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The UK government currently has almost £5 trillion worth of pension liabilities which it will have to pay in the future (£1.2 trillion for public service pensions and £3.84 trillion in respect of the state pension). Most of these are unfunded, meaning that they are largely paid out of annual tax revenues and the bill… Read more »

  In 2011, the Labour leader Ed Miliband drew headlines when he warned that his generation was in danger of failing to fulfil the “British promise” that each new generation should be able to enjoy a better quality of life than the previous one had. This comment seemed to tap into a widespread sense of… Read more »

Who wields the balance of spending power in contemporary Britain? With increasing media and political rhetoric surrounding the “cost-of-living-crisis”, it is useful to analyse patterns of spending behaviour to see if certain types of household appear to be suffering or benefiting disproportionately as a result of broader economic trends. In this report, IF analysed data… Read more »

Debates about aviation policy in Britain are usually concerned with how many airports the country needs – and where they should be built – to support the economy and give us enough extra capacity to handle the increasing amount of flying that people are projected to do in the future. This report, written on behalf… Read more »

The members of Britain’s baby boomer generation who are just starting to enter retirement have been called “the richest generation in history”. Yet, to a large extent, the British welfare state still treats age as a proxy for need, transferring large amounts of public money to all pensioners in the form of universal benefits, regardless… Read more »