Forget emotional arguments against the 'bedroom tax' - it's not even clear how much money it saves, writes Claudia Wood.
There has been growing discussion in the past few weeks of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ – the exclusion of unoccupied bedrooms from housing benefit paid to social housing tenants. As unpopular and controversial government policies go, it has all the right ingredients. It affects families that garner popular sympathy: foster parents, military families, and people caring for their disabled or terminally ill husbands and wives. No sniff of the undeserving poor here. What’...
Duncan O'Leary on how football ownership could be at the vanguard of 'good business'.
Rarely have I been to an event attended by so many MPs as the Supporters Direct meeting in Westminster yesterday. And rarely have those MPs agreed so much with one another, across party lines. The event was to mark the launch of two reports, both of which argue for fans to be given a proper stake in the running of football clubs. It was impossible to leave the event without the impression that English football is currently a poorly run game. Damian Collins MP spoke lucidly about his Football...
Celebrating Britain's diversity must extend to a loosening of the adoption rules on race writes Toby Bakare
The Department of Education's plan to reform adoption ask questions about how much priority Britons should give to race. This is why they are controversial, but also hugely significant as well. Under plans put forward in today’s Children’s and Families Bill racial or cultural factors would not be used as primary factors when matching a child to prospective parents. A recent report has sought to answer conclusively whether inter-racial adoption can be harmful. The study follow...
Andrew Freeman, Director of Demos Finance, on the dangers of new financial wiring.
George Osborne’s speech on banking reform sets out the idea that the proposed ring fence around retail banking will be 'electrified'. The purpose of electrification is to discourage banks from doing what might otherwise come naturally – a gradual erosion of the enforced separation of their retail and investment banking operations. Flouting of the rules will lead not to a regulatory slap on the wrist, but to full break up. It sounds like a good en...
Jamie Bartlett finds a novel way to take the pulse of Lancaster's Question Time audience.
At the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, I study how open source intelligence can help understand society. New data from social media in particular can provide useful real-time insight into public attitudes toward events as they happen. But there is another source I’ve been overlooking all along: Question Time. As everyone knows, this weekly programme asks a panel about the topical issues of the day; and applause is dispensed by means of approval. So can we gauge public opinion ...
A policy focused on drugs and alcohol neglects the majority in poverty, writes Claudia Wood.
Today Iain Duncan Smith gave a speech calling for a more multi-dimensional measure of poverty, reflecting on the fact that the fall in child poverty this year has mainly been down to the fact that the country's median income has fallen. This, he said, demonstrated the fatal weakness in relative poverty measures – they do not assess a person's material situation, rather, their income compared to everyone else. To say someone is in poverty because they receive less than 60 per cen...
Max Wind-Cowie has a confession to make.
I have a confession to make. I have been the subject of several 'penalty notices'. In Hammersmith and Fulham, in Basildon, in Southwark. I keep the little slips of judgmental paper in a draw at home, like a scrap book of my criminality. My offence? Dropping cigarette butts on the ground. I am a victim of the vociferous litter-policing that has, according to the Daily Mail, raised local authorities, and the companies they subcontract to, millions over the last year. But I&#...
Claudia Wood argues we musn't lose sight of the potential benefits of prepaid to the financially excluded.
Today we have launched the Power of Prepaid – looking at the phenomenon of prepaid cards, which are rapidly spreading across local authorities to facilitate the payment of personal budgets. As my comment in the Guardian explains, these cards can work well in distributing direct payments in social care, due to the fact they can be monitored online, removing the huge amount of paperwork required to audit care users’ spending – a statutory duty which has hitherto involved ...
Jamie Bartlett on how we achieve integration on the internet.
On multiculturalism, both the Labour and Conservative parties are edging towards a similar position: we welcome and want people to celebrate their own cultures, background, religions, but not at the cost of weakening a common British identity. We need to integrate, together. What about the internet? We spend a lot of time there of course (on average 4 hours a day), and it is where we get a lot of our information about other religions and people. It is increasingly where movements and identit...
Max Wind-Cowie on Baroness Warsi's speech on Islamophobia.
Sayeeda Warsi is not a woman known for pulling her punches. And, in giving her a new role at DCLG – with responsibility for faith and religious communities – the Prime Minister presumably hoped that she would channel her passion into fighting for groups with whom conservatives have much in common but often little in the way of mutual trust. So did I – in fact, I wanted him to go one step further and make her the Chair of the EHRC. But today, in a speech about Islamoph...