Dear LPG,

I can’t help it, and while I don’t want to be the bringer of bad news, I love statistics and comparing all manner of things using other people’s numbers.  I got looking at what the internet says about poverty in the capital this morning and found some interesting numerical facts.

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Did you know that London is considered the city where the poorest people live?   I found one set of statistics that shows London workers to generate the most money, but also spend the most money leaving us the poorest after all the necessities have been paid out.  So my next port of call was the state of poverty in London where I learned that Lewisham is a little under the half way mark in those ratings. 

But then I wanted to see if I could find out what officially makes a person ‘poor’.  Firstly, I found one definition of what poverty means for a British child, but I suppose I wanted to find out if I, as a pensioner, was officially poor. 

I finally found a reasonably straight-forward set of figures which tells me that the London Borough of Lewisham is an inner London Borough and, as such, if you are a pensioner who has a shared income with a partner of over £382 per week, or a single pensioner with a weekly income of more than £206 it is all good and you are not quite officially poor.

According to my very limited analysis of the few sets of statistics I found, I am relieved to be able to say that I am just about floating on the surface above serious poverty, and having done all this research, I thought it would be good to offer LPG readers the opportunity to work out just how officially poor or rich you were before lockdown all started, because all the statistics that I found were compiled before the ‘L’ word became a really big part of our vocabulary. 

Having said all this I think that while financial poverty levels give some indication about all our lives it is not the most important indication of success, happiness or contentment, but it was an interesting exercise for my brain at the time and might get your mental juices churning for a little while too.

TK, Downham

TK, shares her findings…

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