Publications
Recent publications
Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2007
NPI's tenth annual report assessing the state of progress on poverty and social exclusion across the UK is published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 3 December. With the latest official figures on UK poverty showing a rise for the first time in a decade, this report reviews its usual wide range of evidence in order to reach an overall conclusion on where the strategy to end child poverty now stands. Looking to the future, the report tries to assess whether all that is needed is more of the same - or whether instead the time has now come for a fundamental rethink.
This is the third major report on poverty and social exclusion written by NPI and published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this year. In July, we produced an update of the Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Wales 2005. The 2005 report was read as containing a rather optimistic message: Wales, which had been worse than the UK as a whole had now improved to the point where it was almost average. The 2007 update, by contrast, signalled a darker tone, with the period of steady progress clearly having come to an end.
In April, we produced a special report looking at poverty rates across the UK for different ethnic groups. The particular question of of interest was how far the differences in poverty rates by ethnicity could be accounted for by differences in the composition of different groups. (For example, poverty rates among lone parent households is much higher than average - so an ethnic group with an above average proportion of lone parent households would, all else equal, be expected to have a higher overall poverty rate). The conclusion reached was that about half the difference in the excess poverty rates for ethnic minority groups compared with White British could be accounted for by these compositional effects - but only half. Excess poverty rates for in-work poverty are especially marked.
All these reports can be accessed from our poverty publications page.
Introduce a local income tax? But we've already got one
Commentator Simon Jenkins, long an expert on all things to do with local democracy and local government, recently signalled his support for the introduction of a local income tax. In a longer version of a Guardian Comment is Free piece, Peter Kenway explains why such a position is wrong.
Why Council Tax Benefit matters - and what could be done about it
Council Tax Benefit – which corresponds to the part of council tax that households do not have to pay if their income is low enough – is the only part of the whole council tax system where there is still a chance of reform in the foreseeable future.
With five million recipients and an estimated further two and half million ‘entitled non-recipients’, CTB determines the council tax liability of around a third of all households in England. More important still, CTB has the effect of transforming the council tax system into a hybrid property and local income tax.
This report has been written for the Local Government Association to help it and its members form a view about what could be done about CTB – and why it matters so much to the acceptability of council tax overall.
Means testing for legal aid in the Magistrates' Court
With effect from October 2006, a defendant’s right to receive legal aid for cases before a Magistrates’ Court became subject once again to means-testing, this requirement having been abolished in 1999.
In justifying this re-introduction, ministers stressed that it was designed to ensure that those able to afford the cost of their own representation should not benefit from legal aid. The spectral figures of a convicted murderer and a professional footballer accused of spitting, both of whom had received legal aid, hovered over the debate. Yet our analysis of the new rules paints a very different picture of who, from now on, will have to pay for their own defence: far from being just the rich, the list now stretches all the way to lone parents working full time on the minimum wage. The question we ask is whether this is what parliament really intended.