very much at all’ about the evidence of rising poverty and inequality in their society.4 Most recently, however, the pandemic crisis has put the spotlight on welldocumented multidimensional social disparities in present-day Britain. Coronavirus may have reaffirmed the importance of state intervention, functioning public services, and low-paid key workers, who have staffed ‘the frontlines’ to keep the National Health Service going and to deliver Amazon parcels to luckier people working from home instead of being exposed to the risk of infection on a daily basis. Despite all the clapping on balconies in leafy streets and on the doorstep of No. 10, however, they have not been rewarded but have often paid the highest price. Available statistical analyses have shown that coronavirus has hit the most vulnerable and disadvantaged sections of the population hardest: the highest mortality rates have been recorded in deprived local areas and among ethnic minorities.5 Furthermore, the low-paid have not only suffered a disproportionate death toll; workers from ethnic minority backgrounds have also been affected much more heavily by the economic fallout from coronavirus.6 Consequently, the use of foodbanks during the coronavirus lockdown almost doubled, with families with children at the highest risk.7 The coronavirus crisis has exposed the deep-seated social, economic, and health inequalities that continue to mar British society – and that are pervaded by disadvantages defined by class, gender, race, and space. These multidimensional and intersectional inequalities were a familiar feature of social commentary and media coverage even before coronavirus hit.8 However, the speed with which reliable statistical information about the social costs and unequal effects of the pandemic has become available testifies to the existence of a statistical infrastructure that is up to the task, embodied by government statistics, research institutes, think tanks, anti-poverty NGOs, and the scholarly community. The website of the Office of National Statistics, for example, offers analyses that cross-reference data on mortality rates from Covid-19 with the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), an established statistical series that measures multidimensional social and economic disadvantages broken down by a total of 32,844 small geographical areas in England alone.9 The IMD is composed of seven different indicators ranging from living environment to education to income, with the latter accorded the highest relative weight  Polly Toynbee, ‘Boris Johnson is Relaxed about Poverty Because He Thinks Voters Are Too’, The Guardian, 23 Jan. 2020.  Polly Toynbee, ‘Poverty Kills People: After Coronavirus We Can No Longer Ignore It’, The Guardian, 5 May 2020.  Niamh McIntyre et al., ‘BAME Workers Disproportionately Hit by UK Covid-19 Downturn, Data Shows’, The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020.  Patrick Butler, ‘UK Food Banks Face Record Demand in Coronavirus Crisis’, The Guardian, 1 May 2020.  Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.  Office of National Statistics, Deaths Involving COVID-19 by Local Area and Socioeconomic Deprivation: Deaths Occurring between 1 Mar. and 30 June 2020, ONS Statistical Bulletin (24 July 2020).

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alongside employment; it allows analysts to map geographies of deprivation in England and Wales and to monitor changes in the relative well-being of the population in local areas over time. The latest list of local authority areas with the highest degrees of income deprivation was topped by Birmingham, but it also included the Borough of Tower Hamlets in East London that has preoccupied poverty researchers in Britain since the days of Charles Booth.10 More concretely, the genealogy of the IMD can be traced back to the Urban Programme and the development of indicators of deprivation derived from the Census of Population in the late 1960s and 1970s; it can serve as an example how the present statistical system has evolved historically from earlier precursors and the beginnings in the post-war era. These historical traditions have distinguished the knowledge infrastructure in Britain from other comparable societies to this day. In Germany, for example, authorities and researchers only began a few years ago to produce an equivalent to the IMD, and the result, the German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation (GISD), is no match for its English precursor.11 Tellingly, no statistical analyses on the unequal impact of coronavirus on different local areas, ethnic minorities, and income groups have been available on the website of the German federal statistical office.12 The unequal impact of coronavirus has been sporadically observed by commentators in the German media, but the coverage has usually been based on anecdotal evidence such as news about infection clusters in meat factories or in overcrowded tower blocks with high densities of immigrant population.13 In fact, more precise data about the interrelations and linkages between mortality rates, low incomes, ethnicity, and space have been largely missing from public discussions in Germany, in marked contrast to the British debate. In other words, the diverging trajectories and the legacies of knowledge production on economic inequality have clearly impacted on the ways in which we discuss current social affairs to this very day.

 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, The English Indices of Deprivation 2019: Research Report (London, 2019).  Kroll, Lars Eric et al., ‘Regional Health Differences – Developing a Socioeconomic Deprivation Index for Germany’, Journal of Health Monitoring, 2 (2017), at [10.17886/RKI-GBE-2017-048.2], accessed 13 Feb. 2021.  Römer, ‘Soziale Ungleichheit in der Pandemie’; Statistisches Bundesamt, Dossier: Statistiken zur COVID-19-Pandemie, Ausgabe 13/2020 (Wiesbaden, 2020). Analyses on earnings and employment patterns and other aspects of the impact of coronavirus on German society have been provided by the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, but the analyses contain little on the issue of intersectional inequalities or spatialized patterns of deprivation, e.g. Carsten Schröder et al., ‘Vor dem Covid19-Virus sind nicht alle Erwerbstätigen gleich’, DIW aktuell, 41 (May 2020).  Jan Friedmann and Matthias Bartsch, ‘Das Sozialvirus: Die Ausbrüche in Schlachthöfen zeigen: ob jemand Covid-19 bekommt, ist auch eine Frage von Einkommen, Vermögen und Bildung’, Der Spiegel, 18 June 2020; Shan Huang, ‘Gefahr durch Armut: Corona macht eben doch nicht alle gleich’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 July 2020.

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This book has cast new light on the people and practices that have shaped existing knowledge about economic inequality in Britain since the post-war era. To capture the social and political conditions that governed the production and circulation of knowledge in particular historical situations, this book has relied on the concept of knowledge regimes. This concept assumes that it is not just down to the genius of individual intellectuals what kind of knowledge is available in a given society. Instead, the state of knowledge hinges on more complex configurations. Alongside the leading social scientists, it also depends on civil servants in statistical offices and government departments, politicians, journalists, and social activists. Moreover, knowledge production is not just a matter of ideas and books, but also requires resources, infrastructure, and access to data. This also means that there are organizations and individuals who set research agendas, allocate funding and who can lay claim to the most authoritative expertise and knowledge. In short, knowledge production rests on configurations of historical actors, institutional settings, power relations, and hierarchies of authority, and these knowledge regimes can stabilize over certain periods of time, but are subject to historical change in themselves, change that can be brought about by the dynamics and the interactions between historical actors in the specific field. In the case of post-war Britain, this book has distinguished four consecutive knowledge regimes that underwent transformations on different levels and eventually superseded each other one by one. Firstly, the post-war knowledge regime was dominated by government statisticians who developed statistical series and surveys that laid the ground for all future discussions of the subject. This new observational apparatus significantly improved existing knowledge but remained underfunded so that basic trends in income and wealth distribution in Britain remained contested. Secondly, the early and mid-1970s saw a surge in public and academic interest in the subject: the social-democratic knowledge regime was characterized by unprecedented levels of attention and knowledge production on issues of economic inequality before it petered out in the second half of the decade. Thirdly, Margaret Thatcher’s advent in Downing Street in 1979 ushered in the neo-liberal knowledge regime of the 1980s that was defined by sustained attempts to reverse the social-democratic advances of the 1970s. Fourthly, the early and late 1990s saw the transition to the current globalized civil society knowledge regime that not only introduced new forms of transparency and accountability in Britain but also opened up previously well-guarded national borders in social statistics. As always, history is more messy than neat chronologies may suggest. Admittedly, the boundaries between the different stages in this model were often fluid in places, with partly overlapping configurations of practices, norms, infrastructures, and hierarchies of authority. The chronology suggested here is based on the analytical pinpointing of key changes that stood out as defining features of particular importance. The transition from the post-war to the social-democratic knowledge regime in 1972/ 73 was first and foremost based on the shifting public and academic attention from narrower questions of poverty to wider issues of inequality, a shift that was accompanied

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and underpinned by increasing political interest in the subject. The transition in 1979, in turn, was located in ideologically driven changes to the statistical infrastructure that aimed to minimize the production of public inequality knowledge. Finally, the transition in 1991 was associated with civil society organizations breaking the monopoly of the state in key statistics, a transition that coincided with the long delayed globalization of the knowledge regime that had hitherto been mainly defined in national terms. The changing knowledge regimes were inextricably intertwined with the wider political culture. They had a direct bearing on how society was cast in popular imaginations, and they played an integral part in framing some of the most central social policy debates in contemporary Britain. After all, the making of statistical knowledge is pervaded by powerful implications. Statistics can enhance the visibility of certain social issues while obscuring other social phenomena, categories, or groups. To begin with, the long-standing fixation with macroeconomic factor shares focused attention on the dichotomy of employees and employers, distracting from more fine-grained interpersonal inequalities. The failure to record representative income data of ethnic minorities in Britain, in turn, reproduced images of a white British nation and obscured racial inequalities until the 1990s. Likewise, the concentration on the superwealthy top 1 per cent in recent years implies a very particular way of looking at overall economic inequality that shifts attention away from important processes of widening disparities in the middle and elsewhere in the income spectrum.14 The ways in which statistics have been constructed have clearly influenced public debates and political thought past and present. In the post-war era, the persistent deficiencies and resulting uncertainties about basic trends in economic inequality fuelled the narrative of ‘affluence’ and underpinned unsubstantiated claims about the alleged ‘great transformation’ of British society – exaggerating the extent of redistribution in postwar Britain was part and parcel of the right-wing narrative of national decline that was deployed by the emerging New Right and others to attack the ‘progressive consensus’. In the 1980s, the Thatcher government deliberately fostered growing uncertainty about trends in poverty and inequality as part of concerted knowledge politics that were designed to defuse mounting criticism of the government’s market reforms and to undermine public discourse on class divisions. The links between class discourse and knowledge that Thatcher and her ministers tried to break up had become apparent in previous decades: class talk had gone ‘underground’ in the 1960s before re-emerging in the 1970s, a trajectory that was associated with developments in the production of statistics and social research on class divisions in Britain. In other words, the periodic upswings and downturns in the public and academic concern with issues of economic inequality over the twentieth century and up until the present

 O’Connor, ‘When Measurements Matter’; Savage, Social Class in the 21st Century.

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have not only shaped but also been shaped by efforts to create and disseminate quantitative knowledge about these issues. The genealogy of inequality knowledge also reveals more general trends in British society and politics after 1945. In particular, the findings of this book speak to recent research on the trajectory of social democracy during the post-war era. They corroborate the view that the early and mid-1970s can be regarded as the high point of distributional politics in contemporary Britain.15 Not only was economic inequality rediscovered and placed at the forefront of Labour’s policy agenda; this was also the time when knowledge production on income and wealth distribution peaked. This distinguished these years from earlier phases. Rhetorical commitments to ‘fair shares’ and talk of social justice had long been staples of political discourse but such pledges were not always backed up by actions. The 1964–70 Labour government, for example, had made a casual pledge to reducing the gap between rich and poor.16 Behind the scenes, however, this pledge was not matched by corresponding statistical policies – on the contrary, key statistical series on income distribution were neglected and proposals for investments in wealth statistics rejected. In 1974, by contrast, the incoming Wilson government’s progressive agenda was purposefully combined with a largescale programme in knowledge production. These episodes offer relevant insights for the analysis of political languages and government policies. Ever since techniques of evidence-based policies and statistical policy monitoring were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s, governments promising to ‘level up’ society could be expected to make use of these tools. In other words: the level of investment in knowledge production can be regarded as a litmus test that provides clues about the level of priority accorded to a particular policy. This analytical test can also be applied to the wider history of the British state in the twentieth century. As previous research has demonstrated, increasing knowledge production went hand in hand with the expansion of the interventionist state in the post-war era: the creation of more refined social statistics was both a consequence and a driving factor in this process.17 This fact alone does not say much about the ways in which the welfare state developed, though. A deeper analysis of statistical policies can offer a valuable lens for exploring guiding principles and changing priorities in the genealogy of the welfare state. Post-war social policies certainly followed an overarching rationale to lift people out of poverty and to redistribute income and wealth.18 However, the importance of this objective in contemporary thought should not be overstated. While the redistributive effects of the welfare state and the measurement of poverty became central concerns of government research in the 1960s, there were few attempts to

 Sloman, ‘Harold Wilson, “Selsdon Man”, and the Defence of Social Democracy’, 82–83.  Ibid. 93.  Mergel, Staat und Staatlichkeit, 198–199; Furner and Supple, State and Economic Knowledge; Lacey, State and Social Investigation.  Hockerts, ‘Soziale Ungleichheit im Sozialstaat’.

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design and monitor egalitarian policies to systematically close the gap between rich and poor. It was only for a relatively brief period of time during the mid 1970s that a concerted effort was made to reduce economic inequality and to oversee this programme with an improved statistical apparatus. Knowledge acquired ever more significance on various levels in political culture. As the importance of inequality knowledge became increasingly apparent, the spotlight turned on the government’s analytical apparatus itself. Consequently, public discussions brought more and more meta-knowledge to light, that is, knowledge about the production and circulation of knowledge. Meta-knowledge about the government’s statistical policies became an important issue in its own right, and public discourse about official knowledge production changed existing norms about transparency in governance.19 Governments were expected to answer questions about their statistical policies, and this expectation made the traditional secrecy of British administrations much more difficult to sustain. In the case of New Labour under Blair, for example, the turn to knowledge-based policies was not entirely of the government’s own volition: after much dithering it was eventually pressured into introducing a statistical child poverty reduction target by the activism of social campaign groups, scholars, and other external bodies. This episode shows that the epistemology of a particular policy field is not only shaped by the government – it also depends on the readiness of civil society to claim a stake in the process of social knowledge production. Doing so requires a certain degree of expertise, though, and not all campaign groups and social movements were statisticssavvy enough to engage in such technical arguments. The leading anti-poverty campaign groups and activists that emerged in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s were up to the task: on the back of a long tradition of social research and helped by their close collaborations with social scientists, they developed a high degree of expertise and statistical literacy that allowed them to challenge the government over statistical arguments and key figures. Conversely, their ability to weaponize statistics helped NGOs such as the CPAG to sustain their leading position among other campaign groups in the field. The political battle over the big numbers was also led by statistically minded anti-poverty champions on the British left: Labour MPs such as Michael Meacher and Frank Field operated at the intersection of parliamentary politics, social activism, and the social sciences, and became an important influence on the discussions. As a result, more and more statistical details and terms entered political discourse and, thanks to receptive journalists, media audiences became acquainted with highly sophisticated discussions over measurements, indicators, and numbers. These dynamics contributed much to the increasing quantification of the social world and the growing significance of statistics in political culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

 Berger, Cultures of Transparency.

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When scholars, activists and journalists engaged in statistical arguments, they often reacted to the politicization of statistics by governments. During the post-war decades, governments of all colours increasingly made use of statistics for public relations purposes to sell their policies and narratives to the public.20 This trend accelerated noticeably during the 1960s and 1970s, a trend that was clearly linked to the general expansion of social and economic statistics in this period. The production and circulation of knowledge created dynamics of their own, as ministers and officials learned quickly: the publication of new statistical information regularly triggered political demands for ever more information or the improvement of existing information systems. Governments reacted to these growing challenges in different ways. Labour and Conservative governments alike often proved reluctant to release more information than necessary and exhibited few qualms about employing statistical artefacts to win political arguments. Even the progressive 1974–76 Labour government under Wilson briefly resorted to manipulative tactics in the propaganda campaign over the ‘social wage’ before ministers and officials abandoned the slogan because the claims were deemed unsustainable. However, there were notable differences in degree. The Thatcher governments displayed more inclination to statistical manipulation than any other government before, including the 1970–74 Heath government, and the fallout limited the room for manoeuvre for all future governments. With their populist approach, the casual attitude towards empirical facts and the hostility towards academic experts, the Thatcher governments arguably inspired to some extent the political style of the proponents of ‘post-truth’ right-wing populism that emerged during the 2010s. Inside the government, the bulk of the knowledge work was delivered by civil servants. Highlighting the powerful position held by government statisticians and other officials in the knowledge regime is not to deny the importance of other sources of expertise and knowledge – quite the contrary. Alongside the knowledge produced by the state bureaucracy, there was a pluralism of knowledges on offer at all times, and there is no suggestion here that official statistics were necessarily superior in quality to the enquiries of social researchers or campaigners. Furthermore, from the early post-war era, leading social scientists such as Peter Townsend and Anthony Atkinson wielded much influence and left an imprint on public perceptions and academic discussions on issues of poverty and economic inequality. Indeed, government statisticians frequently consulted with the academic world and duly reviewed the academic literature, which also informed many of their methodological choices in designing official statistics. Nonetheless, many contemporaries regarded official statistics as the most authoritative and substantial source, at least until Thatcher’s government caused a deep crisis in public trust in government figures. Regular large-scale government surveys based on substantial financial and staff resources often carried more

 Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People.

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weight than small-scale local enquiries that were easy to dismiss as unrepresentative if necessary. Government officials not only had privileged access and supplied the data on which academic experts depended in their own work, but were also in a position to make decisions about priorities and directions in government research that had direct bearing on the quality and nature of the information produced by the statistical apparatus. During the 1970s, for example, some experts and officials advanced ideas about designing a small area index of low incomes similar to the later established IMD mentioned above; however, the cumulative effects and limitations flowing from government agenda-setting in statistical work programmes during the first decades of the post-war era precluded any such undertaking. For similar reasons, for decades the statistical system remained largely blind to questions of intersectional inequalities of race and gender – thus, these long-standing blind spots were not only due to the choices made by social scientists or left-wing politicians but also to the research priorities set by ministers and civil servants. In fact, government statistical work programmes in this field were frequently underfunded and at times outright neglected, not only during the 1980s under Thatcher, but also during earlier periods, most notably in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Government Statistical Service more or less halted the work on income and wealth statistics despite the urgent need for reforms and improvements. In the major overhaul of the statistical system under the auspices of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in the mid 1970s, government statisticians played a constructive role, but also obstructed key projects on wealth inequality and other issues when the political climate increasingly turned against progressive politics after 1976. During the 1980s, government statisticians worked in close partnership with Thatcher’s ministers and officials from policy divisions in efforts to gear the statistical system towards the political philosophy of the Thatcher government and to construct political narratives about increasing living standards and the trickle-down effect. The 1980s saw more politicized debates about numbers, political uses of official statistics for government public relations purposes, and political interventions in the statistical system on the part of the government than in any other period, and civil servants played a key role in all of these developments. This is not to suggest that officials had free rein over the statistics. Government statisticians and other civil servants operated in a dynamic political context and frequently engaged in interactions with the public, the academic community, NGOs, and other civil society and intergovernmental organizations at home and abroad. Over the course of the period under investigation here, some of these actors and bodies moved up in the unofficial hierarchy of authority in this field. From the mid 1960s and 1970s, governments faced increasing pressure and constant challenges from the growing poverty lobby: campaign groups such as the Child Poverty Action Group cooperated closely with leading academic experts and wielded more expertise in statistical questions than other organizations, such as the research departments of the main

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political parties. As independent researchers and research institutes began to catch up with the state bureaucracy in the use of computerized analytical models during the 1970s and 1980s, the government eventually lost the edge to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In 1991, the government had to agree to a formal co-operation, which allowed the IFS to become privy to the construction of the main statistical series on income inequality: a watershed moment in the transition to the present knowledge regime where civil society organizations are in a stronger position than ever to hold the government to account. At the same time, intergovernmental organizations such as the OECD effectively became the new custodians of comparative knowledge on international income inequality in the emerging globalized knowledge regime. Tracing the genealogy of knowledge regimes can also help to understand the debate about inequality in today’s world. The evolving knowledge regimes of the twentieth century have shaped the present-day inequality paradigm that has so forcefully returned to the academic and political agenda across the world in recent years.21 The surging interest in issues of economic inequality since the 2010s has been unprecedented in scale, but it has built in many ways on the groundwork that was laid in previous decades. During the post-war era, statisticians and social scientists developed the methodologies and statistical infrastructures that provided the know-how and the data on which the discussions of the early twenty-first century relied. Moreover, it was not in the twenty-first century that the language and the visual representation of economic inequality in terms of income percentiles was invented. Painting pictures of a society divided by deciles or quantiles and tracing how they fared over time was indeed an important innovation that made statistics about trends in economic inequality more accessible for wider audiences and thus enabled the subject to gain more political traction. However, audiences in Britain had already been introduced to this innovation during the post-war era. In particular, it was refined and popularized during the transnational rediscovery of inequality in the 1970s. This decade saw a first boom in knowledge production in academic scholarship and the state bureaucracy. The wave of research pioneered by leading experts such as Anthony Atkinson and bodies such as the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth during these years prepared the ground for many later developments even if it petered out in the second half of the 1970s. The fact that it lost momentum provides important insights into the forces that have furthered or counteracted the salience of the inequality paradigm over the years. It was not only shaped by new initiatives and paradigm shifts in the social sciences. As the Thatcher years demonstrated – when the subject was increasingly marginalized – it also hinged on the political climate of the time, the strength or weakness of social activism, changing media interest, and not least the state as a major factor in the making and the maintenance of critical knowledge infrastructures that were essential to informing debates and to raising awareness.

 Savage, Return of Inequality.

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The state has arguably been the most underrated actor in recent scholarship on the genealogies of inequality knowledge. As this book has demonstrated, the state not only produced a constant stream of social knowledge but also played an important role in shaping the underlying knowledge infrastructures both in national and in transnational contexts. When it comes to the driving forces in the development of global frameworks and standards of international statistics during the twentieth century, previous scholarship has often focused on transnational experts, scholarly discourse, and cosmopolitan staff in international organizations. This study has taken a different approach by putting the spotlight on the workings of international organizations as member-state-driven social spaces. Any initiative in these organizations hinged on the approval of member states, and when it came to harmonizing social statistics most national governments proved to be reluctant. The development of international statistics on comparative living standards had been on the agenda of international organizations since the interwar era. However, many member states showed little interest in according to this project anywhere near the same importance and resources as had been invested in the creation of the system of national accounts and other macroeconomic statistics, which underpinned the productionist post-war international political economy. British governments, in particular, were clearly not eager to subject their Empire to comparisons with other countries, let alone former or current colonies. The idea of international comparisons of social issues was seen as an intrusion into domestic affairs. For British officials, fending off the repeated attempts of various international organizations to establish systems of international social reporting was not only a matter of preserving national sovereignty, but also necessary to avoid potential national humiliation and domestic political pressure flowing from possibly embarrassing international league tables, similar to the established league tables of economic growth, where the United Kingdom had been repeatedly surpassed by other Western countries during the post-war era. In particular, UK delegations played a key role in the failure of what was arguably the most promising initiative in this field, the OECD’s social indicators development programme of the 1970s. An important breakthrough was eventually achieved by the independent experts in the Luxembourg Income Study in the late 1980s and notably during the 1990s when the system of comparative international reporting on income distribution as we know it today finally began to take shape, a transformative moment that amounted to a process of globalization in the sense of ‘structured integration’. Before this point was reached, statistics very much remained a national matter. Admittedly, there were frequent transnational exchanges between academic experts and government statisticians on various levels throughout the century, but British officials were reluctant to adapt their national statistical system to international standards. Methodological nationalism was much in evidence, and the nation remained the main reference point in statistical representations of the social for as long as national statistics were incompatible with those of other countries or world regions. In the statistical field, the social

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was thus defined nationally, and governments had a strong hand in the process. The politics of global statistics on the intergovernmental level help to explain why the transnational debate on global inequality in terms of interpersonal income distribution did not materialize until the 1990s. Methodologically, this book has attempted to make a contribution to the history of knowledge as a field of research that is in the process of emancipating itself from the parent discipline of the history of science. It is meant to advance the methodological ambition of historians of knowledge to widen the scope of research towards an analysis of epistemological practices in broader society and political culture. To this end, primary sources, case studies, and spaces of analysis have been selected to incorporate different forms of knowledge and to go beyond the traditional investigation into academic books and intellectual ideas. In particular, the book has tried to demonstrate the potential of government records as a largely untapped source for historians of knowledge that can reveal the complex webs of cultural assumptions and practices that pervade the production and circulation of relevant knowledge. Looking at these practices through the analytical lens of knowledge regimes focuses attention on the social organization, infrastructures, and political contexts that surround and regulate the production and circulation of knowledge. Knowledge and ideas do not take shape, travel, or acquire validity all by themselves. They depend on changing domestic and transnational knowledge infrastructures that are built and operated by a multiplicity of actors and organizations in hierarchical interactions that are pervaded by power. Understanding the workings and transformations of these practices and knowledge infrastructures is thus at least as important as studying the intellectual ideas and discursive contents associated with historical knowledge.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1

John Moore pointing to statistics during his speech on 11 May 1989: drawing by London-based artist Sarah Beth Lundblad (2023), based on contemporary media footage. Source: Courtesy of Sarah B. Lundblad, London 2 Fig. 2 Contemporary and retrospective knowledge: trajectories of income inequality in the UK, 1949–99. Source: Paul Johnson, ‘The Welfare State, Income and Living Standards’, in id. and Roderick Floud (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2004), 213–37, here 230. Courtesy of Cambridge University Press 7 Fig. 3 Rough comparisons: table on income per capita in the UN’s World Social Situation report, 1961. Source: United Nations, Report on the World Social Situation with Special Reference to the Problem of Balanced Social and Economic Development (New York, 1961), 57. © United Nations 48 Fig. 4 Difficult to read: analysis of redistribution in Britain in the CSO journal Economic Trends, 1962. Source: Central Statistical Office, ‘The Impact of Taxes and Social Service Benefits on Different Groups of Households’, Economic Trends, 109 (London, HMSO, 1962), p. ii–xv, here p. vii. © Crown Copyright 1962 137 Fig. 5 Hardly discernible trends: the income distribution tables in the Blue Book, 1969. Source: Central Statistical Office, National Income and Expenditure 1969 (London, HMSO, 1969), 27. © Crown Copyright 1969 163 Fig. 6 A crisp but belated answer to a long debate: the history of income inequality in the UK according to the RCDIW’s A to Z of Income and Wealth, 1980. Source: Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, An A to Z of Income & Wealth (London, HMSO, 1980), 8. © Crown Copyright 1980 198 Fig. 7 The new language of percentiles: presentation of statistics on income distribution in the CSO journal Economic Trends, 1977. Source: Central Statistical Office, ‘Income Distribution in the United Kingdom: 1974/75’, Economic Trends, 282 (London, HMSO, 1977), 99. © Crown Copyright 1977 204 Fig. 8 Repeatedly delayed and eventually scrapped: the rising poverty count in Thatcher’s Britain according to the Low Income Families Tables, October 1983. Source: Hansard, House of Commons, 24 Oct. 1983, vol. 47, col. 51. Open Parliament Licence 261 Fig. 9 Breaking with the past: the new statistical series Households Below Average Income (HBAI), 1988, with striking figures on income growth. Source: Department of Health and Social Security, Households Below Average Income: A Statistical Analysis, 1981–85 (London, HMSO, 1988). © Crown Copyright 1988 290 Fig. 10 The UK on top of the new European poverty league tables in Eurostat’s Rapid Report on Poverty and Inequality in Europe (1980–85), 1990. Source: Eurostat, Inequality and Poverty in Europe (1980–1985). Rapid Reports: Population and Social Conditions, 7 (Luxembourg, 1990), fig. 2. © European Union 297

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Index of Abbreviations AHC ASE BCC BHC BHPS CAP CDE CES CFS CPAG CPRS CRD CSO CST DE DEPP DHSS DoE DSS DWP Eurostat FES FIS FPRG GDP GHIL GHS GLTS GRO GSS HBAI HMT IEA IFS ILO IMD IR JASP LIFT LIS LRD MPS MSA NAB NES NIBB OPCS

After housing costs Annual Statistical Enquiry British Council of Churches Before housing costs British Household Panel Survey Church Action on Poverty Communal Development Effort Centre of Environmental Studies Census income follow-up survey Child Poverty Action Group Central Policy Review Staff Conservative Research Department Central Statistical Office Chief Secretary to the Treasury Department of Employment Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals Department of Health and Social Security Department of the Environment Department of Social Security Department for Work and Pensions Statistical Office of the European Communities Family Expenditure Survey Family Income Support Family Poverty Research Group Gross Domestic Product German Historical Institute London General Household Survey Greater London Transport Survey General Register Office Government Statistical Service Households Below Average Income Her Majesty’s Treasury Institute of Economic Affairs Institute for Fiscal Studies International Labour Organization Index of Multiple Deprivation Inland Revenue Joint Approach to Social Policy Low Income Families Tables Luxembourg Income Study Labour Research Department Material Product System Manpower and Social Affairs Directorate National Assistance Board New Earnings Survey National Income ‘Blue Books’ Office of Population Censuses and Surveys

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344

Index of Abbreviations

PAR PESC RCDIW RPI RSS SB SBC SME SNA SOEC SPI SR SSD SSDS SSRC SSSC UNCTAD VAT

Programme Analysis and Review Public Expenditure Survey Committee Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth Retail Price Index Royal Statistical Society Supplementary Benefit Supplementary Benefits Commission Social Affairs, Manpower and Education Directorate System of National Accounts Statistical Office of the European Communities Survey of Personal Incomes Statistics and Research Division Social Survey Division System of Social and Demographic Statistics Social Science Research Council Social Security Select Committee UN Conference on Trade and Development Value-added taxes

Bibliography Archives Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Records and briefings of the Conservative Party Research Department: CRD/B/13/5; CRD B/27/1; CRD B/27/2; CRD B/27/3; CRD B/27/4; CRD 2/34/24; CRD/L/4/7/1; CRD 4/7/3; CRD 4/7/7; CRD B/27/6; CRD L/4/43/1; CRD L/4/43/2; CRD L/4/43/3–4; CRD 4/4/55; CRD 4/23/7–17; CRD/L/4/53/1; CRD/L/4/53/2; CRD/L/4/53/3; CRD/L/4/21/1; CRD/L/4/21/2; CRD/L/4/21/3; CRD/L/4/21/4; CRD/B/27/9–10; CRD/B/27/5–8; CRD/B/13/26–34

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Witness Interviews Interview with Bill Barron, former government statistician in the Department of Social Security in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by phone, 17 Sept. 2019. Interview with Melinda Gilbert (née Libby), former special adviser to Social Security Secretary John Moore in 1988–9, London, 8 Aug. 2019. Interview with Dr. Markus Grabka, research officer at the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung since 1993, Berlin, 7 Dec. 2017. Interview with Paul Johnson, current director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and former research officer in IFS research on low incomes in the late 1980s, London, 6 Aug. 2019. Interview with Professor Malcolm Sawyer, economist at the University of Leeds and former advisor to the OECD in the social indicators programme, via Skype, 14 Sept. 2017. Interview with Professor Gert Wagner, economist at the MPI Berlin and former director of the SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP), Berlin, 29 June 2018.

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Index Abel-Smith, Brian 2, 15, 82–3, 88, 102, 116, 124–8, 156, 166–72, 200, 242, 256, 259 affluent society 2, 15, 27, 99–100, 157, 193 Africa 41–2, 58 Allsop, David 278, 287, 293, 302, 307 anti poverty programmes (EC) 34, 82–90, 296 Asia 41–2, 58 Atkinson, Antony B. 12, 22, 91, 100–7, 111–12, 167, 178, 192, 200–4, 231–3, 263, 308–11, 318, 325, 336–8 Attlee, Clement 9, 15, 113 Baldwin, Peter 75, 240 Balogh, Thomas 163 Barber, Anthony 185 Barkin, Solomon 49–50, 97 Barna, Tibor 136 Barreiros, Lidia 88 Barron, William 297, 303, 313 Beckerman, Wilfried 80, 218 Berrill, Kenneth 241, 245–6 Black, Lawrence 178–80 Black political economy 11, 147 Blair, Tony 317, 321–6, 335 Booth, Charles 35, 216, 331 Boreham, John 122–3, 177, 202, 235, 239, 250, 260, 261, 271 Bourdieu, Pierre 16–17 Bowley, Arthur 35–6, 155 Bradshaw, Jonathan 168, 318 Bray, Jeremy 138 British Council of Churches 309–10 British Household Panel Survey. See statistical series Brown, Gordon 274 Byatt, Ian 80 Callaghan, James 226–31, 237, 246–8, 253 Cameron, David 327 Campion, Harry 115, 155, 158, 172–3 Canada 52–3, 60, 64, 72, 74 Cannan, Edwin 61 capitalism 3, 101 – British capitalism 3, 9, 181 – hypercapitalism 5, 315 – social and economic order 5, 105, 150, 180–1, 205, 254

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317052-010

Castle, Barbara 186, 199–200, 224–5 Census of Population. See statistical series Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) 133, 142–3, 178, 189, 209–11, 237–8, 262 Central Statistical Office (CSO) 21, 33, 55, 159, 193, 195, 220, 290–1 – statistical policies 14, 24, 32, 103–4, 148, 238, 243–4, 254, 264, 284, 308–10, 314, 334–5 Chancellor of the Exchequer. See Treasury Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) 15, 27, 126–7, 166, 168, 182, 188, 199, 252, 268, 270, 274, 282, 286, 289, 307–10, 314–15, 335, 327 China 37 civil service / civil servants – role in international organizations 28–35, 42, 56, 60, 66–7, 77, 94–5, 178, 318, 339 – relations with academics 96, 102, 155–6, 169, 172–6, 186, 200–3, 284 – position of power in knowledge politics 30–4, 176, 220, 254–5, 289, 314–15, 333 – Whitehall 25, 57–8, 69–74, 109–10, 113–14, 139–45, 156–62, 169–70, 175–8, 193, 203, 220, 227–8, 238, 241, 246, 262, 265, 272, 283–9, 322, 329 class 8–9, 16–18, 44, 99, 130–1, 146, 149–51, 176, 178–9, 189, 191, 205, 255, 315–6, 333 – middle class 100, 138, 199 – working class 21, 34–9, 113–15, 155–6, 160 cold war 30, 95 Cole, Dorothy 127 Colombia 38 colonialism / colonies 30–1, 37, 42, 45–6, 49, 53, 95, 148, 339 Commonwealth Countries 52, 118, 148, 215 Community Relations Commission 154, 208 computers 25–6, 77, 91, 117, 134, 136, 141, 160–1, 187, 252, 263–5, 279, 307, 311, 313, 338 Conference of European Statisticians 40, 54–64, 271 Conservative Party 99, 185, 255–6 – Conservative Research Department (CRD) 184, 273, 286, 300 – New Right 2–3, 9, 86, 101–2, 145, 189–90, 198–9, 226, 255–9, 293, 333 – One Nation Conservatism 256, 327 Corbyn, Jeremy 323, 328

372

Index

Crenshaw, Kimberle 11, 147 Crosland, Anthony 9, 167, 241, 244–6 Dalton, Hugh 12, 19, 61 Deakin, Nick 214 Denmark 64, 74, 86 Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) 119 Department of Employment (DE) / Ministry of Labour 41, 49, 114–15, 119, 147–52, 158, 170, 173, 185, 187, 206–8, 229, 245, 259, 268–269, 283, 287 Department of the Environment (DoE) 132, 211–16, 243, 267–8 Department of Health and Social Security / Department of Social Security (DHSS / DSS) 25–6, 88–93, 109–10, 117, 125, 130–4, 139–41, 145–6, 161, 169–75, 178, 183, 188, 199–203, 218, 222–4, 228–31, 240–52, 257, 260, 265–8, 272–80, 283–316, 322–6 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 314, 327 Desrosières, Alain 25, 219 development politics 13, 31, 35, 41, 44, 47, 64, 77 developing countries 10, 31, 42–3, 46, 49, 58, 62, 309, 320 Diamond, Jack 162–4, 195–9 Dilnot, Andrew 313 Donnison, David 124, 172–4, 200, 226, 262 Donoughue, Bernard 242–4 Dworkin, Paul 269 earnings. See wages Economic Advisers Office (EAO) 130, 161, 242, 251–2, 300 Economic Trends (journal) 97, 111, 136–8, 149, 158–60, 164–5, 202–3, 223, 261, 268, 288 economics 12, 14 – rediscovery of economic inequality 77, 103, 177–8 – long-standing preoccupation of economists with macroeconomic statistics 12, 52, 333 economic indicators. See macroeconomic indicators Edgerton, David 97, 180, 190, 226 England 153, 210, 253, 330–1 Ennals, David 169 Europe 30, 34–7, 42–3, 49, 53, 58, 66, 82–90, 286, 295–8, 308, 323 European Community, European Economic Community, European Union 82–90, 296–7

– EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 84 – Statistical Office of the European Community (Eurostat) 57, 60, 65–7, 83–9, 323 equality and social justice 9, 35, 78, 140, 179, 194–5, 321, 334 Family Expenditure Survey (FES). See statistical series Family Finances Survey. See statistical series Family Poverty Research Programme (FPRG) 123, 128–9, 132–4, 170, 174, 188 Family Resources Survey (FRS). See statistical series feminism 11, 147, 206–7 Field, Frank 126, 134, 168, 199, 270, 275, 288–9, 294, 301–2, 309–11, 314, 322, 335 Foot, Michael 189, 194–6, 200 Forecast, Nigel 201–3 Forsyth, F. G. 173 Fowler, Norman 277–80 Fowler, Ronald 150 France 35, 42, 49, 52, 60, 63, 66, 79–81, 85, 92 Gaitskell, Hugh 105 Gass, Ron 69, 72–4 gender 10–11, 146ff, 179, 200, 206ff – lack of research on women´s economic positions 146–52, 206–10, 274, 337 General Household Survey (GHS). See statistical series General Registrar Office (GRO) 118–19, 148, 152 Germany. See West Germany Gilbert, Melinda 273, 286–7 Gini coefficient 3, 20, 60, 71, 76, 92, 99, 106, 139, 150, 156, 159–64, 262 globalization 28, 32–4, 94–4, 332–3, 338–9 global South 31, 41–2 Government Statistical Service (GSS) 15, 36, 103, 107–22, 128–32, 188, 195, 200–2, 220, 234, 236, 251, 258–60, 270–1, 303, 337 Greater London Council (GLC) 210–17, 267–8, 318 Greater London Transport Survey (GLTS). See statistical series Greve, John 196, 200 Griffiths, Brian 274 Gough, Ian 167 Gove, Michael 328

Index

Groombridge, Jeremy 286, 303 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 13–14, 28–30, 68, 164, 278 Hall, Robert 157 Harman, Harriet 322 Harris, Gordon 313, 322–6 Harrison, Alan J. 59–60 Healey, Denis 222 Heath, Edward 9, 69, 123, 128, 131, 134, 139–41, 164, 169–70, 174, 177, 181–9, 194, 205, 221, 238, 257, 270, 273, 336 Henderson, David 92 Hennessy, Peter 248 Hibbert, Jack 285 Hickey, Stephen 286–7, 291, 292 Hogg, Quintin 163–4 Home Office / Home Secretary 132, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 175, 209–14, 319 Hopkin, W.A.B. 157 Hordern, Peter 271 Houghton, Douglas 169 Households Below Average Income (HBAI). See statistical series household surveys. See surveys Howe, Geoffrey 87, 171, 253 Huhne, Chris 306 Hunt, John 222, 226, 245–8 imperialism 28–9, 31, 42, 148, 339 income – definition of income 11, 98, 213, 294 – distribution of income and wealth / income and wealth Inequality 7–10, 13–14, 17, 20–1, 28–30, 51–60, 90–3, 98–103, 112–23, 177–80, 189–96, 252–4, 323, 337–8 – functional vs. personal income and wealth distribution 11–14, 19–21, 28, 51–2, 151, 162, 178, 278, 333 – incomes after housing costs (AHC) 299–306 – incomes before the deduction of housing costs (BHC) 299–306 – income statistics / income data 34, 39, 52, 57–60, 82–3, 103, 112–13, 118–20, 213–4, 265–8, 276–8, 287–97, 310–13 – real income 3, 28, 36, 185, 223, 237, 242, 253–4, 289–97 – separate treatment of income and wealth in official statistics 61, 95, 105

373

– system of international reporting on income inequality 27, 29–30, 34, 47, 54, 57, 62, 72–4, 84, 92–7, 339 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). See statistical series India 37, 52, 211–12 industrialized countries 43, 69, 90, 96 inequality – social vs. economic inequality 10–11 – incidence and trends 7, 86, 100, 216, 253, 282 – inequality paradigm 11–12, 96, 112, 338 inheritance 60–1, 104, 107, 232–3, 237, 264 Inland Revenue (IR) 99, 104–13, 118–23, 139–41, 147–9, 162, 191–2, 203, 206–7, 212, 230–6, 287 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 4, 7, 25, 91, 263, 276–9, 301–2, 306–7, 311–28, 338 Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) 99–101, 293 Intelligence Unit (GLC) 211–17, 267, 318 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) 78, 156 International Labour Organization (ILO) 29, 33–44, 57–9, 78, 82, 85, 90, 94, 115, 178 intersectionality 10, 146–55, 206–210, 330, 337 Italy 50, 66, 92 Japan 37, 43, 120 Jenkin, Patrick 182–5, 257–60, 284 Jenkins, John 216 Jenkins, Stephen 306, 320 Johnson, Boris 82, 328–9 Johnson, Paul 301, 311–12 Jones, Elfryn 195, 234 Jones, Jack 194 Joseph, Keith 129, 145–6, 171, 174–5, 188–9, 192, 257, 301, 327 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 7, 311, 317, 327, 329 Kaldor, Nicholas 61 Kew, Nick 274, 277, 290–1, 299 knowledge – circulation and transformation of knowledge 23, 102, 155ff, 164–6, 196–7, 250 – gaps in knowledge 21, 59, 98–9, 105, 107, 110–11, 119, 125, 127, 131, 142, 155, 193, 206, 210, 234, 236, 251, 264–6 – knowledge actors 23 – knowledge base 44, 130, 149, 161, 176, 179, 227, 258 – knowledge infrastructure 23–4, 30, 331, 338–40

374

Index

– knowledge politics 4, 24, 30, 33, 254–5, 289, 314–15, 333 – knowledge regime 4–5, 23–7, 30, 93–4, 102–3, 180, 250, 256, 285–6, 313, 328, 332–40 Labour Party 9, 101, 167, 180, 194, 221, 226, 241, 256, 308–9, 317, 321 – New Labour 4–6, 18, 21, 102–3, 316–28, 334–5 – Labour Research Department (LRD) 98, 167–8 Labour Research Association 99 Latin America 37, 58, 61 Lawson, Nigel 87, 296 Lea, David 197–9 Leavey, John Anthony 159 Lennep, Emiel van 68 Levels of Living Programme (UN) 34, 44–51, 82 Lever, Harold 196 Lilley, Peter 317–20 living conditions 16, 34, 45–7, 84, 155, 208–11, 267 Lomas, Gillian 133, 154–5, 210 London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) 99, 127, 165, 188, 200, 206, 210, 219, 264, 278, 281, 307, 317 Lower Incomes Reference (RCDIW) 205–11, 217–18 Low Income Families Tables (LIFT) 25, 260, 268, 272, 275–7, 289–92, 297, 311–12 Low Pay Unit 192, 219, 260, 282, 285, 308 Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) 77, 81, 90–3, 307–8, 318, 339 Lydall, Harold 99, 105, 110 Macmillan, Harold 114, 151 macroeconomic indicators 12–15, 28–9, 42–3, 51, 58, 62, 96, 136, 164, 333, 339 Major, John 277, 289, 301, 316–22 Material Product System 54 May, Theresa 328 Meacher, Michael 164–8, 182–9, 205, 271, 278, 284, 304, 316, 335 Meacher, Molly 127 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) 112, 130 Monck, Elizabeth 210 Moore, John 1–5, 87, 279–80, 284, 287, 292–8, 320, 329 Morgan, A. M. 50 Morris, Alfred 165 Moser, Claus 62–4, 67–70, 109–10, 118–20, 135, 142, 161, 223–4, 229–32, 235, 246

Moss, Louis 152, 173 myth of ‘great transformation’ / ‘income revolution’ 27, 99, 101, 157, 333 National Accounts / System of National Accounts (SNA) 12–13, 28–30, 34, 40–2, 51–6, 60–3, 67, 96, 111, 143, 151, 339 National Income Blue Books (NIBB). See statistical series neoliberalism 255, 293 Netherlands 52, 59, 64, 76 New Earnings Survey (NES). See statistical series Nicholson, John Leonard v, 57, 77–8, 100, 110–15, 120, 124, 130, 136, 139–40, 150, 155–61, 175–8, 187–8, 203, 218, 242, 299 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 6, 15, 20, 98, 126, 168, 252, 260, 268, 276, 279, 282, 285, 307–9, 315, 318, 323, 326, 330, 335–7 Norway 47, 58, 64, 74 Nott, John 252 Nützenadel, Alexander 31 Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) 130–2, 175, 207–11, 218–19, 227–30, 233–37, 303–4 Oppenheim, Carey 307 Orshansky, Mollie 84 Paish, Frank W. 99 Palmer, Mark 324 Paxman, Jeremy 316 Pegg, D. F. 50 Pemberton, Hugh 179–80 Peretz, Jane 244 Phelps-Brown, Henry 200 Phillips, Melanie 316 Piachaud, David 134, 258, 294, 308 Piketty, Thomas 5, 12, 61, 315 Plowden, William 132, 146, 244–50 Pond, Chris 192–3, 205, 285 postwar period – chronology and narratives 102, 178–80 – consensus 8–9, 101, 190, 285, 333 poverty – absolute poverty 172, 256, 293–4 – child poverty 3–6, 15, 21, 126, 314–28 – definition of poverty 84–90, 169–71, 212, 217–18, 258–9, 293–4, 321–8 – family poverty 123–34, 168–75, 182, 282

Index

– in-work poverty 166, 253, 282, 318 – low pay as a cause of poverty 219, 282–3 – poverty line 2, 76, 80, 84–9, 125–6, 217–8, 259, 295–6, 322–5 – poverty lobby 27, 88, 103, 125, 168–71, 190, 257–60, 292–3, 337 – poverty rate 4–6, 21, 28, 80, 83, 86, 100, 125, 217, 295, 321 – poverty reduction 78, 335 – poverty research 16, 82, 114, 128–34, 165, 170–8, 197, 331 – poverty statistics 25, 88, 126, 218, 256, 259, 284, 289, 298, 306, 316 – poverty trap 134, 182, 263, 278 – rediscovery of poverty 2, 6, 15, 27, 82, 102, 116, 125, 131, 168, 256, 259 – relative poverty 2–3, 76, 84–6, 89, 170–3, 256–9, 289–97, 318, 325–7 – trends in poverty 88, 124–8, 176, 308, 333 Prest, Alan R. 99–100 prime minister 20, 69, 81, 103–4, 114, 120, 140, 144, 185, 189, 223–7, 230–2, 237–48, 254, 260–2, 270, 273, 276, 283–4, 288, 298–301, 316–19, 324, 327–9 Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) 142–3 public relations / government propaganda 4, 6, 10, 183, 185, 187, 220–6, 252–3, 255, 260, 263, 272–6, 285, 288, 293, 295–6, 298, 318–321, 324, 336–7 Pudney, Stephen 303 race and ethnicity 10–11, 98, 132, 179, 211–2, 215, 228, 241, 265–7, 330–1 – lack of statistical knowledge on racial inequalities 21, 124, 146–55, 206–10, 318, 333, 337 Rainwater, Lee 90 Rayner, Derek, and Rayner review 260–1, 264–6, 270–1, 285 redistribution – Distributional Effects of Policy Proposals (DEPP) 138, 141, 242–249, 262 – redistributive effects of government policies 79–80, 99–100, 113–15, 134–5, 139–41, 150, 157–9, 181–3, 207, 229, 262, 268, 307, 334 – tax/benefit system 115, 134-8, 141, 150, 157–8, 207, 229, 253, 263–4, 275, 278, 307, 311

375

Retail Price Index (RPI) 114, 134, 222 Revell, Jack 111, 232 Rogers, Peter 162 Rogers, Phillip 145 Rooker, Jeff 270 Ross, Dick 145, 178, 241, 250 Rothschild, Victor 144–6 Rowntree, Seebohm 15, 35, 114, 128 Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (RCDIW) 21, 26, 59, 98ff, 147, 180, 190ff, 227, 250, 258, 337–8 Royal Statistical Society (RSS) 285 Sawyer, Malcom 76–7, 81, 92 Schaber, Gaston 90 Schmelzer, Matthias 67 Scotland 153, 210–11, 248 Seear, Nancy 206 Sen, Amartya 103, 293 Sewill, Brendan 184–5 Sloane, Peter 204, 207 Smeeding, Timothy 90–2 Smith, Cyril 123–5, 132–4, 157, 169–70, 174–5 Smith, Iain Duncan 327–8 Smith, John 317 Social Briefs, Social Commentary, Social Topic Notes 242–3, 246, 262, 330 social indicators 29, 34, 45, 51, 61–81, 95–7, 120, 147, 151, 156, 242, 295, 339 social question 36 social sciences 4, 8, 15–18, 22, 34, 61, 99, 103, 123, 126–7, 146, 200–1, 255, 257, 314, 335, 338 Social Science Research Council (SSRC) 124, 129–31, 154–6, 174–5, 206 social security reforms 1986 /86 134, 277–81, 294, 301, 308 Social Security Select Committee (SSSC) 289–90, 294, 302, 310–14 Social Survey Division (SSD) 109, 117, 128, 152 Social Trends (journal) 97, 106, 156, 169, 217, 263, 268, 288 social wage 220–6, 336 South America 40 Speich Chassé, Daniel 31 Stark, Thomas 60, 100, 167, 201 Starmer, Keir 328 statistical series – Annual Statistical Enquiry 279, 311

376

Index

– British Household Panel Survey 318–20 – Census of Population 17, 52–3, 118–19, 122–5, 130, 132–3, 148, 154, 208–10, 212, 214–16, 220, 227–30, 267, 331 – Family Expenditure Survey (FES) 26, 56, 100, 112–35, 140–1, 147–50, 158–60, 173, 188, 191, 202, 213, 216–20, 230, 234–5, 249, 255, 260, 264–7, 281–3, 302–4, 311 – Family Finances Survey 230, 266 – Family Resources Survey (FRS) 206, 304–5, 318 – General Household Survey (GHS) 112, 120–3, 130, 152–3, 209–19, 235–6, 266 – German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation (GISD) 331 – Greater London Transport Survey (GLTS) 213–16 – Households Below Average Income (HBAI) 89, 265, 277, 287–90, 296–306, 311–20, 325 – Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 16, 22, 330–1, 337 – National Child Development Study 131, 133 – National Food Survey (NFS) 113, 130, 158 – National Income Blue Books (NIBB) 121–22, 162–3, 165, 191, 202–3, 206–8, 220, 228, 251, 261 – New Earnings Survey (NES) 112, 147, 184, 199, 206, 210, 268 – Survey of Personal Income (SPI) 113, 191, 202–4, 210, 212 statistics – as black boxes 19, 25–6, 306 – co-construction of statistics and society 5–6 – increasing importance in modern political culture 6, 28, 31, 335 – statistical artefacts 10, 221, 336 – statistical literacy 6, 162, 165–6, 168, 205, 309, 323, 335 – statistical manipulation 254–5, 270, 284, 304, 336 – visual presentation and statistical languages 12, 103, 105–7, 158–65, 193, 197, 203–5, 338 Statistics and Research division (SR) 139, 175, 290, 299 Stewart, Michael 144, 164–5 surveys. See also statistical series – ad hoc enquiries vs. regular household surveys 35, 41–3, 52, 58, 125, 127, 187 – error margins and confidence intervals 52, 117, 140, 302–5

– household surveys 29, 34–6, 40–5, 49, 55, 66, 83–4, 89, 112–16, 120, 124, 135–6, 152, 155, 176, 219–20, 227–9, 235, 252, 257, 266, 305, 323 – longitudinal surveys 130–1, 318 – response rates 53, 60, 115, 117–20, 228, 230, 233–4, 237, 265 – sample sizes 41–2, 52, 117–18, 120, 124–5, 141, 152–3, 209, 211, 218, 220, 230, 266–7, 302–5, 318 – sampling frames 53, 118–20, 130, 153, 219 – wealth surveys 99, 107–8, 232–7 Supplementary Benefits (SB) 126, 170, 200, 226, 259–62 – used as a poverty indicator 2–3, 156, 169, 171, 259 – criticized as a poverty indicator 125–7 – vindicated as a poverty indicator 275–6 – Supplementary Benefits Commission (SBC) 126–7, 170, 200, 226, 259–62 Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence 18, 179, 255 Sweden 37, 47, 52, 64, 72 Syson, Lucy 188 System of Social and Demographic Statistics (SSDS) 34, 62–4 Tebbit, Norman 224 Thatcher, Margaret 1–9, 16–18, 21, 24, 27, 43, 61, 80, 86–7, 96, 101–2, 181, 189–93, 197, 205, 219–21, 224, 227–30, 238, 249–301, 305–24, 327–9, 332–3, 336–8 Tipping, David 105 Titmuss, Richard 61, 99–100, 156, 167, 191–2, 200 Tomlinson, Jim 9, 179, 255 Townsend, Peter 2, 15–16, 22, 82, 102–3, 116, 124–8, 156, 166–74, 192, 195, 200–2, 218–20, 256–60, 267, 270, 284–6, 293, 308–10, 336 trade unions 13, 27, 36, 98, 167, 178–9, 181, 183, 194, 196, 199, 221 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 167, 194, 197, 199, 207, 222, 233, 270 Treasury 57, 70–75, 80, 115, 141–3, 172, 183–7, 198, 222–5, 239, 246, 263, 295, –fiscal policies 8, 15, 140–2, 177, 181–3, 252–3, 278 trickle-down effect, trickle-down economics 185, 254–6, 297–306, 310, 315–17, 337 United Nations (UN) 28–43, 54, 60–2, 90–5, 320 United States of America 13, 17, 35–9, 49, 52–3, 60, 82–4, 92, 99, 198, 318

Index

Veit-Wilson, John 327 Wagemann, Ernst 36 wages / earnings – as a component of income 11, 147, 207 – development of earnings statistics 116, 119–20, 148, 185, 187, 200, 208, 265, 271, 282 – dispersion and trends in earnings 177, 185, 199, 265, 275, 278, 282, 295, 329 – pay differentials 182, 199 – preoccupation with wages in trades union movement 167 – public interest in information on earnings 113, 116, 119, 182 – wage share as a rough indicator of inequality 13, 119, 151, 205 Wales 4, 153, 210–11, 253, 331 Walton, John 236 wealth – definition of wealth 11, 110 – distribution of wealth / wealth Inequality 11, 59–60, 98, 104–12, 147, 162–3, 191, 198, 205, 232–6, 261, 337

377

– neglect of personal wealth distribution in economic thought 105–6 – neglect of wealth distribution in international statistics 61 – ‘wealth creation’ and ‘wealth creators’ 1, 96, 190, 252–3, 256, 264, 309 Webb, Steven 301, 311–312, 315 Wedderburn, Dorothy 200 welfare state 2–3, 15, 99–101, 226, 334–5 Welshman, Jon 128 West Germany 21, 36, 43, 49, 60, 85–7, 156, 331 Williams, Ian 25, 275–6, 283, 286, 292–4, 298–301, 312 Williams, Shirley 173, 200, 246 Wilson, Harold 9, 21, 100, 103, 132, 151, 162, 169, 178–80, 186, 189–90, 194, 221, 227, 231, 239, 242, 246, 282, 334–6 women. See gender Women’s Liberation Movement 147, 179, 207 World Bank 28, 32, 43, 60–1, 92