[This is the text to accompany my presentation to open the South West Observatory seminar “Welfare reform: challenges, impacts and evidence”, 13/11/12] Where to start? Politicians are prone to hyperbole. The most minor modification to a relatively peripheral policy is portrayed as a groundbreaking initiative. However, in the […]
This morning the Social Market Foundation launched their report Sink or Swim? which highlights some of the likely problems to follow if the Government pursues Universal Credit in its current form. Jules Birch blogged today over at Inside Housing on some of the many problems that have already […]
Information on the performance of the private contractors responsible for delivering the Government’s Work Programme is beginning to leak out, seemingly despite the best efforts of the Department for Work and Pensions to keep us all in the dark. And the news is not good. It appears that […]
I was considering blogging in detail about David Cameron’s speech yesterday on welfare. But I decided against it. There are already several very good critiques of the substance of the speech. Plenty of people, including IPPR’s Nick Pearce, have pointed out that the speech was primarily about politics […]
… no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. I have always taken the use of the term “enslaved” in the Preamble to the Liberal Democrat Federal Constitution to be figurative, given that slavery was formally abolished in England in 1833. But while reading yesterday’s Observer […]
The other day I had to give a 10 minute summary of my take on the housing challenges we currently face. I don’t claim any great originality in what I covered. But I thought it might be useful to set the points out here. The next stage is […]
One of the Government’s most cunning tactics in the debate over welfare reform is the way it has shaped the discourse and carried people with it. As Jonathan Freedland observes in today’s Guardian, the tactic has encouraged poorer people to turn on each other. At the same time, […]
[Originally posted at Dale&Co., 03/01/12] The new year has opened with a couple of important housing stories. The first was another attempted crackdown on illegal subletting in council housing. The second, which attracted significant media attention, is the reform of the local housing allowance (LHA) – the housing […]
It strikes me that we may need to rewind the clock and recapture something a bit simpler. It might help some members of the political elite talk more sense. There is a continuing academic debate over how to measure poverty. Broadly speaking, thinking on poverty has moved away […]
Earlier today I was reading a piece about the financial crisis which argued that part of the problem with the financial system is a greater reliance on the technology, quants and trading over distance. There are fewer regular face to face meetings with counterparts in the market. This […]
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