The UK government is part-way through significant cuts in spending on public services as it attempts to deal with the large hole in the UK's public finances. As part of this, grants from the UK Treasury to the Welsh Government have been reduced in real terms each year since 2009-10, and the...

The UK government is part-way through significant cuts in spending on public services as it attempts to deal with the large hole in the UK's public finances. As part of this, grants from the UK Treasury to the Welsh Government have been reduced in real terms each year since 2009-10, and the...

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...

If the result of the referendum on 23 June leads to the UK leaving the EU, there will be impacts on the UK public finances. This report aims to set out the possible impacts, focusing particularly on the short run, given that the Chancellor wishes to achieve a budget balance by the end of this...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a monumental blow to the education of English school children. Over the past 18 months, English school pupils experienced two long periods of nationwide school closures. The first round of universal school closures lasted 10 weeks (from 23 March to 1 June 2020);...

Early education and childcare can have a critical impact both on helping children to develop and in supporting parents (especially mothers) to work. But childcare can also have a significant impact on the disposable income - and, hence, living standards - of families with very young children....

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents' daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements. In this paper, we provide a novel description of how parents in England living in two-parent opposite-gender families are spending their time under lockdown. We find that mothers' paid...

Education spending is the second-largest element of public service spending in the UK behind health, representing about £99 billion in 2020-21 in today's prices or about 4.5% of national income. To make efficient and equitable policy choices, it is crucial to have a clear, consistent picture of...

The UK is part-way through almost unprecedented real-terms reductions in government expenditure as the government attempts to deal with the large hole in the public finances. As part of this, the UK government has announced and is in the process of implementing £18 billion of cuts to welfare...