Tom Waters

This report examines changes in the distribution of household incomes in the UK, and the determinants and consequences of recent trends. This includes analysing changes not only in average living standards but also in household income inequality and measures of income poverty and deprivation.

This report provides new estimates of total spending by the government on children in England, including benefits, education spending,services for vulnerable children and healthcare. In the most recent year of data (2017–18), total spending was over £120 billion or over £10,000 per child under 18.

Eligibility for a free lunch was recently extended to all state school children in England and Scotland who are in Year 2 or below (i.e. up to age 6 or 7). For all other state school pupils in the UK, eligibility remains restricted by a means test so that free school meals (FSMs) go to a relatively narrow set of children in poor households. Around 1 million children currently receive means-tested FSMs: equivalent to 15% of those who are not entitled to universal FSMs. We estimate that around two-thirds of those children are in the lowest-income fifth of households with children.

This short briefing note summarises what the newly released HBAI data tell us about how living standards have changed after five years of recovery from the Great Recession, how this differs between different groups, and the implications for inequality and poverty.

Distributional analysis appendix slides

TAXBEN is the IFS’s tax and benefit microsimulation model, which calculates the impact of tax and benefit policy on households. It is used heavily in IFS’s work on the impacts of tax and benefit policy. This document gives a high level summary of TAXBEN, covering what policies and effects it does and does not include, and its limitations.

In this report, we estimate what has happened since 2015–16 to household incomes and poverty rates.

I study a game theoretic spatial model of elections with many heterogeneous constituencies in which both party and candidate behavior are modeled. Parties choose a platform and a ‘whip rate,’ representing the proportion of final policy that will be made by the party, as opposed to by the successful candidates. Candidates are office-motivated and can choose both a platform and a level of advertising in order to defeat their opponent. It is shown that the introduction of whipping as a choice variable can cause party platforms to diverge and that parties will whip on some but not all issues, reflecting the empirical reality of parties influencing rather than determining policy outcomes exclusively.