Evidence briefings

Publicly funded advice and support to business can have a positive impact on business but performance is mixed across schemes, with some schemes delivering little, if any, benefits. Better design and evaluation will improve cost-effectiveness of business advice schemes.

Contributing 47 per cent of revenue to the UK economy, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a key role in boosting productivity – but need support to expand business and increase impact.

Parenting support encompasses a range of interventions and aims. Improved co-ordination of providers and clearer objectives can lead to more effective service delivery.

Involving service users in co-designing healthcare services can pinpoint problem areas and help to improve staff wellbeing and user experience.

A research project exploring how housing providers can alleviate poverty amongst young people in the UK is studying support schemes that have the potential to reduce housing and living costs.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report Social rents policy: choices and trade-offs analyses the consequences of changing the level of rent for tenants in social housing, for tenants, social housing providers and the exchequer.

There are currently no policies that provide genuinely integrated management of water, energy, food and land. Progress towards more integrated policymaking is too slow to match the rate of the ongoing environmental and demographic changes.

The timeliness and degree of detail for flood information need to improve, and flood management responsibilities need to be more clearly defined, according to research on how communities and businesses cope with flooding.

Research findings suggest a migration policy ‘balloon effect’, where squeezing it at one end (restricting the number of non-EEA high-skilled workers) lead to an increased size at the other (inflating the number of EEA high-skilled workers).

Framing the migration ‘crisis’ as a recent phenomenon ignores the longer-standing history of precarious migration to the EU across the Mediterranean. To be effective, policy interventions need to be co-ordinated regionally, and global in their outlook.