If you can’t afford basic necessities, you are poor. Simple enough, but who is to decide what is necessary?

There is a long tradition of delegating this task to experts, whether government nutritionists or Victorian do-gooders. But the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – named after a particularly admired Victorian do-gooder – published the results of a different approach this week, exploring what was necessary by asking focus groups.

This method may seem odd, but the alternatives are worse. The thresholds for absolute poverty, such as the ability to buy enough calories to stay alive, thankfully have little relevance in the UK. “Relative poverty lines” – such as 60 per cent of the median income – are arbitrary and crude proxies for inequality. Inevitably, we are left with subjective opinions about who is poor and who is not, and that will depend on who is asked.

Yet controversy is inevitable. For some, the omission of funds for a car is a sign of London bias. (The focus groups hailed from the Midlands, but never mind.) Others scoff that a mobile phone is surely not a “necessity”. There is no budget for cigarettes, which smacks more of hope than reality for many poor families.

Other necessities include enough booze to get a single working-age person thoroughly drunk once a fortnight. Yet parents are thought to need less to drink than those who are childless and single – a quaint view, even assuming Junior doesn’t break into the drinks cupboard.

Most disturbing, satellite television is thought necessary, but a good business newspaper is not.

An informal Financial Times focus group could not agree on what counts as essential. Some regarded the Rowntree budget of £40 every two years for a suit as somewhat extravagant.

Yet from the How To Spend It floor and Fast Lane came a different view. Frugality? Turning down the private jet and slumming it in first class. And nothing in the budget for a yacht – not even a second-hand yacht? Ridiculous.