(downloads the pdf)
You can keep up-to-date on all our events on Twitter
follow _SMF_ at https://twitter.com
Please click on the links below for details of the SMF's fringe events at this year's party conferences.
To discuss attending an SMF fringe event at any of this year's party conferences please contact Rachel Baker on 020 7227 4404 or rbaker@smf.co.uk
Watch a brief video showcasing our events work here.
You can download recordings of a selection of SMF events here.
Raising fees to £7000 will be unaffordable for the Government unless it removes the current subsidised interest rates the independent think tank the Social Market Foundation has warned. The SMF's analysis further shows that charging commercial levels of interest on these loans would result in middle earning graduates paying back up to £15,000 more than their counterparts who did the same degree but are more well paid. - Read more...
The Social Market Foundation is delighted to announce that its new Chair will be Mary Ann Sieghart. The leading political and social affairs journalist succeeds Labour peer Lord Lipsey. - Read more...
Following the most closely fought election in decades, the United Kingdom now has a new Prime Minister leading the first peacetime coalition government for over 80 years. In the context of such dramatic change, and with many daunting policy challenges ahead, the 2010 party conference season promises to be one of the most interesting and significant for years. With the political and policy landscape in flux, there has rarely been a more important time for open debate and discussion about the policy challenges ahead and the right way to tackling them.
Raising the student fee cap to £7,000 per year would cost the government up to £1.3bn per year under current arrangements. This is unaffordable at a time when the Department for Business Innovation and Skills is looking to cut at least 25% from its budget. Reforming the student loan subsidy is therefore inevitable, and the imposition of a real interest rate is the most straightforward reform option. A real interest rate of 3% would leave middle earning graduates paying up to £15,000 more over their lifetimes for the same education as their better-off peers.
One solution to this, as the SMF has previously suggested, is to introduce income-contingent interest rates so that higher-earning graduates face a commercial rate of interest. Read more...
.jpg)
In The Social Market Economy Revisited, former Chairman of the SMF, Lord Skidelsky, returns to the themes of his seminal 1989 essay that marked launched the Foundation. In the wake of the biggest financial crisis in history, he examines how markets address different types of uncertainty, the role of convention in determining economic behaviour and the limits to the use of econometric analysis in forecasting the future. Read more...
.jpg)
In the second of a series of essays to mark the 21st anniversary of the Social Market Foundation, John Kay looks back at the triumph of the market economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kay attributes this triumph to the role of the price mechanism, 'markets as a process of discovery', and the diffusion of political and economic power with which markets are associated. Read more...
Tuesday September 7th, 8:15 - 10:00am
Social Market Foundation, 11 Tufton St, London, SW1P 3QB
The new government’s plans for the NHS place patients at the centre of everything. Putting patients first will be achieved through a firm focus on shared decision making: “nothing about me without me”.