l'Art Social

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“Our recent *Housing Poverty* report concluded that Britain’s social housing estates, once stepping stones of opportunity, are now ghettos for our poorest people. Life expectancy on some estates, where often three generations of the same family have never worked, is lower than the Gaza Strip” – Iain Duncan Smith MP (2009)

Left-click to enlarge image.

“Our recent *Housing Poverty* report concluded that Britain’s social housing estates, once stepping stones of opportunity, are now ghettos for our poorest people. Life expectancy on some estates, where often three generations of the same family have never worked, is lower than the Gaza Strip” – Iain Duncan Smith MP (2009)

Chris Dillow http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2012/06/c... criticises Mervyn King for over-optimism in reaction to the latest wave of banking scandals. King suggests ‘a real change in the culture of the [banking] industry’ as the way to avoid this sort of thing in future.

The Prime Minister gave a speech on welfare today http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/welfare-speech/ in which he gives various examples of the 'mess of perverse incentives, mind-numbing complexity and real unfairness' bequeathed to the coalition by the previous government. I'm interested in this one:

There seems to be some confusion about the overlap between poverty and employment in the wake of last week's Household Below Average Income statistics.

The failure to meet the 2010 child poverty target is one of the less surprising of our recent disappointments, but we should still be asking what explains that failure, which in turn requires asking what counts as an explanation in this area. The attached PDF is a hasty response to what seems to be a developing orthodoxy, that the labour market route to child poverty reduction has been either neglected or ineffective in the UK.

Listeners to the Today programme http://audioboo.fm/boos/841285-eric-pickles-outlines-problem-family-plan... this morning will have heard a clearly disgruntled Eric Pickles trying to bat away questions about the evidence base for the government’s ‘Troubled Families’ initiative. How has a modest (£450m) scheme to encourage joined-up intervention to address problems of anti-social behaviour and truanting come to be mired in statistical controversy?

PDF of presentation by Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney on TUC-commissioned report 'Making a contribution: social security for the future' (http://www.tuc.org.uk/social/tuc-20994-f0.cfm?themeaa=touchstone&theme=t...)

DRAFT

‘Is this even a word?’ asked the copy-editor for a report I was working on in 2002. She had a point. The word was ‘worklessness’, and despite years of experience in editing, she’d never seen it before. Up to a few years earlier I had probably never used the word myself, but at this stage I was so immersed in the world of labour market and poverty analysis that its oddness had ceased to register.

[Description: An unpublished article from 2010 dusted off in the light of today's coverage of housing benefit cuts in London (word document attached at foot of this post)]

"To live in Westminster is a privilege, not a right, because so many people want to live here," a Westminster council press officer explains in the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/housing-benefit-cap-famili...