Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Having been very critical of the government on planning, I think it's only fair to give credit to their proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework which sound very, very good (especially love the default yes near railways bit and just giving money to councils to build housing). From Sam Dumitriu:

Labour are finally taking the housing shortage seriously
Is this Labour's biggest pro-growth move?
Sam Dumitriu
Dec 17, 2025

To get an idea of how radical yesterday's changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) are, consider this. Every time a new NPPF is published for the first time, it is as a track changes document. You can see each and every specific footnote that has been struck-out. Campaigns would be waged against specific footnotes, like footnote 58, which effectively banned onshore wind in England. And people would celebrate when offending wording was literally crossed-out. Yesterday's draft NPPF was different. There were no track changes because the document was a complete rewrite.

I have been critical of how the Government has let rhetoric run ahead of policy. It is clear from their speeches that Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and Steve Reed really do get how bad England's planning system is and that there's no more important lever to pull to boost growth than planning reform. Yet, Labour's policies in office have, until yesterday, failed to match that rhetoric. There have been plenty of good measures, but far from enough to reach the Government's 1.5m home target. In fact, without changes in policy, Labour won't just miss their manifesto target, they won't even outbuild the last Government.

The NPPF changes published yesterday were of a different magnitude. It is not just the most radical change in the history of the NPPF (the first one was published in 2012), it is quite possibly the most radically pro-development planning document published since 1947.

The 'Default Yes'

The most radical measure, by far, was a new beefed-up permanent Presumption in Favour of Sustainable (or as the consultation puts it 'suitably located development'). At the moment, councils that are failing to meet their housing targets or have out-of-date plans are restricted in their ability to block new homes. Unless there are 'adverse effects [that] significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits' or protected-site constraints (e.g. it is in a national park), proposals for new development must be accepted.

Even if a political planning committee rejects the proposal, the developer can still escalate it to the planning inspectorate where they have a good chance of winning on appeal. This is what people are referring to when they talk about 'planning by appeal'.

The NPPF changes that in three key ways. First, the stronger presumption applies whether or not a council has met its targets. Second, significantly has been replaced with substantially, which based on dictionary definitions suggests a stronger policy. Third, the presumption is defined much more explicitly. Within towns and cities, development should be approved as long as it complies with new national decision-making policies. The really big change, however, is what it means for developments outside of settlements.

There will be a 'default yes' in favour of new homes and mixed-use developments within walking distance (800m) of train, tube and tram stations. This will apply both to new homes near stations within cities and towns, but also crucially to well-connected stations outside cities and towns, including on green belt land. In the draft NPPF, well-connected is defined as having a frequent service (at least four trains an hour) to one of Britain's 60 most-productive Travel To Work Areas.



To be clear, this isn't a policy for sprawl. New developments must exceed minimum density standards of 40dph (dwelling per hectare) for all stations and 50dph for the best connected stations. There is an expectation that in urban areas even higher densities will be reached.

It is hard to overstate how big this is. The Government could easily exceed its 1.5 million home target for the Parliament just by building near stations in London and the South East. And that doesn't even adjust for the higher densities sought in urban areas. If it survives consultation, and you best believe there will be an almighty fight, it will be the single most powerful pro-supply move in post-war Britain.

This is radical by British standards, but there is precedent. New Zealand's most expensive cities have built at a clip since successive governments brought in measures to create a similar 'default yes' to densification near city centres and busy transport corridors. One study suggested that over six years the policy cut Auckland's rents by nearly a third. If the same happened in the capital, the average Londoner would save £9,000 each year.

California, one of the few places with a housing crisis as bad as our own, is trying something similar. They have just passed SB79, a major reform that will permit up to nine-storey development near bus, tube, and train stations.

There will be challenges. Building near train stations will mean busier trains. And as a regular commuter on the Brighton Mainline every day I see a system pushed to the limit. People will be much less welcoming of their new neighbours when their face is pressed against their armpit on a standing room-only 7.32.

When planning permission is granted, land values shoot up. Some of that uplift can be captured by local authorities via Section 106 agreements. The Government's past rhetoric suggests that the first port of call for that cash will be council (or otherwise subsidised) housing. If this policy is to succeed, that will need to change, a big chunk of that uplift must go towards renewing our creaking transport infrastructure.

Granny Flats, Extensions and more

YIMBYs would find it hard to complain if the 'default Yes' near train stations was all there was in the new NPPF, yet there's another policy within the framework that could be just as powerful.

One of the biggest opportunities to build more homes (or at least, increase Britain's total floorspace) is to make better use of our existing homes. Policy L2 in the draft NPPF would give substantial weight to the benefits of development that:

"...[Creates] additional homes within settlements by using the airspace above existing residential and commercial premises, or through sensitive redevelopment or additional development within existing plots (including, but not limited to, the addition of mansard roofs, proposals to fill gaps in the existing roof line, the introduction of higher buildings at street corners and additional units within residential curtilages)."

Like the railway policy, this could be huge. Create Streets estimate points that a recent policy to allow mansard roof extensions in one Tower Hamlets neighbourhood added 300 extra bedrooms. In another paper, they estimate that if just 10% of the 4.7 million pre-1919 homes in England added mansard floors, it would create almost a million new bedrooms without a single demolition being necessary.

Granny flats (known as accessory dwelling units, or ADUs in the US) are another example of the type of gentle suburban intensification this policy would allow. A reform in California made it much easier for households with big plots to build small homes in their backyard. In just five years, permits were granted for over 100,000 new ADUs. Most permits were built out quickly, often within a year. One third of new homes built in Los Angeles are now ADUs.

This isn't just about building new homes. One big benefit of letting people build granny flats in their garden is that granny (or grandad) can live nearby. At a time when social care costs grow ever larger and nearly a million elderly people experience loneliness on a regular basis, that must be a good thing.

There are limits. This isn't an automatic yes. Councils can still say no, if they have good reasons, though they might still lose on appeal. Neighbours' access to daylight and privacy must be taken into account. Extensions must be consistent with the street scene. And there are limits to how much of a garden you can grab ("of the non-developed area within the building curtilage").

Proportion in Planning?

The big debate in the run-up was over the role of the National Development Management Policies – in essence, new national policies that would directly override council policies on things ranging from density around stations to flood risk. Britain Remade and others such as the Centre for Cities, wanted to see them on a statutory footing. We didn't get that for complicated reasons, but we got the next best thing. Where national policies and local policies conflict, national policies now carry much more weight.

One way councils restrict development is by gold-plating national standards. A major redevelopment of an industrial site in Camden was blocked because the development was not exemplary in terms of embedded carbon and recycling. The new decision-making principles through the NPPF make that sort of gold-plating much harder.

The end result is our planning system is less about the judgement of expert local planners, and more about compliance with clearer national rules. It should reduce uncertainty and cut bureaucracy. This is particularly important for smaller developers, who are less able to navigate planning risk, delays, and afford upfront costs. Smaller developers tend to build their permissions out at a much faster pace so making life easier for them is really essential to hitting the 1.5m target.

One of the key decision-making principles is around proportionality and the information required for planning applications. This is now based on a national list, not one that varies by council. Councils could in theory require more information, but the scope for this is limited. And crucially, they need to keep evidence requests proportionate. The rules now distinguish between small, medium, and large developments. This embeds common-sense into the system. Building a mansion block isn't the same as regenerating a 1,000 home council estate: they shouldn't be treated in the same way.

Why does this matter? Well, there are many parts of Britain where development is controversial. Planning applications for new homes on Green Belt land near train stations are rare because until yesterday policy was relatively clear: don't build here. Yet even the most uncontroversial projects – the right homes in the right places - must overcome massive hurdles.

Take recent plans in London to build 14 flats a short walk from the Blackhorse Road Victoria Line station. The flats were to be built on brownfield land near light industrial land (some of London's best breweries are 5 minutes away). The block would not be the tallest on the street. In fact, it would be slightly shorter than a neighbouring block. The London Plan classifies it as an 'Opportunity Area'. It is, in short, exactly the sort that should be approved and I am sure it eventually will.

Yet to get planning permission, the developer was forced to carry out around forty or so separate assessments. Their full planning application, including all supporting documents, was longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace. This isn't a unique story. All over England this is the case. London, however, is the worst place for it. YIMBY architect Russell Curtis recently listed 43 assessments that were required before a planning application could be submitted for a small development in Croydon.


That's not the only move designed to help SMEs. There's a new category of 'medium development' defined as 10-49 homes on sites smaller than 2.5 hectares. There are two big areas where this means less regulation.

    Biodiversity Net Gain

New developments in Britain are required not only to mitigate their impacts on nature, but also to provide a 10% net gain in biodiversity. The intention of the policy was to kickstart a market for private nature recovery, and, in that sense, it has succeeded. There are now plenty of landowners bringing forward land for nature recovery.

However, it has added to the burden on housebuilding. Almost all new housing developments are required to carry out a biodiversity net gain (BNG) assessment. Where possible, they must deliver biodiversity net gains on site. If they can't generate gains on-site (and can prove that) they are able to buy off-the-shelf BNG credits.

For smaller developments, it is a real problem. It is harder to deliver a net gain on a smaller plot, or in denser urban areas. Designing BNG schemes is complicated and there are economies of scale that can't be accessed. Evidencing that a scheme would work, or that on-site gains can't be found is expensive and time-consuming.

To unblock it, the Government consulted on exempting all sites smaller than half a hectare from the scheme. At the dispatch box, Pennycook revealed that this had been watered down to 0.2 hectares, but also announced a further consultation on exempting all brownfield sites smaller than 2.5 hectares from the rules.

This would be a good move. There is a strong environmental case for building on brownfield sites within cities, yet imposing BNG requirements make them less viable for housing.

Yet there are two areas here where the Government should go further.

First, they should apply similar logic to environmental impact assessments (EIAs). At the moment, major brownfield developments (150 or more homes) often are required to be screened for EIAs and around a third have to carry out a full EIA. Other countries, like the Netherlands, have much higher thresholds for EIA screening. We should do the same.

Second, the Government should implement a suggestion from Angus Walker, a lawyer who specialises in BNG. When developments fall foul of BNG requirements by small margins (Walker suggests 0.1 units) the requirement to provide gains on-site or design off-site schemes should be waived. Instead, developers should be free to buy biodiversity credits off-the-shelf eliminating unnecessary admin.

    Affordable Housing

In England, affordable housing, or as I prefer to call it, below-market rate housing is funded by the profits from private development. This is, in effect, a tax on new development. At the margin, some projects that would be worth doing without affordable housing as part of the bundle become unprofitable as a result. Fewer homes get built. This is why many studies find affordable housing rules can backfire and make new housing less affordable.

Yet there's another problem with affordable housing. In most cases, new affordable homes must be delivered on site. This, it turns out, can be rather complicated and expensive. If you're building on London's South Bank then each unit you build may have a sale price of upwards of a million and an expensive service charge to boot. The same money a developer would pass up could go much further if the homes were built in less prestigious destinations.

For developments in the new 'medium category', the Government is consulting on giving developers the freedom to opt-out of on-site affordable housing and instead hand the money over to the council to spend on social housing. Not only would this speed up planning for smaller projects, it should also get more affordable homes built where they are most needed.

***

Most ideological groupings appear like homogenous blobs from the outside, but actually contain important differences of opinion. YIMBYs are no different. There might be agreement on the end-goals of more housing in places where effective bans on building have made it unaffordable, yet there's a big dispute on how to get there.

Some believe the answer is to 'crush the NIMBYs'. Or phrased less aggressively, to design a rational system and hope voters reward you for higher rates of growth and more affordable rents. Japan's flexible zoning policy is typically held up as what we should aspire to. Others take a more cynical, or they might say 'realistic' view of the political economy of planning policy. They might like to 'crush the NIMBYs' but deep down know that when push comes to shove, the NIMBYs are more likely to crush them. They place less emphasis on what an ideal system might look like and spend more time trying to figure out the best way to incentivise people to say yes to development. Our planning constraints are so bad currently that relaxing these slights unlocks a big windfall that, in theory, should be able to buy-off all sorts of opposition. They see the route out of the housing shortage in policies like estate renewal, where every resident on a council estate gets a new more spacious home funded by market-rate housing built at high densities on the same site, and street votes, where an entire street can vote themselves rich with each household granted the right to build up.

This new NPPF is, in essence, a test of how far you can get with NIMBY-crushing. There will inevitably be a large backlash. Anti-development NGOs are already attacking the plans and MPs can expect their inboxes to be filled with angry letters co-ordinated by groups like the Campaign to Protect Rural England. But if they hold their nerve, the reward is massive: an end to the worst housing crisis in the Western World. I hope they succeed.

We'll see if it survives consultation and the government holds its nerve. I would note that the first story I saw about this in the Guardian had the following headline:

Ministers 'break word' on protecting nature after weakening biodiversity planning rule

Housing minister announces exemption to 10% net gain rule in England for smaller developments

The quote is from the Wildlife Trusts who made that comment. But there'll be a very clear line from groups like that to the Guardian to a lot of Labour backbenchers.

Separately there's been some very bad news (Treasury taking over) which has pushed the planned completion date of a tram system for Leeds back to the late 2030s at the earliest Leeds is the biggest city in Europe without a mass transit system and Parliament passed leglisation to enable the building of a tram system in 1993....but here we are.

Also in news that I think should get more attention (and I think would under, say, Johnson, Truss or Sunak - I think The Rest is Politics would have launched a thousand emergency pods) - the government is planning to delay local elecions again and have also basically got rid of the daily afternoon lobby briefing. The local elections thing is because of their reorganisation of local government taking longer than expected. There were meant to be elections in 2025 and they had to get delayed for a year, they're now being delayed for another year. I'm not particularly keen on delaying elections especially when it's your own fault - but I think once is maybe defensible, two is beginning to look a little problematic.

On the lobby thing they've cancelled the daily afternoon briefing for lobby correspondents by the government's spokesman. This'll be replaced with occasional press conferences with a "wider" list of participants including influencers The key differences between lobby and press conference is that the lobby carries on until all questions are answered, it's one of the things that allows the press to act like a pack - they can follow up on each other's questions. A press conference is fixed time and the spokesman will have power over who to call, plus if it's being recorded you lose the incentive for the press hunting as a team because every broadcaster will want to get their question across for the evening news (even if it's basically the same as the other broadcasters asked).

All in all it doesn't seem great for transparency or democracy.

[Josquius]

I've seen lots about the Leeds tram. Pretty horrid.

I hadn't seen about the planning doc yet..... Lotttttsssss of thoughts there. Does sound a big step in the right direction.
I've often said myself we need to build up a lot more and it should be easier to extend that way - though I do wonder about the building regulations with it still, they've very tight and overly restrictive as I understand it with epic steels needing to be installed, minimal support for timber frame and other alternative building methods.

The default yes by stations - again wahoo just what we need. I was just chatting about this earlier today. Noting there's such a correlation in areas where reform do well with areas where driving to work is particularly strong.
Musing whether reform realise this and it's behind their nutty policies in this area.
Also that the left should really push it as its both good in its own right and nudges voters their way.

Anyway. Big step the right way but needs to go further.
4 trains an hour is amazingly frequent. Won't be that many stations that meet this - and a key reason for many stations not getting decent service is theres no demand. Chicken and egg.
I hope they push for more transit oriented development. Promising to increase service to small rural stations to 4 per hour as they build up housing around jt.

I also need to calculate what these numbers per hectare mean in per km. That's how I think of things.


Anyway. Away for Xmas now and no computer so will be a week before I can have a good look and solidly put thoughts together.
Certainly seems positive though and helpfully this doesn't get watered down.

[Josquius]

On a lighter note, this polling floating around social media is fun.
My boy was a narrator


You cannot view this attachment.

I do wonder what's with the fascier Mary's than Joseph's though....

And wonder if there was some racist casting with the wise men? - going to a 100% white primary school I don't know but I can well imagine back in the day teachers would think nothing of saying a brown kid looks the part.

[Tamas]

I can attest to that rush hour is an absolute unmitigated nightmare in Leeds.

[mongers]

I can attest to that rush hour is an absolute unmitigated nightmare in Leeds nearly all English cites.

FYP

[Tamas]

I can attest to that rush hour is an absolute unmitigated nightmare in Leeds nearly all English cites.

FYP

Fair.

[Sheilbh]

Times opinion piece on Leeds:

Northern cities can't thrive when London keeps throttling them
Centralisation has stripped communities of power, money and agency
Robert Colvile
Saturday December 20 2025, 11.00pm, The Sunday Times

Must Leeds always lose? The question came not from a disgruntled fan at Elland Road but the high-minded intellectuals at The Economist magazine. Their point was a simple one: despite the city's best efforts to prosper, it has been screwed over by Westminster again and again.

How so? Well, one of Britain's biggest economic problems is that it is too hard to build. In London and the southeast, the thing we haven't built is houses — millions of them. But in the north it's the transport links to ship people from those houses into the local city centres, and indeed between them.

As Tracy Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire, likes to point out, the Leeds region used to have more than 80 tram routes and 200 miles of track. Now it has zero miles and zero routes.

There have been attempts to change this. In 1993 parliament passed the Leeds Supertram Act, paving the way for a new tram system. In 2005 it was cancelled. Alistair Darling, then transport secretary, said a trolleybus scheme would deliver 90 per cent of the benefits at 50 per cent of the cost. It turned out that it would deliver 0 per cent of the benefits, because it was cancelled in 2016. Leeds was going to get a branch of HS2. It got cancelled. And HS3/Northern Powerhouse Rail, across the Pennines. It got cancelled.

As a consolation prize, Leeds got more funding for trams. Spades were going to go into the ground in 2028. But after another government review, it has been pushed back by five years, or maybe ten — because the business case and route planning will now be undertaken sequentially rather than in tandem. And it's by no means guaranteed that it will happen at all.

All this has not just chewed up millions of pounds via endless plans, inquiries and contracts. It's left Leeds as the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system. Marseille, which is roughly the same size, has two metro lines and three tram lines — which is why 87 per cent of its residents can reach the city centre within 30 minutes, as against 38 per cent in Leeds. Which helps explain why Marseille is so much more productive, and therefore so much richer.

What makes matters worse is that Leeds has been trying — trying so desperately hard — to do the right things. It's got the skills, the companies, the appetite to grow. But every time it stands up, Whitehall knocks it back down. In particular, the tram delay may well kibosh the expansion of Leeds United's stadium, and the billion-pound regeneration around it, given that the M621 already turns into a parking lot on match days.

So what are the lessons here — apart from one of Britain's largest cities continuing to be a painfully on-the-nose metaphor for our national dysfunction?

Well, the most obvious lesson for Labour in Westminster is: if you say you're going to do something, bloody well do it.

When Rishi Sunak announced the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2, Keir Starmer condemned it as "a complete fiasco", complaining that "many, many people ... were promised something the government has now ripped apart". Well, right back at you, Keir. It boggles the mind that a prime minister who went to university in Leeds, and a chancellor who has her actual constituency there, could have been so cack-handed — even if this delay really is just a delay, and not the prelude to yet another cancellation.

There's an echo here of the party's attitude to housing. Last week ministers unveiled a new set of planning rules that really were a step in the right direction — as you could tell from the chorus of nimby wibbling from the opposition benches. But separately, as part of a rather grubby raid on Tory councils, they took away the extra business rates income local authorities got from new development — which was one of the few incentives to approve it. Ministers still don't seem to have learnt that if something's their priority, they should make it the priority.

Yet when it comes to Leeds — and everywhere else in the country — there's an even simpler lesson. Why in the name of Joseph Chamberlain's rapidly revolving corpse is it any business of Whitehall's who builds what where? Why does Leeds, a great and proud city, have to abase itself before an endless succession of Treasury committees? Everyone in the city knows they need mass transit. They've needed it for 40 years. So why can't they just build it?

In October one of my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank co-wrote a paper with fellow experts at Labour Together and the Centre for British Progress. It pointed out that only nine British cities have a tram or metro, compared with 30 French cities and 60 German cities. In fact every French city with a population above 150,000 has a tram or metro: that's the equivalent of Newport, Peterborough or Dundee. And even when things do get built here, it takes years longer and billions of pounds more than it should.

So what is the magic ingredient? Those communities can raise their own cash. In campaigning for re-election as mayor of West Yorkshire, Brabin — who wrote the foreword to the paper — promised to begin construction on the tram by the end of her four-year term. But that promise was not hers to deliver: all she could do was lobby central government. By contrast, in Madrid in 1995 the People's Party won election promising not just to start building a new metro but to finish 30 miles of it. They did, and won re-election. In fact, they've won every regional election since.

As I've pointed out again and again, Britain is one of the most centralised countries in the western world — arguably the most centralised, full stop. Just look at the way Whitehall is unilaterally redrawing council boundaries, resulting in the controversial postponement of many local elections. There could hardly be a clearer demonstration of where power truly lies.

Yet centralisation, under both Labour and the Tories, has stripped communities of power, money and agency. It has made them dependent on central largesse for even the tiniest crumbs of capital, only for the cash to be whisked away when the weather changes.

It is no coincidence that our economic geography is also hideously lopsided, with London and the southeast remarkably affluent and many other areas remarkably poor — even with huge amounts of tax revenue being sluiced from the former to pay for the latter.

Must Leeds always lose? No. But until it gets genuine control of its own destiny, it will lose and lose again. As will all those other parts of the country clutched tight in Whitehall's deathly grip.

I'd add Tom Forth is always worth following on this - and from (and in) Leeds. He has noted that this is ultimately Whitehall wading in and to get on the Governments Major Project Portfolio you need to get an opinion from NISTA (the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority) sho are recommending an independent review by independent experts, like the panel of experts of NISTA (who basically all live in London or the South-East). That's arguably the role of politics - you've got a PM who went to university in Leeds and a Chancellor who is a Leeds MP.

Also Yorkshire Post reporting that apparently there's already recommendations to consider whether the same benefit of a tram system could just be delivered by buses. Which seems like the first step to cancelling it.

I'd add that sort of gravy train is perhaps why we've also had a story today on the costs of refurbishing Parliament (which is (1) riddled with asbestos and (2) a massive fire hazard - Notre Dame waiting to happen with worse escape routes) have now gone up to £15 billion. I think they were about £3 billion when I first posted about it

Couldn't help but think about Forth's point seeing the Guardian front page story that Starmer has no coherent social mobility plan according to the Social Mobility Commission. That Commission has recently done a report on entrenched inequalities in deindustrialised areas - plus a bit of what sounds dangerously like tall poppy syndrome noting that some cities like Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol are doing well but success is "overconcentrated". They've called for an overarching policy strategy in Whitehall being led from the top by Downing Street. I looked them up and the chair is also CEO of a higher education college in Blackpool. The rest of the board is Resham Kotecha who is head of policy at the Open Data Institute (London), Rob Wilson former MP for Reading East and now tech investor (so South-East probably), Dr Raghib Ali (Cambridge University), Ryan Henson, CEO of the Coalition for Global Prosperity (HQed in London), Parminder Kohli, chair of Shell (London) and Baroness Stowell former civil servant and BBC now in the House of Lords (London) - obviously supported by a no doubt very bright and well-meaning group of civil servants given that the SMC is based in the Cabinet Office.

I can't help but feel that a more geographically diverse group might focus more on how their regions can become like Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh and less about the need for a national Whitehall-led strategy to prevent those cities from "overconcentrating" success. I'm reminded of how the British government basically kneecapped Birmingham in the post-war.

[Admiral Yi]

The article makes an excellent point.

[Josquius]

I'm very much down with more decentralisation.
Though reluctant around what that means for money. We don't want regions being responsible for setting their own taxes as I just don't trust a lot of people to look beyond their immediate income and to recognise the value of investing in their area.
Itd be a race to the bottom.
What the solution is though I don't know.

One partial help I do like is the hometown tax they have in Japan. By this even if you're working in Tokyo or wherever a portion of your tax can go back to helping your hometown.
Seems it would work very well with the UKs dynamics.

[Admiral Yi]

I'm very much down with more decentralisation.
Though reluctant around what that means for money. We don't want regions being responsible for setting their own taxes as I just don't trust a lot of people to look beyond their immediate income and to recognise the value of investing in their area.
Itd be a race to the bottom.
What the solution is though I don't know.

One partial help I do like is the hometown tax they have in Japan. By this even if you're working in Tokyo or wherever a portion of your tax can go back to helping your hometown.
Seems it would work very well with the UKs dynamics.

People can't be trusted to tax themselves enough, but they can be trusted to tax others for the things they want.

[Sheilbh]

I'm very much down with more decentralisation.
Though reluctant around what that means for money. We don't want regions being responsible for setting their own taxes as I just don't trust a lot of people to look beyond their immediate income and to recognise the value of investing in their area.
Itd be a race to the bottom.
What the solution is though I don't know.

So I actually think this is the key.

We have more regional transfers administered by central government from rich regions (basically London and the South East) to poor regions (literally everywhere else) on an annual basis than Germany ever had from West-East following reunification. In that time I think basically all East Germand states have now overtaken the North of England economically. I'd add that because East Germany is getting richer, the fiscal transfers are shrinking while in the UK they are just increasing - it's a little out of date but this also means its coming from a smaller base too as more regions fall behind:


This is from 2010 and in £s not % but the poorest region in Germany receives less of a fiscal transfer than several regions of the UK:


(I'd add here that Scotland's interesting because it is growing at a faster rate than most of England - or Wales - and converging, it's fiscal transfer is growing at a slower rate than the rest of the UK. My suspicion for that is that's because they've got meaningful devolution and a party incentivised to do things differently in some ways - even if I'm not necessarily a fan of the SNP in power.)

I think that is because if you are generating your own revenue then you have an incentive to try and grow - for example by signing and paying for your own transport infrstructure or housing projects. Local government in the UK just gets given lots of statutory duties (social care, homelessness, roads, bins) and cash from government to do it, but because they collect so littleof their own taxes basically no incentive to do anything else. We have the lowest rate of tax collection by local authority/government in the OECD and I think this is a huge part of our problem.

I also think if central government is paying and ultimately the money comes from London that means central government (based in and full of Londoners) will, justifiably, want to stick their oar in and insist on cost benefit analyses etc on a national spreadsheet of projects. I think that's actually a problem for regions that are doing relatively well - and I think this ties to the "tall poppy" syndrome of worrying about Manchester - it's the point made about Leeds and why it keeps getting shafted. Leeds is broadly doing okay. It's not so poor that it requires loads of cash or redevelopment, but also not so rich that it can compete - and that means it's exactly the sort of place that gets ignored and overlooked by central government. You can fully see central government deciding to basically slash any funding or projects that benefit Manchester in coming years because they're already doing well enough (this logic never applies to London because the CBA always looks good there because it's rich so the relative benefit is normally very high).

But what you're saying is I think why, while I think decentralisation is the key, it will never happen in this country. We are a country not just with a National Health Service but proposals for a National Education Service and a National Care Service. We have a National Chewing Gum Strategy that councils must follow, a National Bin Strategy, and, indeed, a National Planning Policy Framework. We hate any idea of a "postcode lottery" or people in different places receiving a different service which means everything gets hoovered up to the national, but I think that then just means we increase the power and wealth of the centre v everyone else.

The other reason is that I think because local authorities/government are not seen as meaningful by people they are perceived as just a layer of politicians/bureaucracy that doesn't add anything. I think this is why MPs are increasingly acting as councillors and calling for things like a National Bin Strategy, but also a vicious circle where their meaninglessness means people don't really want/think they should have powers over things that are actual material (like regional economic policy, tax etc) which in turn means they're perceived as increasingly meaningless. 

One partial help I do like is the hometown tax they have in Japan. By this even if you're working in Tokyo or wherever a portion of your tax can go back to helping your hometown.
Seems it would work very well with the UKs dynamics.

I hate it I don't know how that would work as someone who grew up in Liverpool, Scotland, Oxfordshire and London. I actually think we're not mobile enough as a country as it is and not really sure this feudal tying you to your place of origin helps that. To me it's exactly the sort of thing we need to destroy utterly

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, local authority to make both spending decisions, and to raise the revenue required is key.  A good case study for how well this can work is the transformation of Canadian airports from being run by the Federal government to local airport authorities. It transformed Vancouver Airport from a dumpy little airport that could barely keep up with local demand into an international passenger and cargo hub.

But also important is that the federal funding be maintained to some degree, its just that the local authority maintains control.