Property taxes: ripe for reform or a poisoned chalice?

Understand this issue

Average household consumption spending before and after housing costs, and mean weekly per-capita income, in different local authorities, 2018–2019

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Londoners may have the highest average incomes, but their household spending once you account for housing costs is lower than other regions.

11 April 2025

Rank of local authorities by average household income compared to rank by average consumption after housing costs

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On average, London local authorities rank at the top of the income distribution, but are bottom of the net-of-housing consumption distribution.

11 April 2025

Two-child limit mitigation in Scotland would help larger poor families but policy design could harm work incentives

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Mitigating the two-child limit policy would be an effective way to reduce child poverty, but designing an effective policy is not straightforward. 

14 March 2025

Policy analysis

Council tax hikes will do the heavy lifting

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IFS Senior Research Economist Kate Ogden writes in Municipal Journal about what the 2025 Spending Review will mean for public services and councils.

17 June 2025

Which places have the highest standard of living?

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Measuring living standards using average household spending gives a starkly different picture of regional inequalities than using average income.

11 April 2025

Where and how does the government spend its money?

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Explore how and where the government spends money, and how this has changed over time, in all regions and nations of the UK

10 April 2025

Academic research

Resource windfalls, public expenditures and local economies

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We show that the redistribution of natural resource tax revenues to non-extractive municipalities stimulates economic activity in local economies.

18 November 2024

Small area consumption estimates for local authorities in Great Britain

working paper

In this paper, we estimate average equivalised consumption measures across local authority districts in Great Britain.

11 April 2025

Cheapflation and the rise of inflation inequality

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Using household scanner data for fast-moving consumer goods, we show that this was accompanied by historically high rates of inflation inequality.

14 August 2024