Ongoing funding for MIS until 2014

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have kindly agreed to fund research on A Minimum Income Standard for the UK for the next four years. This follows on from our work on a Minimum Income Standard for Britain and subsequent research in Northern Ireland (which found that the standard is similar enough across the UK to justify referring to a ‘UK MIS’).

The funding covers two key aspects of the MIS work:

• Updating MIS on a regular cycle. We at least uprate with inflation every year. Every two years, starting in 2010, we also review whether there is a good case for adding, subtracting or changing selected items in the budgets behind the standards. Our first review was published in July 2010. Every four years, starting in 2012, we will repeat the original research to ‘rebase’ the standard for some of the household types covered. The 2012 rebase will cover families with children, and we would plan to rebase all other household types covered in 2016.

• Disseminating MIS results and working through their implications with stakeholders, decision-makers and influencers. We are finding a wide range of applications for the standard, including calculations of the Living Wage, commentary on tax policy and estimates of the "carbon footprint" of MIS.

Our funding also contains an additional element that will allow us to analyse in more detail than we have done so far the rationales that members of the public use in specifying minimum needs, and how if at all they are changing. After our 2012 study, we will be producing a report on this qualitative evidence gathered from the research we have done so far.