March 2025 | Fair Point | abrdn Financial Fairness Trust Newsletter

All eye on welfare this month

For the UK government, a series of welfare cuts will impact many people with disabilities (see our statement on that here). For the Scottish government, the publication of a progress report on their measures to reduce child poverty show their interim targets have not been met. Our partners at the Fraser of Allander Institute examined how they might best go about meeting their child poverty targets and recommend a more targeted approach.

Summing up what needs to be done, our Policy Advisor Donald Hirsch wrote an article in the Scotsman on Sunday recommending that the governments in Holyrood and Westminster start to make the two overlapping social security systems work together, rather than against each other. Read the article here. 

How can we tackle child poverty?

We also released a new podcast episode, an interview with Alison Garnham, CEO of the Child Poverty Action Group, discussing long term trends in child poverty in the UK and the Labour government’s potential strategies. You can listen to the episode here.

Financial wellbeing for disabled people

This month you will doubtless have seen the coverage of the UK government’s disability benefit cuts – in this context you might find it interesting to refer to our report on the Financial Wellbeing of Disabled People in the UK, which found, for instance, that three-in-ten (27%) disabled households are in serious financial difficulty, compared to one-in-ten (11%) of non-disabled households. For more details, find the full report here.

Funding news

Grants that have recently been approved for funding by the Trust include the following:
A grant to Bright Blue to put on a conference exploring centre-right policies to improve living standards.
A grant to the University of York to enable families with lived experience of poverty to engage with the media.
A grant to the High Pay centre to produce an analysis of pay ratios published by UK listed companies.
A grant to Demos to do research to analyse public attitudes towards further tax increases.
A grant to the New Economics Foundation to support a pilot project on increasing voluntary engagement with employment support for disabled people.

Finally, we are co-funding an online event as part of the Pensions Review - a review of the future of financial security in retirement, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust.

How can people be better helped to draw on their pension wealth in retirement?

Tuesday 1 April | 10:00 - 11:15 | Online

Managing wealth in retirement has been described by a Nobel Prize-winning economist as the “nastiest, hardest problem in finance” due to the difficulty people face managing longevity and investment risks.

With the rise of "defined contribution" pensions in the private sector, "pension freedoms" which removed the requirement for most to purchase an annuity, and the decline of traditional "defined benefit" pensions, the challenges are only becoming starker.

Register here to watch online.