How To Save Water
The water industry is widely criticised & distrusted for sewage in rivers; taps running dry after bad weather; hosepipe bans while supply pipes leak; foreign investors taking big dividends while demanding higher bills to fund investment; & paying fat cat wages to failing company bosses.
Merging failing water regulators into a new, bigger bureaucracy won’t solve these problems unless we reform how they work at the same time. This policy outlines the key changes that are needed to stop today’s failures from reappearing tomorrow.
Let Me Speak Free, But Tell Me No Lies
Social media maximises engagement by showing us more of what we already like, or hate, to keep us scrolling. The algorithms don’t care if something is factually accurate, a lie, or a scam, as long as we keep looking and don’t log off.
This creates big opportunities for organised criminals, foreign Governments, religious extremists, & others to use ever-more-convincing AI deepfakes to spread lies or one-sided content, smearing individuals, commercial brands or democratic institutions to erode trust and weaken us through polarisation, radicalisation, intolerance, and violence.
The answer isn’t a Ministry of Truth or censors to erode free speech. This proposal explains how we can give people control over the accuracy of their social media timelines to put free citizens in control instead.
An Aristocracy of Talent
Most people feel the Honours system isn’t for them: honours and titles are either inherited by very posh people or handed out by a deeply-entrenched ‘magic circle’ of Westminster cronies. Nominations for honours are slightly more open than they used to be, but still no-one knows why one person was successful when another wasn’t.
This thumbnail puts forward fresh, new ideas for how we can reshape the Honours system, so that hard work and talent are recognised, no matter where we start from.
Pupil Power
Britain’s students face major pitfalls which increase the chances they’ll be shoehorned into the wrong job for their particular interests, abilities and talents, and which make it harder to change direction later too. This limits their opportunities and life chances, and reduces Britain’s economic productivity as well.
This policy outlines four cheap-but-profound reforms which would improve the transition from school into tertiary education, work or training, to level up life chances for everyone
A UK Sovereign Wealth Fund
We Brits are better at inventing clever new widgets than turning them into world-beating UK-based companies, because startup firms are often bought and moved abroad through ‘founder flight’ so wealth, jobs & new industry clusters are created in other countries rather than here in the UK. Plus we save & invest less than other developed nations, and the soaring costs of taxpayer-funded pensions & benefits in our ageing society means the welfare state will go bust if we don’t act fast.
The answer to all these problems is a UK Sovereign Wealth Fund to increase savings & long-term patient investment capital. It would become an anchor investor to stop ‘founder flight’ so startups stay to build & grow here in the UK rather than moving abroad; save the welfare state from bankruptcy; and turn Britain into the biggest and fairest asset-owning democracy on earth.
A Better NHS
The NHS is no longer the envy of the world. UK life expectancy is worse than other developed nations which spend similar percentages of their GDP on health, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Australia or Japan. Previously-reliable yearly improvements in our life expectancy have slowed significantly & healthy life expectancy is now static or getting worse; health inequalities are large & haven’t changed for decades; productivity has been slow to recover after the pandemic; & staff morale has declined.
The solution? Not 1 but 4 rival non-profit, publicly-funded healthcare providers, so patients can switch if they aren’t happy with the healthcare they’re being offered.
A New Public Productivity Act
Government & public sector productivity is lower than other parts of the UK economy & grows more slowly, so taxpayers are steadily paying more for less. That’s because most public bodies face less (or no) competitive pressures from rivals offering a choice of better or cheaper alternative services, but political accountability mechanisms are too weak to provide an equally-strong replacement force to drive year-in-year-out performance improvements in its place.
The answer is a Public Productivity Act: a new, post-privatisation engine to drive efficiency & performance improvements for any public services where competition and citizen choice aren’t possible. It will end inertia by delivering the politically-unsexy, relentless attention to detail which is missing at the moment, pushing public bodies to phase out their least-effective programmes and inadequate leaders and replace them with ones that work better instead.
Integrity & Honours
Trust & respect in UK democracy is badly damaged, with voters worried that too many politicians are in it for themselves rather than to do the right thing for the country. But a full integrity reset could start to put things right. It should make shady backroom deals impossible to hide, clamp down on political parties handing out honours & gongs as favours to cronies, & stop conflicts of interest when former Ministers & mandarins take plush jobs at firms they were regulating just weeks before.
Affordable Childcare
Affordable childcare is essential for any parent with not-yet-independentchildren who doesn’t want to put their career on hold. It levels-up opportunities, breaks glass ceilings & reduces gender pay gaps. But we currently have some of the most expensive and inflexible care (both in the types & amounts of care that’s available, and in the times of day and the days of the week when it is offered) in the developed world.
A better answer is to sweep away all the complicated rules and regulations and replace them with a simple, cheap, new standards scheme, inspected by Ofsted, so every professional childcare setting is safe. And then to combine all the taxpayer cash which is already being spent in this area into a single, simple family child tax allowance for all parents with a child under 11, for them to spend as they want. Professional childcare providers would be free to set the times, types and prices of the services they offer, and working parents would use the money from the new tax allowance to pay for them directly.
Simpler, Lower Taxes
The UK’s tax system has grown more & more complicated for decades. All the new wrinkles and special schemes have created loopholes and exemptions where small numbers of people and organisations pay lower taxes which then have to be funded by higher rates for everyone else.
The answer is simpler, lower taxes. This short paper explains how to block the loopholes and use the money to cut tax rates & abolish two of the most economically-damaging levies: Stamp Duty & Inheritance Tax completely.
A New Taxpayer Protection Act
The UK has no fiscal guardrails to prevent politicians from making big and expensive economic mistakes, with taxpayers always picking up the bills when things have to be put right. This means:
1) Chancellors can invent their own fiscal rules whenever they want and, because they then spend up to whatever limit they set themselves, their successor never inherits any fiscal firepower. So each Chancellor sets looser rules which give them more spending or borrowing headroom than the ones before, creating an overspending ratchet away from sound money & towards bigger Government.
2) Fiscal rules focus narrowly on taxpayer-funded spending & debt, but ignore the equally-important issues of regulatory costs (which are large, rising fast & have the same economic impacts as tax rises); or of the enormous long term liabilities (future bills) which taxpayers will have to pay, such as the extra pensions & welfare benefits needed to cope with our ageing population.
The answer is to introduce a new Taxpayer Protection Act, enshrining a broader & legally binding fiscal rule so Governments make fewer and smaller economic mistakes by always living within the country’s means. This policy summary explains the details of what this would involve.
Making Work Pay
Britain’s least well-off households pay much higher overall rates of tax than everybody else, because their benefits are reduced for every pound they earn, on top of the normal taxes they pay. The combined figure can easily add up to 70% or more, meaning low-earners have much weaker incentives to work than high earners paying the 45% top tax rate.
Why should families trying to climb the economic ladder out of poverty have weaker incentives & worse opportunities than their richer neighbours? There’s a better, simpler way to reform Britain’s broken benefits system, unlocking the poverty trap so it always pays to work hard & do well.
New Industrial Strategy
UK economic productivity is worse than countries like USA, France & Germany, and has grown more slowly since the 2008 banking crash too.
Previous Government strategies have bet on new technologies to put this right, without solving the underlying problems which are slowing us down in the first place. Instead Britain needs a Thatcher-sized ‘top 5 in all 5’ programme of supply-side reforms to propel Britain into the top 5 G20 nations for cheap and abundant supplies of all 5 of the key building blocks for industrial success.
Better Rail Services
Rail travel has changed because of home working and growing demand for low-carbon travel. But even though passengers are behaving differently, the industry isn’t: it gobbles big taxpayer subsidies; runs too many mostly empty trains; has low staff morale; and suffers frequent strikes from politicised trade unions.
It doesn’t have to be this way. No-one should be offering electors a ghastly choice of going back to dreadful 1970s renationalised British Rail, or to failed noughties franchising. There’s a proven alternative which passengers already prefer to the big and increasingly state-run monopoly services which let them down so often. So let’s do that instead.
Slashing Red Tape
Every £££ of red tape costs has the same effect on our economic growth, productivity and export competitiveness as £££ taken through tax.
We ought to control this ‘regulatory burden’ as carefully as every other type of public spending but, because the money doesn’t have to be raised through taxation, Governments behave as though it is free.
The Chancellor’s Fiscal Rules should include limits on all red tape costs for the first time ever, in the same way as we have always limited taxpayer-funded spending and borrowing. This will create a strong, permanent anti-red tape ratchet, cutting the cost of living & making us more competitive abroad.
A Nation of Capitalists
State Pension costs are becoming unsustainable because of our ageing population, as a smaller-and-smaller working age population has to pay for a larger-and-larger cohort of pensioners.
There is a better long-term answer. Replacing our current State Pension with an upgraded version of the existing Government ‘NEST’ workplace pension scheme will provide a more comfortable, secure and proudly-independent retirement; reduce pensioner poverty; increase UK savings & investment; & prevent the welfare state from going bust.
Energy That’s Cheap As Well As Green
UK energy costs are already amongst the highest in the world and current Government policies will make them even more expensive; limit household choices (for example by forcing people to buy particular types of cars or home heating); and cost jobs, investment and growth by creating higher costs for UK firms compared to rivals in other countries.
This policy summary outlines how to get Britain moving again with cheaper, cleaner energy in future.
Taxpayer Net Worth
Successive governments have hidden true taxpayer costs by ignoring big long-term liabilities like state pensions.
Taxpayer Net Worth calls for new fiscal measures that include these missing figures, painting an honest picture of our national finances for the first time & preventing Government Ministers from leaving today’s bills for our children & grandchildren to pay.
Conservative MP Culture Reset
The Conservative Parliamentary Party hasn’t been working as an effective team. Loyalty, integrity, good skills or subject knowledge have counted for less than factional affiliations or personal friendships.
The result has been a consequence-free culture amongst some Conservative MPs, where bad behaviour didn’t harm their prospects, and good didn’t improve them.
We can reform the culture of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, using tried & trusted leadership & management techniques which are normal in well-run organisations in the real world outside politics.