CentreForum recently sought advice from a respected political commentator about when to launch our next publication.

"I'd be very interested in it," he said "but I will only be writing about election speculation until Tuesday."

It is therefore no surprise that this blog, which is meant to highlight the interesting policy debates of the day, has struggled to find policy coverage in the broadsheets over the last couple of weeks.

Today is no exception. Poll speculation continues take up all the column inches. Ironically, the most insightful analysis doesn't come from the newspapers at all, but the politicalbetting.com blog which has been given extra detail of the published polls. Normally limited to one posting a day, Mike Smithson has posted 10 entries in the last two days.

The most readable piece today is Mark Lawson's slightly cynical look at Brown and Cameron ('The next PM will be the one who can best fake sincerity').

However, if you really look hard, there is an interesting policy piece today. It comes in the guise of The Times' coverage of an Office for National Statistics report on the family. ('A longer life and in better health - marriage really is good for you')

Sceptics will find as many holes as they want.  For example, the revelation that widowed men suffer some of the worst health might just be that they tend to be older. But, the ONS are generally quite good at not claiming what they can't back up with the data.

What is clear is that, as the Conservatives push The Family up the political agenda, liberals need to be clear where they stand on family policy.  That position needs to be based on evidence such as that in the full ONS report - Focus on families.

A new survey reveals that the pay gap between men and women increased for the first time in a decade this year ("Pay gap is growing between men and women", The Telegraph). Such inequality is depressing, and reveals how deep-rooted discrimination is in the workplace, with simple anti-discrimination legislation failing to tackle tacit patriarchal attitudes. The problem is two-fold: not only are women being paid less for the same job, but they are aspiring to lesser jobs, often due to the responsibilities of family life. With affirmative action (rightly or wrongly) off the political agenda, it seems that the only way to tackle this is to extend policies encouraging women into work and designed to tackle the assumption that women ought to, in whole or in part, stay at home. This, in turn, requires questioning the model of the family that the Tories have been so keen to propagate in recent weeks.

Not that you would know it from Jan Moir's opinion piece in the Telegraph ("Career mums: stop talking about yourselves!"). Moir seems to be arguing that for a woman to express frustration with juggling home and work life is self-indulgent. What her piece misses, of course, is that when society expects 'home life' to fall disproportionately on women, it is not a simple grievance or complaint but an issue of equity: it is harder for women to work than men. Equally, if family life is a privilege, not a burden, as Moir argues, why shouldn't men share in that privilege and restrict their careers to a similar degree in order to do so? In fact, despite her praise for working women who "put up and shut up", Moir's argument is ultimately little more than a rationalisation of gender inequality. Just because previous generations of women have "put up" with this situation does not mean that it isn't unfair.

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.