At their annual conference in September, the Royal Statistical Society organised a session on the government’s consultation on child poverty. With the next announcement on consultation now expected before Christmas, Paul Allin and John Veit-Wilson summarise the presentations and discussion.
Plans to provide 5,000 job and training opportunities for households in Wales in which no-one has a job are at the heart of new Welsh Government plans to tackle poverty.
The plans are an updated version of those published by the Welsh Government in June 2012.
Newly unemployed people will be forced to wait seven days, instead of three days currently, before being able to claim benefits. The announcement was made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as part of a statement on public spending plans for 2015-16. He said the move was designed to be 'helpful' to unemployed people, who would otherwise be distracted by the need to look for a new job.
In all the talk of tackling child poverty, one group has been largely ignored, children of refugees and asylum seekers. Stephen Crossley reports on poverty amongst this 'minority within a minority' and the role local agencies should play.
The idea that if poverty is relative it will always be with us is a common misconception, argues John Veit-Wilson. 'Relative poverty' can be abolished if no one has fewer resources than needed to achieve that society’s minimum standards.
The financial crisis has demonstrated weaknesses in many pension schemes. Changes need to place women at the heart of the pension debate argues Liam Foster.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, is to be called in front of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June over the misuse by the department of government statistics. This follows the rebuke from the official statistics watchdog for claiming that the benefits cap is pushing people to find paid work.
The select committee’s decision to ‘examine the way the DWP releases benefit statistics to the media’ follows a petition to the committee, signed by 96,666 people, calling for the committee to ‘hold IDS to account for his use of statistics on welfare’. Jayne Linney, who set up the petition on Change.org commented: ‘By starting this petition we’ve shown that everyone has the tools to call politicians out if they try to make things up. They can’t get away with spinning statistics any longer.
Calls for the targets of the 2010 Child Poverty Act to be ditched and the role of income support downgraded are mistaken, argues Stewart Lansley.
The paper welcomes proposals in the Hills Fuel Poverty Review to measure incomes for fuel poverty purposes after housing costs and adjusted for household size and composition and the call for substantial additional data collection in order to better understand contemporary energy use behaviours and dwelling temperatures. However, the paper argues for a wider range of measures than is proposed in the Hills review and is concerned that the measurement framework will result in low income households living in energy efficient dwellings being classified as not fuel poor.
Independent experts have sounded a series of warnings over the UK's progress on the active inclusion of people most excluded from the labour market. Adequate benefits, they say, are crucial to any active inclusion strategy.
The experts reviewed the coalition government's actions in 2012 on commitments given to the European Commission: their findings were initially summarised in a 'synthesis' report in January 2013, and have now been released in full.