The current decade is one of significant fiscal austerity for government spending. The coalition government that came to power in 2010 has embarked on a path of fiscal consolidation that is now expected to last at least seven years (up to 2017-18), with tax increases and spending cuts that are...

The UK is currently experiencing a period of considerable fiscal austerity. This has had profound implications for virtually all areas of public spending, including spending on higher education. In this report, we use our own model of graduate earnings and repayments to produce an independent...

This report updates and extends the previous IFS work to examine the consequences of these changes for graduates. In particular, we use a new model of graduate earnings and repayments and explore in more detail the pattern and size of loan repayments made, including by different types of graduates.

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make apractical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to "high-status" universities and professional occupations for high attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The SMF's programmes...

In 2008-09, the UK experienced its deepest recession since the Second World War. One notable feature of this recession was, however, the resilience of employment, which fell by just 2.1% at a time when GDP fell by 6.3%. This suggests that firms may have been trying to weather the recession by...

Longer working lives offer many benefits, but achieving these can pose challenges for individuals, employers and policymakers. In order to support people in their 50s and 60sto remain in paid work for longer, it is imperative that we have a good picture of what paid work looks like at older...

Fuelled by changes to UK pensions policy over the last decade, most notably automatic enrolment into workplace pensions, an increasing number of people save for their retirement in defined contribution pension pots. Due to the end of compulsory annuitisation in 2015, known as 'Pension Freedoms',...

In this report, we examine the long-run fiscal pressures that an independent Scotland may face, how these would differ from those facing the UK, and the size of the fiscal consolidation that may be required to put Scotland's public finances on a sustainable path. We do this using a model of the...

The last 25 years have seen two periods of public expenditure restraint in the UK (the 1990s and the 2010s) and one period of increased spending (between 2000 and 2010). Over that whole time, the Treasury has been responsible for controlling government spending, setting fiscal rules and the...

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is responsible for setting the overall direction for social care policy and funding in England. Recently DHSC has developed in-house modelling capacity to examine likely implications of possible reforms to the system for funding social care. This...