Latest Publications

This paper discusses some of the issues facing women in the criminal justice system, and what policymakers can do to ensure a system that better responds to the circumstances and needs of female offenders.

The benefits system for disabled people, and the support that accompanies it, are broken. This report shows that across a range of metrics, the system is failing disabled people and their families and communities.

Key points ‘Cash benchmarking’ practices have become common in poorer countries in recent years and used by development agencies to compare programme outcomes against the alternative of giving people cash...

This report explores the role that Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies can play in improving the UK’s urban areas and local public services. It is the third in a series of SMF reports on 4IR, kindly supported by Vodafone.

This report, supported by Zurich Municipal, sets out to understand what factors could affect the future of local public services over the next two decades and what new roles for local government could exist by 2040.

This report highlights significant failures in the current rail system – both in terms of its efficiency and in terms of responsiveness to passenger needs. The authors argue that we should look to radical reform of how we franchise rail services to deliver a more efficient and passenger-orientated system.

The debate about the future of the BBC is underway. There are many issues that run through it - how to pay for the BBC, how well it uses the money – though the most fundamental question is about its purpose. This paper argues that the solution is to introduce greater pluralism into the BBC itself and break the hold of a single view of how to do public service broadcasting with the funding provided by the licence fee.

All political parties now acknowledge the importance of more integrated - or person-centred - care. The challenge is now how to pursue this during the next parliament. This paper attempts to tackle how commissioning and funding would work in an integrated health and care service.

This series of essays explores the crisis of legitimacy in working age welfare. It examines the policy options for what to do about financial support for the unemployed.