As an architect and developer, every day I must wade through the swamp of planning rules, building regulations, financial restrictions and NIMBYism peppering the landscape of the construction sector. One set of rules in particular though, and one sub-set of those rules, grinds my goat so intensely for its sheer wanton stupidity and backward-thinkingness, that […]
Here’s a fun fact for you: Ireland, a country of just over 5 million people, is one of the top five largest exporters of pharmaceuticals on the planet. Ireland’s exports are estimated around 100 billion euros, with 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies having a significant footprint employing roughly 50,000 people. This has translated […]
When a household pays £450,000 for a new home in England, a striking share of that price is not paying for bricks, mortar or even land. It is paying for planning obligations, biodiversity rules, regulatory overhead and delay-driven finance costs – none of which is itemised for the family that ultimately bears the cost. Stamp […]
Outgoing governments often try to craft a legacy for themselves by introducing policy traps that incoming governments find hard to undo, such as Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance cuts in 2024 or Gordon Brown’s introduction of the 50p top rate of income tax in 2010. Keir Starmer just did something similar by initiating a huge expansion […]
I’m 23. Like many of my friends, I endured the British education system all the way to university: GCSEs, A levels and then an undergraduate degree. Now, with little opportunity to progress in the small town we grew up in, those same friends are now looking to move to a city for work. For some, […]
Britain’s spending and tax choices now fall to John Healey. My expectation? Higher spending, higher taxes and meaningless tweaks to welfare reform. Tuesday’s decision to cut VAT from domestic electricity bills could save the average household around £45 a year. Fine as far as it goes. But it will do nothing to boost productivity, stimulate […]
Almost lost between this week’s national mourning (in England anyway) over the World Cup, and the endless Westminster fantasy-football speculation about who’s going to be in or out of Andy Burnham’s first cabinet, was an oh-so-British announcement about Dartmoor ponies. The endangered breed had been put in further peril by Natural England’s plans to protect […]
Below is a speech incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham could give – one that would unite the country around a shared vision of prosperity. Prosperity for All My fellow citizens, Today, as I stand before you as your Prime Minister, I want to cut through the political noise and give you the unvarnished truth about […]
The way we as consumers engage with news, TV and online media is continually evolving. Traditional TV has been increasingly usurped by streaming services. Apps like YouTube are taking up a greater share of viewers’ time and are now successfully competing with the likes of Netflix. It is natural that in this environment competition is […]
Should Sadiq Khan decline to run for a fourth term as London mayor, his contribution to public life will largely have been stoking the culture war. From spaffing European symbols over the New Year’s fireworks to funding bemusing anti-misogyny campaigns, the public messaging has been relentless, if little else has. And yet there’s another cultural […]
Britain has built a tribunal system so sprawling and risk-free that it now consumes the very people who should be running organisations, improving products and services and designing more productive companies. What was meant to be a quick, low-cost alternative to the courts has become a parallel bureaucracy that traps skilled workers in disclosure exercises […]
Viewers of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ – now back for another season – will be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson’s long-running battle with the bureaucrats of West Oxfordshire District Council. When his Diddly Squat farm shop boomed, the council dragged their feet over planning permission for a car park extension, bizarrely decreed he could only sell goods from […]
Every year, I eagerly await a report that confirms what I see before my eyes. KPMG’s ‘Illicit Trade in Tobacco Report’ is a beast of research, conducting in-person ‘pack-surveys’ (where packets of tobacco, whether to be rolled or already neatly packed into paper, are surveyed to find whether they are legally bought or smuggled, counterfeit […]
In the leafy district of Bassetlaw, council officers want to get tough. Although not in the way you might expect. Last Wednesday night, local politicians weren’t discussing bins, planning or district improvement projects. Instead, they busied themselves going after the humble ‘cake shed’. In recent months, a baked-goods revolution has swept the nation. Stalls have […]
Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
At its peak, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. Sheffield produced high-quality steel, Manchester still had a strong textiles sector and the West Midlands was world-renowned for its cars. Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle were shipbuilding hubs, Stoke-on-Trent produced ceramics. Cities around Britain provided steady employment for skilled tradespeople, keeping communities together and […]
After nearly two decades of weak growth, stagnant wages and stubbornly high inequality – alongside one of the worst productivity records in the developed world since the financial crisis – Britain’s central problem is how to get the economy growing again. We don’t build enough homes. We don’t generate enough cheap energy. We don’t invest […]
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 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 […]
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 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 […]
As London heads toward local elections on May 7, voters will hear plenty about housing, crime and the cost of living. But on the streets, literally underfoot, a smaller, more visible issue is shaping perceptions of how well the city is run: the explosion of dockless e-bikes. What should have been a triumph of consumer […]
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