Working age benefits

This note provides details on the average losses among pensioner households from tax and benefit reforms that will be introduced between January 2011 and April 2014.

This Briefing Note analyses Universal Credit as set out in the government's White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works.

Immediately following the Spending Review of 20th October, the IFS updated its analysis of the distributional impact of tax and benefit reforms to be introduced between 2010-11 and 2014-15, taking into account the effects of the reforms announced in the Spending Review.2 This did not substantially alter the conclusions from previous analysis by IFS researchers that the impact of the tax and benefit reforms to be introduced over this period was decreasing as a proportion of income within the lowest 90% of households in the income distribution, although it is the very richest households that will lose the most overall. If we were instead to rank households by expenditure, which as we have argued previously might better reflect households' lifetime incomes, losses as a proportion of expenditure again fall as we move up the expenditure distribution

IFS analysis shows that the coalition Government's tax increases and welfare cuts are hitting Londoners harder, on average, than households across the UK as a whole.

We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of moving to a more integrated benefit and tax system, and then discuss issues relating to strengthening work incentives.