Recent years have seen substantial reductions in public spending on social care for older people in England. This has not only led to large falls in the number of people over the age of 65 receiving publicly funded social care, but also to growing concern about the potential knock-on effects on...

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 challenging fiscal situation facing the next government means that both Labour and the Conservatives are looking for ways to improve public services without large increases in spending. Improving the productivity of public services is often proposed as a way to achieve this. This follows the...

NHS waiting lists are likely to be a key issue in the forthcoming general election. The current government has made cutting NHS waiting lists one of its key priorities, while one of the Labour party's five national missions is to "get the NHS back on its feet", including by cutting waiting...

Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

We describe how the size and shape of the state have changed since the mid 1950s and over the 2019-24 parliament, and discuss the future outlook.

This paper uses linked survey responses and administrative hospital records to examine the accuracy of self-reported medical diagnoses. The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) collects self-reported information on the incidence of heart attacks, strokes and cancer in the past two years....

This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care. Mean per-person long-term care spending fell by 31% between 2009/10 and 2017/18 as part of a large austerity...