Latest Publications

Childcare costs in the UK are contributing to poverty and gender inequality. As part of our cross-party Commission on Childcare, we're publishing new analysis on the extent of the childcare crisis - the impact of being dragged out of the labour market to look after children has a long-term, scarring effect on wages. We'll be engaging with stakeholders and developing policy solutions in Autumn.

The shift towards digital banking, accelerated by the pandemic, creates many opportunities and offers benefits for the economy as a whole – but also brings with it some risks. This report explores future access to retail banking services, and the best way to ensure any such changes take place fairly and sustainably, and no one is left behind.

Around 350,000 people use pawnbroking services each year, but the industry is in decline. This report builds a picture of why pawnbroking customers' use the service, how satisfied they are with it, and, crucially, what they would do if it were to vanish from the credit market.

This report seeks to understand how the private rented sector might develop in the years to come, on the basis of a nationally representative survey of 1,376 adults in rented accommodation, and modelling of possible future trajectories for the housing market. Our survey finds a clear appetite from renters for policy action – both to improve the experience of renting and to help more renters to buy.

This report calls on the Government to improve access to and quality of pensions advice and guidance to reduce the risk of financial harm caused by under-saving as well as sub-optimal decisions made at the point of decumulating a pension pot.

This briefing paper explores the role that banks and building societies can play in bolstering financial resilience and improving outcomes for vulnerable customers. It calls for financial institutions to be made to compete with each other on providing quality financial wellbeing services, and ultimately empower customers.

This report calls attention to the scale of in-work poverty in the UK and London today, what drives it, and the impact it has. It is a part of a wider project – created in partnership with Trust for London - to develop a new benchmark that helps businesses tackle in-work poverty.

This essay series, collected in partnership with the Chartered Banker Institute, re-evaluates the concept of the stakeholder economy in light of the economic and social shockwaves delivered by the Coronavirus pandemic.

This report explores the subject of “mortgage safety nets” - support for mortgage-holders in the event of loss of income or employment.