Together, these two volumes showcase the great strengths of UK poverty research, but also reveal the chasm that has opened up between research (and the production of evidence) and the use of that evidence to guide policy in what many would consider to be the ‘home’ of poverty research. The 27 chapters contain a huge amount of detail on how poverty is conceived and measured, its incidence, causes and consequences, how it relates to social exclusion and other social ills and, as a by-product rather than an explicit focus, what needs to be done to address the problem. One fears, having read what has been happening under the UK’s austerity policies, that the clear and consistent message that emerges throughout its many contributions will fall on deaf ears and have little impact – at least in the short-run.

The research was produced by the largest ever project of its type funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and these two books represent one of many channels of dissemination, including other focused books, special issues of academic journals, a comprehensive and accessible website and a series of television programs. Reflecting the project’s broad aim to speak to many audiences, the chapters are well-written – several are exemplary in this regard – although my sense was that some reorganisation of the material might have been beneficial. Several of the chapters in Volume 2, for example, raise important issues about key concepts like living standards, well-being and destitution that could have appeared in the first volume, setting a framework that later chapters on individual groups or specific issues could have drawn on, applied and extended. One example is the penultimate chapter in Volume 2 on multidimensional analysis of social exclusion by Bailey, Fahmy and Bradshaw, which contains insightful analysis that would have provided a solid foundation for earlier chapters that explored in depth different forms and patterns of exclusion.

David Gordon’s early chapter on ‘Measuring poverty in the UK’ – while an excellent summary of developments in the field (to which the author has been a major contributor) – gets somewhat side-tracked into an attack on austerity policies and fails to provide the kind of systematic introduction that the two volumes warrant. In doing so, it also omits some of the key information that later chapters draw on. There is, for example, no clear-cut definition of the ‘PSE-UK poverty measure’ that later chapters use, not always consistently, apparently. Thus, in their Introduction to Volume 2, Bramley and Bailey define the measure as lacking 3 or more consensually defined deprivation items and having an income below the median for those who lack 3 items. In contrast, Bailey, Fahmy and Bradshaw in a later chapter define it as having an income below 60% of the median (equivalised, after housing costs) and lacking at least 3 deprivation items. Neither definition appears in Gordon’s chapter and this lack of consistency and clarity will confuse (and frustrate) many readers who have not followed the technical papers that are available on the PSE-UK website.

This is a small oversight and does not detract from the many excellent contributions that appear throughout the two volumes. Those that I found most compelling in providing new information and new insights into familiar issues include on gender by Dermott and Pantazis, ethnicity by Karlsen and Pantazis, child poverty and social exclusion by Main and Bradshaw in Volume 1, and on living standards by Patsios, Pomati and Hillyard, on severe poverty and destitution by Bramley, Fitzpatrick and Sosenko, and on poverty and well-being by Tomlinson and Wilson in Volume 2. In addition to Gordon’s authoritative chapter on poverty measurement developments, there is also a very fine analysis of fifty years of the experience of poverty by Joanna Mack.

All of the chapters draw to various degrees on the data generated by the 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion UK Survey that would not have been possible without the ESRC funding. The survey set new standards in data collection for research of this kind and in the size, scope, detail and sheer quality of the data itself, allowing for the first time estimates to be derived for small social groups or to allow the circumstances of all groups to be better documented, analysed and understood, and to highlight the important interconnections that are a key feature within and between the dimensions of both of poverty and social exclusion.

Another important innovation of the study is its use of subjective measures that capture more directly the experience of those affected by the issues being examined and provides a window through which to better understand how they adapt and cope with that experience and the consequences that follow. But there is always a danger that such subjective data may reflect lack of information, mis-information or skewed perceptions, calling for validation wherever possible. Taking this data uncritically at face value can produce some puzzling findings. For example, Table 0.5 in Volume 2 summarises several subjective poverty and living standards measures and shows that 30% of PSE-UK survey respondents think that their income is below the level needed to keep them out of poverty, but that only 15% think that their standard of living is below average. Together these estimates suggest that 15% of respondents think both that their income is not enough to avoid poverty but that their standard of living is at or above average. This might be seen as supporting the view that income is a bad measure of living standards, although there may be other explanations that warrant further examination.

The study and these books benefit from that fact that the two key building blocks of the analysis – the consensual approach to poverty measurement and the multidimensional Social Exclusion Matrix – were developed by researchers who were heavily involved in earlier surveys of this type. This has made it possible to examine trends in poverty and social exclusion, dating back to 2000 using a consistent definitional and measurement framework. These trends indicate that improvements have been made – particularly for pensioners and for children following the introduction of the child poverty reduction targets – but that the overall picture described by Mack shows a decline in poverty since 2000 both before and after housing costs, but an increase in deprivation, whether measure relatively using a changing standard or absolutely using a fixed standard. The other important finding that emerges from several chapters is that differences in key health and well-being outcomes, between those disadvantaged and those not, are better highlighted by deprivation measures than by conventional income-based poverty measures.

Gordon, in his measurement chapter, rightly points out that the PSE-UK study builds on over 400 years of research by British poverty experts and other social scientists and that those responsible for the PSE-UK study have been ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. His role in developing the work of Townsend, undertaken over the last four decades with many of those associated with this study, has continued that strong tradition and established new measures that represent genuine progress in our ability to measure and monitor poverty and social exclusion. As a result, we all have wider and stronger shoulders on which to stand. All that is needed now is a government that is willing to heed the evidence and act accordingly. That’s a big ask but these two volumes provide the kind of robust ammunition needed to answer the call.