By Aaron Barbour
So there was a lot happening this week, what with the snow and transport meltdown. We had to close our services down on Monday and Tuesday, which we haven’t had to do for years.
Anyway we had a productive meeting with the DWP Minister for Work, Rt Hon Tony McNulty MP, about our informal economy and Community Allowance work.
And there was the penultimate meeting of the Benefit Take-Up Taskforce, being led by the Child Poverty Unit. The final report is shaping up to be very practical indeed.
At Community Links we work with thousands of children and young people every week. So it was interesting to hear the findings of the Children’s Society inquiry into ‘The Good Childhood’, which are fascinating and helpfully categorised into sections on the family, lifestyle, values, mental health etc…. I’m still digesting them. It’s worth checking out their website to see how they’ve presented the inquiry findings. They’ve gone for a pallete of new media, from the old school: written word, case studies and reports, to video and audio downloads, of for example the launch. They have also developed two versions of the report: one for adults, and another more accessible version for children/young people.
Two days off school for our kids showed the importance of childcare for some of us in the linksUK team, which was further hightlighted in the latest Daycare Trust report ‘Childcare Costs in 2009′, about the above rate of inflation increase in full time nursery care costs. A contributing factor to why so many people turn to informal paid work. The typical cost of a full-time nursery place for a child under two in inner London is £226 a week, that’s over £11,000 a year; a rise of nearly 5 per cent on last year. And yet the current average award through the childcare element of the Working Tax Credit is £65 a week! Not a great incentive for parents having to return to work, or facing losing their benefits. Many see little other choice but to top up their income by informal paid work to help pay for the childcare.
Finally of note was The Guardian’s Tax Gap series - which complements our own informal economy work. It focused on the other end of the informal economy spectrum of tax avoidance and evasion. There is a lot there – blogs, videos, surveys, letters and articles. I enjoyed finally getting a figure of the official estimated tax gap between the £40bn corporation tax collected by HM Revenue & Customs in 2005 and “the theoretical tax liability if all taxpayers complied with the letter and the spirit of the law was somewhere between £3.7bn and £13.7bn”. We’ve been trying to get a figure out of HMRC for years, but have only ever been met with tight lips.
And so … to next week… well it’s looking to be just as packed.
