UK Poverty Post

Nurseries on the brink

On Tuesday the Guardian carried an article highlighting the unintended danger posed to state nurseries by the new early years single funding formula that will come into force from September 2010. Parents reading this will be delighted to know if they didn’t already that free nursery provision will increase from 12 and half hours to 15 hours a week from next September. Yet we have underestimated the cost of delivering this policy without badly harming the services that [...] Continue Reading…

The Cuts Agenda – Don’t run with scissors

Since David Cameron’s speech in Manchester last Thursday, a large part of the political discourse has been about what cuts can, and should, be made in public services. It is important that in a debate about saving money and reducing the deficit, we don’t lose sight of the important services that people on low incomes rely on – and that poorly-paid public sector workers aren’t used as a political football.

The main thing that concerns me when looking at the [...] Continue Reading…

Party Conferences – a world away from real life

It was while I was standing in the Conservative party’s ‘Welfare Reform’ reception in Manchester, drinking free beer and eating beige Canapés whilst listening to Theresa May talk about testing the capacity to work of everyone on incapacity benefit within two years, that I began to feel distinctly uneasy…

Both the Conservatives and Labour party have a policy to retest everyone on incapacity benefits. And it was also in Manchester yet a world away from mini quiche and free beer [...] Continue Reading…

At last, some new thinking on welfare reform

Yesterday saw the launch of what the Centre for Social Justice describes as ‘the most far-reaching review of the UK welfare system in 60 years’. The report, Dynamic Benefits, sets out plans for a near cost-neutral rebalancing of the system, largely focuses on smoothing out the tapers of benefit withdrawal rates and subsequent entry into the tax system.

So what to make of it? Well, I can’t claim to have studied each of its 370 pages in depth just yet, [...] Continue Reading…

Racism in a velvet glove…

If there was a group of people linked only by their ethnographic commonalities, a group who were marginalised, faced discrimination every day of their lives, had poor health, little access to normal education in their home countries, lived considerably shorter lives than others, whose incomes were well below the poverty line, and who were generally maligned by the media throughout the world – you would expect someone to do something wouldn’t you?

Particularly if all of this took place based [...] Continue Reading…

Government slashes support to asylum seekers

At the Refugee Council, we’ve launched a campaign calling on the government to revise its decision to cut support to asylum seekers to just over £5 per day.

From October, single asylum seekers aged over 25 will receive just £35.13 each week, a reduction of £7 on the current weekly amount. The government made this change without any consultation and announced it in a recent letter to refugee agencies.

The cut will mean that an already vulnerable and impoverished group [...] Continue Reading…