The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a new report, Does the tax and benefit system create a ‘couple penalty’? ‘The use of the MIS [Minimum Income Standard] scale, which uses research into minimum living costs to show greater economies of living in a couple than the official equivalence scales, suggests that separation penalties are larger and couple penalties smaller than those scales would suggest. Indeed, it shows no case of significant couple penalty other than in the scenario where the absent parent is able to live cheaply in social housing. Moreover, even the official scale used by the Government (the OECD scale) does not show a clear-cut economic advantage for families on low earnings to split up. In the single earner cases shown here, it shows a couple penalty in one scenario, a separation penalty in three scenarios and no difference in the other three. On the other hand, for a couple with two earners, it shows a substantial couple penalty in all but one of the five scenarios looked at here. So an in-work couple penalty can be identified for a particular group of couples on a particular set of assumptions.’ (p.29).
