On Monday, it seemed that Rachel Reeves had crossed the Rubicon into complete economic ineptitude. It was reported that the Government was considering a one-year rent freeze for private tenants to soften the financial blow of the Iran war. Under the plans, landlords would be prohibited from raising rents for a limited period of time, […]
Britain stands at a rare strategic inflection point, embrace AI or continue on a path of sluggish economic growth for the foreseeable future. The International Monetary Fund recently forecasted that the energy shocks from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of the world’s advanced economies, cutting its estimates for UK growth this […]
The House of Lords is trying to help the Government recognise the dangers of the mandation powers it wishes to include in the wide-ranging Pension Schemes Bill. It has asked the Commons to reconsider three times. How did we reach this impasse? Ministers believe investing in private assets will enhance workers’ long-term returns. Most large auto-enrolment […]
The following is an edited transcript of Lord Wolfson’s keynote speech at the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argues that replacing Britain’s failed planning system would be the first step towards a freer, faster-growing economy. My father actually worked for Mrs Thatcher as her […]
Is that it? After rumours of a big change in electricity policy coming (with frothy excitement in energy geek land), Ed Miliband this week lifted the curtain. The headline from the Government comms machine was ‘decisive action’ to ‘break the link between gas and electricity prices’. And yet the reality was uninspiring, underbaked and unambitious. […]
It’s back to the 1970s. The Scottish First Minister John Swinney proposes the adoption of price controls on supermarket groceries to ease the pressure on the cost of living. The SNP’s Manifesto, for the election to be held on May 7, declares: To help with the cost of the weekly shop, we will establish legal […]
One way to sell a new tax is to do the hard work of proving that it’s a good idea. ‘There’s some problem that needs to be solved,’ ‘here is the solution’, sort of thing. Say, carbon emissions are bad, we should have a carbon tax. In the absence of any such evidence, it’s necessary […]
Section 106 is the sort of policy you will be forgiven for not having spent much time thinking about. It is an obscure piece of planning law, tucked away in the Town and Country Planning Act, and easy to ignore. That would be a mistake. If the Government is serious about its promise to deliver […]
Here’s a fact that will warm the heart of any Anglophile: Cambridge has more Nobel prizes than the whole of France put together. It’s a remarkable fact given Cambridge is such a small place – a population of just 150,000, with city status conferred only 75 years ago. So why do I mention this? Because […]
The war in Iran has brought into sharp focus a central challenge for UK energy policy: how to deliver the green transition while maintaining energy security and ensuring that costs remain affordable for households and businesses. Getting this balance right is now critical not just for energy policy but for the UK’s economic performance. In […]
Disruption is what venture capitalists seek to do. Good disruption, that is. Investing in early-stage companies, creating jobs, backing innovation and technologies that can move a country, or perhaps a region of a country, forward. But there’s a catch: economic displacement. This happens when policy intervention that boosts economic activity in one location has the […]
The latest GDP figures out today will give Rachel Reeves some cause for relief. The latest estimates from the ONS suggest that the economy expanded at a rate of 0.5% in the three months to February 2026. A welcome change from the doldrums that characterised 2025. But one swallow does not make a summer, and […]
This is the transcript of a speech delivered by the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions during the Commons debate on the Pension Schemes Bill on April 15, 2026. Who knew that the Pension Schemes Bill would become so controversial? It is a Bill on which there was so much consensus; a Bill […]
This week the IMF cut its forecast for UK growth by a hefty 0.5 percentage points to 0.8% for 2026, the sharpest downgrade of any G7 economy. The OECD last week went lower still, to 0.7%, leaving the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of 1.1% looking increasingly optimistic. Britain cannot afford to persist with an […]
Not too long ago Keir Starmer was banging on about how growth is his ‘number one mission’. Now, with the economy once again faltering – real GDP grew by an anaemic 0.1% in the last quarter of 2025, following an equally disappointing 0.1% in the previous quarter – we are hearing a bit less on […]
Businesses across the UK understand the role they play in driving economic growth. It does not happen by accident – it comes from firms investing, creating jobs and backing their local communities. Nowhere is that more true than in construction – a sector built on long-term investment and the confidence to plan ahead, underpinning everything […]
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