Poverty prism
Posted: October 22, 2014 Filed under: Poverty Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing.
Who said this? ‘What is currently happening in the housing market epitomises our concerns about Britain becoming a permanently divided nation.’
This is not a quote from a housing pressure group or a think-tank or even an article in Inside Housing. Instead it is the verdict in a report published on Monday by an official government body: the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
The advance headlines ahead of its annual State of the Nation report were about the ‘under-30s being priced out of the UK’ and much of the coverage after that went to the commission’s criticism of Labour’s plans on the minimum wage and its proposal to ban unpaid internships. However, read as a whole the report gives a fresh perspective on problems that are all too familiar to anyone in housing.
Mind the gaps
Posted: August 18, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Poverty, Welfare reform | Tags: David Cameron 2 CommentsSpot the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the speech by David Cameron about family-friendly policies.
The prime minister spoke on Monday about how he will put families at the centre of new domestic policy-making. He asked three questions on this, none of which are directly housing issues but all of which touch on housing: How can we help families come together? How can we help families stay together? And how can we help troubled families and those children who don’t even have families?
Cameron also promised to introduce a family test as part of the impact assessment of all domestic government policies. That has to be good news even if the government has a track record of ignoring inconvenient evidence from impact assessments. However, it also prompts the obvious question of how existing government policies would fare under the test.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Benefits Street, The Spongers and welfare reality
Posted: February 9, 2014 Filed under: Poverty, Television, Welfare state | Tags: Benefits Street, The Spongers 6 CommentsThis week’s final episode of Benefits Street made me go back and rewatch another programme with a provocative title about life on social security.
I was 17 when The Spongers was first transmitted in January 1978 and I still remember it as the single most stunning and harrowing piece of television I have ever seen. The 90-minute programme was a Play for Today – the famous series of one-off dramas that ran on the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s – and tells the story of Pauline, a single mother from a council estate near Manchester. It opens with the bailiffs arriving to seize her furniture because she is in rent arrears and upsetting her eldest daughter, Paula, who has Down’s Syndrome. That’s swiftly followed by a scene outside where workers are erecting giant heads of the Queen and Prince Philip ready for the Silver Jubilee celebrations. Cue the opening titles. You can watch it here:
Going hungry
Posted: May 30, 2013 Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty Leave a commentIt’s shocking but sadly not surprising to see the impact of changes to benefits on the soaring number of people relying on food banks.
Shocking because this is happening only two months in to cuts such as the bedroom tax and four weeks into the start of the benefit cap in four London boroughs, not surprising because the pressure has been building for months. This is the start of the ‘decade of destitution’ that Julia Unwin of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has been warning about.
Church Action on Poverty and Oxfam, the two organisations behind the Walking the Breadline report, are calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the relationship between benefit delays and the rising numbers.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Red flags
Posted: October 30, 2012 Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Welfare reform Leave a commentAs the slow motion train crash of welfare reform continues, the driver is ignoring a succession of people desperately waving as he passes them.
Heedless of the big red flags they are holding, Iain Duncan Smith and his conductor Lord Freud sometimes even wave back and blow the whistle of their sleekly designed train in acknowledgement of what they see as the congratulations of the crowd.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
More trouble with troubled families
Posted: July 18, 2012 Filed under: Poverty 12 CommentsJohn Humphrys succeeded in the impossible this morning and left me feeling more generous towards the Troubled Families Programme – until I remembered all the problems with it.
Last month I blogged about the way that the government’s flagship programme was born out of a dodgy statistic and even dodgier assumptions about ‘problem families’. Today Louise Casey, head of troubled families policy at the DCLG, published a report comprising interviews with 16 families about the problems they face. They are powerful stories of abuse, care, problems at school, problems with drugs and alcohol, risks of eviction and more that illustrate the scale of the challenge and also the value of the work done by family intervention projects.
The trouble with troubled families
Posted: June 10, 2012 Filed under: Poverty 2 CommentsBehind the launch of the troubled families programme by Eric Pickles lies a sorry story of the systematic abuse and distortion of research evidence with an added bit of John Wayne.
Billed as part of ‘counter-attack Sunday’ by the Conservative Home website, the launch was trailed by Pickles in an interview in the Independent. The main point will be to end the ‘it’s not my fault culture’ that has allegedly enabled 120,000 troubled families to avoid taking responsibility for their own lives. Pickles said he would be ‘a little less understanding’ to families ‘fluent in social work’ who are responsible for ‘chaos that costs the country £9 billion every year’.
Jules Birch 