Worries over money overtake climate change concerns

Liz Emerson, IF Co-founder, investigates new Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey data on worries about climate change and argues that the government should be doing much more to reduce the cost of living through a green lens. Money worries A recent ONS survey on worries about climate change found that, when asked about a… Read more »

Should the 3 million pensioner millionaires be benefiting from the pensions triple lock?

With new figures recently published showing that the wealth gap between pensioners and the rest of society is as wide as it has ever been, IF Co-Founder Angus Hanton considers the ramifications of this growing inequality, and asks whether the triple lock on the state pension has had its time. Almost quadrupled in ten years… Read more »

Spring Statement: compounding the cost of living crisis for young people

On March 23, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, delivered his Spring Statement to Parliament, announcing a number of measures intended to alleviate the cost of living crisis. However, IF Co-Founder, Angus Hanton, argues that this package, combined with the government’s longstanding economic and fiscal policies, will do very little to solve the cost of… Read more »

Anti-democratic clauses in trade deals are barriers to intergenerational environmental justice

Part of the concept of intergenerational justice is that young people must be able to have a say in policy-making. Democratic systems must allow for their citizens to exert agency over economic and political processes in the first place, otherwise there would be no vehicle for translating the will of (young) people into action and… Read more »

A year in research: our 2021 recap

The end of 2021 marked the 10th anniversary of the founding of IF, a milestone that we marked with a report looking at how the welfare of younger generations has changed over the past decade. IF published three other research reports this year on growing housing inequality, age bias in government spending and the discount… Read more »

The social care cap and the intergenerational contract

On 7 September 2021, the government announced reforms to the social care system in order to provide more support to people with fewer financial resources. A recent announcement on 17 November 2021 casts doubt on whether these reforms will be worth the costs borne by younger generations. John Hobby, IF researcher, investigates whether this is… Read more »

National Insurance: young people and lower earners hit the hardest

Yesterday, MPs voted to approve raising employees’ National Insurance Contributions (NICs) by 1.25 percentage points, breaking a key manifesto promise not to raise taxes. While the government marketed the rise as “progressive”, in reality it is an intergenerationally unfair tax reform which will affect younger generations the most. Lizzie Simpson, IF Researcher, explains. A regressive… Read more »

New 95% mortgage policy will make homeownership even more unaffordable

The announcement of the 95% mortgage in this week’s budget may have initially sounded like good news for those in “generation rent” who have struggled for years to get onto the housing ladder. However, Lizzie Simpson, IF Researcher, explains why this policy is likely to make homeownership increasingly unachievable for young people in the longer… Read more »