This article explores the value to households in different income groups of benefits from public spending on education, the National Health Service and subsidies to local authority housing. Its results are drawn from secondary analysis of the 1987 General Household Survey (GHS). The paper...

In April 1991 the Government set out its proposals for replacement of the Community Charge (poll tax) by the Council Tax. This paper analyses the structure of the new tax and examines its distributional effects. Section II describes the proposed tax and demonstrates how it is hybrid of poll tax,...

Presenting his 2010 spending review, George Osborne, the Chancellor, insisted that "those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden". How did the Coalition's benefit and direct tax policies affect the distribution of incomes, inequality and poverty?

This paper examines the decline of National Insurance in Britain, as witnessed by its declining share of all social security spending and the steady dilution of the ¿contributory principle¿ on which it was originally based. It argues that this decline is not an accident: under governments of...

This CASEbrief summarises 'Paying for health, education and housing: how does the centre pull the purse strings?' by Howard Glennerster, John Hills and Tony Travers, with Ross Hendry, published by the Oxford University Press

Interim report of the Fuel Poverty Review

This article outlines the recommendations of the UK Pensions Commission, and the data and analysis on which they were based, including projections of demographic change, trends in private pension saving, and evolution of the state pension system. The Commission concluded that without reform,...

Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrial countries and more so than a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways - most obviously in the gap between those who are well off and those who are less well off. But inequalities in people's economic positions are also...