Category Archives: Resolution Foundation

UK rent rises forecast to outpace wage growth for three years

Posted on by

Average 13% increase by 2027 will put millions of households under further pressure, says thinktank

Rent rises in Britain are forecast to outpace wage growth, despite having already surged at the fastest pace on record after the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

The Resolution Foundation expects added pressure on millions of households and said average rents could increase by 13% over the next three years as current high growth in the private rental market work their way through existing tenancies.

Continue reading...

UK politics: Sunak refuses to say how abolition of national insurance would be funded – as it happened

Posted on by

PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure

Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.

In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)

How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?

We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

Continue reading...

Jeremy Hunt’s budget giveaway ‘will act as sweet filling in tax sandwich’

Posted on by

Thinktank says juicy cuts this year follow far bigger increases in 2023 and precede planned ‘chunky rises’

Jeremy Hunt’s expected pre-election giveaway budget will be sandwiched between £20bn of tax increases already implemented and a further £17bn of hikes pencilled in for after polling day, a thinktank has said.

The Resolution Foundation said it expected Hunt to freeze fuel duty and cut income tax on 6 March but warned the chancellor’s “tax sandwich” was based on the “fiscal fiction” of £30bn of spending cuts in the next parliament.

Continue reading...

More than 11 million Britons have less than £1,000 in savings

Posted on by

Resolution Foundation calls for auto-enrolment into saving schemes, as millions have no ‘rainy day’ fund

More than 11 million working-age people in Britain don’t have basic “rainy day” savings of at least £1,000, according to a report that warns that the poorest households are struggling to build up financial resilience amid the cost of living crisis.

The Resolution Foundation said people across Britain faced a “triple savings challenge” of insufficient savings, an inability to cope financially with major life events such as family breakdown, and inadequate retirement incomes.

Continue reading...

The broken state of UK economy is clear; Hunt and Starmer’s solutions are less so

Posted on by

Resolution Foundation report underlines lack of progress by Tories but Labour proposals seem woolly

Britain’s economy is broken. That was the simple message given by the Resolution Foundation thinktank in the final report of its long-running look into the state of the nation.

Monday’s conference to launch the report was a high-powered affair, containing past and present members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Richard Hughes, and other members of the great and good.

Continue reading...

James Cleverly tells MPs crackdown will cut annual immigration numbers by about 300,000 – as it happened

Posted on by

Home secretary to announce big hike in salary requirement for migrants to the UK as Rishi Sunak tries to cut net migration figures

Hunt says the government wants to speed up the time it takes to get a connection to the national grid by 90%.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, is interviewing Hunt. She says he has mentioned the 110 policies, but she wants to know what the growth strategy is.

Continue reading...

Jeremy Hunt faces red wall revolt if he delivers ‘a budget for the rich’

Posted on by

The chancellor’s potential inheritance tax cut in Wednesday’s budget would aid millionaires amid a cost of living crisis

Jeremy Hunt faces a backlash from “red wall” Tory MPs if he uses a fiscal windfall of up to £20bn to deliver tax cuts for the rich rather than to help ordinary families with the cost of living, the Observer has been told.

The chancellor and Rishi Sunak are this weekend finalising an autumn statement on Wednesday that could include a major reduction in inheritance tax – four-fifths of which would benefit those with more than £1m at their death, according to a new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Each person with more than £1m would receive an average tax cut of £180,000, the IFS states.

Continue reading...

Great British slowdown has hamstrung our economy – thinktank

Posted on by

Country needs successful firms to grow and struggling ones to shrink, says Resolution Foundation

The UK needs more businesses to fail, or at least shrink, to solve the economy’s long-running productivity crisis, a study has argued.

The country’s lack of “economic dynamism”, whereby weaker firms or lower productivity sectors shrink, and more productive ones grow, has caused GDP to be 4% lower between 2008 and 2019 than it would otherwise have been, according to a paper published on Monday by the Resolution Foundation.

Continue reading...

Nearly 4m fewer UK working days in past year due to strike action, study says

Posted on by

Resolution Foundation report says much of industrial action ‘fuelled’ by public sector workers’ anger over falls in real-terms pay

About 3.9m working days have been lost to industrial action in the past year, more than at any point since the 1980s, according to a new analysis.

The Resolution Foundation, which focuses its research on low- to middle-income households, said many of the strikes were “fuelled” by anger among public sector workers over real-terms pay declines, which amounted to an average cut of more than 9% since 2021, adjusted for inflation.

Continue reading...