Ä¢¹½´«Ã½

The UK’s parental leave system offers relatively long maternity leave but much of it is poorly paid, while fathers and partners have very little well-paid leave of their own.

This policy brief by , , and reports findings from a conjoint survey experiment with 2,501 UK adults aged 18–45 who have, or plan to have, children.

Respondents showed strong support for more generous provision for both parents. Extending maternity leave paid at 90% of earnings from six to 26 weeks increased policy support by 27.4 percentage points. For fathers and partners, improving pay mattered more than extending leave: moving from statutory pay to 90% of earnings increased support by 18.9 points, while extending leave from two to six weeks increased support by 7.8 points. Preferences were broad-based across social groups.

The findings support a coordinated package of reform: longer periods of well-paid maternity leave, at least six weeks of individually reserved leave for fathers and partners, substantially better pay and broad access to entitlements.

The UK parental leave system gives mothers and fathers very different opportunities to take time away from work after the birth of a child.

, , Tiffany Choeung and Ciaran Hay assess the costs and benefits of a broad redesign of UK parental leave.

The package combines 18 weeks of maternity leave paid at 90% of average weekly earnings, six weeks of non-transferable paternity leave at 90%, 21 weeks of paid shared leave, 13 weeks of unpaid shared leave, day-one access to paid leave and equivalent provision for self-employed parents.

Assuming average take-up, the model produces a £10.1 billion net social gain when life-satisfaction effects are valued over ten years. The result is highly sensitive to how wellbeing is treated: a five-year effect produces a £1.9 billion gain, while excluding monetised wellbeing produces a £6.3 billion net cost. The report shows that the largest quantified cost falls on employers through reorganisation and temporary cover, while the largest quantified benefit comes from parental wellbeing.

The report argues that policymakers should assess parental leave as a package, make uncertainty explicit and improve UK evidence on take-up, employer costs, family wellbeing and longer-term labour-market outcomes.

Policies to extend working lives increasingly seek to support people over 50 to return to employment. Yet we know relatively little about the role of pensions in this return, especially for women returning after varied or prolonged periods outside paid work, who are at greater risk of pension insecurity.

Drawing on 36 life-history interviews with women aged 49–65, this policy brief by Dr Helen Kowalewska shows that women with the greatest pension disadvantage may have the strongest need to return to employment, yet the least room to hold out for jobs that could improve their retirement security. Policy should focus not simply on job re-entry, but on sustainable re-entry that enables women to rebuild retirement security. This brief outlines the changes needed to help achieve this.

Urban green spaces in UK cities are vital to health and wellbeing and provide multiple benefits across many areas of city life. However, access remains unequal, especially for marginalised communities including people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, the elderly and children, and people living in areas of high deprivation. These groups face accessibility barriers that can be addressed through structural changes to the governance of parks. This policy brief sets out an implementation pathway for inclusive governance.

The changes mainly relate to linking park funding streams to health funding, given the multiple benefits these spaces provide; addressing the lack of statutory status for parks within local authority governance; securing maintenance funds alongside initial project funds; and formalising the roles of community groups in park governance.

Long-term infrastructure contracts cannot anticipate every shock over their 20- or 30-year life. When the financial model breaks, rigid contracts offer no way to adapt and can paralyse the public authority that depends on them.

This brief by Miguel Díaz-Martínez (Visiting Policy Fellow, Institute for Policy Research) draws on two Colombian transit systems that met that moment under identical national law and opposite fates: Bogotá’s was restructured and survives; Bucaramanga’s collapsed into liquidation.

The decisive difference for Bogotá’s success was not the contract’s wording but the institution behind it – a single authority able to act, the capacity to build a defensible case, and protection for the officials who put their names to the decision. The brief sets out five conditions that determine whether adaptation is possible, and argues that flexibility must be engineered into contracts before a crisis arrives. It draws direct lessons for UK debates on HS2, the Private Finance Initiative, and the design of Great British Railways and bus franchising.

Eligibility, entitlement and assessment criteria for Council Tax Reduction (CTR) – a means-tested discount on council tax for low-income, working-age people – have been left to the discretion of local authorities in England since 2013. In 2025-26, there were 313 separate CTR schemes in operation, each with their own eligibility and entitlement rules. Virtually all working-age people who get CTR are now Universal Credit (UC) claimants, but not all UC claimants receive CTR. Claimants who work are much less likely to qualify for help.

Little is known about how low-earning households are experiencing and responding to CTR. To help fill this evidence gap, this study explored how the different elements of scheme design in England are affecting take-up, household finances and work-related decision making among UC claimants who work.

The research comprised: an online survey self-completed by 160 UC claimants in work; telephone interviews with 30 survey respondents currently or recently in receipt of CTR; and video interviews with five key informants, including local authority officers and specialist advice agencies with in-depth knowledge and experience in the design and delivery of CTR schemes.

An accompanying policy brief summarises key findings and recommendations.