This was MPs’ last day before the holidays and the department for Work and Pensions celebrated by publishing fourteen – count them – reports, releases and statements. In this take out the trash glut you might be forgiven for missing the excitingly titled Evaluation of Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy: Final Report. [For those of us with…
A new report was published today that ought to have a massive impact on what the politicians say about migration. It’s called Social dimension of intra-EU mobility: Impact on public services and it looks at the impact in West European countries of migration from the ten new member states in the East.(*) I say it ought to…
The headline news in today’s Spending Review and Autumn Statement is the decision not to go ahead with the cuts to tax credits that were due to take place next April. So let’s remember the cuts that were due to come into effect next April, with no protection for the tax credit claimants who were…
People getting the government’s new Universal Credit often have to wait six weeks for their first money and this is causing them problems with their bills, according to a new report. Some have had to turn to food banks. Waiting for Credit is a new report written by a group of 16 Citizens’ Advice Bureaux…
More evidence has emerged about pay stagnation in the UK. Yesterday I noted that the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings showed that house prices had been going up twice as fast as earnings since the recession. Today I read an interesting presentation on the ASHE figures by Philip Wales, the head of Economic Analysis…
A new TUC analysis of the tax credit cuts the Chancellor plans for next April shows that the worst impact will be felt in the regions and nations of the UK that already have the lowest average incomes. In his summer Budget Mr Osborne announced that the government plans to reduce the income thresholds in…
New figures show that house prices have been going up more than twice as fast as earnings since the recession. The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings came out today. ASHE is the most important source of information about earnings and hours worked and we’re always interested in what it shows about the gender pay gap…
I have a post at politics.co.uk, (written on behalf of the End Child Poverty coalition) looking at the Welfare Reform and Work Bill – if passed, it will mean the government no longer has to report to Parliament on progress helping children out of poverty. This will mean that there will be no point at…
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s labour market statistics. There’s some good news – though perhaps the first signs that self-employment is growing disproportionately again – but there’s also reasons to worry that pay rises are slowing down again.
Today the House of Lords debated regulations to cut tax credits, scheduled to be introduced next April. They voted to delay this introduction until an independent assessment of their likely impact has been carried out. In this post I want to look at what this assessment is likely to discover and why I think the…