Well, after David Cameron prepared us for savage cuts to Child Tax Credit, lots of people expected that the government was going to change the Child Poverty Act substantially. After all, the last five years of cuts led the Institute for Fiscal Studies to forecast that, without any further changes, the number of children in…
David Cameron’s speech yesterday ends a lot of speculation: the government seem determined to introduce substantial cuts in Child Tax Credit. The prospect of £12 billion of benefit and tax credit cuts is so horrific that many people refused to believe they were possible. Last month I explained why I thought the politics pointed to…
Earlier today the Office for National Statistics published the quarterly Public Sector Employment figures. I suppose the headline was the fact that the number working in public sector jobs has fallen another 43,000 over the past year, but I was just as interested in the regional figures. These showed that every region has lost public…
This morning the government released the quarterly Graduate Labour Market Statistics for England, which allow us to look at post-graduate, graduate and non-graduate employment rates and salaries since 2006. You wouldn’t know it from the government’s spin, but graduate pay has been slipping for two years now. The official press release led on three points:…
Last month the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the rich countries’ club) published In it Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. It develops the argument the OECD has been making for some time about the malign economic consequences of inequality, and presents evidence to show that it is the growing distance between the bottom…
The new government starts work with commitments to benefit cuts that will be difficult to deliver but politically impossible to avoid. All the options open to the government will cause serious hardship but still won’t deliver the scale of savings the Chancellor wants. It’s very likely that one response to this problem will be to…
Sometimes it can be hard to get a handle on just how important wealth is and the difference it makes to have a lot or a little. As union activists, we work for higher pay and those of us whose main political concern is poverty know that the lived reality of poverty is an inadequate…
Last month, an overwhelming majority of the 2,000 members of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) replying to a survey said that their schools were providing support for children from deprived backgrounds. The same proportion – 84 per cent – said that they were providing more of this type of support than five years…
In the 2014-15 financial year, Trussel Trust foodbanks helped feed families over one million times. As Michael noted when he blogged about this last week, that figure only covers Trussel foodbanks. If you include the ventures run by churches, charities and other community groups the true figure will be significantly higher. It’s worth visiting that…
The IFS is set to release analysis looking at the £12bn of welfare cuts that the Conservatives are proposing. We know already who the favourite targets were for the coalition’s last welfare cuts. Will they be the favourite targets again?