Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not...

As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and...

Conventional in-work benefits (IWB) are means-tested, open to all workers with sufficiently low income, and usually paid without a time-limit. This paper evaluates an IWB with an alternative design that was aimed at lone parents in the UK and piloted in one third of the country, and that...

As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and...

Conventional in-work benefits (IWB) are means-tested, open to all workers with sufficiently low income, and usually paid without a time-limit. This paper evaluates an IWB with an alternative design that was aimed at lone parents in the UK and piloted in one third of the country, and that...

Council tax benefit (CTB) was abolished in April 2013 and local authorities in England were charged with designing their own council tax support (CTS) schemes in its place. Although these must maintain support for pensioners at its previous level, local authorities have had wide discretion to...