The evidence is piling up: most people on low incomes will have been made much worse off in the course of this decade. Most depressingly, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that the child poverty rate, which saw a sustained fall in the New Labour years, from 34% to 27% after housing costs, will have […]
I’ve spent much of the last 10 years listening to parents discussing what they think children need. Our Minimum Income Standards research regularly asks groups of parents to agree what is required in a family budget for a minimum acceptable standard of living . As both a researcher and a parent it’s been fascinating to […]
Like many very simple ideas, a ‘Citizen’s Income’ only becomes complicated when you think through its implications. This fact at least was illuminated in a worthwhile debate I had on Radio 4 Moneybox with some of CI’s advocates. The idea of a Citizen’s Income is that a single, unconditional flat-rate payment for each adult and […]
An unsung success of government policy in recent years has been a great expansion in support for childcare, which has certainly helped more low income parents to work. It’s easy to forget that twenty years ago there was virtually no such help, and this helps explain why parental employment remained much more resilient in the […]