About the Group - Personal Tax, Welfare and Pensions
We work to create a tax and welfare system which supports the government’s goals of deficit reduction, economic growth and fairness. In doing so, we look after high profile areas including personal taxes, labour markets, welfare, tax administration, pensions, and savings. We also coordinate spending controls for both HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions. The Group also has a wider role to assess the overall impact of changes made to taxes and benefit on households across the UK.
Our work means that we are often at the centre of ministers’ decision making, and we play an important part in the Budget and the Spending Review. Our group works closely with colleagues at HMRC, DWP and the Prime Minister’s office, and with a wide variety of external stakeholders.
About the Team
The Labour Markets and Distributional Analysis team is a friendly and diverse team of outstanding analysts and policy makers. We seek to bring together an understanding of households’ living standards and position in the labour market, with key labour market policies, such as the Plan for Jobs, DWP’s unemployment regime and tax-free childcare.
The advertised roles sit within the Distributional Analysis branch of the team. We analyse how tax, welfare and public service spending decisions will affect households’ living standards and advise Ministers accordingly. Whilst our approach on tax and welfare closely mirrors respected think tanks such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, we also model the impacts of public services, such as NHS, schools and social care spending. This broader approach means we can consider a much wider range of ways to provide support to the poorest and most vulnerable households. This means we are involved in policy discussions in areas including social care, childcare, Universal Credit, personal tax, pensions, green taxes, and many more!
We play a key role in fiscal events (such as Budgets and Spending Reviews) where we inform Ministers on the overall impacts of a suite of policy decisions, and our analysis is published in Treasury’s high-profile distributional analysis reports, which regularly features in political exchanges and media reports. The rest of the year we concentrate on producing analysis for ongoing policy development, as well as building our modelling capability to ensure we stay at the cutting edge of what we do. As such, our work provides an attractive blend of high-profile cross-cutting policy thinking and detailed analytical challenge and would perfectly suit an analyst looking to stretch their analytical capability whilst working close to the centre of government.
Key Accountabilities
We are recruiting for 1 analyst position in the Distributional Analysis team (other similar roles may become available soon). This is a high profile team, and you will have the opportunity to work on a range of interesting, influential and challenging analytical projects.
The responsibilities of the role will be varied, and can be shaped to reflect the applicant’s experience, preferences, and the wider needs across the team. There is scope for this role to involve significant technical content, for example, including development and maintenance of the team’s microsimulation models. Equally, post-holders could focus primarily on deploying analysis for policy development. Overall, responsibilities are likely to involve one or more of:
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Building expertise in running the team’s microsimulation models, including our tax and welfare model (IGOTM) and public service spending (RDEL) model. This will also involve contributing to the continuous development of these models, ensuring the team’s continued capability to answer critical questions for policy making.
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Providing distributional analysis at fiscal events (Budgets and Autumn Statements), feeding into ministerial advice on the distributional impact of policies under consideration and producing analysis for the “Impact on Households” document published alongside each fiscal event (the most recent publication can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1142917/FINAL_Impact_on_households_-_SB23.pdf)
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Producing high quality and accurate modelling of the impact of tax, welfare and public spending policy on households throughout the year, developing strong working relationships with policy leads, analysts, and subject experts both within and outside HM Treasury, ensuring that our analysis continues to inform and influence policy development at an early stage. Recent work has included analysis looking at the impact of the cost of living crisis on household incomes, and evaluating the distributional impact of Covid-19 support schemes.