Would you rather work less? You’re not alone

Afternoon all,

How many hours would you ‘ideally’ work each week? If it’s less than full time then you’re part of a growing minority, as explained in our new research on changing attitudes to work, and featured in our Chart of the week.

Mine is well south of last week’s hours, when the team worked flat-out on our overnight Budget analysis and the special edition of this newsletter last week.

It was good to discuss our analysis with the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, where I shared my disappointment in the poor targeting of the Government’s energy bill support this winter. The news cycle has moved on very quickly, but the issue of who gets support will remain crucial throughout this winter – underlined by the Bank forecasting 4.9 per cent inflation yesterday.

And that question matters more than ever, with the outlook for living standards looking downright scary – I went through the numbers behind the jump-scares in our most recent Substack (read to the end for the twist in the final act).

Scroll on for the space race, social care and social housing.

Have a great weekend,

Ruth

Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

Losing the plot. Almost everyone agrees Britain needs more homes; the hard part is finding the land. One promising measure, advocated by the Government, is letting councils build on unused public land – but how much actually is there? This Substack combs Manchester’s asset register, Land Registry data and Street View to find out. They find that the council owns roughly a third of the city, but only 63 hectares of that is idle and suitable. That’s enough for 4,500 homes: a one-off boost that would house under a quarter of the city’s 20,000-plus households on the social housing waiting list. Worth doing, but not enough on its own. Plus, as we’ve said before, money and council capacity matter too. In the meantime, re-pegging Local Housing Allowance to actual rents would help private renters now.

Over the edge. Carer’s Allowance provides nearly £87 a week, but earning above £204 a week wipes it out entirely. This paper tracks what happens to carers who cross that cliff. After crossing, carers who had claimed in the past see arrears and worries rise more than carers who never did: they are 6.2 percentage points more likely to be behind on rent or mortgage and 7.2 points more likely to struggle to get by. Lower earnings, not extra caring, are the driver: nine fewer hours a week and £592 a month less. The Government’s planned £1-for-£1 taper turns the cliff into a plateau: a welcome, if long overdue, change.

Mission control. We often talk about how much public R&D boosts innovation. A new working paper on the space race suggests it also steers the direction of technological change, including the impact on workers. NASA’s mission was to get machines working where no human could survive and NASA-sponsored patents were more likely to be automation-oriented than others (71 per cent versus 55 per cent). Back on Earth,  in the industries and places most exposed to the Space Race, manufacturers’ labour share fell by around a quarter relative to the rest of manufacturing. With governments, the UK’s included, now backing AI and defence missions, what they choose to fund, not just how much, could shape the impact on workers.

Labour of love. Andrew Harrop has taken on the myth that care work is always a bad job. His new Work that Matters report surveyed more than 4,000 UK workers on 40 measures of job quality, and finds that care staff did significantly better than other low-to-middle-paid workers on nine of them, and significantly worse on none. They find their work meaningful, are proud of it and feel unusually secure, ahead of every other sector on confidence that their job will still exist in ten to twenty years’ time. That chimes with our 2023 research, which also found the flipside: that attachment can lead workers to tolerate poor pay and conditions, including illegal underpayment. Harrop rightly concludes that the sector needs to improve – care workers’ good will shouldn’t be used to excuse bad practice.

Something for the weekend | Rate expectations

The Bank of England yesterday raised interest rates for the first time in more than three years. Rate-watchers weren’t shocked, with the UK the last G7 member to move in response to the war in Iran. Alongside the decision came some fairly gloomy forecasts.

The Bank now expects inflation to peak at 4.9 per cent next spring and not to hit target until Q3 2028, two years later than planned – a worrying scenario that nonetheless assumes Bank rate will climb to 5 per cent. This comes at a time when mortgagors are already feeling the hit. Average 2-year fixed rates have risen 1.2 percentage points since February, costing a typical first-time buyer an extra £140 each month.

Higher rates will keep a lid on prices but drag on growth, and workers will feel the squeeze. The Bank now doesn’t expect real pay to rise above its 2025 level until 2028 – relative to previous forecasts, the average private-sector worker is set to earn £670 less next year in real terms.

Those with long memories (stretching all the way back to last week) will recall that the OBR was a little more chipper in its Budget forecasts. Working from August’s energy prices, which have since risen sharply, it expected inflation to stay just under 4 per cent next year. Even then, it foresaw meagre living standards growth for the 2020s. If the Bank’s inflation path plays out, even that could disappear.

Chart of the week

Why have men gone off full-time work? Over the last decade, men under 50 have flipped from more wanting full-time work than have it, to more having it than wanting it. This was just one of the many findings of our report on attitudes to work and how they have shifted over the past decade – one chapter of this year’s British Social Attitudes. In our Chart of the week each dot shows the share of a group in full-time work minus the share who want to be. The closer to the middle a dot is, the closer that group is to having what they want. By 2025 (the purple dots) every group was over on the right hand side of the chart – more of them were in full-time work than wanted it. And by comparing the lilac dots (2015) to the purple ones (2025) it becomes obvious that over the past decade, every group increasingly wishes they were working less than they are, with the steepest increase among men aged 30-49. Interestingly, this isn’t about working fathers, childless men saw the biggest rise in preference for part-time work. Does everyone just need a bit of a breather?