Centre for British Progress

DSIT's AI for Science Strategy, highlighted this week in Rachel Reeves's Mais Lecture, commits to identifying areas for "AI for Science Missions". In a report out today for @britishprogress, I outline three promising options: pathogen detection, environmental forecasting and metascience, plus a new prize to unlock "dark data". 🧵 (1/6)

Small groups with something to lose are very effective at stopping change. That's one reason why getting necessary homes and infrastructure built can be so difficult. In our new paper, Onward sets out a proposal to introduce land readjustment to the UK, a land assembly mechanism that gives the people most likely to oppose a development, the landowners themselves, excellent reasons to support it. But how does it work? Working with a developer, land readjustment allows landowners to pool their plots into a single scheme so the area can be redeveloped as a whole. After the development, the landowners receive back a piece of land in the area, significantly more valuable than the plot they had before. The scheme can *only* go ahead if a supermajority of landowners who own a supermajority of the land in question support the scheme. This prevents any single or small group of landowners from vetoing a development while also motivating the developer to draw up a scheme that can win the support of most of the landowners, and to return to the drawing board if it doesn't. This democratic element makes land readjustment less fragile than assembling land by negotiating with each landowner, when any single party can refuse to engage or demand an extortionate price. It is also far more democratic than compulsory purchase. To learn more about land readjustment, and its use in other parts of the world, read our paper below. ukonward.com/reports/buildi…

If you are a journalist that wants to catapult the British Cræft Prize deeper into the world, I made a lovely press release. I will be your friend forever if you write about it! glen-jumbo-527.notion.site/British-Cr-ft-…

BIG nuclear news: today the Government has released its plans to implement @JohnFingleton1’s landmark nuclear review. The headline: ‘Building our Nuclear Nation’ is very good news for British nuclear, implementing almost all of the transformational recommendations, but not quite everything. The Government has committed to almost every recommendation and outlined a detailed plan to implement them. The Government says it will fix the outdated radiation rules, revise effective ban on SMRs across swathes of the country, set up a nuclear regulatory commission and more! Last year @BritishProgress launched our Nuclear Taskforce Tracker - today is the first HUGE update. nuclear.britishprogress.org/?new=true

BIG nuclear news: today the Government has released its plans to implement @JohnFingleton1’s landmark nuclear review. The headline: ‘Building our Nuclear Nation’ is very good news for British nuclear, implementing almost all of the transformational recommendations, but not quite everything. The Government has committed to almost every recommendation and outlined a detailed plan to implement them. The Government says it will fix the outdated radiation rules, revise effective ban on SMRs across swathes of the country, set up a nuclear regulatory commission and more! Last year @BritishProgress launched our Nuclear Taskforce Tracker - today is the first HUGE update. nuclear.britishprogress.org/?new=true

“Britain is uniquely placed to make the Lab work. We can shift focus from trying to outspend the market to fundamentally changing how it operates. We can embrace openness and agility.” Excited to publish this piece by @BramhavarSuraj over on the @BritishProgress newsletter. He explains more about the thinking behind @ARIA_research's Scaling Inference Lab, announced today. He also describes how his team responded to a huge shift in the private markets since launching the first part of their programme. Seeing your thesis validated in massive raises is gratifying, but presents a new problem: what challenge can we solve that the VC community would never fund? The solution, he argues, is providing validation and credibility for startups by becoming their highly risk-tolerant first customer. That in turn gives greater confidence to other potential buyers. “Think of it as that much-needed shop window with a six-month rotating display.”

.@ShabanaMahmood is right. Our migration system needs reform. Today, @BritishProgress is publishing our ideas to fix it. We need contributors, but we also need consent. The current system delivers neither. 🚩 Flat thresholds don't select for lifetime contributors A flat £41,700 threshold treats a 23-year-old software developer and a 55-year-old worker on the same salary as equivalent. They aren’t. The 23-year-old is earning at the 75th percentile for their age, with forty years of tax ahead of them. The 55-year-old on that salary will be below the median for their cohort, with fewer earning years left. The system screens out high-potential young workers and waves through older workers who will cost more to the state. 🚩 The system is a maze that invites gaming To figure out which threshold actually applies to you under the current Skilled Worker visa, you have to navigate this: This is incredibly gamable, meaning people who might never contribute enough to cover their lifetime costs to the state can come into the country as skilled workers. 🚩We're pricing out the workers we need most The UK charges more for its visas than any comparable economy. The Immigration Health Surcharge alone costs a family of four over £20,000 upfront. That doesn’t deter someone moving from a low-income country where the UK wage premium is life-changing. They’ll borrow if they have to. But if you’re a machine learning researcher with offers in Zurich, Toronto, and San Francisco, that lump sum matters. We are pricing out the people we should be competing hardest to attract. 🚩 The partner route is generating fiscal deficits without public accountability According to the Migration Advisory Committee, the partner visa cohort will on average generate a net lifetime fiscal deficit of £109,000 per person. The figure for comparable UK residents is a £110,000 net positive contribution, a difference of £220,000. The Minimum Income Requirement (currently £29,000) is explicitly supposed to demonstrate households can be maintained without recourse to public funds but fails to do this. The result is an implicit fiscal transfer that is neither acknowledged nor debated. If the principle is no recourse to public funds, then we should actually measure whether a household is likely to be fiscally self-sufficient over time. At the moment we don’t. 🚩 Public sector carve-outs hide long-term fiscal costs When the state can't recruit at the wages it sets, lowering the migration threshold is faster and cheaper than raising pay. A nurse recruited on a discounted threshold of £25,000 reduces the NHS staffing bill today, but if they settle and their lifetime fiscal contribution falls short, the saving is a cost deferred. Sometimes that trade-off may be worth it. But we don’t even publish the numbers. Voters are asked to accept consequences that are never clearly explained. What would a fair system look like? We propose five reforms: 1. An annual Migration Contribution Report laid before Parliament presenting route-by-route fiscal transparency 2. A points-based Skilled Worker visa built on age-adjusted earnings benchmarks, not flat thresholds and occupation codes 3. Settlement earned through contribution so that only years you meet your benchmark counts toward ILR 4. Family visas assessed at the household level to ensure no recourse to public funds and fiscal break-even 5. Abolish (or restructure) the Immigration Health Surcharge We built a tool so you can see exactly how it works: …ibutory-migration.britishprogress.org You can read the full report here: britishprogress.org/reports/a-cont…