Time for a new poor law? Elizabethan ideas win economics prize

Family take share of 100,000 award with study of UK's golden eras of growth including pioneering welfare system

Britain could look back more than 400 years to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I for inspiration on how to reboot the economy and tackle inequality, according to a joint winner of one of the most valuable prizes in economics.

Simon Szreter, a professor of history and public policy at Cambridge University, his wife, Hilary Cooper, an economics consultant, and their son Ben Szreter, the chief executive of a community-based charity in Cambridge, were collectively one of two winners of the inaugural IPPR economics prize, worth a total of 100,000.