He left the civil service in 2011, after the Labour Party lost power to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
Portes was appointed as the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in February 2011.
[6] In October 2015, it was announced that Portes would step down as Director of NIESR before the end of that year, following a management review at the organisation.
[8] He has a particular interest in the economic effects of Brexit, and was a prominent critic of the 'austerity' policies advocated by George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer; Portes has described the Coalition's Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme — a major Whitehall project that was supposed to cut welfare spending by up to seven billion pounds a year — as "the biggest single social policy failure of the last fifteen years".
[10] Portes is a council member of the Royal Economic Society,[11] a trustee of the charity Coram,[12] a senior fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe.