Gerardo J. Arriaga-Garcia and Lee Gregory reflect on a decade of UK political manifesto audits by ASAP UK, revealing a persistent lack of ambition across parties to tackle poverty. Their analysis highlights declining commitments, especially under Labour’s 2024 government, and calls for a renewed focus on human flourishing in anti-poverty policy.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighted that 14.3 million people, or 1 in 5, were in poverty. Of which 4.3 million were children and 1.9 million were pensioners. These rates of poverty in the UK have been fairly persistent for the last few years. The new Labour government has done little to reassure people that this situation can be resolved: the maintenance of the two-child cap on benefits, and suggested cuts to disability support. These are all signs of a lack of ambition within government to address the persisting and pernicious levels of poverty in the UK.
Our recent research draws together the insights from the manifesto audits (2015, 2017 and 2024) organised by Academics Stand Against Poverty UK (ASAPUK). The outcome of our review suggests a pretty stagnant ambition to address poverty in the UK across the political spectrum.
Auditing the Manifestos and their anti-poverty potential
ASAPUK is the UK chapter of the global ASAP network. Its ambition is to empower academics to make a greater impact on severe poverty. In 2015, ASAP UK launched its first audit, bringing together a large number of academics to develop the methodology, which has been in place for subsequent audits (2017 and 2024).
To evaluate the anti-poverty ambition of political manifestos requires a robust framework, and the 2015 ASAPUK team ran a series of workshops with academics to develop their methodology. This adopted a human flourishing approach. This approach refers to the freedom for individuals to live meaningful, secure and fulfilling lives. It is a shift away from simply asking whether people have enough money to survive, and instead asks whether the policies proposed will help people thrive. Drawing on global research, this framework considers an array of “inputs” such as income, assets, knowledge, skills, time, etc, which shape people’s capacities to pursue opportunities to live a good life. As such, it is not just focused on income and money matters, and allows the notion of flourishing to be applied across varied policy issues: from social security to criminal justice, from social care to support for disabled people and fiscal policy.
ASAP UK then invites academics to act as auditors across their policy area expertise and apply the flourishing framework to the manifestos. These follow a set methodology established by the 2015 workshops, and each review is anonymously and independently reviewed by another academic. One of the authors (Gregory) was involved as an auditor in 2015 and 2017, but was not directly involved in developing the used methodology. View full details and copies of audits, the narrative regarding human flourishing, and the methodology.
A potential limitation of the ASAPUK narrative is that there is no clear account of what makes for a flourishing life. It recognises the individual, social and environmental factors involved in such debates, but does not provide a clear account of what the “good life” looks like. This is likely because there is no one good life, but multiple, depending on the varied preferences and ambitions we all have for the life we lead.
Consequently, the ASAPUK approach is to identify the factors that allow for flourishing and explore where these exist (or not) in manifesto policies. Evaluating these documents to explore whether they effectively provide resources, opportunities and systems of support which allow people to pursue a life which fulfils their rational, social and spiritual capabilities: to live a life worth living.
The audits provide an individual score for different policy areas and then a combined overall score out of 5. ASAPUK regards a score of 4 or 5 as a promising set of policies to address poverty.
Failing to address poverty
The audits do not make a comparison to past assessments. As such, our research took the three audits together to provide an analysis of the political ambitions to tackle poverty in the UK.
Over the last decade, no major party, including Labour, has ever scored above three out of five for their anti-poverty commitments. This persistent low scoring indicates to us that no political party currently has the ambition needed to address poverty in the UK. In particular, the conclusion drawn is that Starmer’s government will not offer a renewed ambition to tackle poverty. The Conservatives have scored poorly across all three audits; the Liberal Democrats score well on some specific areas, but lack a broader approach.
Other parties have dipped in and out of the audits depending on how early (or not) their manifestos were released. Looking just at 2024: Reform scored 0.9 – they did not score above one on any policy area (from education through to social security and levelling up). Whilst other parties had some variation (the Conservatives scored 3 on disability support but 1 on fiscal policy), Reform scored consistently low. The Greens also saw variation, with 2 for disability and social security, but 5 for housing.
For our review, considering the Labour 2024 election victory, we were interested in the changes in score between 2017 and 2024.
In 2017, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour received a score of 3.6, with a rating of 4 for its social security policies. These included pledges to repeal cuts to Universal Credit work allowances, increase Carers’ Allowance, reform sanctions and a challenge to the demonisation of welfare recipients.
Fast forward to 2024, and Labour’s overall score dropped sharply to 2.1. This decline reflects the party’s vague commitments, lack of any pledge to increase benefits or end the two-child limit, and general unwillingness to undo the damage of previous austerity measures.
Starmer’s leadership has framed these omissions as tough but necessary choices, and appeals to fiscal responsibility: the 2 child limit within social security, which is causing ongoing hardship; proposed cuts to disability support, which triggered a backbench rebellion and government u-turn; and persistently high energy prices expected to become the new normal despite the manifesto commitment to lower bills.
But this approach continues a trend away from rights-based welfare towards a model shaped by behavioural expectations and individual responsibility. It signals the return of an old story: work is the only route out of poverty. Work is an effective route, but not a guaranteed means, for escaping poverty. Here, the flourishing approach adopted by ASAPUK is useful, for it reminds us that to truly flourish, we need to look beyond income across interconnected policy areas, for example, the poverty triangle.
Rethinking poverty, supporting flourishing
With all parties scoring low in the anti-poverty efforts, there is little evidence to believe that there will be sufficient political pressure for Labour to rethink the approach set out in its manifesto. Adopting a more ambitious anti-poverty approach seems unlikely under a Starmer leadership. The child poverty strategy is expected later in 2025. Calls by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to take corrective measures for the consequences of the 2010 reforms, such as removing the two-child cap, remain off Labour’s agenda. We are likely to see tweaking of the social security system and continued reliance on paid employment and childcare support to tackle poverty – but no wider ambition.
An ambitious programme of policies to tackle poverty would place flourishing at its heart and seek to reform the social and institutional context which currently prevents many in the UK from flourishing. Whilst work has important aspects in our lives, we each want a wider range of opportunities and experiences that lead to a good life. Continuing to tinker with a social security system which has not eradicated poverty in over 100 years is not going to be effective. There needs to be a more overt challenge to the Overton window. Two starting points are perhaps the most prominent in the contemporary UK debate. Increasing awareness and calls for a Basic Income may offer a more radical reform which lifts people out of poverty. It will require greater effort to tackle income and wealth inequality, starting with a 2% wealth tax.
This blog was written by Dr Gerardo Arriaga-Garcia, Research Fellow, City-REDI, University of Birmingham and Lee Gregory, Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.