Ahead of next week’s budget, the Tory peer and chair of a poverty commission on the case for more welfare fundingThere was some surprise when the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) unveiled a new measure of poverty last month. No shock, perhaps, that it found more people living below the breadline than previously thought, but a degree of curiosity that the chair of the “rigorously non-partisan” body was Philippa Stroud: Tory peer, ex-adviser to the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and champion of controversial welfare reforms that many consider to be fuelling Britain’s poverty epidemic.