Government finances and spending

Presentation given at the 'Autumn Statement 2014: IFS analysis' event on 4 December 2014.

This comment piece was first published by The Times and has been reproduced here with permission.

Presentation to the CIPFA Pensions Network CFO Briefing, 24 November 2014, London.

This presentation was given at the National Association of Schools Business Management on 19 November 2014.

This presentation was given today by Claire Crawford (University of Warwick and IFS) at the Nuffield Foundation.

This presentation was given today by Professor Lorraine Dearden (Institute of Education and IFS) at the Nuffield Foundation.

This presentation was given at an Economic and Social Research Council / British Academy event on 'UK housing: setting out the challenge' held in London on 29 October 2014.

There has been heated debate over the increase in tuition fees to £9,000 a year for many students that occurred in 2012. But another major change to the support for disadvantaged students was introduced at the same time: not only were universities required to provide details of their proposed financial support schemes and access programmes before they were allowed to charge fees above £6,000, but also the government introduced a National Scholarship Programme (NSP), designed to offer additional financial support to students via their universities. Here we provide an in-depth analysis of the financial support that universities have been offering since 2012 and the likely consequences now that the government has announced that the NSP will no longer provide support for undergraduate students from 2015.

This presentation was given to Government Economic Service officials at an HM Revenue & Customs conference on the Economics of Tax held in London on 20 October 2014.

With the general election now just eight months away the political parties are starting to set out what they would aim to achieve in government. In this observation, we describe what each of the three main UK parties have said about their fiscal targets and discuss how these differ from current coalition government policy and from each other. Meeting the Conservatives’ target could result in debt falling more quickly than would be the case under the rules proposed by Labour or the Liberal Democrats. But doing so would require tax rises or significantly greater cuts in public spending than Labour and the Liberal Democrats would require to meet their rules – on top of those that are already planned up to 2015–16.

This presentation was given to officials of the Indian Revenue Service on the Indian Institute of Management programme at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, on 18 September 2014.

The future of the welfare state, and particularly of the NHS, has taken centre stage in the Scottish independence debate in recent days. Given the political rhetoric, there is a clear need for some impartial analysis. In this observation we try to set out some of the facts on both recent changes in NHS spending in England and Scotland, and the prospects for the future whether Scotland is in or out of the Union. Our analysis suggests it is unlikely that independence would make it easier to find additional money for the NHS.

This presentation was given at the IFS Residential Conference 2014 on 'Taxing remuneration: principles and practice', held at the University of Cambridge on 5-6 September 2014.