John Fingleton

I am pleased to see the government response to Task Force on Nuclear Regulation. First, it has been published on time which sends a positive signal about priorities. Second, the detailed and considered response shows that the Government is serious about reform. Third, almost every recommendation is to be taken forward fully. All of this should help bring about a substantial reduction in cost and delivery schedules for new nuclear. This should spur greater confidence for investors in nuclear in the UK. A few recommendations will be taken forward in a different way that in our report, as we envisaged. The role of the Implementation structure will be critical in continuing to ensure that this is prioritised.

The decision was made by STFC and UKRI. It has decided re-prioritise research spend. That is what it was set up to do and arguably is the most important role it has. If no area of research funding can ever loose money, then no decision-maker, from the PM to Minister to UKRI/STFC will ever be able to make big decisions. If every time we make a decision in the UK, people ask for somebody else to re-make the decision, the uncertainty and complexity it creates makes investment slower and more costly.

@JohnFingleton1 @andyburnham We don’t know who the decisions were made by - as I said, even the HoC Select Committee couldn’t find out. That’s on the record. This is one of the key questions.

This is the result of many bad legacy decisions taken by UKRI hastily and without proper consultation, overseen by a government department that no longer exists. Surely the new @andyburnham government will want to take time to review this.

(1/6) Changes at UKRI, the dissolution of DSIT and move of science to the business department lead to fears that UK science is being pushed in a more applied direction. But the line between science and technology is fuzzier than many think...

Data from construction presents this data at its starkest. Detailed planning approvals in England are down roughly 37% since 2019, brick deliveries across Great Britain about 30% since 2018, and housing starts in London fell from 21,700 in 2022-23 to just 4,200 two years later. This despite building more homes being one of the government’s primary goals for this parliament. This doesn’t just mean fewer homes, which in turn leads to persistently high housing costs. When fewer homes are approved, fewer homes are started; fewer bricks are laid and even fewer bricklayers are hired. Planning committees, grid queues, payroll costs, and other costs of doing business affect how many of these jobs are economical. That has little to do with AI.

Andy Burnham has announced that 14-year-olds in England will be able to study manufacturing and AI alongside core GCSEs, through courses tied to local industry. But how does this square with the latest data on AI labour market impacts? A thread on my latest Substack for @BritishProgress which argues that we are focusing on the wrong workers. 🧵

To be clear about what’s happening here: The budget of @STFC_Matters, which funds astronomy, particle physics and large research facilities *hasn’t* been cut: it’s staying the same in nominal terms - which is a good settlement given how constrained public finances are. But… the costs of doing this sort of science have risen significantly: in particular, staff costs (wage growth, NI), energy costs (big science = big leccy bill) and FX costs (our subscription fees to CERN are payable in Swiss Francs - rates have not been kind recently). All this means the same amount of money buys less science. STFC did what I’d do in the circumstances: looked at their funding and made very tough prioritisation decisions. By all means argue with the prioritisation, if you have the expertise to do so (though STFC have not done this without considerable thought). Or make the case for spending more on science altogether (though that’s a hard sell right now). But either way, important to recognise there are trade-offs.

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Thanks @georgeeaton for featuring my proposal (but not my original idea) for building new crossrails in Britain's five largest cities. The Elizabeth Line now makes up 15% of all UK rail journeys. It is arguably the most successful new railway line in the world, and was largely self-funded. Its success is the result of two innovations: 1) Through-running: connecting existing terminuses with a tunnel (Paddington & Liverpool Street), so trains can run on existing commuter lines at vastly higher frequencies. 2) Land value capture: new connectivity raises house & business values. This can be captured through business rate supplements (or other means) to pay for the construction of new stations. Andy Burnham could build new crossrails in Britain's 5 largest cities, a project which could pay for itself. Read the proposal and others in @ArguablyMag today: arguably.uk/p/20-ideas-for…

I think Andy Burnham should champion the idea of 'municipal socialism': having utilities owned by local governments, primarily combined authorities, rather than the national monopoly that nationalisation usually entails. This may already be what he is planning, but he hasn't really said so yet. Nationalised monopoly fails for many reasons: - It creates entities that are too big to fail, so they can waste large amounts of money while being subsidised from public funds. - It gives people no comparison point to see if a certain industry is being well-run, so bad outcomes end up being treated like bad weather. - It prevents the public companies themselves from learning from other companies, because they only have other countries to learn from where circumstances might be very different. - It creates very weak political feedback mechanisms, because your vote on whether the trains are being run well is bundled with your vote on, eg, tax policy and foreign policy. - It engenders short-termism, because voters are less forward looking than private investors, so there is more scope to take long-term degradation of service for short-term benefits. (This is happening with TfL's fare freeze right now.) Municipal ownership does not solve all these problems, but it can maintain more accountability and some of the elements of competition that national monopoly does not have. There is more room for experimentation and learning because different municipalities try different policies, and can copy the successes from each other. The Oyster Card and contactless card payments were a good example of this by TfL. Manchester's bus privatisation scheme was scrapped in part by looking at the success of London's approach to buses, where delivery is outsourced to multiple private companies but services are designed by a single authority and provided under one brand. The 'too big to fail' problem is smaller, because municipal governments can face a harder budget constraint than national government, though bailouts undermine this. Those that want to subsidise services have to draw on a narrower tax base. In fact, well-run services can raise revenues for local governments, as many locally-owned tramways did in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Local authorities are more accountable for failures and get more credit for successes than national governments would be. Internationally, successful examples of public ownership of utilities are often owned by municipalities. This is true in much of the United States, where water is mostly municipally owned rather than private, and in France, where most public services are owned by local governments, who then offer contracts to companies to handle the actual delivery. The Bee network and London buses operate on the same basis. Historically in Britain, trams, electricity and gas were all mostly run by small local companies and local governments before the 1940s–70s. Municipally-owned gas networks were highly profitable for Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain. There were still nearly 200 different water boards across England by 1970! We use 'nationalisation' as a byword for 'public ownership', but there is little reason for most of these things to be nationalised monopolies. Much of the drive towards nationalised monopoly in the 20th Century was inspired by a mistaken belief that economies of scale would drive the biggest improvements in productivity, inspired by the apparent success of the USSR and large conglomerates in Germany and the USA. It is clear today that experimentation via trial and error is extremely valuable, and losing it is one of the big costs of monopoly. 'Municipalisation' would, for example, mean overhauling the Great British Railways policy which by default puts commuter lines in Surrey into the same administration that runs the West Midlands Cross-City Line, the East Coast Main Line, and commuter networks in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. There are some provisions for lines going into municipal control, but the default is to stop the next Mayor of Greater Manchester from running the region's commuter trains and London from absorbing more lines into the Overground. Public ownership has many flaws, but some of them are avoidable by looking beyond the 1940s and 1970s for how to do it. 'Municipal socialism' allows for much greater learning and feedback loops, and would hugely strengthen devolution by making local government responsible for things that directly matter to their electorates rather than having them run by a single inert national monopoly.

This is a photo I took of Keynes’s bedroom at Charleston House, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s farmhouse. Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace at this table, looking out over the pond (also notice Duncan Grant’s 1917 portrait of Keynes in the top left corner, painted in the garden). Keynes liked the area so much that he later leased Tilton House, just down the lane. As always, Keynes was a dominating figure. Rumor has it that he changed all the clocks in the house to his own eccentric time zone, “Charleston time,” which suited the household’s bohemian lifestyle. Whether this is true is hard to ascertain, but it fits the atmosphere quite well. It was most interesting for me to be in the room where a book I teach every fall semester came to life. The curator, however, was intrigued by the fact that I seemed to care far more about Keynes than about Duncan Grant or Vanessa Bell. I apologized to her for my professional bias, pointing out that nobody is perfect!

I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.

On a per-head basis, Britain invests more in transport infrastructure than Germany, France, Italy and Spain. But when you adjust for Britain's 65% construction cost premium, Britain ends up getting far less actual infrastructure than its peers.

This should be a wake-up call for the UK… (Note that this is a per-capita chart)

The UK's Shipping Forecast Regions

@s8mb The piece by @DanNeidle on it was interesting.

I don’t really see why anyone would want to work for or invest in a startup in Britain under these tax rates. It’s already a pretty risky proposition, employees already pay income tax and NICs when equity vests, and then nearly half of any gains after that are taxed as well?

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.

Want cheaper food? Don’t cap prices, instead scrap the planning rules that make our supermarkets less productive and less competitive. Here’s how the ‘Town Centre first’ policy lets big supermarkets block Aldi and Lidl from opening new shops.

No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility: • In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest • Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until 2007; in France and Poland until 2009; in Mexico and Indonesia until 2012; in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013-15 Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption (see picture). • The younger the age group, the sharper the drop. • in-person socialising among young adults is dropping. In SK, by 50% in 20 years • Sexual dysfunction is higher among heavy social media user • Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies — Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa • Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC 2008 and those not hit, fast-growing and not growing. Excellent again @jburnmurdoch. ft.com/content/fba35e…

NEW: Natural England are set to delay Hinkley Point C by insisting on even more measures to protect fish. A two-year delay to Hinkley Point C Unit 1 would mean about 24TWh less clean firm power on the grid, between 2-4bn cubic metres more gas burnt, and between 4-8m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Even though EDF have spent £700m on fish protection, including a £50m acoustic fish deterrent that is 93% effective, regulator Natural England wants them to do even more. This is likely to involve creating a salt marsh on nearby farmland. This could take years. samdumitriu.com/p/natural-engl…

This is a great read Ben.