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A Minimum Income Standard for Britain
This project brought together the expertise of CRSP and the Family Budget Unit (FBU) in order to develop a minimum income standard that enabled an acceptable standard of living in Britain for different family types. The research used the consensual budget standards method pioneered at CRSP with the FBU expert or ‘normative’ approach, thus ensuring that the minimum income standards will be rooted in social consensus about the goods and services that everyone in modern Britain needs, while at the same time drawing on expert knowledge about basic living requirements and actual expenditure patterns.
The project included an extensive analysis of data from the Expenditure and Food Survey which helped to set the budgets in the context of what survey data tells us households spend. It draws on previous work to derive a model to establish what income would be required to meet the minimum income standard and also has produced a basis for uprating and rebasing the budgets over time.
Sue Middleton (now retired) and Karen Kellard (now at BMG Research Ltd) 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 the Director of the Family Budget Unit at the University of York. Noel Smith has a background in minimum income standards research, and in 2004 undertook a study into budget standards for disabled people for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Abigail Davis specialises in designing and using qualitative methodology and working with vulnerable groups.
Website: www.minimumincomestandard.org
Sponsor: Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Theme: Children, Youth and the Life-course
Start date: May 2006
Completion date: July 2008
Publication: Bradshaw, J., Middleton, S., Davis, A., Oldfield, N., Smith, N., Cusworth, L. and Williams, J., (2008) A Minimum Income Standard for Britain: what people think, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Project team (CRSP)
Noel Smith, Abigail Davis, Alan France, Nicola Selby.
Further funding secured to take forward MIS research.
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