A Minimum Income Standard for Britain

Background

Current debates about reducing or ending poverty in Britain suffer from the absence of a socially agreed, empirically based minimum income standard. This research brings together the expertise of the Family Budget Unit (FBU) and SPRU, with the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP) and BMG Research in order to develop such a standard which will answer the question:

‘What level of income is needed to allow an acceptable standard of living in Britain?'

Aims

The aim of the research is to develop a minimum income standard blending the best elements of the two main methodologies that have been used to develop budget standards in Britain in recent years. Such a standard will specify an income sufficient to reach a basic standard of living: a standard that social policy should aspire for everyone to meet. The standard will be rooted in social consensus about the goods and services that everyone in modern Britain should be able to afford, while at the same time drawing on expert knowledge about basic living requirements and actual expenditure patterns.

Policy and practice relevance

The research will establish a minimum income standard for each type of family. These can then be used as benchmarks for benefits, tax credits, foster care allowances, affordability of housing, minimum/”living” wages, income-based charges and penalties, and many other purposes. It will also be possible to test the validity of existing equivalence scales – implied in benefits and used in research on income poverty.

The findings will have direct policy relevance by contributing to debates and discussions about poverty in Britain and, hence, informing the development of policy designed to combat it.

Research design, methods and analysis

The research will combine the consensual budget standards method pioneered at CRSP with the FBU/SPRU expert or ‘normative' approach, thus ensuring that the minimum income standards are rooted in the views of ordinary people but tested by expert opinion. The research design encompasses seven stages of discussion, consultation, calculation, verification and testing to derive the budget standards. Focus groups will draw up and reach a consensus about the content of the budgets. Their deliberations will be monitored, informed and advised by the technical and scientific knowledge of expert professionals, in an iterative process.

The project includes an extensive analysis of behavioural data using the Expenditure and Food Survey which will help to set the budgets derived in the context of how families prioritise resources in real life. The project will also draw on previous work to derive a model to establish what initial income is required to enable expenditure at the level of the budgets to be achieved. Further, it will produce a basis for uprating and rebasing the budgets over time.

The proposers

Sue Middleton, Karen Kellard and colleagues have developed and refined the Consensual Budget Standards methodology in CRSP over the last ten years. Jonathan Bradshaw re-pioneered the use of budget standards in the UK and is currently (Hon) Director of the Family Budget Unit.

Expected outputs

The expected outputs from the research are minimum income standards for different family types in the United Kingdom. They will be in a format that makes it easy to calculate the budget of each family unit according to composition, as well as the initial income needed under the current tax and benefit system for a household to achieve the minimum. A final report for the project will present budget standards for the current year, and discuss an approach to uprating and rebasing them in the future. The project will also open up possibilities for future work that builds on a baseline of minimum income standards to specify budgets for groups with particular additional needs.

Output

The central output will be a short accessible report and summary of findings. However, we are certain that the results of this project will be of great interest to the policy community, the research community and the general public. We therefore anticipate a wide range of opportunities for dissemination, including articles, interviews, events and briefings for government departments and others. This website will contain downloadable working papers explaining the methodology, spread sheets and the grossing model, allowing users to adapt variable costs items.

Further details

This project, which is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, commenced in May 2006 and will be launched in July 2008.

Proposal

Download a copy of the proposal:

A Minimum Income Standard For Britain (105 kb)

A Minimum Income Standard For Britain (192 kb)

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