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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.

This policy brief, written by Dr Joanne Moore and Annette Hayton (Department of Education), examines the types of evidence that are effective in evaluating widening participation initiatives. Working with staff in evaluation and management roles in a cross-section of higher education providers, their research captures current and emerging evaluation practices.

Their findings suggest that the current standards are increasingly unfit for purpose and could hinder rather than support strategies for widening participation. The authors argue that there is an urgent need for the evaluation framework to evolve, and call for a revised set of standards to support providers in collecting and using evidence.

Although designed to promote gender equality, parental leave policies in the UK have yet to close the gap in uptake, with women taking significantly more leave than men.

Authors , and James Bailey recommend reforming the UK’s current parental leave policies to enable better uptake of leave entitlement by fathers, in turn leading to greater sharing of childcare responsibilities between fathers and mothers, and a stronger attachment to the labour market among mothers.

In the report Costs and benefits of improved paternity leave: too good to ignore, they presented a cost-benefit analysis of one specific policy proposal – an expansion of paternity leave for employed fathers from two to six weeks, at a rate of pay close to salary replacement level.

In this companion piece, they take this proposal further by assessing the costs and benefits, and thus the social net benefit, of introducing a new entitlement for self-employed and worker fathers, who are currently ineligible for any support. They propose the introduction of Paternity Allowance – a six-week entitlement paid at the current Statutory Paternity Pay rate and mirroring in spirit the Maternity Allowance already available to mothers in similar position on the labour market.