The Royal Statistical Society has written to the UK Statistics Authority to call for a comprehensive review of inflation measures. The letter, from RSS President David Hand to Sir Michael Scholar (the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority) expresses concern about the way in which the Office for National Statistics concentrates on the Consumer Price Index, even though it is not the best index for all purposes – such as wage negotiations, where it is “not ideal.” The letter raises concerns about the way in which the ONS monthly inflation press notice now only headlines the CPI, leaving the Retail Price Index to the inside pages (a point we’ve also raised).

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   Filed under: Budget, Pensions, Welfare | No Comments »

Today End Child Poverty reports on new research, commissioned from the IFS, that shows definitively what many others have highlighted – the cuts announced in the Budget will hit families and the poorest the hardest.

As we showed immediately after the Budget, the Chancellor’s claim that the spending changes he announced were ‘progressive’ has always been contentious – significantly the Treasury’s modelling did not include a third of social security changes, including cuts to Housing Benefit and Disability Living Allowance, and only changes up until 2012/13 were considered.

This IFS research puts the Budget’s regressive impact beyond doubt: the poorest will be hit more than many of the richest in cash terms let alone as a percentage; poor and middle income families with children lose out more than any other household types and the very poorest families with children lose more than any other groups – with 5% of their total income being cut. Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, Child poverty, Welfare | 3 Comments »

Today’s Home Office consultation on the Government’s new drug strategy asks:

Should we be making more of the potential to use the benefit system to offer claimants a choice between: some form of financial benefit sanction, if they do not take action to address their drug or alcohol dependency;  or, additional support to take such steps, by tailoring the requirements placed upon them as a condition of benefit receipt to assist their recovery?

It’s interesting to remember that within days of entering Government the Coalition decided not to proceed with Labour pilots that would, in part, have followed this appoach. At the time, the Social Security Advisory Committee’s (SSAC) critical report was cited as the reason – as has been widely reported today, the committee concluded that:

There is little, if any, evidence that strong mandation will support problem drug users to succeed in treatment and move towards the labour market. It may, in fact, move people further from the labour market as they drop out of the benefits system and turn to other sources of income such as crime and prostitution. Read more »

   Filed under: Welfare | 2 Comments »

The Social Security Advisory Committee is running a consultation on a set of regulations that will amend the Work Capability Assessment, which is used to assess eligibility for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The consultation is set out in an extensive DWP Explanatory Memorandum, which has now been published on the SSAC website. This document includes a short discussion on the future shape of welfare to work services, which includes the following text (bold is my own):

we intend to build on the strengths of the personalised support delivered through JSA so that personal advisers can assess an individual’s need in order to provide enhanced support and low cost, flexible provision, to help improve employability.

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   Filed under: Labour market, Welfare | 1 Comment »

If the government is indeed going to announce restrictions on ‘universal’ benefits it won’t come as a bolt out of the blue. The Budget froze Child Benefit for three years and the re-testing of Disability Living Allowance claims is supposed to cut back the number of people receiving the benefit by one fifth. The leaks about Winter Fuel Payments and Child Benefit would therefore represent a continuation of a policy trend that is already established.

How far will they go? The BBC reports a government spokesperson saying that the restrictions will fall short of means-testing benefits that are currently universal. But it’s hard to see how that will produce the savings needed: Read more »

   Filed under: Welfare | 2 Comments »

This week the Prime Minister has been keen to tell us about the massive savings that are available should fraud and error be completely removed from the administration of tax credit and benefit payments, promising that this would be “the first and the deepest” of forthcoming spending cuts.

Channel Four’s Fact Check does a good job of breaking the figures down, and pointing out the low probability of the entire £5.2 billion being saved. But the DWP’s recently published ‘draft structural reform plan‘ does even better, setting out the Department’s aim to ‘reduce fraud and error in the benefits system to a maximum of 1.8% of expenditure’.

A few quick calculations therefore reveal the scale of what is actually being promised. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics, Social exclusion, Welfare | 1 Comment »

If you live or work in London you may have noticed the front page headline in Monday’s Evening Standard:

David Miliband’s tax blow to 34,000 homes in London

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   Filed under: Tax, Welfare | 1 Comment »

One of the claims in Iain Duncan Smith’s Twenty-first Century Welfare really annoyed me when I first read it, and it has been niggling away at me ever since:

“The welfare system has failed to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and poverty.”

I suppose the reason I find this statement so annoying is that you come across it so often – after a century of social security, we still have poverty and inequality. So obviously social security/the welfare state is a failure.

This is a claim that fails to take into account what would happen if we didn’t have the welfare state. Read more »

   Filed under: Social exclusion, Welfare | 2 Comments »

The Department for Work and Pensions has finally published a consultation document on Twenty-First Century Welfare. For a couple of weeks there have been constant will they-won’t they rumours that the Department was about to publish a White Paper on reforms to the benefits and Tax Credits system. In the end, the document that has emerged looks far more like a Green Paper, with very little detail, and a series of questions about the strategic direction for policy.

If you’ve already read the Centre for Social Justice’s Dynamic Benefits and the Coalition’s State of the Nation, then very little in today’s publication will be new to you. It seems very likely that there was a plan for a White Paper, but that it fell victim to the strains between Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne that I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

The reasons for this tension are easily set out:

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   Filed under: Welfare | 1 Comment »

The National Audit Office has just published their annual report on Fraud And Error In Benefit Expenditure and the headline has been that overpayments from fraud and errors “hit £3.1 bn”.

As always, we’re going to see that figure used to create the impression that everyone on benefits is defrauding the system, that Shameless is some sort of documentary about how claimants actually behave. It’s time to remember:

• Benefit fraud accounts for only a small part of the benefits bill – less than 1%;
• The level of fraud is not ‘out of control’ – it came down significantly a few years ago and has run at much the same level for six years;
• Benefit fraud is less common than insurance fraud or tax evasion.

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   Filed under: Welfare | 4 Comments »

The changes that the Budget outlined to Housing Benefit have proved to be some of the most controvertial. Since they were announced extensive analysis has been undertaken of the potential impacts these changes could have, including the DWP’s own equality impact assessment, and below we have outlined some of the key findings that have emerged.

A central concern is that several of the policy priorities the new Government professes its committment to – ending homelessness, reducing ‘ghettos’ of poverty and increasing social mobility – are extremely likely to be undermined by these new measures. Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, Welfare | 2 Comments »

We had a fascinating briefing here at Congress House yesterday, an opportunity to hear about the impact of the Budget on the poorest people.

I thought it made a very strong case that the Budget measures will have a very unfair impact on poverty and inequality. Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, Housing, Public services, Public spending, Welfare | 4 Comments »