The Labour Governments high profile targets for reducing child poverty, and its policy commitments to reducing pensioner poverty all focus on household income as a measure of well-being. Government tax and benefit policy has also focused on income supplementation as its main means of improving the well-being of pensioners and families with children.

Within this UK policy context, the importance of household expenditure as a measure of living standards has been largely overlooked. This project seeks to rectify this by focusing on what trends in household consumption and expenditure can tell us about both the depth and incidence of poverty in Britain, and the effectiveness of the Governments current approach of raising household incomes in order to improve the well-being of the poorest in our society.