Policy areas where genuine new thinking is most needed
Housing and planning is probably the single most acute failure. Britain has systematically under-built for decades, and the consequences ripple through everything else, including labour mobility, family formation, intergenerational wealth and public sector recruitment. The political economy is well understood, in that existing homeowners benefit from scarcity, and they vote. The ideas required are not new; we must liberalize planning, build upwards and empower local authorities to capture land value uplift. But the political mechanism to unlock them remains unsolved. This is a problem that has been technically solved but politically blocked.
Productivity and economic geography have to be redressed. The UK's productivity gap with comparable economies has been widening since 2008 with only intermittent serious attention. The challenge is tangled, including low investment, poor management quality across the economy, skills mismatch, and concentration of dynamism in London and the Southeast. Industrial strategy keeps being attempted and then abandoned or captured by interest groups. What might work is less a sector-picking strategy and more a serious account of what the state can do without displacing the market, perhaps bending its rules selectively.
NHS reform is perhaps the deepest structural challenge. The model, one that is free at the point of use, centrally funded, and largely state-delivered, commands intense public loyalty while producing mediocre outcomes by international comparison. Waiting lists, workforce shortages, and the interface with social care have all been in crisis for years. The political constraint is that any reform proposal is immediately read as ‘privatization.’ The need for new ideas is acute precisely because the conversation is so constricted.
Social care is arguably even more neglected than the NHS. The funding model is broken, the workforce is underpaid and precarious, and the system's interaction with family life and informal caring is largely ignored in policy. It has been awaiting a ‘sustainable settlement’ since at least the Dilnot Commission in 2011.
Education beyond schooling, the apprenticeship and further education system, is a consistent underperformer. The UK has a strong higher education sector and a decent school system, but the intermediate layer of vocational, technical and adult retraining is fragmented and underfunded. This matters increasingly as automation reshapes the economy.
The fiscal-demographic squeeze frames all of this. An ageing population, rising debt service costs, and a public appetite for higher spending and lower taxes creates a constraint that mainstream politicians have been reluctant to acknowledge honestly. There is a dearth of serious proposals for either supply-side reform serious enough to change the trajectory, or honest public discussion about trade-offs.
Criminal justice and the prisons crisis receives less intellectual attention than it should. Prisons are overcrowded, reoffending rates are high, and the probation system has been badly degraded. There is interesting international evidence about what actually reduces reoffending, but it rarely makes it into mainstream debate.
Although the constitution and governance are somewhat removed from daily politics, they are arguably foundational. The relationship between Westminster, devolved governments and local authorities is incoherent. The civil service does not function efficiently. Planning for long-term challenges in energy, infrastructure and demographic change consistently loses out to electoral cycles. Britain has the institutions of a 19th Century state trying to govern a 21st Century economy.
The common thread, which would resonate with the ASI's analytical style, is that most of these problems are understood, in the sense that the diagnosis is available. What is missing is either the political mechanism to act, or the lateral thinking that reframes the problem in a way that dissolves the political obstacles rather than trying to bulldoze them.
Madsen Pirie