How to boost the wellbeing of workers, political leaders and football ultras 23 May 2025 Ruth Curtice Afternoon all, It’s been a week for getting out of your comfort zone. The Government has been busy patching things up with Brussels and U-turning on welfare cuts, meanwhile I’m about to tell you about football. Stay to the end for a chart that shows much more briefly than my blog that the priority for living standards is not winter fuel payments, sorry. Of course it’s not at all clear what the Prime Minister actually announced and targeted options are available. For those who really want to delve into the detail, this autumn RF paper was great revision for me this week. Have a good weekend, Ruth Chief Executive Resolution Foundation Pinching pennies. Which price hikes do consumers notice the most? Food, according to this research from the Bank of England. Apparently, rising food prices matter more for household inflation expectations than other sources – including energy. So, food price shocks are most likely to impact household decisions on consumption, saving and investments, as well as work-related choices like moving jobs, negotiating wages and choosing hours. April’s inflation figures, published on Wednesday, showed a sharp rise. This was mostly driven by energy bills, so may not impact the public outlook on inflation as much as if we’d seen a noticeable uptick in the cost of groceries. Happily, forecasts expect inflation to ease, and we had better news on the energy price cap this morning. Powerful purpose. Looking for a way to motivate your team without extra cash? This paper says you can, just help them ‘discover their purpose’ within their job. Evaluating such interventions they find promising results – a considerable reduction in the share of workers under-performing in the participating group. The experiment saw the equivalent of 50 per cent of low-performing workers improve their performance standards. So tell your team they don’t need money just meaning, and let me know how it goes down…. The worried well of Westminster. One for Cabinet Ministers after a long week … ‘Sick of Politics?’ asks whether political office – entailing as it does “stress, long hours, and media scrutiny” – carries a wellbeing penalty for elected officials. You will be relieved / disappointed (delete as appropriate) to learn that politicians see a modest reduction in doctor visits for both physical and mental health concerns “pointing to potential health benefits associated with political advancement”, possibly because of the linked increase in social status and income. It’s worth noting at this point that this data is limited to…Norwegian mayors. It may be the case that municipal Norwegian politics is somewhat less cut-throat than other political arenas. Mulling migration. Amid a polarised debate, here’s a helpful explainer on migration from the Migration Advisory Committee. Net migration seems to have peaked at 906,000 in the year to June 2023 (1.3 million people coming in and 414,000 leaving). As we learned earlier this week, that number more than halved in 2024, falling to 431,000 (detailed breakdown of that data here). It’s only since the mid 1990s that immigration has been net positive in the UK. One thing I didn’t know is that we now require net immigration of 120,000 just to keep our population flat, since deaths now outnumber births for the first time in fifty years. With so much focus on the numbers, interestingly the MAC’s view is that composition matters more for economic impact than aggregate numbers. But they also point out that the routes that are easiest to restrict (skilled work, students) are the most economically beneficial, while harder-to-control routes (asylum, family) offer fewer economic benefits. Something for the weekend? | The final whistle It’s the end of the football season this weekend in England, Italy and Spain. That means lots of dead rubbers, but also championships to be won and relegations to be avoided. In a sentence I never thought I’d write, here’s the Curtice guide to what to look out for… The theme of the weekend is North-South divides, and European socio-economic divides don’t get much bigger than the quintessential northern Italian city of (Inter) Milan and the beating heart of the South – Napoli. Population-wise they’re not too far apart with 970,000 Neapolitans and 1.4 million Milanese, but Milan pulls ahead with GDP more than three times the size (€161 billion vs. €55 billion in 2016). Who to root for? The Neapolitans are famous for their celebrations , so let’s hope Scotland’s own Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour get to celebrate the scudetto. Closer to home, it’s North vs South London as Leyon Orient face off against Charlton Athletic in the League One play-off final this Sunday. On one economic metric (Gross annual household income) they’re already neck and neck, with Newham just behind on £51,592 and Greenwich winning by a nose on £53,010. Living between Charlton and Crystal Palace, if the Addicks win this Sunday, I will be able to reveal the results of a fascinating social experiment – which set of fans have a higher propensity to signal their high life satisfaction via the medium of car horn tooting. Finally, there’s a divide in the Championship play-off final as barely northern Sheffield (United) take on properly northern Sunderland. This game is known as the most lucrative match in football, with the winners set to bag a minimum of £220 million from promotion to the Premiership (as well as near-certain humiliation and relegation next season due in part to the financial divides in football). It turns out football’s finances are as perilous as Britain’s right now. Time for a Resolution Football Foundation? No thanks. Chart of the week Labour’s welfare trilemma has continued to dominate domestic politics this week with the PM announcing a U-turn on Winter Fuel Payments. I was struck by a line from Liz Kendall’s speech about “ensuring public money is focused on those with the greatest need”. So, COTW zooms out to examine where that need is with new Resolution Foundation poverty projections across the Parliament. The overall poverty picture is relatively uninspiring – it is not expected to be any higher or lower in 2029-30 than it is today in 2025-26. But that hides stark differences between groups. The good news is that pensioner poverty is on track to continue falling over this Parliament, as it has done steadily for the past three decades. Less welcome is the rise in poverty among families that include someone with a disability. But most stark is the rise in child poverty – which is already twice as high as pensioner poverty – with increases driven largely by the roll-out of George Osborne’s 2-child limit on benefit support. It would cost £10 billion to fix welfare trilemma – too much in today’s constrained fiscal environment – so choices must be made. Winter Fuel Payments may be high on voter concern, but the brave decision would be to instead focus on those who are too young to vote at all.
