Jonathan Bradshaw - Researching Poverty

Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury

Peter Townsend

David Gordon

Sue Middleton

George Smith and Michael Noble

Liz Tadd

Ian Gregory, Humphrey Southall and Daniel Dorling

Glen Bramley and Martin Evans

Roger Burrows and David Rhodes

Linda Harvey and David Backwith

Jan Pahl and Lou Opit

John Washington, Ian Paylor and Jennifer Harris

Ruth Lister and Peter Beresford (with David Green and Kirsty Woodward)

SIR PETER BARCLAY, CHAIRMAN JOSEPH ROWNTREE FOUNDATION

As chairman of Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I welcome the publication of these volumes containing the proceedings of the conference sponsored by the Foundation.

The Foundation was delighted to support this event for a number of reasons:

His work and his ideas also had a great influence on his father Joseph and in 1904 were partly responsible for Joseph's decision to establish his three trusts.

If you read about the debates which followed the publication of the survey, in Asa Briggs' (1961) fascinating and comprehensive study of Seebohm's life, they have an uncomfortably modern ring. The Charity Organisation Society had, throughout the previous century, maintained that poverty was caused by the moral turpitude of the poor (shades of 'benefit dependency?') - in answer to which Seebohm was able to show that poverty was a real phenomenon with clear structural causes. He called for a minimum wage and warned his opponents, as Asa Briggs recounts, 'not to pit their uninformed feelings about poverty against his facts If they saw people who by his standards were in primary poverty appearing to live well (as we see sometimes in TV documentaries today), let them not, said Seebohm confuse 'things that are seen with consequences of poverty which are not seen' - (in our time, isolation, bad health, bad living and social exclusion in general).

Finally, the Foundation welcomes this publication because it provides a unique opportunity to review the theory method and policy relevance of poverty research. As a consequence, I hope that after 20 years in which such research has been largely ignored - in fact, in recent years only the brave even dared to mention the word 'poverty' at all - I hope we can bring high quality research in this area back into the centre of both social research effort and informed policy debate and that we shall look back on these conference proceedings as a significant turning point.

Briggs, A. S. (1961), Social Thought and Social Action: A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871-1954 , Longmans.

Cole, M. (ed.) (1956), Beatrice Webb's Diaries 1924-1932 , Longmans, London.

Rowntree, B.S. (1901), Poverty: A Study of Town Life , Macmillan, London.