Factcheck: Is child poverty down?

One claim from today's Prime Minister's Questions drew particular criticism this afternoon:

"child poverty is down"— David Cameron

In fact, many of the responses on Twitter claimed the exact opposite.

While one measure suggests the PM is right, another can as easily be used to say he's wrong.

There's no single definition of 'child poverty' in the UK. Official bodies measure it in three main ways. The first, takes a certain 'low' level of income and counts how many children live in households at or below that level.

The second finds out the 'middle' income nationally and counts children who live in households earning less than 60% of it. This is known as the 'relative' poverty measure and is the one the Prime Minister was using.

The other way is to count children in families which have poor living standards. For example, where there's no safe place to play outdoors or they can't afford things like school trips.

But even these won't capture what some people might think of as poverty.

There are 300,000 fewer children living in 'relative' poverty (to which the Prime Minister referred) - that is, 300,000 fewer children living in households earning below 60% of the median income, compared to the last year under Labour. This is also down as a proportion of all children.

But this isn't always a useful measure. As the Coalition itself has conceded, when everyone's income falls (such as can happen during recessions), this can mean poverty falling as well, which isn't very intuitive.

The Child Poverty Action Group has also suggested most of this fall is because of policies introduced during Labour's period in office, the effects of which were drawn out over several years.

So an alternative is to take a certain low level of income and simply raise it every year at the same rate as prices. On this measure, there are about 200,000 more children in poverty than during the last year of the Labour government. But there are also more children anyway, and the percentage of children in poverty hasn't really changed over the same period.

The bigger picture shows a decline in poverty be various measures over the long term.

It's difficult to draw any conclusions from the other measures of poverty as the way they're counted has changed in recent years.