The Government has announced that child benefit will be withdrawn from families containing a higher-rate taxpayer from April 2013. This would save around £1 billion a year, but the way it will be withdrawn looks unfair to some families, and will seriously distort work incentives for some families with children.

The consultation period on the Government's ideas for fundamental reforms to the benefits system ends on 1 October. Integrating all benefits and tax credits should create a system which is simpler for both claimants and government, but the Government will need to explain much more clearly how a Universal Credit would work and how much different groups of recipients will get if we are to have an informed debate on its merits.

The Department of Work and Pensions today published a consultation paper called 21st Century Welfare which sets out ideas for fundamental reforms to the benefits system. The report presents a number of options for integrating different existing benefits.

Last week the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable, suggested a graduate tax as a 'fairer' replacement for tuition fees in higher education. All the Labour leadership candidates - with the exception of David Miliband - have expressed support for this idea, as has the National Union of Students; the leading universities, meanwhile, have opposed it. This Observation examines whether the rationale for such a policy and the practical implications of it have been fully considered.

The Coalition agreement reiterated the Conservative's manifesto pledge to "increase the proportion of tax revenue accounted for by environmental taxes". Past experience suggests that this is easier said than done: environmental taxes fell sharply as a share of total receipts during the Labour Government's period in office despite a similar ambition to shift taxes from 'goods' to 'bads'. Unless the Coalition announces new increases in environmental taxes, the latest forecasts show they are unlikely to meet their pledge either.

Now that the Office for Budget Responsibility has delivered its judgement that the structural hole in the public finances is slightly larger than Alistair Darling claimed in his final Budget in March, attention turns to how George Osborne might go about filling it in his first Budget next week.

As part of an international collaboration funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Australian Research Council, researchers at the IFS and the Australian National University have sought to compare the nature of private schooling in both Australia and the UK.

The coalition government has announced ambitious plans for a new generation of schools inspired by the Swedish model of "free schools." Creating these new schools will clearly involve a capital cost. However, capital spending is likely to be significantly cut across most departments over the next four years, education included. Unless the new schools programme is to be very modest, plans for overall capital spending will need to be revised upwards or the cuts to investment spending elsewhere will be extremely deep.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, today gave a little more detail on the Government's plans for welfare reform, suggesting that the benefit system needed simplifying, incentives to work strengthening, and welfare-to-work programmes reforming . But what can actually be done?

The new coalition Government has announced a £6.2 billion headline cut to public spending in the current year. Since £500 million is being recycled into additional spending or tax cuts, and the £704 million earmarked for devolved administrations does not have to be found until next year, the likely reduction in borrowing in 2010-11 is around £5 billion. This is less than a tenth of the fiscal repair job that Alistair Darling's March 2010 Budget forecast suggested will be needed over the next few years.