Blog

The ticking debt bomb?

Matthew Whittaker

This blog originally appeared on Public Finance

When the financial crisis first hit, politicians of all parties talked up the notion of ‘rebalancing’ the economy, moving away from a growth model dependent on financial services, house price increases and consumption and towards one based on the real economy and on trade. Five years on and, with little sign of a sustained economic recovery, the chancellor appeared to wind the clock back in his last Budget.

The new Help to Buy scheme is designed to give a shot in the arm to the housing market, making it easier for households who are currently considered too risky by lenders to get onto and move up the housing ladder.

Giselle Cory

Today’s figures from the ONS show that household disposable income continued to fall in 2011. This is part of a longer term trend of stagnation and decline in incomes that began around 2003. As we showed in the Commission on Living Standards, disposable income per head fell in every English region outside London from 2003 to 2008, even while the economy continued to grow. For much of the UK, the squeeze started long before 2008.

Today’s new data show this trend is worsening. Disposable incomes across the UK fell in 2011 much more than in the previous year. Across the UK, the average fall from 2010 to 2011 was 2.4 per cent, compared to a fall of 1.2 per cent in 2010 and growth of 3.1 per cent in 2009.

But again it is the regional breakdown of income growth that is most striking. The chart below shows the change in disposable income per head from 2003 to 2011 in English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Alex Hurrell

Earlier this week the government announced that the minimum wage will rise to £6.31 from October this year. This marks a 1.9 per cent increase on the current rate of £6.19 and means the fourth straight annual fall in the real value of the minimum wage after inflation. The new rate was announced by Vince Cable at a Resolution Foundation event, held with the High Pay Centre and the Institute of Directors, to bring together debates about high pay and low pay. So how exactly does the minimum wage compare to the hourly wages received by those higher up the earnings distribution?

Figure 1 below shows the gross hourly wage at different points in the hourly earnings distribution: the National Minimum Wage from October 2012 and the new rate from October 2013, and at the 50th (the median), 70th, 90th and 99th percentiles. The earnings distribution considered here relates to the gross hourly wage received by full-time employees as recorded in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). This measure excludes overtime but includes any bonus payments or incentive pay received in the reference pay period.

Alex Hurrell

Trends in real wages under the new inflation measures

Last month’s ONS Consumer Price Inflation release for February 2013 included for the first time two new inflation index series, the RPIJ (1997-2012) and the CPIH (2005-2012). These new measures have been introduced in response to concerns with the current RPI and CPI measures respectively.

RPIJ is a modified version of the RPI, based on a slightly different mathematical calculation. It has been developed in response to a recent review of RPI by the National Statistician that concluded that RPI did not meet international standards because of the formula it uses (known as the ‘Carli’) to calculate prices for certain items in the RPI consumption basket. The new RPIJ measure is identical to the RPI in terms of the items it covers but addresses these concerns by using an alternative calculation method where necessary (known as the geometric ‘Jevons’ formula).

James Plunkett

This post originally appeared on James's Huffington Post blog

While low pay and in-work poverty have risen up the economic agenda in recent years, our policy debate has been stuck in a loop. Ask most Labour politicians about low pay and you can expect a well-intentioned but passive mixture of pride in the minimum wage and warm words on the living wage before the topic is changed to the importance of protecting support like working tax credits. Turn to a Conservative and the ingredients generally differ but are no less predictable, giving little more traction on low pay itself: a worrying silence on the minimum wage, a touching faith in general skills policy (and a falling skills budget) to help the lowest paid, before a swift change of topic to the importance of tax cuts.

James Plunkett

This post originally appeared on James's Huffington Post blog

As always, it's the policy pronouncements that attract the attention on Budget day. A cheap pint is much more interesting than the minutiae of OBR figures. But the big story on Wesndesday in terms of its impact on households didn't come from the Chancellor but from Robert Chote, head of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility: big downward revisions to wage forecasts that mean the pay squeeze just got far tighter and longer than previously thought.

The simple figures published by the OBR tell the story. In December - just three months ago - the OBR thought average pay would grow by 2.2 per cent in 2013 while prices would grow slightly faster, with CPI inflation forecast to be 2.5 per cent. On Wednesday both numbers moved in the wrong direction. Earnings growth in 2013 is now forecast at 1.4 per cent while prices are forecast to rise twice as fast as wages, at 2.8 per cent.

Matthew Whittaker

In the run up to today’s Budget, it has been widely reported that the Chancellor is set to announce a further above-inflation increase in the personal tax allowance – the amount that an individual can earn before becoming liable for income tax – meaning that it will reach the £10,000 target that the Government previously set for the end of the Parliament one year early, in April 2014.

The allowance would thus be more than 50 per cent bigger than when the coalition took office, and an estimated two million workers will have been taken out of income tax altogether over the period. But, with wage earners unevenly spread across families, just how much do households stand to gain from this latest move?

Gavin Kelly

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

Before we rush to dissect the government’s new childcare policy it is worth pausing to reflect on the very fact that in an unprecedented time of austerity a Conservative-led administration is proposing to spend near on £1bn on childcare. There are all sorts of caveats and problems with the policy, when it will be introduced and how it will be paid for. But before we rush into all that we should note that today’s announcement confirms that the issue of childcare will remain at the centre of the political arena.

Sophia Parker

This blog originally appeared on Bright Blue

Today sees the launch of 'The Squeezed Middle: the pressure on ordinary workers in America and Britain' - a collection of essays from America’s leading thinkers in the field of living standards to understand what lessons, if any, we might draw from the US experience.

You may well wonder what we can take from a country where the crisis in living standards is so great that it’s not an exaggeration to talk of America’s ‘lost generation’. Productivity has risen threefold since 1970 but barely a dollar from this buoyant economy has made its way into the average person’s pay packet. Even the recent return to moderate growth in the US has not eased the challenges most families are facing