good morning. This week’s comprehensive spending review sets the government’s trajectory and direction to many of the other Congresses. One of the challenges facing labor, some thoughts about child poverty, and some thoughts about how it shows their wider difficulties.
Means for the purpose
Public Policy Research and Changing Reality Institute is a collaboration between parents on low income, social researchers and charities, and has produced a new report on how to obtain poverty strategies for working children. It insists on removing the benefits cap (which limits total social security eligibility) and the two-piece chilling restriction policy.
The two-person benefit limit is a popular policy. Last summer’s YouGov poll found the majority of support among all groups except the ages of 18-24.
As long as possible, as our readers know, I like to use Ipsos polls, which is the oldest existing poll in the UK and I like the longest possible dataset. They also found something similar last summer.
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But the problem is, if you have a commitment to reducing child poverty in the UK, abolishing the limits is really very high on the list of things you can do. (I am grateful to Harvey Nriapia for the charts. FT website readers can float above the circle to see the exact amount).
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Given the voluntary restraint of the labour government’s tax hike, ending the limit costs a lot of money. However, there are no other cheaper measurements that have something like the same effect. (One of the cheap measures recently announced was the universal credit for expanding free school lunches for all children in the UK. The policy is set to cost around £1 billion over three years between 2026 and 2028.)
The fact that abolishing the benefits restrictions for two people is unpopular adds to the point. Workers have committed to curbing child poverty. Kiel Starmer reiterated the importance of that.
Over many of the government’s agenda, it remains “Can we have an end without means?” Today’s FT Leader is a great example. Part of the government’s growth agenda involves shaking the London stock market. Again, there are policies that are useful for similar costs (£3 billion). The government can terminate or reduce the stamp duty tax of 0.5% on the purchase of shares in British companies.
There is no poll of this policy, but I am very surprised to see whether “cutting taxes to buy stocks” is popular and what I’ve learned from hearing and learning about traveling around a country that covers politics for the past 12 years. But ultimately, labor has a purpose – promoted growth – that is the goal of cost. Individual measures such as the restrictions on two people and the abandonment of tax reform are decisions that fall into the budget. But Sadiq Khan’s team at City Hall fears London will not secure additional infrastructure spending and the mayor of the capital will also be denied the further ability to raise revenues via tourism tax. (Tristram Hunt wrote a good piece on such tax cases.)
Another link feature, in my opinion, is to end the two-person restrictions and tax reform savings over the long term. Lifting children out of poverty is cheaper than growing in poverty. If you have a higher tax on stock purchases than peers, it will be higher in the long run than it will be raised.
However, a repetitive feature of government over the first years of its life was the tendency to end, but it didn’t want to bear the political costs of the instruments it accepted. As a comprehensive spending review is not a budget, there is no policy detail at the same level as seen in fiscal events, but it gives us whether it is changing or whether labor is planning to take their second and third years in a similar way to the beginning.
Try this now
I saw Phoenician plans at the cinema. I was very nervous about this because I love everything Wes Anderson has done for so long. This was a great return to form. Here’s Danny Lee’s review.
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