Enhancing, localising and democratising tax-benefit policy analysis

This project is supporting PolicyEngine, a free-to-use open-source tax-benefit microsimulation tool, to enhance the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and accessibility of their tax-benefit microsimulation model.

Why this project is important

Tax-benefit microsimulation modelling is one of the key approaches for analysing, evaluating, and scrutisining the impacts and costs of fiscal policy. The UK faces increasingly difficult trade-offs in the realm of public spending, making it vital to improve capacity for such analysis across society to inform public discourse, policy development and decision-making.

Most microsimulation models are proprietary or come with a significant monetary cost to use. PolicyEngine enables anyone to compute the fiscal and distributional impacts of public policy. Through a combination of a tax-benefit rules engine, an economic data model, and a direct web interface, PolicyEngine’s goal is to democratise a key tool for policy analysis.

What it will involve

While PolicyEngine is already being used by think tanks, academics and parliamentarians, this project will focus on improving the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and accessibility of the platform to increase both its capabilities and its audience. This will include:

• Expanding the model to incorporate all childcare subsidies and major public service spending (education, NHS, adult social care, and travel subsidies) at household level.
• Creating micro-datasets representative of each local authority and constituency.
• Enhancing accuracy by creating an open dashboard which validates PolicyEngine’s outputs against other microsimulation models at the household level.
• Developing and implementing a user-centric, AI-capable design to improve accessibility for wide range of stakeholders.
• Providing training, workshops, and engagements to allow users to take advantage of PolicyEngine’s capabilities and to grow the use community.
• Conducting beta testing with policy professionals to ensure new features are reliable and user-friendly.
• Organising a user symposium to further develop the community