Single parent homes to soar – or not?

‘Single parent homes expected to soar’ says the headline in today’s Western Mail, prompting responses from the Centre for Social Justice, the Church in Wales and others about the breakdown of families, the need to support marriage and concern about the effect of separation on children.  All very…

Is it useful to think of the UK economy as a single entity?

The international monetary fund (IMF) has concluded that the UK economy is now ‘on the mend’, but will proceed at a moderate pace as public sector cuts offset the gains of increased household consumption and boosted export demand. However it also concluded that there remain sizable risks such…

Balancing the books

We all know that balancing the household budget is never easy.  Before the recession, a financial problem meant cramming in the overtime or borrowing on the credit card. In today’s economy, however, many people are taking the tough decisions needed to deal with their debt hangover. In many ways,…

Young children bear poverty brunt

New figures on child poverty reveal the shocking extent of children living in low income households in Wales.  The figures, made available to us by HMRC and published on our website, give for the first time a breakdown of child poverty in different local authorities and by the…

Equality – made in Merthyr

The film ‘Made in Dagenham’, which charts the fight for equal pay of women machinists at Ford, was filmed at the former Hoover factory in Merthyr Tydfil. But the Hoover plant had an equality struggle of its own, in the early 1980s, when the then union agreed with…

The role of the councillor, AM and MP

It was interesting to hear David Davies MP at the scrutiny conference on Monday speak of the problems members of parliament serving on select committees have in developing the required expertise for effectively scrutinising the executive as a member of a select committee when they also have constituency responsibilities…

It ain’t what you say….

Not long after the first showing by Sky of A Town Like Merthyr I was filming in the Gurnos with my colleague Nicola Ebdon. We were shooting for a short film for European Year of Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion. Within a short time a small crowd had…

Scrutinising Scrutiny

Today the Bevan Foundation teams up with the National Assembly Commission, Welsh Local Government Commission, the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action and my company, Positif Politics, to stage a one-day conference on scrutinising political scrutiny.

Don’t switch off. This isn’t a dull topic – promise. We have gathered a range…

Five myths about worklessness

1.The number of people on benefits has soared It hasn’t. The number of people on benefits has actually decreased over the last ten years, from 370,000 in 1999 to a low of 310,000 in 2008 before rising to 340,000 today. 2. People don’t want to work About 230,000 people in Wales…

Worklessness: the untold story

The latest statistics on workless households in Wales have prompted the usual headlines about the ‘benefit culture’, ‘shameless generations’ of the workless, and the workshy.  But there’s another story behind the statistics that these headlines don’t cover.

It is indeed the case that more than one in five…