Report providing an overview of the conditionality-based welfare systems in the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden and Norway and comparing these with the UK system to see if they hold any lessons for the welfare system in the UK.
Survey assessing what progress has been made in alleviating social problems in the areas of welfare, employment, education, health, crime and community.
Britain’s Poorest Children Revisited focuses on the experience of severe and persistent child poverty in the UK during the period 1994- 2002. The report begins by examining trends in childhood experience of severe and non-severe poverty between 1994 and 2002, with particular reference to changes after 1997, when new policies were introduced to address the problem of child poverty in the UK.
This report examines the extent to which work can contribute to the eradication of child poverty, and identifies a number of issues that necessarily arise if work is seen as the best route out of poverty. The government has repeatedly stated that work is the best route out of poverty. This implies that work is not the only route, but is the preferred or main route in tackling child poverty. This report examines the extent to which there is underemployment among parents and a desire to work among parents who are not currently working.
Ethnic minority women are amongst the poorest and most socially excluded people in the UK. Yet very little is known about their lives, or how to lift them out of poverty. The report outlines 7 key policy traps and the steps needed to get things right. It looks at household dynamics, moving beyond paid employment as a panacea for poverty, and how women’s lives change over their lifetimes. It shows how ethnic minority women need to be brought back into the policy picture if their poverty is to ever be addressed.
The Child Poverty Bill was introduced to the House of Commons on 11th June 2009 as Bill 112 Session 2008-09. "The Bill would provide a statutory basis to the commitment made by the Government in 1999 to eradicate child poverty by 2020." It "places a duty on the Secretary of State to meet four United Kingdom-wide income poverty targets by the end of the financial year 2020".
People who have a range of needs including homelessness and mental health and substance use problems, and are involved with the criminal justice system, often live at the margins of our society. This research aimed to examine this group’s abilities to access financial services, their financial management skills and the interplay between key life events, mental health and offending.
Household incomes are dynamic and families can move in and out of poverty over time, with some of them becoming trapped in a cycle. What causes this kind of ‘recurrent’ poverty and how does it relate to unemployment and low pay? How could these cycles be broken? This report summarises the findings of four projects about recurrent poverty and the low-pay/no-pay cycle and examines relevant current UK policy and practice and suggests ways to create longer-lasting routes out of poverty.
Paper reporting on the proceedings of a conference on the impact ten years of devolution has had on the problems of poverty and inequality in Scotland. The report records the views of the main speakers and contains the recommendations coming out of the conference.
This research studied Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Ghanaian and white English working-age people living with long-term ill health. It found that the effect of long-term ill health in reducing chances of employment was similar across ethnic groups. Individuals with long-term conditions required substantial flexibility in employment, due to pain, fatigue, unpredictable symptoms and health appointments; this could conflict with employers' needs for reliability.