The mental picture of the gloomy, sinister workhouse is one of the enduring impressions of Victorian England. Charles Dickens painted the best-known picture of it in his Oliver Twist and nearly everyone has shed a tear for Oliver, the poor and miserable child who was struck a harsh blow when he asked for more gruel.

But it seems to me that while the cruel, repressive, soul-destroying 19th century workhouse regime ended long ago, a deplorable four million children — one in three — are currently living in poverty in the UK, one of the highest rates in the industrialised world. A staggering two million British children now have no parent, or parents, at work.

The UK has the highest divorce rate and largest share of solitary parents in Europe. And the UK continues to have the highest teenage birth rate in Western Europe.

I do not want to go on ranting about the UK because it is truly not representative of Europe. It is only a small, chilly cold island, exploiting the European Union (EU) for its expedient, self-serving purpose of having the cake and eating it too.

If we take a look at the EU sans the UK, despite its overall wealth, nearly one in seven people are at ‘risk' of poverty. The figures are even higher for some groups, such as children and older people.

However, the problem is often not well understood because people often only think of poverty in Europe as being something that is so extreme that it brings misery and threatens people's very existence as with developing countries. No, not so. In mainland Europe, living in so called ‘poverty' is considered a direct attack on people's fundamental rights — as it limits the opportunities they have to achieve their full potential. It is often closely associated with social exclusion, where some people are pushed to the edge of society, limiting their access to resources and opportunities, leaving them with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability.

However, it needs to be noted that in the European context, people who are socially excluded or vulnerable are not ‘poor', as defined in the Indian context.

Let me spotlight the specific dimension of poverty and explain how poverty is understood and measured currently in Europe. Within the EU, poverty is generally divided into two types — absolute or extreme poverty and relative poverty.

Absolute/ Relative Poverty

This is most common in developing countries — when people lack the basic necessities for survival. Some people in the EU — for instance, homeless people or the Roma (wandering people with nomadic lifestyle) in some settlements — still experience this.

The European Union's social inclusion process uses a relative definition of poverty where some people's way of life and income is so much worse than the general standard of living in the country or, region in which they live. As a consequence, they struggle to live a normal life and to participate in ordinary economic, social and cultural activities.

Now, what does this mean? This means they can afford only cheap food, fruits and vegetables and cannot afford to buy meat and fish. They run out of money occasionally, and so cannot afford to buy newspaper or repair their broken TV. Or they cannot eat out next week. It means they cannot invite the friends of their children over to stay with them, because their homes are small. Or that their children cannot participate in school skiing holidays or a language week abroad; so their children become ‘excluded' and lead a hidden life.

How poverty is measured

Deprivation indicators are an important approach to measuring relative poverty. Essentially, this involves identifying the basic necessities as seen in the country someone is living.

Within the EU, poverty is normally measured by using relative income poverty lines. This involves working out average or median household incomes in a country.

A poverty line is then set, which is a percentage of that average income. Commonly, these poverty lines range from 40 per cent to 70 per cent of household income. In the EU, people falling below 60 per cent of median income are said to be at-risk-of poverty.

In most West European countries, there are lower levels of income inequality that indicates that they have lower levels of poverty. There is evidence that those countries that are “top performers” and have the highest levels of employment in the EU tend to have low poverty levels as well. The malaise of high poverty is coupled with low employment in some Mediterranean countries, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain.

Therefore, even if one out of seven Europeans lives under the poverty line, that does not mean he or she goes without food, clothing, healthcare and shelter. The relative poverty concept implies that poverty can have a different meaning in different societies. For instance, the living conditions of people who are relatively poor in France are probably superior to the poor in Portugal and a little worse than that of the poor in Luxembourg. Despite the fact that poverty in parts of eastern and southern Europe is on the rise, human development indicators confirm that living conditions in all of the EU countries are among the best in the world.

(The author is a former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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