Centre for Research in Social Policy

School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences

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Why Rishi Sunak can complete George Osborne’s ambition to make work pay

On this day in 2015, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in a newly elected Conservative Government dramatically announced a National Living Wage designed to ‘make work pay’, while easing the burden on the Exchequer by cutting state support for working families. It’s been a very long five years since this grand plan was launched by […]

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New ideas will be needed if the next PM is to help those facing the toughest summer

Later this month, we can expect our new Prime Minister to enter Downing Street with a promise to bring the country together and help those who are struggling. David Cameron made his entry speaking of fairness and his desire to ‘help the poorest’; Theresa May of helping the ‘just about managing’. The current frontrunner sees […]

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The trend of rising child poverty towards record levels is now beyond dispute

In 1999, Tony Blair promised to abolish child poverty by 2020. In that year, 3.3 million children were in poverty on the government’s preferred measure. By 2010, this was down by a million, after the longest sustained fall in child poverty ever recorded. Today’s poverty figures show the reversal of that trend accelerating. By 2017/18, […]

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Is this the moment to call time on Universal Credit, a decade on?

The past week’s whirlwind of critique of Universal Credit is quite overwhelming because it brings together so many different kinds of problem, each with a large impact on the lives of low income families. Some are to do with delays people have already experienced by new claimants and the huge suffering that will cause if […]

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Five things that official inflation figures don’t tell you about the minimum cost of living

Over the past ten years, median household income has risen by about 28%, while the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) shows inflation running at 25%. So while living standards have stagnated, they at least appear to be up a bit on their pre-recession level. Such statistics give us a broad picture of how households are doing […]

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Time to start fixing the broken safety net that no longer catches struggling families

Families on low incomes are once again bearing the brunt of a tough economic environment. Over the past decade, rising costs of items such as food, energy and childcare, combined with stagnating wages and cuts in benefits, have repeatedly put a squeeze on family budgets.  Between 2014 and 2016, some of these pressures eased, as […]

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Budget comment by Professor Donald Hirsch, Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University

Cuts in welfare were at the heart of the then Chancellor’s agenda coming into the present Parliament; two years later, not a single new measure affecting benefits was announced in this Budget. Any new welfare savings have been formally ruled out in this Parliament, with the proviso that if spending breaks a new cap, further […]

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Will low income families’ ability to afford the necessities of life stop declining?

The mood music on welfare cuts may finally be changing. The new Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green has explicitly sought to distance himself from the stance of the past six years by stating that there ‘will be no new search for cuts in individual welfare benefits’.  The cuts of the past few years have […]

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