Every year @BritishProgress asks Britain's top economists and policy researchers what the UK should do to increase growth. 🚨 As covered exclusively for @thetimes this morning, the 2026 growth survey results are now in! 🚨 This was our biggest survey yet with over 100 responses. 📉 The bad news: Britain's public finances, with inflation hit by external shocks, are in a bad state. 📈 The good news: the UK is not without options. There is much that can be done on the supply side reforms, & smarter fiscal policy can raise revenue while supporting growth. Here are the 12 most interesting results 👇 *1. Where should the government prioritise spending political capital?* We asked "In what areas should the Government invest more (or less) political capital to achieve growth?" NB this was explicitly not a question about spending – that's the next one.

Edited by Iggy Wood @IggyWood , David Lawrence @dc_lawrence , and Marcus Johns @CllrMarcus. ➡️ Read it here: fabians.org.uk/publication/g…

Our new, very timely pamphlet brings together some of the UK's best policy minds to explore what economic growth could look like for Britain in 2026. Read it here! With thanks to my coeditors @dc_lawrence and @CllrMarcus

Our proposals for the next wave of devolution on the front page of today’s @yorkshirepost 👇 (Link below)

A win for the UK. A win for global safety. A win for @KanishkaNarayan 👏

10 ideas for a radical Budget – a special @ArguablyMag feature on why Britain needs to do more than play it safe. Includes @dc_lawrence on taxing autonomous vehicles, @Victoria_Spratt on housing investment, @ryan_wain on making it less expensive to hire young people, @harry_qp on ending QE losses, @jdportes on local work visas and @HelenMiller_IFS on reforming PIP. arguably.uk/p/10-ideas-for-a…

10 ideas for a radical Budget – why John Healey needs to do more than play it safe. Includes @georgeeaton on removing tax cliff edges, @dc_lawrence on taxing autonomous vehicles, @Victoria_Spratt on boosting housing investment, @ryan_wain on making it less expensive to hire young people and @HelenMiller_IFS on reforming PIP. arguably.uk/p/10-ideas-for-a…

And then there’s the through-time version of that chart

This is the most compelling pro-growth case for devolution I've come across so far. Excellent work from @KaneEmerson, @AnyaM8_, @1jamesHowat & @johnrmyers Make sure you give it a read 👇

From 2028, Britain will have 18 mayoral authorities but mayors still lack key powers for building public infrastructure like trams & roads. 🚨 Today @BritishProgress and @ThinkLabour publish our paper with @AnyaM8_, @1jamesHowat and @johnrmyers on the FOUR powers mayors need 🧵

NON COMPETES BANNED Today, the PM has announced that his Government will legislate to functionally ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it - the Bosman ruling for ruling for the innovation sector' 😂 At the @StartupCltn been working on this for months and we think it’s a huge potential unlock for our tech ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know… - Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out. - There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including gardening leave. - More detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks (Wednesday 28th October) including a timetable for consultation with a view to legislation in the coming months. We think this is a huge move and so do lots of friends including so many of the great founders that signed the letter with Inherent just the other week. Why? Because talent matters and mobile talent means startups can build. The Valley was built on free-flowing talent. In the UK, we’re now seeing our own versions of this story with companies being built from alumni of both homegrown firms like Revolut and beyond. But we need that to move faster. Hiring and building faster means British startups and scaleups can grow faster. Barriers to that slow our ecosystem down. We won’t pretend it will be perfect, and people (including some of our friends but also lots of fairly vested interests too) will have a right to disagree. But we think that startups will thrive and win in a faster paced Britain. So we are delighted with the progress today - as part of a strong speech by the PM outlining his ambition for building the world’s leading innovation nation including more on tax, growing companies outside London and more. But this is the start, not the end of the process. The announcement launches a consultation. It doesn't mean the issue is settled. How far reform goes, and what it looks like on the ground, is still to be decided. The Prime Minister today has done something that can materially impact the trajectory of the UK tech ecosystem and with it our economy - but only if we make sure it’s delivered. So, the real work starts now.

NEW: Chair of the London Assembly’s Planning and Regeneration Committee @JSmallEdwards calls for a pattern book to unlock upward extensions across London 🏘️📈 Upward extensions could have HUGE POTENTIAL 🏙️ @JSmallEdwards’ letter outlines that they could deliver from 140k-500k NEW HOMES in London alone.

My colleague @pdmsero has written a really important piece on the supposed access to capital gap between Britain and the US. He argues, against popular opinion, that access to capital isn't the reason why British companies are small. The issue is that a range of different problems can appear like access to capital problems. If a firm has a bad idea, or the market is too small, or regulatory and infrastructure costs are too high, these will all limit a company's ability to raise capital. European founders will then complain about access to capital, when the real problem lies elsewhere. Pedro argues that we can see this in returns data. If European countries were underpriced by capital markets, we would expect to see returns that outpaced US counterparts. But this is not what we see in the data. Instead, Pedro argues that European companies are "constrained by barriers to scale that make them less capable of delivering the returns required to encourage more investment." These barriers can be regulatory, or the result of smaller market size, or high costs of infrastructure (housing, energy, construction). The policy implications are significant: if capital is not the main issue, then we should spend less time trying to force capital into British firms (e.g. through pension mandation or financial incentives). Instead, we should focus on making Britain, and Europe, an easier place to scale, with fewer regulatory barriers and cheaper fundamentals. Read the full piece on the @BritishProgress substack here: britishprogress.substack.com…

Research by economists at NYU found that compulsory petrol price transparency in Germany reduced petrol prices by around 3% and diesel prices by 2%. Very sensible pro-consumer policy here to put pressure on retailers to compete!

I've wanted to read this analysis for a while, really glad @pdmsero has done it. The key point: "If capital were the binding constraint, investors would be leaving money on the table, and UK&EU firms would deliver higher risk-adjusted returns than US ones - we don't see that"

AI acceleration is the safest option for Britain – @dc_lawrence explains why global influence depends on domestic adoption. arguably.uk/p/ai-acceleratio…

The scandal here is that Britain consistently overspends but under-delivers on infrastructure. Our @BritishProgress study with @BritainRemade found that we spend 30% more than comparable OECD countries on transport & energy infrastructure, but deliver a fifth less. Overall we face a 65% cost premium for building in Britain: for the same money, we could have a lot more if we built like European countries do. The only people who benefit from this system are rent-seeking sectors, like consultants and lawyers employed to ensure compliance with complex regulations. Meanwhile it's ordinary people, like taxpayers and Miatta's constituents, who lose out.

Britain banning superintelligence is like Belgium banning nuclear weapons. Since we are not at the frontier, regulation without the US is largely performative. A better option for Britain, and for global safety, is to build our our AI capacity to reduce dependence on the US. See my latest piece for @ArguablyMag arguably.uk/p/ai-acceleratio…

Why AI acceleration is the safest option for Britain – excellent from @dc_lawrence for @ArguablyMag on why global leverage depends on domestic adoption. “Increasing data centre capacity, attracting top talent to British labs, rethinking our copyright regime so that models can be trained here, and generally making our regulatory regime friendly to AI investors.” arguably.uk/p/ai-acceleratio…