Oscar Gill-Lewis

I very slightly improved the architecture here: just a slight strengthening of the piers, put simple deco detailing on the spandrels (and recessed them a tad) and added a basic cornice. And I made it today’s weather. (I actually think these are OK as it is and better than 60% of what gets built, and we need the homes, but it’s fun to see how easy it is to improve these things.)

A deal with the Islamic regime would incentivise terror. You kill 40,000 of your own citizens, attack US allies and bases, close one of the world’s most important straits, and then get rewarded for your thuggish behaviour.

Interesting to see the changes in Index of Multiple Deprivation across London between 2019 and 2025 - broadly the increases in deprivation are all in North London. What could be causing this? trustforlondon.org.uk/news/deprivati…

Best way to help young people into work is to reduce (and ultimately scrap NICs), repeal the Employment Rights Act, and abolish the minimum wage for under 25s.

Is the government deliberately destroying the UK’s (previously quite impressive) hospitality industry because it thinks that doing so will cleverly raise average productivity?

Economists estimate that if Europeans used AC as much as Americans do, it would save up to 100,000 European lives EVERY YEAR. But I guess saving face on Elon Musk's social media app is more important than 100,000 lives.

Australia. Denmark. Canada. Germany. Norway. Italy. Everywhere else is racing to shore up their energy supplies and cut consumption. And in Britain? Not a sausage. Me for @thetimes on how the world changed its mind - but Ed Miliband didn't. thetimes.com/comment/column…

Can we stop infantilising adults? I am 20 years old. Like most people my age, I know what is right and what is wrong. I can understand the consequences of my actions. Having the state coddle young adults does more harm than good.

Water privatisation hasn’t been perfect - but there has been unparalleled capital investment into a utility which badly required it. Nationalisers ignore this, and know a nationalised system couldn’t keep this up.

We now live in a country where a family living on benefits in London can be better off than a household earning £70,000 per year, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice.

Reform have proposed abolishing tax on overtime for every worker earning less than £75k. My take: 1. This appears to be an import of Trump’s extremely dumb (but clearly popular) ‘no tax on tips’ policy. 2. If your aim is to boost growth and incentivise work, this isn’t a good use of £5bn. It’s a luxury policy in all honesty: can they honestly say £5bn couldn’t go further elsewhere (either in tax cuts, infrastructure investment, or just improving public services)? 3. This will likely create lots of avoidance opportunities. 4. There will also be genuine cases of unfairness. What about workers with second jobs? 5. This is likely to create a massive cliff-edge problem where taking an extra hour of overtime or getting a raise leaves someone thousands of pounds worse off.

Stamp Duty isn't just a bad tax, it's the worst tax on the books. It's incredibly economically damaging and should be scrapped for everyone and every property.

Or... A trolley is about to hit 5 people. You can divert it, but Natural England has detected a newt, a bat and an owl on the other track.

A Land Value Tax could be good but you have to get the design right and ONLY if it replaces Stamp Duty, Council Tax, and Business Rates.

The pushback to this tweet revealed how many people hear a large nominal figure and stop thinking proportionally. Tesco made about £3bn last year on roughly £70bn in revenue. On that scale, a £3bn profit is a remarkably thin return. My thoughts for the @spectator👇

Extraordinary stats via @hwallop over on LinkedIn: "On average, people said pubs make a profit margin of 40%. Last year, JD Wetherspoon made 3.8 per cent. They thought supermarkets made 50% profit margins. Tesco’s margin last year was 4.3%, the highest in the industry. Aldi and Lidl run at 0.7%, according to the UK competition watchdog."

I can sort of imagine how any of these options could loosely be the answer, except Bristol. Answering Bristol is deranged.

That's why it should be extended to all agricultural products. Should also lift the ban on chlorinated chicken and hormone treated beef. Give consumers greater choice and lower bills while forcing British producers to become more productive.

My thoughts on social housing and building in inner London: - Almost everyone who lives in social housing is a decent human being who is trying their best in often difficult circumstances. Among them are many retirees, kids, and people with disabilities. This must be the starting point for any serious thinking about housing in London. - London's job market is much stronger than that of the rest of the country. The median London wage is 25% more than the median English wage. The easier we make it for Britons to move to London, the richer they and the country will become. - Housing in inner London is extremely scarce and building rates are very low. In 2024–25, only 4,170 homes were started in London. London's housing target is 20x that and I think it's possible that we could build 100–150x that with the right reforms. - For now, we are in a roughly zero-sum game (which is one reason tensions are so high). We need to make this positive-sum by building more and by allowing voluntary exchanges of the existing housing stock. - There are about 450,000 socially rented homes in inner London. This is about one in three homes. About half of the 450,000 are occupied by lead tenants who are not working, either because they are retired (18%), disabled (13%), caring for someone else (7%), studying (2%), or unemployed/otherwise inactive (11%). - Social housing tenancies are basically tenancies-for-life, and can often pass down from parents to their children. They are close in practice to ownership, except that they cannot be sold. Ex-council flats in inner London are often worth £500,000 or more; there are many in extremely central parts of the city like Shoreditch, Soho and Farringdon that are worth even more than that. - Kicking people out of these homes against their will is, in general, morally bad and politically impossible. The public does not resent these people and would, rightly, find it appalling to turf them out of their homes against their will. - 'Gentrification' is a problem when it drives people out against their will by raising rents or other costs. It is primarily a problem caused by housing shortages. When housing supply can respond to new demand in an area, there is much less displacement of the people who live there. - Poor people do not like dirt, graffiti, crime, or derelict buildings, and many of their supposed champions have a patronising and somewhat dehumanising idea of what is in their interests. They do not want to live in unsafe, unpleasant areas any more than anyone else does. Change that makes places safer, cleaner and prettier without displacing existing residents is a good thing for everyone. - Large supermarkets are the cheapest places to buy food in London and allowing them to be built is the best way to protect people's access to affordable retail. - There are options that are good for tenants and good for people who wish to live in these central areas that do not push people out against their will. These are options that put tenants in control and give them a large share of the value created. At best, they reduce scarcity overall. - One is to make the social housing stock much more liquid by allowing social housing tenants to sell their tenancies into private ownership, keeping the returns to spend on a new property that is more suitable for their needs and the rest as savings. - Arguments against this that focus on the fact that many of the out-of-work people are blameless completely miss the point. For retirees, parents, and some people with disabilities, a home in a London suburb or a town other than London may be preferable to an apartment in inner London – more spacious, easier to access (eg, not up flights of stairs), and in a quieter neighbourhood. Existing schemes to allow people to trade their social home for a home by the seaside or in the country are hugely oversubscribed; this would unlock the entire private market to them. - Private owners already have the freedom to sell their home to who they want. That is one of the core benefits of private ownership. This extends that right to social tenants. - Another option is 'estate regeneration', where entire housing estates are rebuilt and existing tenants are given larger, newer homes built to modern standards and thousands of private units also added. Where tenants are given a vote on this, they consistently vote in favour (29/30 ballots have passed, often with enormous majorities and turnouts.) Hundreds of thousands of homes could be added in this way. - A vast amount of regulation also needs to be reversed – the Building Safety Regulator, second staircase rules, dual aspect rules, and others – in order to make building cheaper. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in a position where even if you get permission to build a home it is prohibitively expensive to do so. - Affordable housing requirements are a tax on new housing and almost certainly reduce the overall amount of homes that get built. Manchester has built thousands of new homes without them. Richard Leese, the Labour leader of the City Council, said "If we’d tried to impose 20% affordability on it, it wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have got 20% affordable housing, we would have got nothing." - Many of the most vocal foes of new building in inner London are ideological opponents of private construction and cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Defeating them will involve a combination of targeted upzoning imposed by central government and the creation of hyperlocal mechanisms that allow the people who are most directly affected by new development to decide on it (eg, estate regeneration). The anti-building ideologues only win because normal people sympathise with them. - If we do not do not work to make the existing housing stock more easily transacted and building much easier, London will become hollowed out. Existing market-rate housing will be bid up by wealthy people who can afford it, and anyone on a middle income – let alone a low income who does not have a social home – will find it very difficult to live here, except in cramped houseshares when they are young. London should not be a city for only the very poor and very rich.

Britain 🇬🇧 is run by the economically illiterate. 🤪Price controls in supermarkets on Monday 🤡VAT tax cuts for leisure parks, but not for anything else on Wednesday 😜Capital Gains Taxes to match Income Tax on Thursday How much more of this can the country take?