It’s time to talk about tax relief — how more accountability on tax expenditure could help ease the welfare squeeze

As the Budget approaches we await the details of deep cuts in welfare spending, but the fact that they are coming is beyond doubt…

Credit where it’s due? How to reform and make the most out of Universal Credit

There are some issues where a little bit of knowledge, and a lot of bluster, are all that’s needed for a politician — whether government or opposition — to get through a standard media grilling.

The View That Britain Should Be Learning Lessons From the US Labour Market Is Long Past Its Sell-By Date

Political debates about key policy challenges often tend to idealise — and bastardise — the experience of other countries. Whether it is Finnish…

Will the welfare cap stand the test of time?

George Osborne’s welfare cap will be voted on tomorrow. It’s viewed by many as a moment of reckoning for Labour in which it will be caught in a deadly trap: support eye-wateringly tight and binding proposals that threaten the future of the welfare…

The robots are coming. Will they bring wealth or a divided society?

Whether it’s our humdrum reliance on supermarket self-service tills, Siri on our iPhones, the emergence of the drone as a weapon of choice or the impending arrival of the driverless car, intelligent machines are…

Rethinking post-crash social policy — IPPR’s Condition of Britain

Another day, another think-tank report. That, no doubt, is how it must feel to news desks, political hacks and listeners of the Today programme alike.

Seattle, Stuttgart, Switzerland — welcome to the new era of minimum wage radicalism

Lift your gaze from the humdrum debate on living standards in the UK and look overseas: something seems to be stirring on the politics of low pay.

Raising low pay is welcome. But we should still fear the forces hurting family incomes

George Osborne’s audacious unveiling of what he termed the “national living wage” dominated the budget coverage and succeeded in delighting, outraging and confusing in almost equal…

Stuck or just passing through: how can policy-makers improve social mobility?

One of the recurring fixtures of British political life is a bout of soul-searching about social mobility. Depending on the point of view of the pundit, this tends to involve a nostalgic backward…

2015: The outlook for living standards — sunshine and clouds ahead

The economic recovery gained momentum in 2014, though it failed to feed through into raised living standards as much as many hoped. There are reasons for being fairly optimistic that this could start to change next…

SeaTac: the small US town that sparked a new movement against low wages

Until the turn of the year, few Americans had much reason to have heard of SeaTac, a small community just outside Seattle. Those aware of the town’s existence knew it as a place that exists to serve the…

The politics of childcare are heating up. Here’s why

Often an issue only gets the attention it deserves due to a shift in the wider political context. And so it may be with our creaking childcare system. Despite unprecedented increases in public support — and major improvements — it’s still…

By omitting the earnings of one in seven workers from jobs data, our economic policymakers are operating in the dark

Whether you view the self-employed as the silent victims of our invidious jobs market or emblems of a new spirit of…

Pay set is to go up, or down, or stay the same — it all depends on how you measure it

We can expect to hear an awful lot about the closing gap between pay and inflation over the next few months as, inevitably and thankfully, on some measure we close in on a “cross-over…

Where next for the minimum wage?

Today marks the first real terms rise in the minimum wage in six years. It speaks volumes about the convulsions in our labour market that something that was once taken completely for granted is now viewed as a significant and welcome departure. And the rise occurs at a…

The generation that’s going backwards

Falling incomes, rising prices, impossible debts … even before the crash some workers faced a suffocating squeeze

When John F. Kennedy declared that “a rising tide lifts all boats” he was encapsulating the postwar belief that growth would…

Will the return of economic growth mean rising wages for workers?

How effective will advanced economies be at translating economic growth into higher wages for those in the low to middle part of the distribution and is this link weakening over time, reinforcing a ‘trickle-up’…

The end of pledge-card politics?

The next election will see a battered electorate in need of economic and social respite confronted by a political elite woefully lacking in resources and public trust. Never in recent times will so much be asked from leaders who have so little to respond with.

Now is the time to debate full employment

A Labour leadership striving to re-earn the electorate’s trust in its capacity to manage the public finances wisely, restless mid-term Conservative backbenchers fearing they are sliding towards electoral defeat, a recession-wearied public agitated about…

Once interest rates start rising, how can indebted households be helped through the painful transition?

Whether it is this autumn, the New Year or shortly after next May’s election, everyone knows that interest rates are going to start rising sometime…

Planning for a pay rise — could ‘forward guidance’ work for Britain’s low paid workers?

The Low Pay Commission should consider setting out how the minimum wage would increase over time if the recovery is sustained

The price we pay for poverty wages is too high

Low pay is not simply a rite of passage that young people go through, the odds of escaping are truly grim.

Living on low pay in 2013 is a rough and all too common experience, but being stuck on poverty-pay for a decade or…

How much wriggle room will the Chancellor have in the July Budget?

After the flow of easy pre-election promises, here come the hard choices of government. As George Osborne approaches his ‘emergency Budget’ attention will turn to what room for manoeuvre he really has given all the…

It’s too early to be pessimistic about boosting living standards

Things are likely to stop getting worse sometime soon, progress will then be painfully slow, and it’s going to be an awful long time before they get back to where they were before the crash.

Why living standards and public finances matter

The party that persuades voters it can deal with both issues will win the election.

They are the towering issues of British politics that are not about to go away soon: the steep decline in living standards and the grim…

How far apart are Labour and the Lib Dems on fiscal policy?

If they did a deal what might it look like: an end to austerity?

Five weeks to go to polling day and it’s clear that the media, and perhaps the public, aren’t getting the answers they’d like to some of…

What’s in store for the 2015 victor: winner’s curse or a steady recovery?

One of the laziest lines in politics is that there are good elections to lose: five years in opposition are rarely rewarding. But it’s certainly true that there are less attractive elections to win and…

Why hasn’t 2014 been the year of the pay rise?

Next month we will be treated to the familiar spate of end of year reviews. Amid all that copy we can expect a regular theme to be that this was (another) year in which all the forecasts of a rise in earnings for workers were proved wrong.

What’s really been happening to living standards?

Despite the fact that it’s been centre-stage for a number of years, there is still a lot of confusion about the squeeze on household incomes: who has really been hit and by how much? Given that this will be a central political issue between now…

Why the Lib Dems’ £12,500 tax allowance promise is a smaller pledge than it sounds

Since the weekend, when the Lib Dem faithful gathered in York for their spring conference, quite a few column inches have been filled with frothy speculation about Nick Clegg’s likely…

Another Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2015? It’s no done deal

With £40bn of fiscal misery still to come, talk of another Tory-Lib Dem coalition predicated on possible tax cuts seems far-fetched

The wrong reform — at the worst possible time

Britain’s poorest households — already struggling to cope with falling wages, rising living costs, and a series of cuts to tax credits and benefits — are about to receive another blow. And very few of them know it’s coming.

What does the childcare announcement really tell us?

Before we rush to dissect the government’s new childcare policy it is worth pausing to reflect on the very fact that in an unprecedented time of austerity a Conservative-led administration is proposing to spend near on £1bn on childcare…

Households face £26bn of fiscal pain in 2016–18

If the current timetable for deficit reduction is maintained, households should brace themselves for roughly another £26bn of fiscal pain in the years between 2016 and 2018 — whether it comes in the form of extra cuts to public services, another…

Ed Miliband has many challenges — but the spending review isn’t one of them

George Osborne’s immediate priorities shouldn’t distract Labour, which instead must focus on how it plans to cut the deficit

Could the Tories’ plan for re-election in 2015 cost just 10p?

Might something new be stirring on the right of politics in relation to the plight of Britain’s low paid? Just to pose the question is to invite ridicule from many on the left: how could the minimum-wage opposing, tax-credit…