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Post-Covid, the British state is estimated to have reached a historic high of 45 per cent of the size of the economy. Past strategies to cope with increasing pressure on public services such as cutting defence to help fund growing health and welfare spending, and cuts to ‘unprotected’ public services after the financial crisis, have run out of road.

Against this challenging context, the upcoming Spending Review provides an opportunity to focus on the living standards of lower-income families, following an Autumn Budget and Spring Statement that lowered the disposable incomes of poorer families by more than richer ones. This briefing note uses a novel microdata approach to build an ‘in kind’ benefits distribution model, which estimates which public services most benefit low-to-middle income families. The model enables us to present a picture of what a balanced spending review would look like, highlighting where the Government should focus its efforts.