Government policy

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.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, has said he could manage to live on £53 a week 'if he had to'. He had been challenged on the BBC's Today programme by a market trader, David Bennett, who said he was forced to survive on that amount – his net income 'after paying rent and bills'. (The current level of jobseeker's allowance is £71.70 a week for those aged 25 or over.)

Following the programme, an online petition gathered 460,000 signatures, in the space of ten days, calling on Duncan Smith to prove his claim in practice.

This policy working paper is a response to the government's consultation paper on Measuring Child Poverty. The working paper argues that the government consultation paper is ‘conceptually completely inept and confused’. In particular, ‘it fails to recognise the fundamental distinction between measures of poverty and the characteristics of poor children and the associations and the consequences of poverty'.

Tax and benefit changes announced by the Chancellor in his 2012 Autumn Statement will mean an extra 200,000 children living in poverty by 2017-18, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.

The Autumn Statement announced several important changes to the tax and benefit system from April 2013 – including a higher personal tax allowance and a 1 per cent cap, for three years, on the annual uprating of most working-age benefits and tax credits.