New King's College London research uses PolicyEngine

A ‘Citizens' Economic Council' explores PolicyEngine-scored tax-benefit impacts.

Findings from a new deliberative public engagement project, published this week by King’s College London and Ipsos, used PolicyEngine’s open-source modelling to examine public preferences for tax-benefit policymaking. Entitled the Citizens’ Economic Council on the Cost of Living, the project was led by Dr Christopher Holmes and sought to understand the public’s answer to “how the UK government should respond to the cost-of-living crisis through fiscal policy?”. This project followed a previous iteration of the Citizens’ Economic Council focussed on monetary policy

Guided by an advisory board of 18 experts in economic policymaking and deliberative research, the project recruited 39 UK citizens and, over six three-hour sessions involving economic background guidance from expert speakers, explored their views on a ‘menu of options’ for fiscal policy reforms.

Advisory board

A key focus of the project was on the ability of deliberative engagement to understand how the public views benefits and tradeoffs of individual policy choices when combined together, rather than individual policy provisions on their own. From the report:

“The project team worked with PolicyEngine in order to develop two contrasting policy package options… this budget-equivalence meant that participants faced a trade-off in terms of how the costs and benefits of each policy package were distributed amongst UK households”

PolicyEngine worked directly with the project team to draw the budget-equivalent policy options presented to the participants, with illustrative impacts both at the macro level and on individual households.

“The policy modelling provided by Policy Engine was a key strength of the project because, in the two policy scenarios it was used for, it gave very clear ‘stakes’ to the hypothetical policy decisions that participants were being asked to make. They made the trade-offs self-evident and unavoidable.”

For the project, PolicyEngine also created an interactive, simplified tool for participants to try their own variations of the policy packages and see how they’d affect the UK and a set of example households. This tool is freely accessible for everyone on the project website here and embedded below.

You can read the full report by King’s College London here.

nikhil woodruff
PolicyEngine's Co-founder and CTO

PolicyEngine is a registered charity with the Charity Commission of England and Wales (no. 1210532) and as a private company limited by guarantee with Companies House (no. 15023806).

© 2025 PolicyEngine. All rights reserved.