I am the think tank and my aim is to conduct research in a proposal to alleviate poverty. If the minimum wage was raised to ? 7. 00 then obviously this would help the lower class people to earn more money and would mean people with part times jobs who usually get paid very poorly to become paid a lot more and therefore would be very useful. Also it would mainly affect many of the female workers as a lot more females then males and therefore for many of the single mothers it will mean they will be able to receive more money and have a better lifestyle.

This however will not affect pensioners and the unemployed as they are not working and so will not receive any benefits from it and they will most likely still remain in poverty which is not good as they are usually the people in poverty in the first place, but then this may just give the unemployed people the incentive to actually try and go out and find a job. Raising the state pension would mainly affect the older households as they will be the pensioners.

It will allow them to elude poverty as they will have means to have a better lifestyle. However for everyone else this will not make a difference for them well not for at least a few years or even decades so trying to tackle poverty by this method would be not very appropriate. Raising child benefits is quite a decent method because many of the kids that are in poverty are in it due to their parents being poor, so helping out the parents with children will cause poverty to drop dramatically.

This will also be extremely beneficial to single parents as it allows them to have more money to help both of them to survive. Also as kids are the future we need to make sure that we can help out as many as possible that are in poverty and if we can help those that are not then that is another plus because it will mean they will have a much better lifestyle and therefore it may lead to helping the youth of the societies to become well educated and so it will lead to our economy continuing to be strong and prosper.

This however will not affect the adults without kids including the pensioners. The adults without kids is a very large percent and therefore increasing the child benefits will not be as beneficial as first glance made it seem and so would not alleviate poverty as much as I would like. Raising the job seekers allowance by an average of ? 50 would help decrease poverty because it will definitely create a huge incentive for the unemployed to actually start looking for jobs and getting the money.

It will mean eventually the people will find jobs and so in the long term the benefits being given to these people will go down and so can be used on others. However a problem with this is that many people may see this as an opportunity just to get extra money and may just continue to stay on the job seekers allowance while pretending to find a job however may actually never accept a if they are offered one.

In addition this is very limited to the unemployed people and with poverty in so many other categories of people, such as the pensioners, part time workers earning minimum wage and the women on maternity leave or having to care for their baby and so is not really an effective method. By providing 24 hour nursery care and creche facilities this once again is only going to help a limited group of people which are the parents of young kids which is definitely a small proportion of the unemployed and part time workers.

This obviously will mean that this group of people will find it easier to get out of poverty by leaving their kids in good hands with the nursery care and therefore going out to look for jobs and so will be at least getting job seekers allowance if they do not get the job they want. However, like I have said it is not very conventional and will not be a practical method. Another method is that we can target the unemployed and virtually force them to work which would be by cutting all benefits to workers able to work and therefore if they do not find work then they would literally have no income.

I guess this would make them find a job, but this is incredibly harsh as many of these people will not be able to find jobs due to the current situation of there being very limited jobs and we are trying to alleviate poverty this method would just make more poverty. I believe this would be a very poor method to use. In conclusion I believe that all the methods I have talked about do have their positives and negatives but really they will not work very well by their selves and so will need to be used together alongside other proposals.