Archive for November, 2009
Just the beginning for welfare reform
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009Despite the Welfare Reform Bill passing into a law a couple of weeks ago, there seems fairly universal acceptance that there’s still a lot of welfare reforming to be done (including, some would argue, undoing the damage done by the most recent set of reforms).
The questions left are around the direction of future reform, its [...]
Londoners unite to tackle poverty
Monday, November 23rd, 2009Next Tuesday 1st December a coalition of anti poverty charities and organisations from around London, including Community Links, will meet to share successes and look ahead to next year. Stephen Timms MP for East Ham will open the event, but after that we’ll be hearing almost exclusively from activists and charities working locally around London, [...]
How we reduced Jobcentre delays from 8 weeks to 3 days
Monday, November 16th, 2009A few years ago we started looking into how Newham’s local Jobcentre could run a better service for its users, many of whom were coming to us for advice when the service let them down.
We began with the principle that those who experience a problem understand it best, and asked service users and frontline staff [...]
Fraud and error in the benefits system – where DWP are going wrong.
Monday, November 16th, 2009Last week the Department for Work and Pensions released their annual figures (PDF) on fraud and error in the benefits system. It seems a good time to make exactly the same points we made last time this happened.
Firstly lumping together fraud and error is misleading and means everyone (including Teresa May, in the Telegraph article [...]
Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action launches new research at Chain Reaction
Thursday, November 12th, 2009Today at our Chain Reaction event the Council on Social Action will be launching three new papers.* You can follow Chain Reaction live on this page, and even watch the launch of these papers, with vice-chair David Robinson at 11.30am.
The first two look at just how important human relationships are in society. A mentoring scheme [...]
David Cameron on poverty - does Big Society just mean Better State?
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have very successfully wrestled the poverty agenda off Labour in the last few months, and today David Cameron goes a bit further in fleshing out their vision. Apparently he’ll echo Labour’s commitment to ending child poverty (a commitment which should soon be enshrined in law anyway), will focus on [...]
Guest post - UK homeworkers left increasingly unsupported
Monday, November 9th, 2009Joe Turner is Director of the Freedom Clothing Project
Government believes there may be 70,000 homeworkers in the UK earning below the minimum wage. That is 70,000 people, primarily women, who are so exploited by bad employers that they continue working on poverty rates, hidden behind their own front doors.
Ministers have said to me that the [...]
Why aren’t the child poverty and welfare reform bills better aligned?
Friday, November 6th, 2009A couple of days ago shadow work and pensions minister Andrew Selous mentioned both our work on the informal economy and the community allowance campaign during the committee stage of the Child Poverty bill. It’s always nice to see a bit of lobbying reflected in what politicians say, but it also reveals something of the [...]
The impact of the recession on child poverty
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009The End Child Poverty campaign released a report today which highlights the obvious, but is still depressing reading. In a recession where unemployment rose rapidly and is still rising, there are 170,000 more children in families without jobs, and two million in families reliant on benefits.
You can argue about the statistics, as thinktank Policy Exchange tried [...]
Four good reasons to pay people on benefits for working in their community
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Yesterday saw the parliamentary launch of two new reports into the Community Allowance. It’s a fairly simple proposal - allow local people on benefits to earn money doing part-time community-building work, with no impact on their benefits - yet there are so many good reasons why it should happen.
Most of them are outlined in the [...]
We spent a week debating the way poverty is portrayed in the media, generating over 20 fascinating posts from a wide range of authors. 