Latest Publications

The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, currently at Committee stage in the House of Lords, is set to undermine vital rights that protect vulnerable consumers and help workers understand how they are monitored by companies and public bodies. The Bill is a threat to fair markets and open public services.

Mutuality has a rich history, but it remains largely misunderstood. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the modern mutual sector, exploring its key opportunities and challenges.

People in poverty regularly face a poverty premium in the insurance market. Not only is that unfair, it also leads to worse outcomes for people, families and society – and it risks trust in the market mechanism. In this report, we conceptualise drivers of the poverty premium and call on the government, the insurance industry, and regulators to establish policies that can protect people in poverty from paying more for coverage.

Government regulations can result in higher consumers prices, make businesses less competitive, and they can prevent innovation and reinforce barriers to entry. In this paper, Harvard Senior Fellow and Regulatory Policy Committee Chair Stephen Gibson, reviews previous efforts to reduce red tape.

In the Conservative political tradition, state regulation is often viewed in binary terms – its presence an intrusion, and its absence a mark of freedom. This has certainly been the case in the ongoing debate surrounding the review of the 2005 Gambling Act. In this personal essay, SMF Senior Fellow Dr James Noyes rejects the binary view in favour of a more nuanced approach to regulation and the role that the state can – and should – play in the gambling market.

The UK has had an exports problem since the financial crisis of 2008, further compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this report, we show that e-commerce should be a key focus of trade policy effort as it offers a route to get more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exporting, and how to remove the barriers they face.

This briefing presents a long-term solution for keeping consumer energy companies afloat through the current crisis while limiting the financial burden on taxpayers, drawing upon the structure of the Brady Plan which helped to successfully resolve the 1980s sovereign debt crisis.

This briefing sets out why a social market-based pro-enterprise agenda is the strongest foundation for a successful and sustained post-Brexit and post-pandemic economy that is also able to weather the headwinds of technological change

This report explores the state of competition in the UK economy, and the extent to which supposedly competitive markets are delivering good outcomes for customers, with a particular focus on the retail banking sector. It sets out a range of policy recommendations for enhancing competition in the banking sector and the UK economy more broadly.