The Chairman of the National Equality Panel (NEP), Professor John Hills, has been briefed by ISER researchers.
A 16-strong ISER team gave a series of presentations to John Hills and his secretariat on current and future research including pay gaps, child poverty, disability, taxes and benefits, parenting and child development.
The NEP plans to make use of ISER research as it puts together “an authoritative analysis of inequality” for the Government. Its report will investigate how people’s life chances are affected by gender, race, disability, age and other important aspects of inequality such as where they were born, what kind of family they were born into, where they live and their wealth. Ultimately it will analyse how equality trends have changed over the last decade and establish where gaps have widened or narrowed in society.
John Hills, who is Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE), said:
“This very impressive and well-pitched seminar alerted us to a huge volume of relevant material which is going to be very useful for the panel’s work. It has provoked a lot of thoughts about how it can all fit together
ISER Director, Stephen Jenkins, who is also one of the nine academics on the Panel, added: “This was an excellent opportunity for ISER to showcase its research to this influential Panel.We hope to make an important contribution to its findings and ultimately to the way the Government tackles inequality in the future.”
Who’s getting the benefit?
Income Support and income-related JobseekersAllowance are the safety net benefits providing a minimum income to people (below pension age) who have no job and who do not have a working partner either. The number of people receiving these benefits has been declining over the past 15 years. In research commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ISER’s Director Stephen Jenkins and Lorenzo Cappellari have looked at the trends in detail to find out exactly what has been happening. Rather than study the numbers of claims in payment at any one time, they have used the British Household Panel Survey to look at the flows – the number of people starting a period on benefit, and the number completing a spell.
Part of the reduction in the number of claims can be explained by a downward trend in the number of people more at risk of being out of work, such as those without educational qualifications.
But this has been offset by an increase in the size of other groups at risk, such as individuals with health problems.
The slow but steady reduction on the unemployment rate since 1993 has had a predictable effect on the number of IS and JSA claims – reducing the number of initial claims, and reducing the duration of spells. It can be assumed that if unemployment rises following the recent financial crisis, the number of new IS and JSA claims will rise too.
But the state of the overall economy only partly explains the pattern of claims over recent years. The analysis showed a sharp downturn in the number of entries into the social assistance system, which could not be attributed either to personal characteristics, or to the health of the labour market. This change in the trend occurred around 1998. This might be attributed in general terms to the Labour government’s emphasis on welfare to work policies, especially for one parent families. But the analysis cannot be used to attribute the reduction in income support claims to any particular programme.
Although the number of people starting to claim Income Support and JSA fell, the rate at which they left the system slowed down too. So a smaller number of families are spending longer periods claiming these safety net benefits. There are signs that relatively disadvantaged people are increasingly concentrated on means-tested benefits. For example the fraction of claimants with health problems rose from 53% to 76% between 1991 and 2005; while the fraction renting their homes rose from 59% to 77%. These are slow but potentially worrying trends: if continued, the safety net scheme will focus increasingly on a small minority of people confined to long-term poverty.