Tag: Poverty and social exclusion

Unravelling needs-based social security

[Originally posted at the SPS Comment and Analysis, 03/11/16, under a slightly different title] We are about to see one of the welfare policies of the late, only occasionally lamented Coalition government bear particularly ugly fruit. On Monday the process of lowering the Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) from £26,000 […]

The Tory £12bn and manifest inadequacy

The leak to the BBC hinting at the scale of the cuts to welfare budgets being modelled by the Department for Work and Pensions has caused consternation. And so it should. Given that George Osborne has refused to say what he is proposing to cut from welfare spending […]

The Universal Credit fiasco

When the history of this Coalition government is written a substantial chapter will no doubt be devoted to contrasting the vaulting ambitions of IDS’s welfare reform agenda with the incompetence and inhumanity of its implementation. Like some sort of inverted alchemist IDS has the ability to turn golden […]

Pathways to housing-related poverty

The JRF report What will the housing market look like in 2040?, released yesterday, provided an eye-catching and headline-grabbing answer to the question that acts as its title. Presumably grabbing the headlines was the point. The answer is that under plausible assumptions about future trajectories on tenure, costs and […]

The miraculous power of welfare reform

The international news is pretty grim at the moment. This doesn’t really fit well with the traditional idea that we’re in silly season, when Prime Ministers travel to holiday destinations to point at fish. Yet something that fits entirely comfortably with silly season is another self-justificatory speech by […]

Fighting talk

These days it seems we’re more likely to hear politicians talk about a “cost-of-living crisis” or, possibly, allude to problems of housing affordability than we are to find them discussing “poverty”. Indeed, we’re back in an era where the whole concept of poverty, and whether there are any […]

Moralizing destitution

Just by way of a change, today I wrote a post at Medium.com. It’s a crisp, clean properly WYSIWYG writing experience. There is just enough formatting to allow you to make your point. But not a lot of bells and whistles to distract you from the writing. That […]

Messing with the minimum wage

Making work pay. Few sensible people would object to this as a policy aspiration. It’s at the core of the Coalition Government’s justification for its reforms to the social security system. So that’s got to be good. The cracks begin to appear when we move on to consider […]

Housing strategies in challenging times

[On 10/01/13 I gave a brief overview of the context facing rented housing as part of an event called Housing Challenges in Exeter organised by Exeter City Council. This is the text to accompany my presentation.] Our housing system faces significant pressures. Short term pressures generated by the […]

Osbo’s poverty trap and pinging the elastic of reality

Since they entered office the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition has been engaged in a systematic process of stigmatising those in receipt of social security benefits. Great emphasis has been placed upon the undeserving and the fraudulent. There is support for the hard working strivers, but condemnation for […]