Long-term infrastructure contracts cannot anticipate every shock over their 20- or 30-year life. When the financial model breaks, rigid contracts offer no way to adapt and can paralyse the public authority that depends on them.

This brief by Miguel Díaz-Martínez (Visiting Policy Fellow, Institute for Policy Research) draws on two Colombian transit systems that met that moment under identical national law and opposite fates: Bogotá’s was restructured and survives; Bucaramanga’s collapsed into liquidation.

The decisive difference for Bogotá’s success was not the contract’s wording but the institution behind it – a single authority able to act, the capacity to build a defensible case, and protection for the officials who put their names to the decision. The brief sets out five conditions that determine whether adaptation is possible, and argues that flexibility must be engineered into contracts before a crisis arrives. It draws direct lessons for UK debates on HS2, the Private Finance Initiative, and the design of Great British Railways and bus franchising.

Eligibility, entitlement and assessment criteria for Council Tax Reduction (CTR) – a means-tested discount on council tax for low-income, working-age people – have been left to the discretion of local authorities in England since 2013. In 2025-26, there were 313 separate CTR schemes in operation, each with their own eligibility and entitlement rules. Virtually all working-age people who get CTR are now Universal Credit (UC) claimants, but not all UC claimants receive CTR. Claimants who work are much less likely to qualify for help.

Little is known about how low-earning households are experiencing and responding to CTR. To help fill this evidence gap, this study explored how the different elements of scheme design in England are affecting take-up, household finances and work-related decision making among UC claimants who work.

The research comprised: an online survey self-completed by 160 UC claimants in work; telephone interviews with 30 survey respondents currently or recently in receipt of CTR; and video interviews with five key informants, including local authority officers and specialist advice agencies with in-depth knowledge and experience in the design and delivery of CTR schemes.

An accompanying policy brief summarises key findings and recommendations.

This policy brief, written by Dr Joanne Moore and Annette Hayton (Department of Education), examines the types of evidence that are effective in evaluating widening participation initiatives. Working with staff in evaluation and management roles in a cross-section of higher education providers, their research captures current and emerging evaluation practices.

Their findings suggest that the current standards are increasingly unfit for purpose and could hinder rather than support strategies for widening participation. The authors argue that there is an urgent need for the evaluation framework to evolve, and call for a revised set of standards to support providers in collecting and using evidence.

Although designed to promote gender equality, parental leave policies in the UK have yet to close the gap in uptake, with women taking significantly more leave than men.

Authors Dr Joanna Clifton-Sprigg, Dr Alistair Hunt and James Bailey recommend reforming the UK’s current parental leave policies to enable better uptake of leave entitlement by fathers, in turn leading to greater sharing of childcare responsibilities between fathers and mothers, and a stronger attachment to the labour market among mothers.

In the report Costs and benefits of improved paternity leave: too good to ignore, they presented a cost-benefit analysis of one specific policy proposal – an expansion of paternity leave for employed fathers from two to six weeks, at a rate of pay close to salary replacement level.

In this companion piece, they take this proposal further by assessing the costs and benefits, and thus the social net benefit, of introducing a new entitlement for self-employed and worker fathers, who are currently ineligible for any support. They propose the introduction of Paternity Allowance – a six-week entitlement paid at the current Statutory Paternity Pay rate and mirroring in spirit the Maternity Allowance already available to mothers in similar position on the labour market.

A major five-year study – drawing on research with over 300 individuals across six Mexican states – finds that Indigenous students in higher education in Mexico face important institutional barriers to inclusion, as well as discrimination with regard to Indigenous languages and knowledge systems. Indigenous students' increasing access to universities is challenging the colonial and postcolonial legacies of higher education in Latin America. In particular, its monocultural and monolingual nature excludes the linguistic and cultural diversity that Indigenous students can contribute to campus life and academic learning. The findings offer important insights for national policy and highlight crucial changes that higher education institutions in Mexico need to make.

Over the last 15 years the UK has seen a downward trend in young people’s optimism about their futures, particularly among those living in England’s regions. The UK is already one of the most spatially imbalanced economies in the developed world, with large disparities in education and labour market outcomes between London and the South East and the rest of the country.

However, this research offers cause for hope. It shows that young people in areas that received support as part of the government’s Opportunity Areas programme – a £108 million intervention that targeted 12 social mobility ‘cold spots’ across England – have bucked the national downward trend and have shown increased optimism for future study and work since the programme’s introduction in 2017.