🚨New polling shows that 72% of people that voted Labour in last month's General Election support the new Government moving the country to a shorter working week. 59% of those that voted for Reform UK also support. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

Rumblings over the weekend suggest Labour is considering significant welfare reform. At NEF, we've been making the case for shifting the focus from enforcing compliance through conditionality to fostering genuine engagement through relational support neweconomics.org/2024/07/terms-…

Good. Extending the Household Support Fund is absolutely the right thing to do. But we need to work towards a proper plan to address hardship, with a social security system that does what it is meant to do - helping people to afford the essentials.

Could an approach based on voluntary engagement with employment support lead to positive change for people with health problems? Really important work from Tom Pollard NEF and thought-provoking responses in the comments. Decades of harm and broken trust will be hard to undo...

Just re-sharing this in case anyone interested missed it earlier in the week & has some Friday time for a read...

Important piece by Philip Collins - it's vital that this Labour government finds ways to shift the balance of taxation from income to wealth, both to increase tax revenue & to address the social fractures that huge & growing wealth inequality is causing prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/economic…

Hope there's truth in this rumour that Labour are considering removing landlords' exemption from national insurance Working tenants pay NI on their earned income so why should landlords enjoy an NI exemption on the passive income they draw from tenants? telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/…

Really important piece by Chaminda Jayanetti - both the two-child limit & the benefit cap break the connection between level of need & level of support by prioritising politically motivated ceilings on payments. Both need scrapping if we want to have a fair & effective safety net

Record high rates of economic inactivity due to disability & health have led to calls for increased requirements to seek work But my new NEF paper argues that DWP could do much more to engage people with support on a voluntary basis, with better results neweconomics.org/2024/08/better…

"if upratings only follow prices, this simply perpetuates the inadequate levels of income, relative to living costs, that so many claimants now face" Important Donald Hirsch piece for abrdn Financial Fairness Trust on the need for the new Labour government to address the inadequacy of benefits

Many will be well aware of the inadequacy of our social security safety net. It’s broken. For a single person person it doesn’t even cover basic food and energy costs. But how do we reverse this decline? New abrdn Financial Fairness Trust report by Donald Hirsch financialfairness.org.uk/en-gb/what-we-…