Households have been coping remarkably well with high housing costs, but interest rate rises lurk just around the corner

How do different households cope with housing costs? Laura Gardiner summarises new research which highlights the resilience and ingenuity of modest income families in mitigating housing affordability challenges. But the eventual rise in interest rates will spell trouble for many. In London for example, even with a combination of strategies in place, modest income families are likely to have to spend at least half of their income on rent or mortgage payments, leaving little left over for other essentials

The rise and rise (?) of zero-hours contracts

While the evidence is mounting that zero-hour contracts are here to stay, we shouldn’t overplay their impact on the labour market: they still affect only a very small minority of workers and some value the flexibility they bring, writes Laura Gardiner

The initial impact of COVID-19 and policy responses on household incomes

As soon as the scale of the coronavirus shock to the economy became clear, the UK government introduced three policies to protect directly household incomes: a Job Retention Scheme, to pay the wages of employees who were temporarily furloughed; a Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, to give grants to established self-employed people whose businesses had been affected; and a package of increases to entitlements to social security benefits, with Universal Credit at the core, that bolstered the UK’s means-tested ‘safety net’. This paper analyses the design and beneficiaries of these policies and, given the distributional pattern of the labour market shock, considers the emerging overall impact on living standards, particularly of low-income households

A framework for gene mapping in wheat demonstrated using the Yr7 yellow rust resistance gene

We used three approaches to map the yellow rust resistance gene Yr7 and identify associated SNPs in wheat. First, we used a traditional QTL mapping approach using a double haploid (DH) population and mapped Yr7 to a low-recombination region of chromosome 2B. To fine map the QTL, we then used an association mapping panel. Both populations were SNP array genotyped allowing alignment of QTL and genome-wide association scans based on common segregating SNPs. Analysis of the association panel spanning the QTL interval, narrowed the interval down to a single haplotype block. Finally, we used mapping-by-sequencing of resistant and susceptible DH bulks to identify a candidate gene in the interval showing high homology to a previously suggested Yr7 candidate and to populate the Yr7 interval with a higher density of polymorphisms. We highlight the power of combining mapping-by-sequencing, delivering a complete list of gene-based segregating polymorphisms in the interval with the high recombination, low LD precision of the association mapping panel. Our mapping-by-sequencing methodology is applicable to any trait and our results validate the approach in wheat, where with a near complete reference genome sequence, we are able to define a small interval containing the causative gene

Consuming forces: generational living standards measured through household consumption

This report, which has been prepared by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University and the Resolution Foundation for the Intergenerational Commission, sheds further light on living standards across generations by considering levels and patterns of expenditure for working-age households in detail. It uses surveys of household spending to explore how actual consumption expenditure has changed over time overall, and for different age and income groups

The ‘housing pinched’: Which UK households are most at risk of falling over the edge?

Decades of chronic housing undersupply have meant that housing price growth has consistently outstripped income growth, driving up costs across tenures and meaning that households spend a growing share of their disposable incomes on their accommodation. New research by Laura Gardiner examines the UK households that are spending more than half of their disposable income on housing costs. Most of the ‘housing pinched’ are working and more than a quarter live in London