Universal credit

We use data on household incomes from the Family Resources Survey, together with OBR macroeconomic forecasts and announced changes in tax and benefit policy, to project household incomes up to 2021–22.

This paper describes all the main benefits in the UK system, giving details of rates and allowances, as well as numbers and types of claimants and levels of expenditure.

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014–15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years.

This report, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is the fifteenth in an annual series published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). It analyses the HBAI statistics and digs deeper to explore the driving forces behind key trends in living standards, inequality and poverty.

Official data on the distribution of household incomes in the UK are available only with a significant lag: the latest statistics are for 2013–14. In this report, we use modelling techniques to provide a more up-to-date picture and to assess how things are likely to evolve in the coming years.

The IFS Green Budget 2016 was published on 8 February.