Mainsteam poverty analysis is deficient because it ignores important within-household aspects. This point has been made by many, and stressed by feminists especially, yet mainstream poverty measurement practice remains unchanged. Why is this? What should we be doing? This paper examines anew the case for taking within-household factors into account in poverty measurement. The analysis reveals a number of unresolved issues including some problems with recent feminist arguments, but concludes that there is a good case for changing current practice. To demonstrate that this is feasible, four research projects are described. These are my agenda for action.

This paper considers social security policy and structures in relation to the labour market of the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper begins by describing the labour market of the late 1980s and summarising projective descriptions of labour demand in the 1990s. The second section of the paper reports on recent research examining the labour supply behaviour of long term unemployed people, drawing out the role of social security policy and structures therein. The third section of the paper concludes that the role of social security policy is at present essentially reactive rather than proactive; that it does little to address the likely need for labour of certain kinds in the 1990s; and that efforts to address the problem of long term unemployment through social security policy have been largely misdirected. The final section of the paper briefly considers some of the ways in which social security systems can be more proactive and suggests a number of both short term and longer term policy changes which research indicates would be of benefit in the UK.

This paper examines the growth of housing inheritance in Britain since the late 1960s using Inland Revenue statistics. It also uses survey evidence to examine the uneven distribution of inheritance by housing tenure, class and region, and assesses its implications for consumption cleavage theory. It argues that at present the social distribution of housing inheritance is far from equal, benefiting home owners and the professional and managerial classes, but that, over the next 40 years, it will become much more widespread as the post-war generation of home owners bequeathes property. It is likely, however, that the children of tenants will be generally excluded from housing inheritance which is largely confined to the children of home owners.

This paper reviews recent research on take-up with a view to identifying the most promising lines of further enquiry. In the late 1970s take-up research seemed to be foundering in the face of the complexity of the factors affecting claiming decisions. Progress came via the development of models of the claiming process. The most influential postulated a series of thresholds which claimants must pass in a set sequence on the way to claiming a benefit. One question for future research is whether this model is still the best starting point or whether there are others which capture the key factors and their interaction more fully and accurately. Another approach is to look at claiming decisions indirectly by applying multivariate techniques to continuous survey data to examine the relationship between variables such as age, income and housing tenure and differing probabilities of claiming. A second question is what the two approaches can offer each other. Overhanging all the issues facing take-up research is the problem of sampling a population—eligible non-recipients—for which, almost by definition, no suitable sampling frame exists. The paper concludes by examining various options for identifying this elusive group.