l'Art Social

In his 1942 report 'Social Insurance and allied services' Beveridge set out a plan for a system of social security which would be free of the stigma associated with earlier forms of public assistance. Seventy years later, it would be hard to argue that benefit stigma has disappeared. On the contrary.

A spokesman for Iain Duncan Smith has accused Sarah Teather, the LibDem MP for Brent Central, of being 'hugely misinformed' about the government's benefit cap policy, which she criticised in an interview in today's Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/17/benefit-cap-immoral-sarah-... . The spokesman goes on to say: 'It's not fair or right that benefits claimants receive higher incomes than hard-working families who are striving to get on in life.'

Sue Marsh asked about a pie chart showing how 'welfare' spending breaks down between different categories. I've seen various attempts to illustrate this, but as there is no consistent definition of 'welfare', I decided to start from scratch and pull the data together myself. The PDF shows the results.

[A very quick look at today's statistical release]

You know what it's like. You're sitting there quietly minding you own business when two men of a certain age start holding forth about something they obviously know nothing about. You try to ignore it: it's none of your business. But the voices get louder and louder as they become more passionate in their uninformed conviction. The first lines of 'Oliver's Army' are repeating themselves in your head:

'Don't start me talking/I could talk all night/ My mind goes sleepwalking/While I'm putting the world to right'.

Large families, MPs and Hume’s test

I assume that when people talk about 'predistribution' they mean the distribution of what ONS refer to as 'original income', which for people of working age is basically income from earnings and investment, before taxes, National Insurance contributions, government income transfers and benefits in kind. Targeting 'predistribution' as advocated by Labour leader Ed Miliband would therefore, presumably, involve trying to shift the distribution of original income.

So how has the distribution of original income developed over recent decades?

New legislation announced by George Osborne at the Conservative party conference today will introduce a new type of employment contract under which existing employment protection will be dropped in favour of employee shares in the firm, exempted from capital gains tax. In his speech the Chancellor said: 'Workers: replace your old rights of unfair dismissal and redundancy with new rights of ownership.And what will the Government do? We’ll charge no capital gains tax at all on the profit you make on your shares. Zero percent capital gains tax for these new employee-owners.

Listening to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l0kcc last night (on the government’s ‘troubled families’ initiative) brought home to me a paradoxical feature of contemporary public debate. Policy issues of all kinds are routinely framed in terms of statistics, often selected and publicised by the government or other interested parties.

A lot of people seem to have liked the cone chart on intergenerationally workless households with children I published earlier http://lartsocial.org/cone2 , but I've noticed a problem with it. The volumes in the chart aren't proportional to the variable being displayed, which is the number/percentage of households falling into the various categories. For example, about half of households with kids have all adults in employment. This is the category at the bottom of the chart.