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.

Today’s fiscally neutral Autumn Statement was billed as one for strivers. We have already shown that around 60 per cent of the cut associated with the 1 per cent uprating of most working-age benefits and tax credits will actually fall on working households. But of course, the additional £235 increase in the personal tax allowance from April 2013 will benefit many of those in work. What’s the combined impact?

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

In the Autumn Statement there will be a blizzard of facts, figures, assertions and counter-assertions. There have been a few helpful pointers on what lto ook out for (try this and this), and I’ve already given my tuppence worth on what may happen to the faltering fiscal rules. But here are a few further insights to bear in mind.

First, be on striver alert. Expect plenty of warm words about "do-ers and grafters" who get up and work hard on modest means. In a different part of the Chancellor’s speech there will be tough messages and measures for those working age families who receive tax credits and benefits. Not for the first or last time the impression will be given that these are two distinct groups inhabiting different moral and economic worlds. They aren’t. Three quarters of tax credits go to working households. If reports about capping tax credit increases at 1 per cent are correct then so-called strivers are about to be squeezed too.

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

Next week George Osborne will hold forth on the size of the underlying deficit and reveal whether austerity will now extend until at least 2018. When he does, he won’t know what he’s talking about – and he’ll be in good company.  Neither will Ed Balls when he responds, nor will the phalanx of city economists who rush to comment, nor indeed will establishment economic institutions such as the IMF and the OECD.

This isn’t because our current crop of politicians and economists are unusually uninformed. Rather it reflects the fact the debate on fiscal policy is being driven in no small part by an economic concept – the structural deficit - that is very close to being unmeasurable. It’s an example of how what sounds like a sensible idea in theory can go wrong in practice. 

This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post

At the start of this week Conservative MP, Elizabeth Truss, published her proposals for reducing the high costs of childcare in Britain. At the heart of her proposals is a drive to reduce regulation on the childcare industry. Truss has two main ideas: a relaxation of ratios so that a single childcare worker can look after more children and replacing the Ofsted registration and inspection scheme for childminders with accreditation through agencies as in the Netherlands. This, Truss argues, would lower the barriers to becoming a childminder and bring many people who are at home looking after their own children into the profession. The National Childminding Association could not have hoped for better marketing than it has had from Elizabeth Truss. While she is right on the importance of childminders, her proposals are not the answer to the affordability challenge facing working families.

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

It’s not every day you open the paper to read about a cabinet minister – one who isn’t the Chancellor - holding forth about the ‘instruction’ that has been given to the Treasury on a key aspect of economic policy. Nor we should we suppose that Nick Clegg elected to give the interview to the FT only to use this line due to a slip of the tongue.  It tells us something.

The specifics are about whether the Treasury should use its ‘balance sheet’ to enable a ‘massive’ increase in infrastructure spending (on housing and transport).  The timing reflects the wider context. The last few weeks have been unkind for the Coalition’s favoured economic narrative. The return of recession has been the key event but hardly the only one. The election of President Hollande, the continued euro-zone crisis, President Obama regularly appearing on our TV screens talking about jobs and growth, a Labour reshuffle that was seen to help unify different shades of economic opinion, and now the IMF saying (once again) that further action may be required, including fiscal stimulus, if the economy doesn’t pick up – all these have unsettled the Coalition.  

This post originally appeared on the OECD blog

How did inequality and household debt interact in the run up to the 2008/09 financial crisis?  Today, a new report by NIESR for the Resolution Foundation provides new evidence on that question for the UK. The new analysis confirms the severity of the borrowing situation of low income households in Britain before the crash and raises difficult questions about patterns of consumption in an era of high inequality.

The report’s key contribution is to dig beneath headline figures for household debt to describe the borrowing picture for households at different points in the income distribution. It’s well established that UK household debt, in common with many other countries, ballooned in the late 1990s and 2000s, with the aggregate savings ratio—the percentage of household disposable income that is saved—turning negative in 2008 for the first time since records began. Yet so far these headline figures have been something of a black box. 

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

The last time a letter left on a desk caused such a stir it involved an exchange between two senior politicians about the future of the country’s finances. This time the note was from a group of Whitehall cleaners to Iain Duncan Smith asking him to make good on his commitment to make work pay and make his department, DWP, a living wage employer. The fact that it so caught the public mood says something about how the question of low pay has risen in salience. 

This is in no small part due to the success of the living wage campaign, a grass-roots movement formed just over a decade ago, to push for a decent wage – above the minimum wage - for workers. It has helped shine a light on the rising problem of in-work poverty. In an era when there are many structural forces bearing down on low pay – from shifts in technology and trade to the continued demise of collective bargaining and the real terms falls in the minimum wage - the momentum behind the campaign for a living wage is a rare example of at least some countervailing pressure.

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

“In this country we have to look upon budget promises as made of the same stuff as lover’s oaths.”  So said Lord Salisbury, three times Conservative PM, and his words are perhaps more apt than ever given that all the love drained out of the Coalition’s marriage some time ago. We need to sift carefully before being sure about what today really means.  

As with all Budgets we should start this process by asking what impact it will have on the overall economy, who wins and loses, and what it will mean for the political strategies of different parties. 

In terms of macroeconomics this budget was always going to be a non-event. It is broadly fiscally neutral, with only very minor upward ticks to growth forecasts. None of this is a surprise: this chancellor was always going to ignore those calling for more stimulus. This Budget, like all the others this Parliament, lives in the shadow of the choices made in the emergency Budget in June 2010 and subsequent spending review.