The Labour party is pointing to the fact that the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats are proposing cuts to child tax credit for middle- to high-income families with children. But just what cuts are being proposed and which families would be affected? And how different is this from current policy?
This paper makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of higher education participation amongst individuals from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
All the main UK political parties claim to have put the needs of families at the heart of their campaigns. The Conservative Party has also pledged to end the couple penalty for all couples in the tax credit system. How does the reality - as measured by specific pledges in their manifestos - match up to the rhetoric?
This Election Briefing Note, drawing in part on past notes in this series, analyses the manifesto proposals of the three main political parties in the area of families with children.
The Liberal Democrats have, once again, claimed that the poor pay more of their income in tax than the rich, and that this gap has got larger under Labour. But, by ignoring the fact that the poor get most of this income from the state in benefit and tax credit payments, and by overstating the extent to which indirect taxes are paid by the poor, this comparison is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
In this Briefing Note, we assess the changes to living standards that have occurred under the first 11 years of the Labour government and compare these changes with what happened under previous governments.
This election briefing note finds strong evidence of an increase in the rate of severe poverty since 2004-05, mirroring a rise in the official poverty rate, although the rate of persistent poverty does seem to have fallen under Labour, at least until 2007.
This report examines the extent to which the aspirations, attitudes and behaviour of parents and children can help explain why poor children typically do worse at school than children from richer backgrounds. It is based on the analysis of a number of large-scale longitudinal data sources capturing groups of children in the UK from early childhood through to late adolescence.
This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, which is tracking almost 19,000 babies born in 2000 and 2001 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This report documents the dynamic patterns in work and poverty for families using data for the years 2001 to 2006 from the Families and Children Study.
This note compares three policies that have been recently suggested which would change the way that families with children are treated by the tax and benefit system.
