l'Art Social

I've invited housing minister Grant Shapps, via Twitter, to correct an inaccurate statistic which he promoted in several print and broadcast outlets over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Over on the TUC's indispensable Touchstone blog Richard Exell charts household consumption expenditure, using the latest release from ONS which takes us up to the last quarter of 2012 http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/03/stagnation-charts-1/ It's essential to look at household spending as well as income, because the two don't necessarily move together, even over quite extended periods.

Some pictures are worth a thousand words. Not this one: in fact it requires about a thousand words of explanation. But what it shows is quite simple - tenants receiving Local Housing Allowance in London prior to the government's restrictions to the benefit tended, contrary to what has often been asserted, to live in cheaper areas, subject -crucially- to the local availability of rented accommodation. An opener for discussion of the impact of LHA restrictions on London's social geography in succeeding posts.

Not your typical idiotic Daily Mail story: this one was written for them by the Treasury!

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Employment is at its highest levels on record, as ministers like to point out: what they omit to point out is that this particular record has been broken 139 times since 1971, including 74 times under the last government.

This is the opening section of a story in today's Daily Mail.

The story so far:

The government intends to stop uprating most benefits and tax credits with price inflation from next year, meaning that their value will fall in real terms by the difference between inflation and 1%. It is also raising the threshold for income tax from £8,105 to £9,205. This combination of measures will create winners and losers .

The government wants to switch to below-inflation uprating of a number of key working age benefits http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/as2012_policy_decisions.htm . The opposition points out that this change will have a big impact on working families.

This chart is a by-product of some other work I've been doing. It shows the income distribution, broken down into 5% intervals, from 1961 to 2010/11. I don't think it demands a great deal of commentary. Taking the 50 year period as a whole,income growth was greater the higher up the income distribution: but that pattern really only kicks in the mid-1970's, prior to which differences in income growth were less marked and less consistently related to position in the distribution. Note that incomes are in constant prices, so the chart documents real terms change.

In many ways Radio 4's report 'The State of Welfare' http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p0fpg, broadcast on 27 November to mark the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report, showed the BBC at its best. There was something symbolically appropriate about Radio 4 disrupting its morning schedule, a revered national institution in its own right, to devote three whole hours to the social security system that Beveridge founded.