The Equality and Human Rights Commission have released a series of infographics to illustrate key findings from their March 2018 report on the impact of tax and welfare reforms.
The Government Equalities Office have published its 8th report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (pdf), in April 2018.
‘Undocumented migrants find themselves criminalised for doing what they must to survive.’
This is according to the April 2018 guidance (pdf) from Liberty on defending migrants’ rights and tackling the hostile environment
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) have published their business plan 2018/19 (PDF), in March 2018.
This plan outlines the priorities for their work in the coming year.
The profiles of homeless people are changing, with children becoming the largest group of people in emergency shelters as a result of a deterioration in the living conditions of extremely vulnerable families.
This from the March 2018 annual report (PDF) from the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA)
This report reveals how millions of Europeans face housing exclusion on a daily basis as well as a dramatic picture of increasing homelessness across most of the EU – in particular amongst children, women and migrants.
The report finds:
In France, 20,845 people called the 115 homeless helpline requesting accommodation (in June 2017)
Dublin City Council spent € 39 million on hotel nights for homeless people in 2016, while € 10.7 million was spent on prevention and supported housing
In Britain, 29% of spending was on temporary accommodation and (44% of which was spent on hotels/Bed and Breakfast) and 61% on housing services (between 2015-2016)
Over the last number of years, only two European countries (Finland and Norway) have seen a reduction in the number of homeless people
Read the full report (PDF).
‘The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world’ says the March 2018 Equality Trust manifesto.
‘The impact of changes to direct taxes and benefits is to reduce the income of
Bangladeshi households by around £4,400 per year on average’.
Four months after releasing their 2017 interim report, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have published their final cumulative impact assessment (pdf), in March 2018.
The report exposes how much individuals and households are expected to gain or lose, and how many adults and children will fall below an adequate standard of living, as a result of recent changes to taxes and social security.
The report finds:
Negative impacts are particularly large for households with more disabled members, and individuals with more severe disabilities, as well as for lone parents on low incomes
For some family types, these losses represent over 13% of average net income
At an individual level, women lose on average considerably more from changes to direct taxes and benefits than men
Lone parents in the bottom fifth of the household income distribution lose around 25% of their net income, on average
Around 1.5 million more children are forecast to be living in households below the relative poverty line as a result of the reforms.
EDF and a number of our members have contributed to the development of this important research.
Read the full report (pdf).
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has assessed the progress on socioeconomic rights in Great Britain since 2016.
‘Relationship breakdown is the largest single trigger of rough sleeping, leading to 42% of male rough sleeping’.
This is according to the February 2018 briefing paper (pdf) from the House of Commons Library. This paper provides background information on the problem of rough sleeping in England, and outlines Government policy on this issue.
The paper finds:
The most recent statistics published on 25 January 2018 recorded a 169% increase in the number of people sleeping rough in England since 2010
Among women, 35% slept rough after leaving home to escape domestic violence
Rough sleeping is at its most severe in London.
Read the full report (pdf).
Despite allegations of serious abuse in immigration detention centers, the UK
persisted in not imposing a maximum time limit for immigration detention, and
continued to detain asylum-seeking and migrant children.
This is from the January 2018 report (pdf) from the Human Rights Watch (HRW). World Report 2018 is their 28th annual review of human rights
practices around the globe.
The report summarises key human rights issues in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide, drawing on events from late 2016 through November 2017.
The report finds:
Germany over the past year made headlines when the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to enter its parliament in decades
Despite a strong tradition of protecting civil and political rights, Australia has serious unresolved human rights problems. Australia continued in 2017 to hold asylum seekers who arrived by boat on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the island nation of Nauru, where conditions are abysmal
Bahrain’s human rights situation continued to worsen in 2017. Authorities shut down the country’s only independent newspaper and the leading secular-left opposition political society.
In Bangladesh, civil society groups faced pressure from both state and non-state actors, including death threats and attacks from extremist groups.
Read the full report (pdf).
