The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published its annual MIS update, which this year includes the first "rebase" of MIS budgets (those for families with children) since the original research in 2008. You can read all about it at:

http://www.minimumincomestandard.org/2012_update.htm

and

http://www.jrf.org.uk/focus-issue/minimum-income-standards

When MIS was first launched, teh JRF thought it would be a good way of monitoring how the minimum standard moves as Britain becomes ever more prosperous. Now that the reverse is happening, it has become a valuable monitoring tool, of a different kind!  Overall, we are finding that the concept of a stable set of minimum requirements has proven robust, even in economic hard times. But against this overall stable picture, there have been some interesting specific additions and subtractions, which you can read all about in their report...