When they help boost the government’s employment statistics, argues Claudia Wood.
Last week I blogged that in the current economic climate, today's 'striver' can often be tomorrow's 'scrounger'. Because the fact is, many of those we describe as working poor are often in temporary or insecure employment, in industries such as hospitality and retail, which are vulnerable to seasonal trends. It means many families are just a triple dip away from finding themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese Wall that the government has erected between the two so...
David Goodhart casts an eye over the latest Census figures and asks what they say about how we are living together.
The census has given us a snapshot of just how rapidly England's (and to a lesser extent Wales's) population is changing but it doesn't tell us much about how we are living together. What kind of new life is being created between the existing people and the new ones? Is a harmonious common life emerging across ethnic boundaries, or are different ethnic communities living largely apart from each other? There are a few signals from the census. On the positive side about 2m househol...
Janani Krishnaswamy explores a key issue in the debate over the Communications Data Bill.
For almost a decade, the UK government has been concerned over the challenges of online surveillance in the climate of fast-changing technology. Today, the Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Data Bill has given its verdict on the latest effort to improve government surveillance online. On the face of it, the report has made a thoughtful analysis of the different concerns around the Bill: proportionality, price, and privacy concerns are all raised. One of the core recommendati...
Following the release of the latest Census results, Ally Paget looks at the challenges of local data.
Last month Demos launched Poverty in Perspective, a report arguing that an effective, nuanced response to poverty depends on an understanding of different combinations of disadvantages – different poverty 'types'. Demos and NatCen used the 'Understanding Society' dataset to identify five distinct types of child poverty in the UK. The report also outlines a 'toolkit' to assist local authorities and practitioners to identify, target, and address disadvantage in th...
Claudia Wood reacts to the welfare changes announced in the Chancellor's Autumn Statement.
Today, the government announced that Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) will be uprated by a 1 per cent rather than by the rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), for the next three years. This is troubling for a number of reasons – the first being that while this actually only makes a small different next April (1.2 per cent less than expected as CPI currently is at 2.2 per cent) which shouldn’t forget th...
Jo Salter describes an often overlooked group - working-age childless households in poverty.
It is not unexpected that children are exempt from the evermore prevalent narrative of the deserving and undeserving poor – all children are considered to be equally deserving. So too are pensioners, who, having contributed all their lives, rightly expect to be supported in their later years, an opinion shared by the public at large. It is perhaps this special status which has helped build a cross-party consensus around the need to prioritise child poverty, and why the Government has b...
Claudia Wood talks through our pensioner poverty types.
When the phrase ‘pensioner poverty’ is used, it conjures up particular images – a widower living alone in a cold, damp home, perhaps in poor health. It is usually placed in the same sentence as ‘fuel poverty’ or ‘social isolation’. These are important observations, fed by the first-hand experience of charities and local practitioners working with older people. But as valid as they are, they remain incomplete – looking only at subsets of the pens...
Louise Bazalgette introduces For Starters, arguing that the Government should do more to improve early childhood nutrition.
The new Demos report published today, For Starters, presents new analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study showing that children who had regular mealtimes at age 3 were 88 per cent more likely to have good social and emotional development at age 7, as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire. They were also more likely to have good test scores in reading and maths at age 7. These findings add to a host of existing evidence demonstrating the importance of breastfeeding and &ndash...
Chris Tryhorn unpicks the regulatory regime laid out in the Leveson report.
So did the Leveson Report just save self-regulation of the press? To update that famous Fleet Street qualifier, ‘Up to a point, Lord Justice Leveson’. In proposing a renewed form of self-regulation with some statutory underpinning, Leveson has charted a course between the Scylla of the status quo and the Charybdis of state censorship. The judge is clear in his report today that his solution to press reform ‘is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of th...
Claudia Wood argues that household poverty is complex, varied and often hidden from public view.
Yesterday, Demos launched the results of a ground-breaking analysis of poverty. Poverty in Perspective applies 20 indicators – spanning health, education, housing, material deprivation and social networks – to households below the poverty line (classified according to the ISER’s Understanding Society dataset). We identified which indicators clustered together most frequently, to create distinct ‘types’ of poverty, each characterised by a unique combination of in...