Both before and since the 2024 UK general election, politicians have been talking about the potential value of impact investment in achieving their policy goals. Despite this interest, and an increasing body of evidence from live examples, it has proven hard for policymakers to understand how to integrate impact investment options into their policy toolkit.

This report by Stephen Muers, Chief Executive Officer of Better Society Capital, aims to introduce some of the circumstances in which this approach might be helpful, specifically within a UK domestic context and reflecting the different levels of government that can make use of it.

This report by Dr Marsha Wood, Dr Rita Griffiths and Professor Nick Pearce draws on interviews with 22 low-income parents in receipt of Universal Credit (UC) and explores how they manage childcare costs, as well as their broader experiences of childcare and work conditionality requirements.

In particular, the report focuses on the challenges low-income parents faced with reclaiming childcare costs through the childcare element of Universal Credit. The report makes a number of recommendations about improving childcare support for low-income families.

The interviews were conducted as part of a wider qualitative longitudinal research study, funded by abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, exploring the experiences of working claimants on UC.

The report is accompanied by a policy brief summarising the key findings and recommendations.

This guide, written by Dr Poornika Ananth, is intended as a resource for policymakers to help them understand how to use qualitative research methodologies in the written public consultation process.

Qualitative data are vivid, rich, and nuanced, and are particularly beneficial when complex processes and relationships between constructs need to be understood or examined, when individuals’ lived experiences, interpretations, and social contexts need to be captured, and when knowledge is incomplete, underdeveloped, or flawed.

The brief provides guidance on how to collect and analyse qualitative data from the public in ways that account for the standard constraints of public consultation processes and enable the development of an actionable set of policy insights.

This report by Dr Chris Dimos, Dr Aida Garcia-Lazaro and Charles Carter investigates productivity and innovation in the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority (WofE CA) and offers comparisons to selected Mayoral Combined Authorities.

This research extends previous work by providing additional insights on the topic, utilising new data at the establishment level provided by the Office for National Statistics. The use of microdata enabled the aggregation of establishment-level data to the desired regional level for a wider set of establishment characteristics including ownership, size, profitability and industrial affiliation. This enables a more detailed analysis of how productivity and innovation vary across establishment characteristics.

The report also investigates the motivations and obstacles to innovation. The combination of microdata from the ONS with broader regional analysis makes this study a valuable tool for policymakers and stakeholders looking to enhance the WofE CA's business environment and regional competitiveness and successfully implement WofE CA's Plan for Innovation.

The Government faces a key balancing act: growing a world-leading life sciences sector while safeguarding patients from the risks posed by financial conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical and medical device companies and the NHS, its staff and professional bodies. Ensuring full transparency of these ties is essential, but the current disclosure system, created and overseen by the industry, does little to address these risks. Independent research and the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review have highlighted its failures. In addition, cases of avoidable patient harm and instances of major companies failing to disclose payments underscore the urgent need for reform. The Government’s proposals in 2023 offered only modest improvements.

This policy brief, written by a team of international academic researchers and UK-based patient advocates, recommends legislative changes in three key areas based on patient experience, international best practices and research evidence. The reforms will promote transparency by being comprehensive, enforceable and actionable. In so doing, they will support the Government’s core missions to strengthen the NHS and drive investment in life sciences. Following the scope of the IMMDS Review, the reforms focus on England, but their core transparency principles are relevant for all devolved administrations within the UK.

Drawing on the findings of a qualitative research study exploring the experience of working claimants on Universal Credit (UC), this new policy report by Dr Rita Griffiths and Dr Marsha Wood explores the interaction between earnings, ‘passported’ benefits and other means-tested support.

The research found that, while all participants had levels of earnings low enough to entitle them to UC, only in rare instances did UC receipt, of itself, automatically qualify them for help. Not only were application processes typically onerous and time-consuming, but many working claimants were ineligible for support due to the very low earnings thresholds which applied to most of the schemes. Others had variable earnings which meant they dipped in and out of eligibility from one month to the next. Those whose earnings rose above a certain level could find themselves financially worse off, undermining UC’s fundamental goal to ‘make work pay’. This was because the extra take home pay was often worth less than the value of the entitlements lost. These ‘cliff edges’ discouraged some people from working longer hours and earning more.

A key recommendation is for a comprehensive review to be conducted of the additional means-tested benefits, schemes and discounts that sit outside Universal Credit, exploring their interaction with earnings and their effects on work incentives and employment behaviours. This should be included as part of the review into UC and the Government’s new child poverty strategy.

The report is accompanied by a policy brief summarising the key findings and recommendations.

The research was funded by abrdn Financial Fairness Trust.