Latest Publications

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 Scottish economy’s global reputation for producing alcohol has come with historically high levels of drinking and harm. The Scottish Government is currently consulting on a range of regulations on alcohol marketing. Analysing the relationship between alcohol and the Scottish economy, we find that such regulation is unlikely to have much of an effect on the Scottish economy, since so much of Scottish alcohol production – most notably whisky – is sold abroad.

The ethnic minority gap in financial products such as pensions and insurance is well-documented, but poorly understood. Drawing on existing and new survey data, and in-depth interviews, this report seeks to understand the scale of this gap, and possible explanations behind it, as well as proposing recommendations to policymakers and the industry on how to reduce the risk of disadvantage faced by ethnic minorities.

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 paper argues that the real estate and investment sectors must accelerate their journey from theorising about social value into widespread practice. It sets out recommendations for how designers, developers, the financial services industry, and local and central government can work together to maximise social value.

Across the world, approaches to cannabis regulation are changing. This report reviews evidence from jurisdictions that have liberalised cannabis, assessing how they have impacted health, crime, and economic outcomes, comparing them against the UK’s prohibition regime.

This paper makes the case for introducing a statutory levy on the gambling industry, to be overseen by a new independent board led by the Department of Health and Social Care. The paper surveys the current voluntary system of industry funding for harm reduction. It finds that the voluntary system is structurally flawed and has failed in its approach.