Most people are aware that everyone who reaches state pension age in Britain, and most of the over 60s, are given a generous taxpayer-funded subsidy to use public transport. But how do people actually use this in practice? And how much does it cost? In order to investigate how people use age-related fare concessions, IF… Read more »
Term: Papers
All in this together? Why over-65s should pay National Insurance
There is currently an imbalance in the UK tax system. As things stand, workers stop having to pay National Insurance contributions (NICs) when they reach state pension age, effectively giving workers who continue at their jobs a pay rise at the expense of the general taxpayer. The rapid increase in the number of workers who… Read more »
Can the UK Afford to Pay for Pensions?
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 »
Will young people be poorer than their parents?
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 »
Spending Power across the Generations
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 »
Flying in the Face of Fairness: intergenerational inequities in the taxation of air travel
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 »
Pensioner Millionaires in the UK: identifying the numbers
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 »
How the Localism Act hands power to older generations
Is decision-making automatically more democratic if it occurs at the local level? The assumption that this is the case has underpinned much of the political rhetoric surrounding the “Localism” agenda, which has sought to devolve political power away from top-down, centralised decision-making as much as possible in favour of transferring new powers – especially in… Read more »
The IF Intergenerational Fairness Index: 2012 Edition
The IF Intergenerational Fairness Index represents the first attempt which has been undertaken in the UK to measure systematically the impact that government policies have had on the younger generation. By combining data on a range of variables stretching back to 2000, the IF Index enables us to demonstrate quantitatively that the position of young… Read more »
False Accounting? Why the government’s Higher Education reforms don’t add up
The Coalition government’s reforms to higher education funding in England have been enormously controversial ever since they were first announced. But why did the government decide to go down this path at all? In this groundbreaking research paper, written on behalf of IF by higher education expert Dr Andrew McGettigan, he argues that the main… Read more »