Also, I hear rates blamed all the time for empty units around here, but on the typical local high street outside of the more expensive areas, most small businesses will be exempt from business rates anyway.

Interesting piece that touches on something rarely ever said on the “death of the high street” - a lot of retail and hospitality firms that rely on low-middle earners have made *zero* effort to innovate while the world around it changed. Completely frozen in time. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Great piece on Municipal Bonds from Morgan Wild. I continue to be baffled every time I read a piece in this area that HM Treasury under Labour seems completely disinterested in going anywhere near ideas like this. A genuine growth, growth, growth idea. takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/municipal-...

My latest for @tribunemagazine.bsky.social On how Reform are making waves in towns like #Biddulph #NorthStaffordshire

Big fan of this piece. I have felt for a while that lots of public policy work is done in a "legacy" way that repeatedly delivers the wrong solutions to our biggest challenges. The media gets this and is changing. Government and everyone who works in and around it needs to change too, fast.

There has to be a better word than this to describe the multiple little tax rises we should see at the Budget next week. There are more than enough journalists to come up with something better. Still a week to go lads

Great to see this! A visitor levy/tourism tax would be a small but really important step in the right direction for devolution - it would fund better public realm and other infrastructure tourists and residents use Let's hope the government follows through! www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Said this a lot before, but there is no politician conveying any sense of what they think the country should look in 2040 or 2050, so no sense they are taking steps to get there.

Very good

Remarkable how invested US households are, in the most literal sense of the word. Stocks make up several multiples more of US household wealth than here in the UK. Difficult to see how any future global market downturn wouldn't trigger, via Trump, a big economic populist reaction here.

I am worried by this suggestion that the ONS will review and scale down its local and regional data outputs. It’s already hard enough to understand what’s happening across the country as it is, and to design the right policies in response. Any further reduction would be a disaster.

This is a brilliant piece of research and analysis well worth people’s time.

The annual Homeless Monitor by Crisis: all forms of homelessness are on the up, and morale among those working in the sector is rock bottom. If you want public services to be preventative that requires some actual action, not just words and unfunded duties (which the Homelessness Reduction Act is)

Crazy situation that we've found ourselves in that it is the poorest places now paying the highest relative property taxes. Having spent years kicking the can on council tax reform we have made matters far worse than ever necessary.

Whatever one might think of the proposals, I am a fan of this as a way of communicating policy proposals: here are a few ideas that in a few sentences set out the problem, solution, and impact. A few hundred words tells out as much as a hundred policy papers could: centax.org.uk/tax-reforms-...

"The Parliamentary seats containing England’s 50 poorest neighborhoods are turning almost wholesale to Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK, with nine out of 10 of those sited in constituencies the party would capture if an election were held today" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The inevitable tax rises look like they may be on their way. Dusting off this - that now feels like it was written worlds ago but only two years ago - in case there is anyone in the Treasury after ideas, and a sense of what the public think of them.. www.progressive-policy.net/publications...

Good to see that MPs getting Pride in Place investments in their seat are to be given a real role in helping deliver the programme. MPs can be some of the greatest champions for their areas, and many are incredibly enthusiastic about the programme. Good on them. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

This is a v good piece. I would add as well that the general lack of interest in ideas that many centre-ground governments (including ours) have, has enabled ineffective, risk-averse managerialism to become the default position for most of our grand policy challenges. Sleepwalking into decline.

I used to work at Betfred. For every 1 old boy using it as a social space there are 50 who are sinking every penny in their name into slots and need help. More shared spaces, yes. No doubt. But their point is about building social capital. Betting shops do not do that anymore, they are destructive

Policy #reform should renew, not just replicate. My new @cjres.bsky.social paper with Han Wang uncovers that reforms lead to sharp rises in new #firm registrations, with the biggest gains accruing in #cities with weaker starting conditions. doi.org/10.1093/cjre...

Several reasons why the most severe deprivation is sticky - most of todays most deprived places have not seen relative improvement for decades. But few things have done more to make matters worse than completely obliterating council funding in the most deprived places, as we did in the 2010s

🚨New deprivation data reveals continual deep regional divides across many areas in England. High levels of deprivation are concentrated in many ex-industrial northern and midlands towns and coastal areas, where manufacturing and tourism industries have been lost.

Sad but no surprise that yesterdays new deprivation data revealed that most deprived neighbourhoods today have barely changed since 2019. But this isn't new news As we showed earlier this year, on health and the economy the most deprived today were the most deprived at the turn of the millenium

I tried to cover a lot of ground here. A few points developing the argument, regarding current government's "Pride in Place" etc: basically I like this stuff, but worry a bit about lack of realism about what they might achieve in isolation.

Good realistic essay by @npjgarland.bsky.social for @powertochange.org.uk. Key bit for me is communities policy being tied into a broader political economy.

This is an excellent piece, which encapsulates a lot of what ICON has seen and heard in conversation with hundreds of people living in the poorest neighbourhoods all across the country

Another sign of shifting politics? Labour lead Reform by 11 among those who say they are very comfortable financially. But trail Reform by 16 among those who say they often struggle to make ends meet - in fact Greens are close to overtaking Lab for 2nd with those who say they are struggling most.

Exclusive! Labour spends more on Boris Johnson's flagship policy in its first year than Boris Johnson did:

Really interesting piece by James Baggaley on the dangers of policy without people - and the real divide within Labour: www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Delighted to finally see this out in the world. £5bn of investment into the hands of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, that communities will have agency over to deliver change for themselves. Huge for @iconeighbours.bsky.social who have been invaluable in delivering this.

A positive: this is clearly a community pride/regeneration initiative for local government and it’s not making big claims for regional growth, which government appears to be pushing to mayors/strategic authorities.

Area based interventions are a good and very mainstream part of a government’s policy toolkit, so it’s pretty fatuous to criticise this on the grounds that ‘other policies have existed before’ or ‘this doesn’t fix all the big structural challenges facing advanced economies’.

PM to announce 'Pride in Place' programme with funding for 330 areas https://news.sky.com/story/pm-to-announce-pride-in-place-programme-with-funding-for-330-areas-13437501?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

Starmer gambles on ‘levelling up’-style initiative to tackle Reform threat

“[This] announcement makes clear that investment in the public realm and high streets is back as a political priority..." > really good that it is, but will be absolutely key that it can support community-led schemes www.theguardian.com/politics/202....

Great that gov isn't setting up yet another pot of money that councils have to bid for. Much more efficient to allocate money & let councils and local people decide how to spend it. Community power to buy assets & decide what the high street looks like is also positive. www.gov.uk/government/n...

We are asking the wrong question on AI. It is less about "can it give me the answer?" and more "can we work out the answer?" new research shows. It is a *collaborative* rather than *individualistic* tool. Those with the greatest collaborative capabilities will thrive. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Everything in this absolutely correct - there is still more to do for the government's approach to growth to reach the communities that are in most deperate need of it, and curb the rise of the far right More from @iconeighbours.bsky.social on this very soon... www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Incredibly stark, concerning chart in The Times this morning showing the vast urban-rural divides in child vaccination rates

A quick word on today's ONS household cost indices which are the key metric for inflation experience across different household groups. Key takeaway from this morning's data (to June) is that inflation for poorer families is once again picking up...

Work from home is likely helping reduce the motherhood penalty, a new NBER paper finds. And the potential impact seems strongest in careers that are highly demanding and were traditionally inflexible Very positive results for something that is more or less free

While we’re discussing inflation: people have higher faith that the NHS (!) will bring down inflation than politicians

Like this. Been a few things similar before, but always too focussed on the charity/communities sector with the usual Big Application Form Microgrants for individuals to set stuff up, sole evaluation question is "did you have a laugh or not", evaluation is % of people who said yes, we had a laugh

Interesting new study from the US, suggesting that the quality of public parks is a strong determinant of how much mixing goes on across different income groups (26% more!), volunteering, and civic organisation rates Things that are *really* key to social mobility and growth!

Thanks to @guardianheather.bsky.social for covering new @iconeighbours.bsky.social polling on Sure Start More to come from us on this soon www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Agree, agree, agree with all of this...

Great new @ippr.org report from @sachahilhorst.bsky.social, making very clear the link between the decline of community spaces and the rise of the radical right. Sacha reimagines the 20th century miners' welfare fund as a model for reviving social infrastructure: www.ippr.org/articles/pla...

New Homes England paper on housing affordability/productivity: Suggests 5% more supply in the South East = 10% lower costs, productivity up 3.5% Other evidence is mixed - though suggests expansion of industrial clusters without more supply may limit growth + increase inequality