By Guy Palmer Director of the New Policy Institute

BBC Wales commissioned the New Policy Institute to survey the state of poverty across Wales. Here, the institute's director outlines his findings.

Well, the simple answer is that not many statistics are publicly available.

With this in mind, we decided to do some analysis ourselves using the latest data from official government surveys.

As of April 2001, there were 700,000 people in Wales living on incomes below the low income threshold that the government uses when monitoring the numbers of people in income poverty.

For a couple with two children, this threshold is �225 per week, after deducting income tax and housing costs.

Importantly, children in Wales are much more likely to live in low income households than adults: one third of all children (250,000) live in households below the low income threshold.

Only Greece has a worse record than Wales

These numbers are comparable with Scotland and northern England but much worse than southern England.

They also compare unfavourably with the rest of Western Europe: only Greece has more proportionally more people below the low income threshold.

The good news is that the numbers have come down by about 10% since 1997, when Labour came into power.

And many of the poorer sections of Welsh society have seen real rises in their incomes, such that they kept up with the rest of us.

Low pay statistics

Not such good news is that the scale of the reductions so far done little to reverse the massive increase that happened during the 1980s, when the numbers doubled.

It is not sufficient to put the government on track to meet its strategic target of eradicating child poverty over a 20-year period.

The risk of being on a low income in Wales varies hugely according to how many adults in the household are working - just 4% of households where all adults are working have low incomes compared to 75% of households where all the adults are unemployed.

But it is also clear that there are substantial numbers of people in Wales who are both working and on low incomes - particularly where part-time work is involved or where one of the adults is working and the other is not.

Around 250,000 people fall into this category. Yet there are, apparently, no low pay statistics available for Wales.

Finally, Wales appears to have relatively high levels of both 'hidden unemployment' and youth unemployment.

Pupils failing

It also appears to have many more pupils failing to achieve any GCSEs.

One question which arises is what should the assembly be doing to address these issues?

Why not follow Scotland's lead and develop a national anti-poverty strategy, against which they subsequently monitor progress?

Why not follow England's lead and set public short term targets for reductions in income poverty, health inequalities, and so on?

In conclusion, we think that this is a subject where the assembly can potentially make a real difference, but only if it really grapples with the Welsh-specific dimensions of the problem.

We hope this article makes a start in that regard.