Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced a ‘70th Birthday present’ for the NHS, pledging average real annual increases of 3.4% per year for the next five years. One challenge for the Government is where the money to pay for this will come from. After social security spending, the NHS is the single biggest element of government spending, so a large increase in NHS funding has significant implications for the public finances.
Yesterday we heard the first details of a new five-year funding settlement for the NHS in England. It was announced NHS England funding would be slightly more than £20 billion higher in 2023-24 than in 2018–19 after adjusting for forecast economy-wide inflation over the period. This represents a larger increase in funding for the NHS than we have seen in the last 8 years, but remains below historical average growth in UK health spending (3.7% per year).
Following widespread austerity measures introduced in 2009/10, public funding for adult social care has fallen substantially. In particular, funding for social care for people aged 65 and older has been particularly hard hit, falling by 21% between 2009/10 and 2015/16. While some additional money in recent years has reversed some of these cuts, these funding decisions are likely to have had a number of consequences for users of social care, their carers and for other related public services. But what do we really know about their impact?
This report examines changes in the distribution of household incomes in the UK, and the determinants and consequences of recent trends. This includes analysing changes not only in average living standards but also in household income inequality and measures of income poverty and deprivation.
It’s ten years since those heady pre-crisis days when boom and bust had supposedly been abolished, when we seemed able to afford ever more public spending, and when we could expect earnings to always rise ahead of inflation. The great recession continues to cast a long shadow over all our lives, and not least when it comes to pay.
Public spending on social care for older people in England has seen large cuts in recent years, falling by 21% between 2009–10 and 2015–16. This has led to growing concerns over the potential for adverse effects on other public services, and in particular the NHS.
Recent years have seen substantial reductions in public spending on social care for older people in England. This has not only led to large falls in the number of people over the age of 65 receiving publicly funded social care, but also to growing concern about the potential knock-on effects on other public services, and in particular the National Health Service (NHS).
This chapter of the flagship annual publication 'Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK' examines how the hourly wages, weekly earnings and living standards of people with low hourly wages have changed in the years after the introduction of the NLW.
This paper studies the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. It shows that under limited commitment with coalitional deviations, this relationship is theoretically ambiguous.
