Briefing notes
We produce short briefing notes on current policy issues, drawing on our expertise and research findings.
Briefing note
Current plans for councils to rely on council tax and business rates for the vast bulk of their funding don’t look compatible with our expectations of what councils should provide. A proper national debate on how much we are willing to pay and what we expect of councils is needed.
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The tax and benefit system is a key tool for a government trying to reduce inequality. In this briefing note, we examine the effects that cash benefits and taxes had on UK inequality in 2016–17.
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In this research we investigate who wins and loses from universal credit, and by how much. For the first time, we also look at the effects of universal credit on people’s incomes over eight years of their lives, rather than just at a point in time. This lets us look at the impact on those that ...
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This Saturday (6 April 2019) marks the start of a new tax year. Unlike many other countries, the UK routinely – and sensibly – uprates the cash values of most tax thresholds and benefit rates each year in line with inflation, in order to maintain their real value.
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After five years of recovery from post recession declines, real income growth ground to a complete halt in 2017–18.
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This work estimates how government spending is distributed by subject studied and university attended, based on grants and unrepaid student loans (including both tuition and maintenance loans).
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The Chancellor is yet to confirm how much money will be made available to departments at the 2019 Spending Review. To meet his promise to end austerity, Phillip Hammond will need to find billions of extra funding.
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Pupils benefit from a large amount of state funding for education in the 12+ years they spend in formal education, about £73,000 on average for pupils aged 16 in Summer 2010 in England. The total amount they experience is shaped by their education choices (e.g. whether to stay on post 16 and/or go ...
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English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and boost local revenue-raising capacity. However, ...
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Analysis of how council spending on adult social care and other services changed between 2009-10 and 2017-18.
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There has been lots of recent research and debate on individuals’ accumulation of wealth for retirement, driven by the concern that younger generations are not saving enough. Much less attention, however, has been paid to how individuals use their wealth once in retirement. In this note, we ...
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In this briefing note, we examine how individuals’ financial wealth evolves as they age through retirement.
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The extent to which people draw on their housing wealth in later life is an important issue, with implications for the living standards of current older individuals and their use of other financial resources, the likely bequests that will be received by younger generations, and policymakers’ ...
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Since 2007 it has not been permitted to advertise food and drink that is high in fat, salt or sugar during children's television programmes. Evidence from Ofcom suggests that in 2016 children spent 64% of their viewing time watching programmes outside children’s programming. Recent discussion ...
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High quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) are critical to children’s development and their success in adult life. Ghana has shown substantial commitment to improving ECCE, with one of the highest pre-school enrolment rates in Sub Saharan Africa. However despite this, significant ...
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Over the past 40 years, the UK has seen an almost continual rise in the proportion of women in employment. The employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to a record high of 78% in 2017.
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The business rates retention scheme (BRRS) means that councils bear a proportion of the real-terms change in business rates revenues in their areas. When the BRRS was introduced in 2013–14, this proportion was up to 50%. However, since April 2017, the government has been piloting 100% retention ...
Briefing note
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 ...
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This note summarises ongoing work being undertaken by Lucie Gadenne, Tushar Nandi and Roland Rathelot on the scale and nature of supply chain distortions in West Bengal. Earlier work examined the effects of reforms to West Bengal’s simplified tax schemes on revenues.
Briefing note
This paper, written collaboratively by IFS researchers and policy-makers from Ethiopia and Ghana, has multiple and interlinked objectives: (i) to provide an overview of tax incentives and best practices for their design grounded in economic principles, and assess how these apply to the case studies ...