Blog
Matthew Taylor
These are tough times for our country and its people. After the shock of the global crisis and the scale of public debt which followed in its wake, it would have been hard enough in a benign global context to get our own economy moving, but now the perilous situation in Europe makes it much harder. Although the recent fall in unemployment is welcome, the combination of low salary increases and rising costs for essentials such as fuel, food and transport mean we are seeing a continuation of several years of falling living standards, something which tends to impact most on the least well-off in our community. And we are still relatively early in the process of reducing the public sector deficit.