Analysis of the parties' proposals in the run-up to the general election 2010 will be posted here as it becomes available.
This work has been kindly funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
In this press release we provide an initial analysis of the information in the new coalition government's agreement on their plans to tackle the public finances and on their planned tax and benefit reforms.
This election briefing note reviews the policies that the three main UK political parties have announced in their manifestos that relate to state pensions, private pension saving, public sector pensions, and employment at older ages.
The Labour party is pointing to the fact that the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats are proposing cuts to child tax credit for middle- to high-income families with children. But just what cuts are being proposed and which families would be affected? And how different is this from current ...
All the main UK political parties claim to have put the needs of families at the heart of their campaigns. The Conservative Party has also pledged to end the couple penalty for all couples in the tax credit system. How does the reality - as measured by specific pledges in their manifestos - match ...
This Election Briefing Note, drawing in part on past notes in this series, analyses the manifesto proposals of the three main political parties in the area of families with children.
In this election briefing note, we look at the environment policy proposals put forward by the three main UK political parties in their manifestos, as well as the current government's plans for the future.
The Conservatives have pledged in their manifesto to "increase the proportion of tax revenues accounted for by environmental taxes, ensuring that any additional revenues from new green taxes that are principally designed as an environmental measure to change behaviour are used to reduce the burden ...
This Briefing Note examines what the parties have said (explicitly and implicitly) about the scale, timing and composition of the fiscal repair job ahead, teasing out the differences and similarities.
This note discusses the tax and benefit proposals of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, looking at their economic and administrative merits, their distributional impact and their effect of incentives to work and save.
On the face of it, there appears to be much agreement between the three main UK parties on education policy: they all propose the creation of new schools or academies, and all plan to introduce a 'pupil premium' that is intended to provide more funds to schools with disadvantaged pupils. On closer ...
Today's GDP figures show that the economy grew by 0.2% in the first quarter of 2010. In the election campaign much has been made of the impact of the timing of spending cuts and tax increases on the ability of the UK economy to sustain this recovery. This is an important issue, but much less ...
Sensibly, there is general agreement between the three main parties on the need to tackle the large rise in youth and long-term unemployment caused by the recession, and all parties have policies to help deal with the high number of people who are out of work and receiving disability benefits. ...
This Briefing Note reviews developments in welfare policy under the current government and analyses the manifesto proposals of the three main political parties in this policy area.
Efficiency savings alone won't be enough to sort out the UK's massive deficit and there will have to be cuts in the quality and/or quantity of public services coupled with cuts to welfare benefits and increases in tax, write Rowena Crawford and Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
In this note, we will examine Labour's record on environmental policy since 1997. We start with a broad overview of the environmental record, looking at key outcomes on environmental taxes, expenditures and emissions and continue by looking in detail at policy developments and outcomes.
This Commentary documents in some detail how children's cognitive and social development differs between married and cohabiting parents, and provides a preliminary assessment of the extent to which such differences might be due to a causal effect of marriage itself.
Young children's cognitive or social and emotional development does not appear to be significantly affected by the formal marital status of their parents, according to a new report from IFS researchers.
The Liberal Democrat manifesto contains more extensive and more detailed tax and spending proposals than those of the other main UK parties. But taking as given the Liberal Democrats' estimates of the amounts that their proposals will cost and raise, the document is less clear than it could be in ...
The Liberal Democrats propose to increase the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 while keeping the level of income at which people start to pay the higher rate of tax unchanged. They say this giveaway would cost £16.8 billion in 2011-12. They also propose a set of significant ...
The Conservative manifesto did not tell us anything about their tax and spending plans we did not already know. In particular, it was no more explicit about how much more ambitious the Conservatives would be than the Government in reducing the budget deficit over the medium term. The Conservatives ...
The key question for the next Government is what size and combination of public spending cuts and tax increases to implement to repair our public finances. Anyone looking for a more detailed answer from Labour in its manifesto will have been disappointed.
The Liberal Democrats have, once again, claimed that the poor pay more of their income in tax than the rich, and that this gap has got larger under Labour. But, by ignoring the fact that the poor get most of this income from the state in benefit and tax credit payments, and by overstating the ...
As we watch the parties squabble over how much can be achieved in efficiency savings this year, it is worth remembering that we will not be able to judge with confidence which was right even after the event.
The tax and benefit measures implemented by Labour since 1997 have increased the incomes of poorer households and reduced those of richer ones, largely halting the rapid rise in income inequality we saw under the Conservatives. Despite this, inequality was still slightly higher in 2007-08 than when ...
This election briefing note finds strong evidence of an increase in the rate of severe poverty since 2004-05, mirroring a rise in the official poverty rate, although the rate of persistent poverty does seem to have fallen under Labour, at least until 2007.
In this Briefing Note, we assess the changes to living standards that have occurred under the first 11 years of the Labour government and compare these changes with what happened under previous governments.
The Conservative Party plans to cut central government spending on public services outside the NHS, defence and overseas aid by £6 billion in the coming financial year in order to finance a cut in National Insurance that would offset most of the impending increase that the Government has ...