Carol Miers

25 Twitter accounts to follow in 2014 on welfare reform – the first 10

We’ve compiled a list of 25 useful Twitter accounts if you want to follow welfare reform. In this post we reveal the first 10… Follow them all – and over 40 others – as a list here. How we did it: finding Twitter accounts to follow 1. Joseph Rowntree Fdn.  @jrf_uk,   @Helen_Barnard I shouldn’t have […]

Single parents in the centre of the benefits storm – get Gingerbread’s data

With rising prices on one side and falling benefits on the other, have single parents been disproportionately hit by welfare reforms? Gingerbread, the charity supporting lone parents, believes so. Their online survey ‘Paying the price:single parents in the age of austerity (pdf)’ asked a number of questions about meeting rising living costs, with 591 single […]

Housing and #welfarereform – a Twitter discussion

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Welfare reform and data: telling London’s benefit cap stories

#WelfareReform child poverty mapped – but ‘doesn’t show the variation at ward level’ – Ade, @1in10 pic.twitter.com/uyVo4ja6cG— HMI Welfare (@HMIWelfare) December 9, 2013 Representatives of the voluntary sector gathered on Monday for an event to share good practice on using data on the impact of welfare reform – and Help Me Investigate was there to […]

The respectful charity shop built on social franchising

The Trussell Trust has reason to feel proud about spreading its humanitarian vision, stepping in to give three days of crisis food nationwide. It is a vision that David McAuley said his fantastic team buys into and one that has also caught the interest of groups around the country. The uptake of their simple food […]

Savage times, but food banks act to put bread on the table

Many supermarket customers dropped food donations into Tesco trolleys over the weekend for those UK people struggling with food poverty. The traditional habit of feeding the birds snippets seems to be replaced with more serious concerns. The Trussell Trust’s national food collection across 3000 Tescos stores on the busiest weekend of the year meets an […]

Questions to NHS organisations on mental health unanswered

HMI Welfare wanted to know what help was on hand for people with mental health problems in hospital Accident and Emergency departments. It seemed a simple question: How many mental health staff work in A&E? What we found, however, was an inconsistency across NHS helplines about who to ask about the services available to mental health patients. We contacted: NHS England, […]

Get the UCU data: further education zero hour contracts

Sixty-one percent of further education colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have teaching staff on zero-hour contracts, according to the University and Colleges Union (UCU). 200 colleges responded to Freedom of Information requests from UCU. A further 75 failed to reply within the 4 weeks required by the Freedom of Information Act. We’ve obtained the UCU FE […]

Useful links to Sept 27: Hurt from the cuts; Loan policy supports unwise lending

Benefit sanctions hitting homeless people hardest. Homeless Link has commissioned a report called A High Cost to Pay (pdf) that highlights the difficulties of the most vulnerable people in attending benefit dependant interviews. There is a call for Jobcentre Plus advisors to better understand the predicament of homeless people. Homeless Link found that the sanctions […]

Useful links to Sept 16th: reassess mental illness; axe bedroom tax; the new poor; CPAG update

These are some welfare links we found interesting during the second week of September. What were Ian Duncan Smith’s ‘welfare reforms’ really about?. Guardian, Sue Marsh, spokeswoman and author of Diary of a Benefit Scrounger says the reforms are frightening the most vulnerable. Hard evidence: are migrants draining the welfare system?. The Conversation. The evidence […]