My final newsletter – fewer meetings, less management, slower pay growth?

Morning all,

As I step back from my role as Deputy Chief Executive at RF (I’ll be sticking around as a Research Associate, so you may still spot my by-line here and there), I’ll also be hanging up my Top of the Charts pen. Thank you for occasionally welcoming me into your inboxes over the past few years.

But the world very much keeps spinning, as the deluge of data we experienced this week demonstrates – from the labour market, to inflation, to rental prices, to pay, there was plenty to dig into (and scroll down to Chart of the Week to find out what the latest pay data tells us about pay inequality).

Next week brings Halloween Chancellor Healey’s first Budget. The team at RF is gearing up for their traditional all-nighter – I recommend signing up for the morning-after-event to get the lowdown on our overnight analysis before the last in-person tickets are gone.

Have a great weekend,

Mike

Deputy Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

This could have been an email. How many hours this week did you spend in meetings? And how many of them were useful? (RF colleagues: this is a rhetorical Q). This write-up of research into the prevalence of meetings notes the widespread disdain for their abundance. The analysis finds the average (Norwegian) worker in their survey spends 4.7 hours per week in meetings (one hour a day doesn’t sound so bad??), but that increases substantially for managers. There’s a perk, though: spending more time in meetings is correlated with faster wage growth. Plus, firms with higher salaries tend to meet more. That’s notable because the more you pay your workers, the more expensive it is to convene them away from their spreadsheets (that is all people do at work, right?), so there must be something in it. If only I had read this before I cut my working hours and excused myself from management duties…

Not doing so well. Life in the UK is not getting any better, according to Carnegie UK’s latest Life in the UK index. Drawing on a survey of around 6,700 people, it puts the UK’s collective wellbeing at 61 out of 100 this year, the first fall since the index began in 2023. Unsurprisingly, cost of living pressures knocked economic wellbeing down two points to 70 out of 100. Our focus is on living standards, but research like this provides an alternative insight into issues like intergenerational differences (people aged 55+ have a wellbeing score six points higher than people aged 16 to 34 or 35 to 54), social inequalities (people who are not heterosexual report lower wellbeing than the heterosexual majority), and deep-rooted structural inequalities (social renters score a whopping 25 points below homeowners on economic wellbeing, at 50 versus 75). Here’s hoping Andy Burnham can put us back on an upward track.

Working out welfare. There is much focus now on how to reform welfare, but alarm bells should have been ringing a lot earlier, given the rapid rise in out-of-work benefit recipients since 2016 (up by about 1.5 to 2 million, with the uncertainty caused by the move to Universal Credit over the period) despite a stronger labour market. So argues Paul Gregg, former RF Research Associate and current labour market policy royalty, in an essay on how the welfare system has “malfunctioned”. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Paul argues, job-search conditionality, strong part-time work incentives, caseworker support and scaled-up job placements worked well together to get benefit recipients into work. Since then, employment support has reverted to a cheaper sanction-based regime; in-work benefits have been cut back; and “the binary nature of our welfare system pushes our ageing and increasingly impaired population to claim incapacity benefits over limited working with in-work financial top-ups.” Paul argues that the current Government does not seem to have a coherent strategy for how to reform welfare to get people into work – although the imminent Milburn review may change some of that – and that its focus so far has been more on cost-cutting. Do the other political parties have the answer? You’ll have to come back later for part 2.

Tot(ting) up. More policy design issues this week, as a new report suggests how to reform England’s three (!) childcare subsidy schemes, each run by different parts of government and with their own eligibility rules, rates and payment methods. This is not only inefficient for government but (unsurprisingly) confusing for parents: only two-fifths of families on Universal Credit who pay for childcare claim the childcare element, and take up of Tax-Free Childcare is under half.  Low take-up, the report says, is due to stigma, low awareness, administrative burdens and the reliability of payments. A simpler system would help; the report suggests the Government should consider a single system for supporting parents with childcare costs which varies the subsidy rates smoothly by income to prevent cliff-edges,  something we’ve previously called for too.

Total recall. We have all randomly decided to clean the house, cook or stare out the window to shield ourselves from a mountain of work. However, a new paper – which feels directly targeted at people who have to write a weekly newsletter – argues that selective memory (or wishful thinking), not just weak willpower, can be a culprit behind procrastination. Over four weeks, around 500 German students had to finish a tedious transcription task of unknown length and were sent hints about their workload size. Among those who received bad news, those who weren’t reminded later on quietly ‘forgot’, and put the chance of a light workload 10 percentage points higher than those who had been reminded. Each 10 percentage point rise in hoped-for ease meant 7 per cent less work done early, leaving more to pile up. So, just keep telling yourself how much work you have to do, and it should get done.

Chart of the week

It wouldn’t be a Mike TOTC without some mention of inequality, and yesterday’s ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data dump gave us the definitive take on earnings inequality, with data now up to 2026. The headline was that the share of workers in low pay failed to fall for the first time in 15 years, but Chart of the Week takes a closer look at overall pay inequality, measured by the 90:10 ratio (where higher numbers mean more unequal pay) for hourly pay and weekly earnings. Women’s weekly earnings have long been less equal than men’s – due to their higher share of part-time workers – but the genders have been slowly converging since this series began in 2002.  More recently, overall earnings inequality has ticked up across the board, after a decade of decline. This is partly because the National Living Wage, which used to outpace median pay, is now only keeping pace with it, but is also because high earners are pulling away: weekly pay for the 90th percentile grew by 7.3 per cent in nominal terms this year (to reach £1,433 a week), against just 1.1 per cent at the 10th percentile. Among men, earnings inequality is now at its joint highest on record (alongside 2014), thanks to increasing numbers with a low weekly paycheck (the 10th percentile fell in cash terms from £309 in 2025 to £301 in 2026).