Poverty

Today we are releasing a brand new picture of the nation’s welfare ghettos. Our research gives a disheartening insight into the extent of dependency in England and Wales. The top line: things are getting worse. This is much more detailed and useful information that the statistics often bandied about by politicians. It is well known, for example, that nearly 2 million people have been claiming out-of-work benefits for more than five years. But what does that look like? We’ve examined the smallest measurable units recorded by the Department for Work and Pensions (the technical term is ‘Lower Super Output Areas’) which are smaller even than council wards – they contain

Frank Field’s been thinking. He will make his report on poverty next week and he hints at its contents in an extensive interview with the Times (£). He is convinced that there is more to social mobility than money and he has some brilliantly simple ideas to alleviate poverty. He advocates creating four or five terms in the school year to shorten the long summer holiday, which he argues disadvantages the poor. ‘They have less help at home so they lose out even more in long holidays. They drop behind, they are not being read to or tutored or talked to in the same way as many middle-class children. They

The IFS has given the coalition’s opponents powder for their muskets, only it’s a little damp. The IFS’ analysis is drawn exclusively from straight tax and spend figures; it does not account for the future financial benefits brought by structural public service reform – so Gove’s and IDS’ reforms, both of which aim to alleviate poverty, have not been evaluated.  Matthew Sinclair explains why this means the IFS has exaggerated the severity of Osborne’s Budget: ‘Suppose you invented a policy, some kind of economic miracle, which doubled the incomes of the poorest ten per cent of families without the Government spending a pound.  That would reduce benefit spending.  It would

The Winter Fuel Allowance was an emotive part of the election campaign, with Labour accusing the Tories of planning to scrap it and David Cameron promising not to. At no point during that debate was it asked whether the WFA was a good way to spend money. Our report earlier this year, Cold Comfort, examined in some detail the demographics of fuel poverty, as well as questioning the logic behind the government’s target. If you take the fuel poverty measure (those spending more than 10% of income on energy) as read, the last government failed utterly to achieve anything on it – as the graph below shows. They introduced the

I detest the use of the word ‘Czar’. Everything has a Czar – potato regulation, multi-story car parks and Twitter being my favourite three. But the war on poverty needs to be fought by free-thinking absolutists. The appointment of Frank Field to conduct an independent review into poverty and life chances confirms David Cameron’s, and the coalition’s, non-partisan commitment to social mobility and betterment.   Field presents his analysis in a succinct piece in the Telegraph.  He writes: ‘Over recent decades, the Left and centre-Left’s answer to poverty and inequality has been to spend more money, to redistribute from richer to poorer. Yet this central social democratic ideal is being

Yesterday, it was Michael Gove’s schools agenda. Today, it’s the other main reason to get behind the coalition: IDS’s plans for fixing the welfare system. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has given a speech outlining them this morning. You can read it here, and I’d certainly encourage you to do so. There are plenty of welcome ideas in there, but none more so than IDS’s emphasis on removing disincentives to work from the tax and benefit system. We at Coffee House have banged on about his “dynamic” approach, developed at the Centre for Social Justice, for some time now – and with due cause. You can set

Is Frank Field back? The Labour MP has spent much of his life talking about the poor. Judging by reports today, he might be offered a job chairing a commission on child poverty. This is good news but, as Mr Field has already said, there is not much point in him debating the finer points of poverty definitions. He would need to be given remit to suggest policy. What should those suggestions be? First, he should argue that we need to be a lot less self-indulgent about how we think about child poverty. It may be great to think of ourselves as tackling a major social ill, but the past

The power of ideas is vastly underrated in British politics. It has become fashionable to dismiss them as “ideology” and declare oneself in favour of “what works”.  But the idea of what works is, of course, driven by concepts. As Keynes put it: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”   I write this because ConHome has just run a piece by Max Wind-Cowie saying, “Equality should not be a dirty word for the Conservatives”. I do admire the way Demos, seeing Labour on the way out, is trying to inject as much of its agenda

Cameron has been fairly bold in entering the debate on marriage, because we don’t like do that debate in Britain. Not really – it’s private, and we Brits don’t like debating private things. Anything which helps marriage can easily be paraphrased as “deploying fiscal incentives to force something which should largely be a private decision”. And not by the left, but by our very own Pete Hoskin in the below post. Now, we are a heterodox bunch of baristas here at CoffeeHouse and we do disagree – so here is why I think Pete is wrong. I’d like to have a go offering some of the “convincing answers” he’s looking