Publications Archive

Small Pieces Loosely Joined highlights how billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being wasted due to the inability of local councils to share and to use technology and data in the most cost effective way. It sets out how councils can save money by making better use of data through sharing and fraud prevention and by replacing bespoke IT systems with an ‘app store’.

Bonus ISAs proposes a new scheme to give people more flexibility to build up their tax-free savings pots during the course of a lifetime. The “Bonus ISA” would be offered to anybody who is unable to use their full annual tax-free savings allowance (currently set at £15,000). People would be given the power to roll over any unused portions of their existing ISA allowances into their Bonus ISA account.

Warmer Homes presents a character profile of the 2.3 million households in England living in fuel poverty. Among the findings in the report is the fact that nearly half of all fuel poor households (1.1m) are in work, challenging the perception that fuel poverty primarily involves the elderly and retired.

This report calls for plans to introduce auctioning to enable all technologies to compete on a level playing field should be brought forward. It points to Brazil, where prices for onshore wind have dropped to world record lows since auctioning was introduced. If the UK can achieve a even a fraction of the results from Brazil, it would allow much greater decarbonisation for the available budget.

Housing associations are being stifled by unnecessary red tape that prevents them from building 100,000 new homes a year – a third of the total housing supply needed to keep up with demand. The government should create a new category of ‘Free Housing Associations’, that are able to set their own rent policy, choose their own tenants and manage their housing stock with greater autonomy.

Money for Nothing argues that new fiscal rules should bind future governments to a spending envelope based on reducing the UK’s debt-GDP ratio to a sustainable level. The report highlights the scale of the challenge and argues that strict penalties must be put in place to ensure that politicians stay within the rules, including automatic nominal freezes to public sector pay, the state pension and benefit payments.

Electoral Omission highlights how the administration of elections in the UK remains dangerously inefficient and open to fraud and predicts that there will be up to 15.5 million errors on the UK’s electoral registers at the time of next year’s General Election. The report recommends the introduction of targets for the maximum number of omissions and errors in the electoral register and annual checks to measure accuracy, along with small council tax rebates to encourage people to complete and return their voter registration forms.

Making Contributions Count proposes a new unemployment insurance scheme which will put personal contribution at the heart of the welfare system. The scheme would see people who have worked hard and paid their taxes able to draw from a contributory pot to provide a greater level of out of work support if they need it. Upon retirement, the contributions would be released as part of an individual’s pension package, which could see people who worked all their lives receiving in excess of £10,000.

Work 2.0 provides a blueprint for how the Work Programme – the government’s flagship welfare-to-work policy – should be improved, including ideas on how to better assess jobseeker needs, how to integrate the Programme into the structures of Universal Credit, and how to better recognise local labour market conditions.

A “perfect storm” of challenges could see over 3,000 primary schools (20%) falling below the government’s tough new minimum standards in 2016. Primary Focus says the most effective way to ensure teachers and schools have the capability and capacity to cope with these challenges is to convert all primary schools into Academies, and then ask each school to join an Academy ‘chain’ by 2020.

The technology revolution is failing to reach all parts of Britain. Silicon Cities argues that ‘clusters’ – geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field – are the most effective way of boosting the technology sector across the country, and makes a number of recommendations as to how this can be achieved.

Written by inner-city crime writer Gavin Knight, The Estate We’re In calls for politicians from all parties to pledge to turn around the most deprived council estates within the next decade. The report highlights how decades of neglect and ghettoization have led to acute social problems and, using case studies to extract best practice, draws out the key lessons for policymakers in how to turn around the worst housing estates.

Parks and other urban green spaces are highly important to the social and economic wellbeing of the country. However, as local authority budgets have been squeezed, public funding of parks and open spaces has declined. In light of this, Green Society suggests a number of innovative ways to protect and improve the UK’s urban green spaces including the idea of a council tax rebate for local residents who volunteer to maintain nearby green spaces.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have recently called for more schools to run longer days – either to provide more opportunities for extra curricular activities, to help learning, or to provide a safe and secure place for childcare for working parents. Our report, and accompanying polling from YouGov, looks at what a longer day might look like in practice.

By 2050, global output is projected to treble, with two-thirds of growth coming from emerging economies. The developed world will have to change radically if it is to adapt to this new environment successfully. To realise the opportunities of the next four decades successfully – for the developing world to adapt to dramatic social and economic changes, and for the developed world to face its structural, fiscal and demographic challenges and ‘pay its way’ in the years ahead, it is vital that these long-term issues are addressed.

Connecting the UK to power stations in other countries could help bring down energy bills and meet our decarbonisation targets. Getting Interconnected shows that interconnectors could save British consumers as much as £1bn a year, as well as allowing access to zero-carbon electricity. The report calls for overseas generators to be allowed to compete for government subsidy in the new capacity market and endorses ways to ensure that revenue supports development of new interconnector links.

Politicians and policymakers must put technology front and centre of their thinking for the 2015 general election. This manifesto sets out three principal goals: to build the world’s most connected and digitally skilled society; to make Britain the most attractive place outside of Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurs to start and grow a business; and to make our government the smartest in the world.

For too long, people from ethnic minorities have been categorised under the catch-all title of “BME”. But this title does not depict the clear and meaningful differences between each of the communities that come under this title. A Portrait of Modern Britain draws on an extensive set of survey, census, academic and polling data to build up a detailed picture of the five largest minority groups in the UK. It outlines the demographics, geography, life experiences, attitudes and socioeconomic status of each of these major ethnic groups.

Is there a north-south divide political divide? A major study into public attitudes – Northern Lights – examines the new political and social geography of England. The research finds that the way people vote is less and less determined by their social class, and more by how they think the government is performing and their attitudes to controversial issues like migration and crime.

This report is Policy Exchange’s contribution to retirement housing provider Hanover’s Hanover@50 debate on the future of housing for older people. The report says reform of the planning system to encourage developers to build more homes, including bungalows and self build homes attractive to older people looking to downsize, is the fairer way of reducing the generational divide.

Board Rules: Improving corporate governance, reveals that the solutions proposed and enacted by the government to drive up the standards of corporate governance among UK companies amount to little more than, “a damp squib”. The report recommends that investor representatives should be appointed to board nomination committees and that CEOs should be banned from such bodies.

Taxing Jobs argues that because pay and productivity have remained strongly linked over the course of the recession, wages will begin to rise and productivity will improve as employers take on more staff. Providing a boost to the labour market in the form of a cut to the payroll tax for businesses would speed up the rate at which companies take on more staff. This would reduce unemployment more quickly and force employers to improve productivity and therefore pay among their workforces.

Watching the Watchmen calls for a fundamental change in the power relationship between schools and Ofsted. It calls for lesson observations to be ditched, for Ofsted to consider abolishing or radically reducing the number of inspectors contracted to private companies and for inspectors to have relevant and recent teaching experience. It also proposes a new two-stage inspection process that will allow more resources to be focused on struggling schools.

Future Courts calls for magistrates to dispense justice inside police stations at peak times – including evenings and weekends – and be put in charge of the administration of out-of-court disposals, as part of a radical drive to speed up the operation of the criminal justice system.

Some 48,530 children are now in a care system that is letting many of them down and is in radical need of reform.Fostering Aspirations makes a number of recommendations to increase the number of carers and improve the quality of care children receive.

11 million people are at risk of entering ‘pensioner poverty’ when they retire. With the average pension pot standing at £36,800 a person will need to save six and a half times more to reach the £240,000 required to generate the government’s recommended retirement income of £16,200. Help to Save calls for government to make it obligatory for people to save for their retirement by removing the opt-out in the existing auto-enrolment scheme while also increasing individual contributions to pensions as their incomes rise over time.

Parenting Alone calls for more support to help lone parents with young children into work. The report finds although the number of lone parents working is higher than in the 1990s, 650,000 – or 1 in 3 – are still unemployed. It recommends more intensive support for lone parents when their youngest child is 3 or 4 and measures to stabilise the income of those moving from benefits into work or to higher paid work.