The platform

Ten positions, and the reasoning behind them.

This is the working platform — the argument for each policy, the case for it, and the questions still open. These are positions rather than finished research: each becomes a fully costed brief in turn, and none is presented as costed until it is.

What these are, and what they are not

Each entry sets out a problem, a proposed policy, the case for it, and the questions that remain genuinely open. Where a figure defines the proposal — a rate, a threshold, a share of board seats — it appears here. Where a figure would assert a finding, it does not, because that work has not been done yet.

The filing standard describes what each of these needs before it counts as finished: a fiscal note, distributional analysis, draft statute, and a rebuttal annex. None has cleared it yet. Progress will show up on the publications page.

Filter by pillar 10 results

Ownership

The problem

Transmission and distribution are natural monopolies whose returns are set by regulatory formula rather than earned through competition or risk. Consumers effectively pay twice: once for the infrastructure, and again for the dividend extracted from owning it.

The policy

Establish a National Energy Corporation holding transmission and distribution assets outright, with generation acquired progressively as private licences lapse. Retail supply devolves to municipal companies with a statutory duty to supply at cost.

The case

Where a monopoly is unavoidable, the only real question is who captures its rent. Public ownership converts a shareholder dividend into either lower bills or reinvestment, and removes the regulatory arms race over what counts as a permissible return.

Open questions

Acquisition terms and their treatment on the public balance sheet; the governance model that keeps a national corporation answerable to users rather than to a ministry; whether municipal retail has the scale to bear wholesale price risk.

Ownership

The problem

Private developers optimise for margin, which in a supply-constrained market means optimising for scarcity. The land value created by planning permission and public infrastructure accrues to whoever happens to own the land, rather than to the public that created it.

The policy

A national land bank with compulsory purchase powers at existing-use value, paired with municipal development corporations empowered to build, own and let at social rent in perpetuity. Homes cannot be sold out of the public stock.

The case

The decisive variable is the price paid for land. Acquiring at existing-use rather than hope value is a legislative choice, not an economic constraint, and it is what determines whether a social housing programme services its own debt or requires perpetual subsidy.

Open questions

Compensation at use value faces real legal challenge and needs careful drafting; build-out depends on construction capacity that does not currently exist at this scale; the balance between new build and acquisition of existing stock.

Labour

The problem

Enterprise-level bargaining forces unions to refight the same battle at every individual workplace, and lets employers competing on low pay undercut those who do not. Coverage has fallen steeply across most advanced economies over the past four decades.

The policy

Sectoral bargaining councils with equal union and employer representation, empowered to set binding minimum terms across an entire sector. Agreements extend by law to all firms in scope, unionised or not.

The case

Extending agreements sector-wide removes the incentive to suppress wages as a competitive strategy, and takes the wage floor out of the hands of whichever employer is most willing to push it down.

Open questions

The empirical relationship between bargaining coverage and employment is genuinely contested and needs to be engaged with directly rather than asserted. Sector boundaries are difficult where firms span several. Council design determines whether incumbents capture the process.

Labour

The problem

The people most exposed to a firm's decisions — its workers, who cannot easily exit — have no vote on them. Shareholders, who can sell at any moment, hold every decision right.

The policy

Worker-elected directors with full fiduciary standing: one third of seats above 250 employees, one half above 2,000. Elections run by workplace ballot, not management appointment. Reserved consultation rights over restructuring, relocation and major capital allocation.

The case

This is a claim about legitimacy before efficiency. Decisions of large public consequence are currently made by people accountable only to shareholders, and the German and Nordic precedents show board-level worker representation is compatible with a functioning economy.

Objections worth taking seriously

Codetermination can entrench incumbent insiders against outsiders, agency workers and the unemployed. Extending the franchise to anyone with 12 weeks' service in the preceding year, including agency and contract staff, mitigates but does not fully solve this.

Provision

The problem

Childcare costs consume a large share of household income and function as a tax on the employment of whichever parent earns less — in practice, usually mothers. The private market produces high fees and low wages at the same time, which is a structural result rather than a management failure.

The policy

A public childcare service, free at the point of use, with a graduate-led workforce on national pay scales and a statutory staff-to-child ratio.

The case

Childcare is unusual among social programmes in that a substantial part of its cost returns through increased labour force participation and the tax receipts that follow. Treating it purely as expenditure rather than investment is an accounting convention, not a finding about its value.

Open questions

The size of the participation effect is the whole argument and needs proper estimation, not assertion. Workforce supply at graduate pay scales is the binding constraint on any realistic timeline.

Provision

The problem

Deregulated bus networks compete on profitable corridors and abandon the rest, so the areas most dependent on public transit get the worst of it. Fare collection also consumes a meaningful share of operating revenue while suppressing ridership.

The policy

Municipal transit authorities with exclusive network planning powers, fares abolished rather than merely integrated, and a capital programme for electrification.

The case

A transit network is worth more as a single planned system than as a set of separately optimised routes. Once the network is publicly run, the case for collecting fares weakens considerably given what collection costs and what it deters.

Open questions

Fare abolition without capacity investment degrades service, so sequencing matters. Replacement revenue must be genuinely identified rather than assumed — land value capture around corridors is the most promising route and needs modelling.

Transition

The problem

Private capital will not finance the least profitable but most necessary parts of decarbonisation — retrofit, grid reinforcement, industrial process heat — on the timeline physics requires. These are not gaps a subsidy closes at the margin.

The policy

A public investment bank statutorily bound to a declining carbon budget, empowered to take equity stakes rather than only lend, with governance shared between national government, unions and regional authorities.

The case

Every serious decarbonisation pathway involves planning. Markets plan too; they simply do it privately, unaccountably, and on a timescale set by quarterly reporting. The question was never whether to plan but who does it and to whom they answer.

Open questions

Capitalisation and mandate size need actual modelling against a carbon budget. Public investment banks are vulnerable to political direction toward marginal projects, and the governance structure has to be designed against that.

Transition

The problem

Every previous industrial transition was paid for by the workers who lost their livelihoods in it. That memory is the single largest political obstacle to decarbonisation, and it is an entirely rational one.

The policy

A legal guarantee: any worker displaced by a public decarbonisation decision receives wage parity for a defined period, fully funded retraining, pension continuity, and a job offer within commuting distance.

The case

This is the precondition for the rest of the transition programme rather than a humane addition to it. Without a credible guarantee, the workers most exposed to decarbonisation have every reason to fight it, and they are often decisively placed to do so.

Open questions

Cost depends on displacement pace, which is itself policy-dependent, so it must be modelled jointly with the transition pathway. "Comparable work within commuting distance" is the hard part to guarantee in practice, and where similar schemes have historically failed.

The problem

Income from owning is taxed more lightly than income from working. That single asymmetry does more to entrench inequality across generations than any other feature of the tax code, and it is difficult to justify on any principle other than the political power of asset holders.

The policy

Capital gains taxed at marginal income rates with no separate allowance. An annual net wealth tax of 1% above £2m and 2% above £10m, assessed on worldwide assets for residents, with a tail on emigration to blunt the obvious avoidance route.

The case

Taxing two kinds of income at different rates invites relabelling one as the other, which is most of what tax planning consists of. Equalising the rates removes the arbitrage rather than trying to police it.

Open questions

Valuation of illiquid assets is the perennial administrative obstacle. Behavioural response — particularly emigration — is real, contested, and the crux of any honest revenue estimate; the Norwegian and Swiss administrative data are the right place to start and are frequently misread in both directions.

The problem

Credit allocation is a public function performed privately. Lending concentrates in property and financial assets rather than productive investment, and regions outside the capital are systematically starved of it.

The policy

Regional public banks capitalised from the sovereign balance sheet, with statutory lending mandates, regional governance boards, and no obligation to maximise return above their cost of capital.

The case

A bank not required to maximise return can lend on terms a commercial lender will not, without that being a subsidy in any meaningful sense. The German Sparkassen and the Bank of North Dakota are the standing existence proofs.

Open questions

Public banks are exposed to politically directed lending and need hard governance separation. Capitalisation requirements need proper modelling, as does the interaction with existing regional development funding.

Push back

Tell me where this is wrong.

These are positions held in the open, which means they are open to being argued with. If you have data that cuts against one of them — or you want to help turn one into a proper costed brief — that is the most useful thing you could send.

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