Four year funding agreement secured to take forward 'A Minimum Income Standard for the UK' research (January 2010)

CRSP has recently received the excellent news that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Trustees have 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 more recent research in Northern Ireland (which found that the standard is similar enough across the UK to justify referring to a ‘UK MIS’).

The funding secures two key aspects of our work over the next four years:

• Updating MIS on a regular cycle. We will at least uprate with inflation every year. Every two years, starting in 2010, we will also review whether there is a good case for adding, subtracting or changing selected items in the budgets behind the standards. Our first review will test whether different attitudes in changed economic times create a case for this. 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. At present for example we are working closely with people involved in campaigning for and implementing the Living Wage to explore how MIS can inform arguments about the required wage level.

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.

We look forward to developing and disseminating this worthwhile project.

The MIS Team
Donald Hirsch, Noel Smith, Abigail Davis, Nicola Selby and Sharon Walker