The number of people in Britain who live below the poverty line may be only half that claimed by lobby groups, charities and the Church of England, an official analysis revealed yesterday.

New figures show that while nearly 15million people say they are surviving on very low amounts of money, many are spending much more than the incomes they admit to.

If the spending of people classified as poor is counted alongside the money they say they have coming in, only 7.6million people are poor, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

ONS report said 22.8 per cent of the population is considered poor on the basis of declared income but when spending taken into account, that figure is halved (file picture)

Its findings put a major question mark over claims of the poverty lobby that many millions are going hungry and undermines routine demands from charity chiefs, Left-wing politicians and churchmen for ever-larger state benefits to alleviate hardship.

The report said that while 22.8 per cent of the population is considered poor on the basis of declared income, the share of the population who are poor when their spending is taken into account is 11.5 per cent.

‘The degree of overlap between these groups may provide valuable information in supporting the effective development and targeting of policies,’ the ONS report said.

The commonly used poverty line marks anyone as poor if they are living on less than 60 per cent of average income. On this measure, a typical poor person had an income of £11,257 last year, the analysis said. But the same average poor individual spent £15,829.

The report pointed to the plight of people who are living not only on low incomes but whose spending is less than 60 per cent of average household spending. ‘Those who are in poverty on both measures are worse off than those experiencing poverty on a single dimension,’ it said.

Poverty figures are worked out from ONS income surveys, but yesterday’s report said ‘consumption expenditure is thought to be a better measure of achieved living standards’, and examined surveys of family spending.

It found that the tenth of the population who said they have the lowest incomes declared they had on average £5,000 to live on, including all state benefits, in the financial year that ended in March 2017.

But the same people on average spent £12,800 in the same period on food, drink, clothes, transport, household goods and other outgoings.

The commonly used poverty line marks anyone as poor if they are living on less than 60 per cent of average income

ONS researchers said some people may not be disclosing their full income when surveys are conducted. ‘Certain types of benefits tend to be under-reported,’ they added.

It was also noted that ‘people towards the bottom of the income distribution often have multiple income sources, which makes measurement error harder to avoid’.

The figures, which did not include housing costs, were based on the Family Resources Survey, which asks people in 19,000 homes about their income each year, and the Living Costs and Food Survey, which records the annual spending of 6,000 homes.

Yesterday academic and researcher into the family Patricia Morgan said: ‘A large number of people are working unofficially and are unlikely to declare their incomes. There are many single mothers who are in fact supported by partners, but will be reluctant to discuss it because they wish to keep their benefits.

‘All this is ignored by the poverty lobby. Spreading the idea there are very high levels of poverty is their business.’