Comparable Projects

1. What This Covers

This project is part of a wider field of UK policy research, campaigning and think-tank work. The organisations below cover overlapping ground (tax, welfare, housing, public services and the economy) from different histories, funding models and starting assumptions, across more than a century of British think tanks. Where an organisation sits politically affects which conclusions it tends to draw from a given set of facts, so that is stated for each one rather than left unsaid.

2. The Eleven Organisations

Fabian Society, founded 1884. Britain's oldest political think tank, founded by early socialist thinkers including Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, and historically affiliated to the Labour Party. Publishes across the whole range of domestic policy. Political position: progressive/left, with the longest continuous history of any organisation here. Funding: member subscriptions (over 7,000 members) and grants and sponsorship for particular projects; a conventional membership model, not corporate or single-donor funding.

Centre for Policy Studies, founded 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. A free-market think tank credited with shaping the thinking behind 1980s Conservative economic policy. Covers tax, the economy, welfare and regulation. Political position: centre-right, explicitly free-market. Funding: placed in the lowest tier for transparency by the watchdog Transparify, and doesn't publish a donor list. Its own board and directors supplied nearly half its income in 2021/22, and it has received tobacco industry funding in the past, including from British American Tobacco.

New Economics Foundation, founded 1986. A progressive think tank focused on social, economic and environmental justice, with particular interest in alternatives to growth-focused economic policy. Covers the economy, work, housing and climate. Political position: progressive/left. Funding: rated "broadly transparent" by Transparify and graded A by Who Funds You; publishes its funders, including the Oak Foundation, the National Lottery Community Fund and the European Climate Foundation.

IPPR, founded 1988. A large, long-established think tank whose research covers the economy, work and skills, housing, tax, devolution, energy, education and democratic reform. Historically close to Labour and centre-left policy development, though formally independent. Political position: progressive/centre-left. Funding: graded A, the highest rating, by Who Funds You, and rated "broadly transparent" by Transparify; funded by charitable trusts, foundations, businesses, unions and individual donors. Says it doesn't accept money from political parties.

Demos, founded 1993. Describes itself as a cross-party think tank, working on education, skills, health and housing without being tied to any one party. Political position: cross-party/centrist, one of the few organisations here designed not to sit clearly on either side. Funding: graded B by Who Funds You, for publishing its funders and some donation amounts on its website.

Institute for Fiscal Studies, founded 1969. An independent research institute covering tax, pensions, public spending, inequality and the public finances. Its February 2026 report proposed replacing the UK's pass-or-fail fiscal rules with a graded "fiscal traffic lights" system, and its Pensions Review (July 2025) looked at whether today's workers are saving enough for retirement. Political position: non-partisan and technical, treated across the political spectrum as a neutral referee on fiscal arithmetic. Funding: research grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK government departments and international research bodies, plus foundation and corporate funding for specific projects.

Policy Exchange, founded 2002 by the Conservative modernisers Francis Maude, Archie Norman and Nick Boles. One of the UK's largest think tanks by output, covering education, housing, home affairs, energy and the economy. Political position: centre-right. Funding: graded E, the lowest rating, for transparency, with no significant improvement since 2019; has received over $3.8m in US donations since 2000, with individual donors largely undisclosed.

Centre for Social Justice, founded 2004 by Iain Duncan Smith, Tim Montgomerie and Philippa Stroud. Focuses on the root causes of poverty and social breakdown: family stability, welfare dependency, addiction and education. It has argued for scrapping the state pension triple lock, starting from concerns about family breakdown and disadvantage among working-class boys and young families rather than from fairness between generations. Political position: centre-right, co-founded by Conservative politicians and widely described as centre-right. Funding: graded D, the second-lowest rating, by Who Funds You, down from a higher score in 2019; it doesn't publish a full list of donors.

Resolution Foundation, founded 2005. Focuses on living standards, inequality and fairness between generations. Describes its purpose as being "to inform and not persuade", and its analysis is heavily quantitative, drawing on economists from the IFS, LSE and Oxford. Its July 2026 report The Great Escape looked at the UK's fiscal position, citing about £450bn a year of tax receipts lost to weak growth compared with pre-crisis projections, and about £90bn of extra spending pressure from an ageing population. Political position: formally non-partisan; its subjects (living standards, inequality) are more often associated with centre-left priorities, but its recommendations aren't aligned with any party. Funding: mainly the Resolution Trust, with other named funders including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and Ernst & Young; a registered charity with published annual accounts.

Institute for Government, founded 2008. Focuses on whether government can actually deliver a policy, rather than whether the policy is economically desirable: institutional reform, public service delivery and accountability. Its 2026 programme covers preparation for the 2027 spending review and civil service reform. Political position: non-partisan, with an all-party board; its focus is how policy is delivered, not its direction. Funding: mainly the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (a core grant of £4.6m in 2021/22), plus universities, charitable trusts and corporate partners.

Autonomy Institute, founded 2017. A research organisation whose current main project, Programme 2029, describes itself as a "progressive policy platform" covering housing, food, water and energy, public services, tax, work and incomes, and media and democratic reform. Political position: progressive/left, built around public ownership of essential services and a guaranteed income floor. Funding: the smallest and newest organisation here; known to receive foundation grants (for example from the Guerrilla Foundation), but this project found no full public list of its funders, which is noted here as a gap in this research.

3. A Direction Worth Pursuing

Reviewing these organisations raised an idea worth developing properly rather than adding here as an afterthought: a structured, issue-by-issue comparison of this project's proposals with a free-market case, a centre-left case and a Conservative case for the same problem, checked against neutral evidence from the IFS, ONS, OBR and the organisations above. That is a substantial piece of work in its own right, and it has been added to the project backlog to be scoped properly rather than built from this page.