Seeing the system
Two explorers for issues usually argued about with one headline number.
I’ve just published two explorers I’ve been playing around with: one for UK income tax bands, and one for young people out of work and learning (also known by that horrible term NEETs). They are both about tackling the same challenge. How do you take an issue that’s usually argued about through one attention-grabbing headline number, and let people change the inputs and explore it for themselves?
The second one came from listening to Alan Milburn on The Rest is Politics, talking about his review of young people out of work and education, and I agreed. He described it as a problem with the system, and not with young people. But a system argument needs a way to see the system, so that’s what I wanted to build.
The explorer follows one year-group of today’s 16-year-olds to age 40. It treats their lives at 35 as the outcome that matters, not next year’s benefit bill. It’s focussed on what investment/spending today means in terms of gains to people which arrive a decade later. That lag though, is the whole political problem, but I think it’s much easier to see rather than to describe.
I also wanted it to be transparent about what the explorer knows, so every policy carries a grade, from A (official data or a randomised trial) to D (an assumption). Where I couldn’t source evidence, the assumption becomes a setting in the explorer you can move to fit your own beliefs.
The tax explorer is simpler. It’s built on HMRC’s own figures, so today’s rules reproduce the real £245bn of tax receipts. You can redraw where the bands fall, try other countries’ systems, or switch on behaviour and watch receipts move. Some of the behaviour settings are my own judgement, and again the page says so.
Neither of these is a forecast. They show what follows if the evidence is right and the assumptions hold, which is about as much as anyone can honestly claim. Have a play, and let me know if you find them useful.