Robert Joyce

The current government has delivered or is planning radical changes to the delivery of education, health and, through its planned 'universal credit', working-age social security.

This article suggests that the unequal presence at good schools between advantaged and less-advantaged households is driven more by proximity based admissions criteria than differences in parents' preferences for particular school characteristics.

The Office for Budget Responsibility's new Welfare Trends Report is a welcome development. It describes some of the key risks around their forecasts for benefit spending and, therefore, the factors that could lead to the Chancellor’s welfare cap being breached. Neither the welfare trends report nor the welfare cap are sufficient to improve policy making. If further welfare cuts are deemed to be appropriate then those cuts should be well argued and well designed, rather than simply those that are the quickest or politically easiest to achieve.

There has been heated debate over the increase in tuition fees to £9,000 a year for many students that occurred in 2012. But another major change to the support for disadvantaged students was introduced at the same time: not only were universities required to provide details of their proposed financial support schemes and access programmes before they were allowed to charge fees above £6,000, but also the government introduced a National Scholarship Programme (NSP), designed to offer additional financial support to students via their universities. Here we provide an in-depth analysis of the financial support that universities have been offering since 2012 and the likely consequences now that the government has announced that the NSP will no longer provide support for undergraduate students from 2015.

Employment rates of men and women in their 50s and 60s have been growing for nearly two decades – a trend that was only briefly halted during the recent recession. Employment rates for men age 65-69 are at their highest levels since 1974 and continue to grow while employment rates for older women are at record levels. There are reasons to expect that this growth will continue as changes in private pensions and state benefits increase incentives to remain in work longer. For women this upward trend reflects the continuation of a long-term trend since at least the late 1960s. In contrast, recent growth in employment among older men follows a period of dramatic decline between the late 1960s and mid-1990s. In two new publications released today, researchers from the IFS set out levels of employment among older men and women in England in 2012–13, and survey explanations for why these have increased so substantially since the mid-1990s.

The Prime Minister, in an article in today’s Times, said “In this parliament we will have made £100 billion of savings while cutting income tax by £10.5 billion. In the next parliament we plan to make £25 billion of savings while making £7.2 billion of income tax cuts”. This repeats a statement made at this year’s Conservative Party conference. The implication is that most of the planned cuts in public spending have been made and that the promised tax cuts in the next parliament are relatively modest by comparison with what has been managed in this parliament. In this observation we explain what these numbers mean and question whether it is sensible to compare them at all.

The government has started to send out information on how tax revenue is spent to individuals who pay income tax or National Insurance contributions. It has broken down spending into a number of categories. The biggest of these is "welfare", which represents a quarter of total spending. State pensions also appear as a separate category, accounting for 12% of spending. In this observation we look at what counts as pension and welfare spending, and offer some alternative breakdowns.

This article for 'The Conversation' suggests that three and a half years after finishing university, graduates who attended private schools earn an average of 7% more per year than graduates who went to state school.

Paul Johnson, IFS Director, writes in the Times.

Over the course of this parliament, the government have made changes to benefits and tax credits that, at the time they were announced, were expected to reduce spending in 2014–15 by £19 billion relative to a world of no policy change. In fact, real spending (after adjusting for CPI inflation) will be only £2.5 billion lower in 2014–15 than it was in 2010–11. This observation explains why.

A comment piece by IFS Director Paul Johnson.

This week the Care Quality Commission (CQC) published comparable information on all GP surgeries in England for the first time, with the aim of identifying which practices should be prioritised for newly introduced inspections. Understanding whether, and why, some GP practices fail to provide quality care is important given the vital role that GPs play within the NHS. In recent years, there have been substantial changes to the organisation of GP practices, with a shift away from single-handed practices towards practices with six or more full time equivalent GPs. A new IFS report published today finds that small, and in particular single-handed, GP practices are more likely to provide poorer quality care than larger GP practices, as measured along a number of dimensions. This suggests that the trend towards larger practice sizes may have had beneficial effects on the overall quality of primary care provided.

In work funded by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland, the IFS today published an update of our previous income projections for Northern Ireland and for the UK as a whole. This observation draws out what this research tells us about the likely path of household incomes in the UK in the next few years.

This comment piece was first published by The Times and has been reproduced here with permission.

Today the Department for Work and Pensions published its first quantitative analysis of the impact of the new benefit cap. The analysis suggests that, as a direct response to the cap, some moved into paid work, while relatively few moved house. But most individuals appear neither to have moved into work nor to have moved house. This observation discusses these findings.

IFS Director Paul Johnson discusses the Autumn Statement and the direction of British economic policy in a contribution to The Economist published today.

This article was published in the Times newspaper.