The Joseph Rowntree Foundation wants to reduce poverty in the UK and to achieve a consensus on how to do this.

Overview

The UK has had a number of anti-poverty strategies in recent years, often focusing on particular groups, like children or pensioners, or with a specific regional scope.

What they have all lacked however is an evidence-based link between the policies or actions suggested within the strategy and the outcomes sought. JRF has repeatedly criticised such strategies on these grounds, so we are grasping the nettle by asking what it would take to create an evidenced, all-age strategy to reduce poverty across the UK.

Aims

The main aim of the programme is to produce an evidenced anti-poverty strategy for all age groups and each nation of the UK.

• We want policy-makers and our stakeholders to use the outputs we develop to inform national and local anti-poverty strategies.
• We intend to encourage a debate, based on the evidence, among poverty stakeholders about what a low-poverty UK would really be like.
• We aim to assess and strengthen the political consensus on how to reduce poverty. While we hope to build as large a consensus as possible from which to launch the strategy, this may entail producing some options that cater for different perspectives on poverty, or suggest a range of ways to alleviate it.