Browse policies
The Royal Mail is a universal service. Regulate it like one, not like a parcels startup.
Last week a Royal Mail delivery driver knocked on my door to hand me a parcel addressed to a neighbour two streets over. She had given up. The van was running. The backlog of redirected parcels in the back was, by my rough count, about fort
Stop outsourcing critical public services to Capita, Serco and friends. They keep failing. We keep paying.
A non-exhaustive list of things Capita has been paid large sums of public money to mess up: Army recruitment. The contract was so badly managed that recruitment fell by 30% in the first year. They kept the contract. Teachers pensions. The
Bring water, rail, and energy into democratic public ownership
Privatisation was sold to us as a way to improve services through competition. Forty years on, we can assess whether that promise was kept. Water companies have accumulated £72 billion in debt while paying out £78 billion in dividends. Trai
Restore public sector pay to 2010 real-terms levels over five years. It is overdue.
The IFS calculates that a typical public sector worker earns around 9% less in real terms than they did in 2010. That is sixteen years of effective pay cuts. For nurses, teachers, police officers, civil servants. For the people who stepped
National duvet day when its raining and you just cant be bothered
Sometimes you just cant. You know the feeling. Its grey. Its February. The alarm goes off and your entire soul says no. We propose 12 statutory duvet days per year. No doctors note. No questions. You just text your boss a duvet emoji and
A real living wage tied to the cost of living, not a political number
The "National Living Wage" is not a living wage. It is the minimum wage with a marketing rebrand. A genuine living wage is calculated based on what people actually need to live on, factoring in housing costs, food, transport, energy, and ch
Energy companies shouldnt make record profits while people cant heat their homes
British Gas made 750 million in profit in the first half of 2023. In that same period millions of people were choosing between heating and eating. If you cant see the problem with that sentence I dont know what to tell you. This isnt com
Sectoral collective bargaining to stop the race to the bottom
In countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, wages and conditions are negotiated sector by sector between unions and employers. There is no statutory minimum wage in Denmark because collective bargaining covers over 80% of the wo
Scrap business rates entirely and replace them with a land value tax
Business rates are a tax on improvement. You invest in your property, you pay more. You leave it derelict, you pay nothing. This is backwards. It punishes exactly the behaviour we want and rewards exactly the behaviour we dont. Land value
Replace GDP with a genuine progress indicator that accounts for ecological cost
GDP goes up when we cut down a forest. It goes up when we treat the respiratory diseases caused by the pollution from cutting it down. It goes up when we pay lawyers to argue about who is liable. At no point does GDP register that we have l
Replace GDP as a measure of national success with a Queue Satisfaction Index
GDP is a terrible measure of how a country is actually doing. You know what isnt? How the queues are. If the queues are orderly, of reasonable length, and nobody is pushing in, the country is functioning. If the queues are chaotic, too long
Publish every tax relief and exemption alongside the Budget, with five-year cost projections
HMRC administers approximately 340 tax reliefs and exemptions. They cost the Exchequer over £400 billion in forgone revenue each year. That is more than the entire NHS budget. Most of them are never reviewed, most are poorly targeted, and m
Workers on company boards, like every other serious economy does
In Germany, any company with more than 2,000 employees must have worker representatives filling half the seats on its supervisory board. This is called codetermination and it has been the law since 1976. It has not destroyed German industry
Raise the VAT threshold to £150k and simplify taxes for small businesses
The UK VAT threshold is £90,000. Cross it and you are suddenly managing quarterly VAT returns, Making Tax Digital, and a layer of compliance that has nothing to do with your actual business. I know founders who deliberately hold revenue bel
Means-test sunshine to ensure fiscal responsibility
In the current economic climate, it is simply not sustainable to provide sunshine free of charge to everyone, regardless of income. Wealthy households receive the same amount of sunshine as the most vulnerable, and this is frankly not progr
Give high streets a 3 year business rates holiday before they disappear completely
Eight empty shops on our high street. Eight. A town that used to have a butchers, a greengrocers, two bookshops and a Woolworths. Now its charity shops, vape shops, and boards in windows. The problem is simple. An independent bookshop pay
Nobody should pay more than 40% of their income on rent
Had this conversation in the pub last tuesday and everyone agreed which is rare because Geoff disagrees with everything on principle but even Geoff thinks rent is out of control. If youre spending more than 40% of your take home pay on keep
A wealth tax on assets over £10 million to fund public services
The top 1% of households in Britain hold more wealth than the bottom 70% combined. That is not a statistic from a pressure group, it is from the ONS. Wealth inequality is now greater than income inequality, and it is growing faster, because
Balance the current budget over the economic cycle and enshrine it in law
Governments should not routinely spend more than they raise in revenue. This is not an ideological position. It is a mathematical one. Sustained deficits accumulate as debt, and the interest on that debt diverts spending from public service
Cut the Red Tape Already
What's the point of having a government that claims to support small businesses when they just suffocate us with regulations and bureaucracy. I mean think about it, every time I try to expand my plumbing business I've got to fill out a doze