UK Poverty Post

Let’s watch our language when it comes to welfare

Iain Duncan Smith has claimed there is a ‘culture of worklessness’ that prevents people getting jobs. But what he describes is not a “culture”- it’s a set of facts that mean that, even where people desperately want to work, doing so makes them worse off.

Nor does the solution proposed by the DWP deal with this alleged ‘cultural’ aversion to work.  What IDS is describing is rational decisions by people who will be worse off if they work. When income [...] Continue Reading…

Surviving on a shoestring? Stuck in the benefits trap? Why not share your experiences with the world.

From our experience, the assumption that people living on benefits don’t want to work simply isn’t true. We know that trying to survive on a very low income in the UK is a tricky business. Which is why we are looking for people who would be willing to share their experiences and frustrations of what it’s really like trying to survive in the system.

We’d like to hear from women and men who’d be up for taking part in a [...] Continue Reading…

Housing Benefit cuts will make people homeless and drive them away from jobs

As specialist organisations have time to evaluate the likely effect of the Housing Benefit cuts, it is becoming clear that families will be forced into homelessness and child poverty will be exacerbated. The changes will force families to move away from the areas where jobs are most likely to be found.

As Nicola has reported, the Budget introduced a number of severe cuts in HB and each of these will increase the number of families unable to pay their [...] Continue Reading…

Budget 2010: Cutting Benefits by Stealth

The headline announcements were bad enough. Largely due to the increase in the highly regressive VAT, it is, as the IFS put it, ‘likely that the overall impact of [the Budget’s taxation] measures was regressive’. George Osborne’s claims that this was a progressive Budget were only possible because of measures already announced by the previous government.

The VAT increase alone will cost the poorest tenth of families 2% of their income, compared to only 0.8% for the richest tenth. Then [...] Continue Reading…

Recognise and reward those who care

Carers’ Week, 14th – 25th June
Coinciding with Refugee Week, this week is also Carers’ Week, a chance to recognise the enormous contribution to society made by the six million unpaid carers in the UK, as well as to highlight the difficulties faced by those who are often forced to give up work or a social life in order to look after a friend or relative – as recently covered by Oxfam’s paper Something for Nothing.

According to Carers UK more [...] Continue Reading…

Keep remembering that we have a choice in how we get out of this mess

Writing in Saturday’s Guardian, Polly Toynbee threw an interesting perspective on what promises to be the biggest debate in politics over the next few years – deficit reduction. So far, the arguments have largely been about the ‘when’ – which is a question of profound economic importance and disagreement. But this article engages with another crucial issue: the ‘how’. In particular, she emphasises that there really is a political choice to be made between raising taxes and cutting spending. [...] Continue Reading…