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16 December 2009
7 comments
The UK still has a higher proportion of children living in workless households than any other member state of the EU-27. This is the result of an unfortunate combination of two circumstances: first...
27 November 2009
6 comments
Kate Green, the Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group, recently responded to an IEA blog piece in which I examined a CPAG article by Polly Toynbee. I had argued that the article was not...
23 November 2009
35 comments
It is a bit tricky to criticise an organisation that describes itself as “the leading charity campaigning for the abolition of child poverty in the UK”. But when a charity enters the...
6 November 2009
14 comments
It is widely agreed that state pension age (SPA) needs to rise to reflect the financial downside of the happy prospect of greater life expectancy. The current government is committed to this, albeit...
2 November 2009
6 comments
Policy Exchange has just released a report aptly titled Poverty of Ambition, which criticises the major parties’ approach to child poverty. It explains why our conventional poverty measures...
22 October 2009
0 comments
Reform have today launched a report calling for the end of middle class benefits to stave off increases in tax. Before querying that proposal, let me say first that I am glad that they have waded...
6 October 2009
0 comments
The Conservatives are proposing to clamp down on incapacity benefit claimants in order to deal with the large numbers they say should be in work. This is a laudable aim, of course, but it is highly...
9 September 2009
10 comments
Professor Christoph Butterwegge, a political scientist and poverty researcher at the University of Cologne, seems to be angry with his fellow citizens. What is bothering him is that...
2 September 2009
4 comments
In A History of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr describes post-war Britain as a grim place in material terms. In 1950, only 4% of the adult population owned a television, and only 3% went on holidays...
17 August 2009
4 comments
Gordon Brown recently signalled a shift in public policy away from performance targets and towards entitlements. He argued we should place access to health, education, housing and welfare on the...
6 August 2009
2 comments
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) announced today that they had changed their forecast on house prices for 2009, and that instead of a fall they now foresee a...
5 August 2009
72 comments
Allister Heath once labelled Gordon Brown “a man who seems to love making simple things as complicated as possible”. A recent analysis of the benefit system by the Centre for Policy...
27 July 2009
6 comments
Conventional wisdom has it that inequality between the rich and the poor has grown substantially in recent years, and that this is a trend which should concern all right-thinking people. A timely...
1 July 2009
0 comments
“Approximately 32 per cent of children in Wales – 192,000 children – live in poverty”, argues a condensed report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The paper (which builds on...
29 June 2009
6 comments
Following on from Richard Wellings’ post on the welfare state and saving, perhaps I can comment on the welfare state and babies. Pay-as-you-go pensions systems rely on children to make...
24 June 2009
2 comments
The last decade has been marked by a combination of low savings rates and high debt levels in both the USA and Britain. Indeed in 2005, the savings rate in the US reached zero, while 13 million...
27 May 2009
2 comments
Last week it was revealed that at least £7 billion has been paid out wrongly on tax credits over the last five years. Indeed, the tax credit scheme has been accompanied by administrative...
1 May 2009
2 comments
Today is International Labour Day, a day to celebrate “the social achievements of the workers”. Or so they say. Unfortunately, in much of the Western world, 1 May is simply an...
1 May 2009
14 comments
A fellow academic recently commented that the phrase “housing for the poor”, which was used in the title of an issue of Economic Affairs I edited in 2008, was, to quote, “...
26 March 2009
16 comments
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a debate on the housing opportunities for young people hosted by BBC Radio Leicester. The young people there were very aware of the issues of affordability and...
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