Business owners have been the fastest-growing part of the UK labour force since at least 2000. Between 2000-01 and 2015-16, the number of employees grew by 15%, while selfemployment (including those operating as a sole trader or as a partner in a partnership) grew by 25% and the number of...

The 2010s have been a decade of major financial change for English local government. Not only have funding levels - and hence what councils can spend on local services - fallen significantly; major reforms to the funding system have seen an increasing emphasis on using funding to provide...

This report examines how living standards - most commonly measured by households' incomes - have changed for different groups in the UK, and the consequences that these changes have for income inequality and for measures of deprivation and poverty. In this latest report, we focus in particular...

From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a "one-stop shop" for...

Funding the National Health Service is the biggest single thing the government does, so it is not surprising that it is at the forefront of the election campaign. In this report, we look at how health spending has changed over the last 70 years and place funding increases since 2010 in the...

Whether the UK leaves the European Union, and if so on what terms, is a crucial issue and therefore rightly should be the subject of much debate in the run-up to the general election on 12 December. But Brexit is not the only economically important decision that the UK faces. So the general...

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of whether additional taxes should be devolved to English local government. The past decade has seen a number of changes to how local government is funded, including the introduction of business rates retention. Broadly, these...

The long-term care needs of the growing older population are increasingly important issues for policymakers and society as a whole. This report uses new data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing - a panel survey representative of the household population aged 50 and over in England with...

The local government finance system in England is undergoing genuinely revolutionary change. A highly-centralised system of funding, with central government grants allocated on the basis of councils' relative spending need, is set to be replaced by a system where councils as a group are...