The cost of living and reasons to be sceptical

Shimeon Lee has a topical TPA piece on defects in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s “cost of living tracker.”


A closer look at "JRF's cost of living tracker"

Active users of X may have seen a viral clip last week of LBC host Nick Ferrari pushing back on the claim that 7 million households supposedly cannot afford a 50p toothbrush. The figure comes from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s “cost of living tracker” which claims that 7.4 million low income families are going without essentials in 2026.

This has been uncritically repeated by outlets like the BBC who featured a 77 year old woman claiming she cannot even afford to turn on her oven - more dramatic than anything actually measured in the JRF survey. The same woman has appeared in many similar articles before, making outlandish claims like only having seven hot meals a year. Stories and reports like these are used to build the case for ever more government spending, with the JRF calling for the universal credit standard allowance to rise by as much as 68 per cent, for example.

Yet there is reason to be sceptical. In the BBC article, the same woman who cannot afford to use her oven reported spending £50 a week on petrol - enough to drive 300 miles. Exactly why a pensioner is driving the equivalent of London to Newcastle every week is unclear, especially considering she couldn’t afford a car in 2024.


No surprises but the whole piece is well worth reading.


Ultimately, the problem with measuring hardship in this way is that going without some things does not necessarily mean lacking the money for it. People make different choices about how to allocate their resources. In the same 2023 JRF survey, 15 per cent of those who were “going without essentials” also said they did not intend to reduce socialising due to cost, with 15 per cent also economically inactive. More welfare should not be the default answer, and when extraordinary claims and common sense contradict, common sense should prevail.