Comparable Projects

1. What This Covers

This project sits within a wider field of UK policy research, advocacy, and think-tank work. The organisations below cover overlapping ground — tax, welfare, housing, public services, the economy — from different institutional histories, funding models, and starting assumptions, spanning more than a century of British think-tank history. Where an organisation sits politically shapes which conclusions it tends to draw from a given set of facts, so that is stated plainly for each one rather than left implicit.

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 with the Labour Party. Publishes across the full range of domestic policy. Political position: progressive/left, with the longest continuous institutional history of any organisation on this list. Funding: member subscriptions (over 7,000 members) and project-specific grants and sponsorships — a conventional membership-funded model, not corporate or single-donor.

Centre for Policy Studies — Founded 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. A free-market think tank credited with shaping the intellectual basis of 1980s Conservative economic policy. Covers tax, the economy, welfare, and regulation. Political position: centre-right, explicitly free-market in orientation. Funding: rated among the least transparent UK think tanks by the independent watchdog Transparify, which places it in its lowest tier; does not publish a donor list. Its own board and directors supplied nearly half its income in 2021/22, and it has historically received tobacco industry funding, including from British American Tobacco.

New Economics Foundation — Founded 1986. A progressive think tank focused on social, economic, and environmental justice, with a particular emphasis on alternative economic models to conventional growth-focused 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 spans the economy, work and skills, housing, tax, devolution, energy, education, and democratic reform. Historically closely associated with 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. States it does not accept money from political parties.

Demos — Founded 1993. Describes itself as a cross-party think tank, working across education, skills, health, and housing without a fixed institutional alignment to any single party. Political position: cross-party/centrist — one of the few organisations on this list that does not sit clearly on either side of the spectrum by design. Funding: graded B by Who Funds You for publishing its funders and some donation amounts on its own 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-fail fiscal rules with a graduated "fiscal traffic lights" framework. Its Pensions Review (July 2025) examined retirement adequacy for today's working-age population. Political position: non-partisan and technical — treated across the UK political spectrum as a neutral arbiter on questions of fiscal arithmetic. Funding: research grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK government departments, and international research bodies, alongside foundation and corporate funding tied to specific projects.

Policy Exchange — Founded 2002 by 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 recorded 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, education. Has argued for scrapping the state pension triple lock, reaching that position from a diagnosis centred on family breakdown and disadvantage among working-class boys and young families, distinct from an intergenerational-fiscal-fairness framing. Political position: centre-right — co-founded by Conservative politicians and widely described as a centre-right think tank. Funding: graded D by Who Funds You, the second-lowest rating, having scored higher in 2019; specific donors are not comprehensively published.

Resolution Foundation — Founded 2005. Focuses on living standards, inequality, and intergenerational fairness. States its own 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 examined the UK's fiscal position, citing roughly £450bn a year in tax receipts lost to weak growth against pre-crisis projections and roughly £90bn in additional demographic spending pressure. Political position: formally non-partisan; its choice of subject matter (living standards, inequality) is more commonly associated with centre-left priorities, though its recommendations are not aligned with any party. Funding: primarily the Resolution Trust, with additional 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 given policy, rather than whether the policy is economically desirable — institutional reform, public service delivery, and accountability structures. Its 2026 programme covers preparation for the 2027 spending review and civil service reform. Political position: non-partisan, governed by an all-party board; its focus is delivery mechanics rather than policy direction. Funding: primarily the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (a core grant of £4.6m in 2021/22), supplemented by academic institutions, charitable trusts, and corporate partners.

Autonomy Institute — Founded 2017. A research organisation whose current flagship project, Programme 2029, describes itself explicitly as a "progressive policy platform" covering housing, food/water/energy, public services, tax/work/incomes, and media and democratic reform. Political position: progressive/left, built around public ownership of essential services and an income-floor model. Funding: the smallest and newest organisation on this list; known to receive foundation grants (e.g. the Guerrilla Foundation), but no comprehensive public funder list was found — noted here as a genuine gap in this research, not glossed over.

3. A Direction Worth Pursuing

Reviewing these organisations surfaced an idea worth developing properly rather than folding in here as an afterthought: a structured, issue-by-issue comparison of this project's proposals against a free-market case, a centre-left case, and a Conservative/right 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 — it has been logged to the project backlog for proper scoping rather than built from this page.