On Thursday, the government set out its plans for council funding in England next year. In this briefing note we examine plans for both core funding and top-ups for ongoing COVID-19 related costs, and look at some of the issues looming beyond next year.
In this paper, we estimate the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on mental health in the UK. We use longitudinal micro data for the UK over the period 2009–20 to control for pre‐existing trends in mental health and construct individual‐specific counterfactual predictions for April 2020, against which the COVID‐19 mental health outcomes can be assessed.
We find that reductions in social care spending led to substantial increases in use of Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments by individuals aged 65 and above. The impacts were most pronounced among the very oldest (those aged 85 and above) and those living in more deprived neighbourhoods.
This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care.
People on middle and higher incomes need to save privately for retirement, but deciding when and how much to save is difficult. One particular trade-off people face is how much to save in a pension and how much to save for, or spend on, owner occupied housing. In new research published today we examine interactions between housing and and pension saving at two distinct stages of life.
We examine the extent to which owner-occupiers in their 50s and 60s change their private pension saving when they complete repayment of the mortgage on their primary residence. Using panel data from a household survey, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we identify those who completed repayment of their mortgage as anticipated two years prior.
The research summarised in this briefing note has taken an important first step in understanding how the timing of individuals’ pension saving interacts with the accumulation of housing wealth.
In this paper, we estimate the effect of house prices on whether or not young adults actively save in a private pension. We use job-level data from a survey of employers, matched to average house prices at the level of an individuals’ location of employment, exploiting geographical variation in local house price movements in England over the decade 1997 to 2007.
