Polly Simpson

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.

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government.

This note addresses the questions raised by the HCLG Committee's Local Government Finance and the 2019 Spending Review inquiry.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is responsible for setting the overall direction for social care policy and funding in England. Recently DHSC has developed in-house modelling capacity to examine likely implications of possible reforms to the system for funding social care. This departs from the process used by the Dilnot Commission on the Funding of Care and Support, where modelling of the implications of the proposed reforms was commissioned from the Public Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent and the London School of Economics.

The National Infrastructure Commission commissioned a team of academics and researchers at the IFS and UCL to create a software tool that estimates how land values respond to changes in land purpose or infrastructure improvements. The tool is now available online, and this page provides some background on, and documentation for, the project.

Analysis of how council spending on adult social care and other services changed between 2009-10 and 2017-18.

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 of real-terms changes in business rates revenues in a number of areas of England. From April 2018, a further 10 areas are piloting 100% schemes. In this briefing note, we examine two questions. First, what are the financial implications of the pilots for different councils? In particular, what is the financial benefit to councils taking part in the pilots, and what does this imply for those councils not in pilot areas? Second, what can be learnt from these pilots? The government has explicitly set out what it hopes to learn, but how informative are the pilots actually likely to be?

This report argues that ongoing reforms to local government finance risk a growing funding gap for adult social care and conflict with efforts to provide consistent and high-quality care services across the country.