The Covid-19 pandemic has shone a light on what it means to experience sudden income loss, insecurity and difficulty making ends meet. It has also revealed and exacerbated the instability that many low income families already face on a regular basis. But what can be learnt in the light of responses to the pandemic? Our […]
Is this the moment to call time on Universal Credit, a decade on?
Category: Families, General, Income, Living standards, Tax credits, Uncategorised
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 […]
Using the Minimum Income Standard as a criterion for fair access to justice has profound implications for its status as a national standard
Category: Consumption, Families, General, Households below MIS, Income, Living standards, Living wage, MIS
Today, the Law Society is publishing my report that asks a simple question about the way people are assessed for eligibility for civil legal aid. Can those denied full legal aid because of their income afford to pay for their own legal advice and services? The criterion for considering affordability is whether such costs can […]
For the less well off half of families, budgets continue to take away, not give away
Category: Families, Income, Living standards, Tax credits, Universal credit
In today’s Budget, Philip Hammond repeated the mantra that the Government wants “to help families cope with the cost of living”, and even acknowledged that short term relief from the assault on living standards needs to parallel long-term investment to improve productivity and housebuilding. But he conspicuously avoided repeating previous references to “just about managing” […]
Public policy is becoming ever more skewed in trying to focus on “deserving” groups
Category: Childcare, Consumption, Families, General, Income, Universal credit
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 […]
Time to start fixing the broken safety net that no longer catches struggling families
Category: Families, Income, Uncategorised
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 […]
An autumn statement that only just about managed to distribute some jam
Category: Families, Inflation, Living standards
Both the tone and content of Philip Hammond’s first budgetary statement belied the mood music of the past few weeks: that Theresa May’s government will do much more to help just about managing families – dubbed the “JAMs”. It continued in a modest way some policies of its predecessor: freezing fuel duty; promising more social […]
Will low income families’ ability to afford the necessities of life stop declining?
Category: Families, Income, Living wage, Uncategorised, Universal credit
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 […]
Ten years of parenting – a perspective on what children need
Category: Childcare, Families, Living standards, MIS
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 […]
Bringing up a family on a low income involves chances and choices
Campaigners seeking to draw attention to the worst effects of hard times on family poverty rightly cite the growing use of food banks to illustrate severe deprivation in the UK. But while about 200,000 children were in families using foodbanks last year, about 30 times this number – six million children – were on low […]