On Monday, Cabinet Office minister Ed Miliband used a Guardian interview  to indicate that measures to tackle inequality would figure prominently in the Labour manifesto he has begun to draft ('Miliband: "I want a buzz back in the manifesto"').  In it he said:

"I think we have to take a sober look in the manifesto work on whether we are on a path to tackle some of the great causes of inequality. In the kind of market economy we live in and the kind of world we live in, it is much harder than we thought to make a difference to child poverty."

[Mr Miliband] thinks most people care about "where are the poorest in society relative to the middle.

"I think the gap itself is an issue, but what a lot of people would say about Britain is that when we are the fourth richest society in the world, why do we have people with such low incomes and what can we do about them?"

Today's release of the policy document Freedom from Poverty, Opportunity for All: Policies for a Fairer Britain by Shadow  Schools Secretary David Laws and Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Danny Alexander suggests that the Lib Dems are willing to enter the debate. The paper proposes:

• Introducing a 'pupil premium', with £1.5bn extra targeted at the children with the greatest need, as recommended in Paul Marshall's recent paper Tackling Educational Inequality

• Reforming tax credits by ending the overpayments crisis and taking higher earners out of the system all together.

• Increasing Child Benefit by around £5 per family per week, taking 150,000 children out of poverty.

• Replacing Job Centre Plus with a new 'First Steps' agency, while outsourcing properly funded employment support to the private and voluntary sector and introducing a single working-age benefit.

• Immediately restoring the earnings link to the basic state pension and in the long run introducing a citizens' pension.

• Establishing an Independent Commission on Public Sector Pensions to ensure that they are fair and affordable - with any savings re-invested in a higher state pension.

The policy paper has already received coverage from the BBC ('Lib Dems unveil anti-policy plan') and the Guardian ('Lib Dem pledge on poverty'), with more considered responses likely to emerge in the coming days. For political and ideological context, Menzies Campbell's IPPR speech from last December is well worth reading ('Poverty and Opportunity: The Liberal Way').

With Ian Duncan-Smith's 'Breakthrough Britain', the Conservatives are also signalling they don't want to be left out of the debate.