ABSTRACT
Social security benefit payments are intended to be related to rough standard of subsistence, and this relation have to be considered when the quinquennial review of social security scheme is presented to Parliament in the near future. The studies that followed in the next forty years adopted the same approach and although there were some minor alterations, the standards used for measuring poverty were broadly the same, adjusted according to change in prices, as that used by Rowntree in 1899. In 1936 Rowntree made a second survey of York, in the course of which he used a more generous standard of povertyin. A yardstick for measuring poverty can only be devised in light of knowledge about family budgets. Whether, in fact, the subsistence basis for benefit payments should be accepted by the nation in the future is one of the fundamental questions that will have to be faced by Parliament next year when quinquennial review of social security is considered.
