Tom Crossley is a Research Fellow at IFS and a Research Professor for the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
He was previously director of the consumption and saving research sector at IFS. His research interests are Household behaviour, financial security, living standards, the design and collection and analysis of survey data.
In recent months, there has been much speculation that the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) will be abolished or restricted as part of the forthcoming programme of spending cuts. In this observation we contribute to this debate by summarising what the WFP does, and does not, achieve.
The September 2010 inflation numbers, used for the annual inflation adjustments to many taxes, benefits and tax credits, were published today by the ONS. In June, the Chancellor announced that benefits would be uprated with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI) or Rossi Index from April 2011, claiming that the CPI provided a better measure of benefit recipients'
Individual cost of living indices will vary across individuals, and thus any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. This article proposes a solution to this problem.
