So: dare I hope? Today I’ll share some reasons why we should, some reasons why we might need to hold onto our cynicism a while longer, and some thoughts about how best to make progress on this, my own Valhalla.

First - the hints: We know Burnham wants to sort out social care (the costs of which end up as a kind of property tax distributed at random on the basis of your health condition). He’s interested in reforming business taxes to protect the high street and its pubs. Ideas have been floated for Council Tax reform that might fill the gap marked “a wealth tax that isn’t stupid and ineffective”. And articles have been found, dating back to 2010, in which Burnham even declared himself in favour of something Lloyd George attempted more than a century ago (and failed at): a land value tax.

I’m not going to make the case for property tax reform at any length here - because I can’t do a better job than tax expert Dan Neidle who summed it up perfectly last month in the Times when he said a land value tax would “fuel growth, kill off three awful taxes and make us all richer.” Suffice to say: stamp duty distorts prices and stops people moving even when they should, business rates are outdated and easily manipulated and Council Tax caps them all for stupidity - designed in a political rush to replace the Poll Tax and only made worse since then.

Land Value Tax by contrast is the stuff of Liberal Democrat dreams. They sing an ode to it - The Land - at every ‘Glee Club’ singalong at every party conference. But Dan Neidle is not a partisan hack: he’s a tax expert. And he’s right. We could rid ourselves of distorting, unpopular and complex taxes, use land better, and increase the nation’s prosperity with reform.

So why on earth hasn’t it happened already? The answers are a useful object lesson in why good policy making so often gets stuck - and what an ambitious reformer might do if they want to succeed where others have failed. For me - the answer has to be to piggyback on the devolution moment. It’s the only story with the strength to carry a reform of this scale.

The scars on my back

First: a confession. I feel partly to blame for the mess we are in.

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My first job in politics was in 2004, working for Ed Davey on local government and housing policy. My first task was to help him campaign for the party’s policy of abolishing Council Tax and replacing it with a Local Income Tax. Council Tax had been rising fast for many years so it was an easy bete noir, but something worse was coming down the tracks: revaluation.

Council Tax is based on property values in 1991. By 2004 it was clear those values needed updating, and the government had scheduled for this to happen in 2007. Ed was convinced we could make a big fuss about the impacts of the revaluation, so I set about building a rather elaborate model to project what those impacts would be. Using a range of different house price trackers and public data about the numbers of properties in each ‘band’ in every local authority, I demonstrated that a straightforward revaluation would massively shift the tax burden towards London and the South East: property prices had risen faster there.

Now, you might argue that this would be fair: for those who had benefited from house price rises to take on a larger share of the tax burden. However, we were so focused on getting Council Tax abolished that we didn’t consider this very deeply. I took my model to the Daily Mail, who published it on their front page, with the title “Target South East”.

At this time, the Conservatives had been against individual Council Tax rises but because they still liked the tax better than any alternatives they hadn’t made a big fuss about it. Suddenly, those pesky Lib Dems were getting media attention on an issue Conservatives could own. The local government adviser Sheridan Westlake (if you know, you know) smelled blood.

Through his principle Caroline Spelman MP (now Dame), he tabled parliamentary question after parliamentary question about how the valuation office agency would do this Council Tax revaluation. Scare story after scare story appeared: inspectors in your attics, measuring your windows and your front lawns, fines for installing home improvements, checks to see if you had a shed or a swimming pool. Anything that might be taken into consideration by the VOA when determining the value of your property was described as if it would be intrusively inspected by a seedy man in a raincoat in the dead of night. The stories were relentless and now Council Tax revaluation was a big political controversy.

Then, in the middle of the 2005 General Election campaign, David Miliband announced the Council Tax revolution would be cancelled. And here we are, 22 years later. Council Tax is still based on property values in 1991. Sorry.

This is how politics breaks things

This was my apprenticeship in Westminster, and I learned to play politics like everyone does. The incentives of political competition and political journalism alike are to pick holes in reasonable ideas and to hang the consequences.

This is how social care reform was sabotaged, time after time, for decades. Burnham himself started cross-party talks before the 2010 election and George Osborne blew them up to launch a campaign against what he dubbed a ‘death tax’. Theresa May went into the 2017 election with a promise to fund a cap on social care costs with a new charge on in-home care. Jeremy Corbyn blew it up to launch a campaign against what he dubbed a ‘dementia tax’.

It is a truism in politics that the losers will always complain more loudly than the winners celebrate. But whether it’s Council Tax, social care charges or most of the other major reforms this country needs I think the problem goes deeper. A tax or funding system has become so twisted and tortured over time to accommodate political realities that it is almost impossible to explain it with logic.

But when you replace an illogical system with a logical one, ipso facto you get an illogical set of losers. This means the new system is blamed for the faults of the old one and holed beneath the water line before it ever leaves the dock.

And so?

So what’s the playbook for getting big things done in a partisan system? Last time I wrote I told the story of pensions reform, from which there are three lessons:

• Embrace the trade-offs - big wins for both ‘sides’ of a debate are a far better ambition than a listless compromise where everyone gets nothing

• Go long - a reform that will take a generation, and still need doing again in 20 years is nothing to be scared of. It’s what a life in politics should be devoted to.

• Bring people in. Pensions reform was led by an independent expert, Lord Turner but it involved extensive and comprehensive (years long) consultation with people inside and outside the system, citizens and experts. And that has been followed by consistent and deliberate storytelling about the what, why and how of the auto-enrolment pensions system.

I wish I thought this would be enough to get property taxation past the British people. Property is, I’m afraid, the political bear trap that makes the other political bear traps scared. What the Conservative party showed with their scare tactics about attic inspectors and front lawn measurers is that we have a deep, almost pathological distaste for intrusion into our private domain, and of course, anything that might disrupt property prices will send a ripple of panic through almost any neighbourhood. When 65% of the population is invested in the asset class of home ownership, and often invested to the exclusion of any other assets, would you expect anything else?

There are some tricks we can play

• Transition is the most important thing to get right. We’ve navigated the transition to water metering in some places by allowing people to continue to pay the water rates (rather than the metered amount) until they move. For those whose land value tax was higher than their previous Council Tax, we could do the same - or offer them a few years’ grace so they can move.

• Allowing people to bundle up their land tax debts as a liability against their estate makes perfect sense for the asset rich and income poor - often the elderly for whom a move is impractical.

• (The problem with both of these is they hobble your revenues in the short term, but let’s worry about that in a moment)

• Self-valuation might sound mad - allow everyone to tell the government how much they think their property is worth - but it does get rid of the intrusive tax inspectors; one Georgist thought experiment was to suggest that the state have the right to compulsorily purchase any property at its owner’s nominated value, removing the incentive for under-valuing your home.

More importantly than all of this, we should notice that the disruptive impact of a Land Value Tax remains the same one I modelled back in 2004: Target South East. North of Birmingham, Dan Neidle’s model identifies only Manchester and Trafford making a larger contribution to the tax take (Wigan, incorporating Makerfield, pays less). South of Birmingham it’s only London, the Home Counties, Bristol, Bath and the Cotswolds.

And the Prime Minister’s central story is that is a problem he wants to fix, not embed. He wants to grow the rest of the country - so the hot spots and thriving communities are not clumped in a blob in the south east but accessible to everyone.

That’s why I think the real answer to serious property tax reform has to be making it part of the central story of this government - by coupling it with devolution. A land value tax will price some people (and economic activity) out of London. Make a virtue of that. In fact - help it along. Take the heat off London by moving Parliament up to Birmingham (which needs it) or Manchester (which probably doesn’t but is a little more in vogue right now).

Then make the transition from the old tax regime to the new one a matter of devolution as much as a matter of tax design.

Let me explain: instead of devolving business rates (as is planned) - cut them, and make up the revenue with a small, regionally-levied land value tax. In year one, say, LVT brings in 10% of the target tax take, and legacy business rates bring in 90%. In year two, the LVT rises to 20%, and business rates are cut again. Do the same for council tax and stamp duty, and in 10 years you’ve got a serious devolved land tax on your hands.

It also helps ease the ‘low upfront revenues’ problem we identified earlier: by transitioning slowly from one system to another, people can see increased tax liabilities looming while they have time to do something about it. That ought to reduce the number of people you need to permit to defer those liabilities.1

And finally, because not all the Mayors are Labour, you create political buy-in that makes it harder for other parties to be quite as reckless in sabotaging your proposals. They will have their own mayors eager to get their hands on a better way of raising money for their areas - and in fact it becomes thermostatic because the worse Labour does, the more opposing mayors they will have.

Politics as usual

As I mentioned at the start - I came into politics to help solve housing policy. After nearly 25 years it seems to me that land, property, planning and housing policy are worse than when I started. British pathologies about house prices, the untangleable complexity of our multiple forms of social housing, our tendency toward nimbyism, and our intransigent resistance to tax reform are powerful forces that only a brave politician would dare to fight.

So I don’t dare to hope too much. But perhaps the wind is favourable for once. Perhaps we won’t still tax people on 1991 property values in 2091. Let’s cross our fingers.

PS: The Financial Times was good enough to publish an article by me on high streets and business rates reform last week. As I mention there, James Plunkett and I are working on a campaign called “Communities Against Delinquent Ownership” to help support local movements to take on, and take back, derelict buildings that matter.

Later today I’m doing a talk with the wonderful Will Sandbrook at the NEST Insight conference about how change happens, and how think tanks contribute to the process. Preparing for it has relit my confidence and optimism about what remains possible in our complex, conflicted society, and how those of us committed to change might start to organise ourselves differently to get things done.

This is partly a story about pensions policy. But mostly a story about what the rest of us can learn from what has been handled well, not just once but repeatedly for nearly twenty years. Of course: pensions are not solved in the UK. Problems don’t get solved. Society is not perfectable. But pensions have got better, in substantial and meaningful ways and when most of our politics is spent shouting about failure and polycrisis, we should let ourselves pause to notice that more often.

You might want to note that James Purnell, the Chief of Staff to the incoming Prime Minister, plays an important role in this story. Those of you inclined to optimism might smile quietly. But those of you inclined to hero-worship should not get too excited: the magic belongs to no individual, but to collaboration and imagination.

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What went right

In 2002, the government set up a Pensions Commission under Lord Turner to address the chronic problem of under-saving for pensions. It reported in 2006, after extensive consultation and engagement, recommending an increase in the State Pension age and the establishment of automatic enrolment for all employees into workplace pensions to which employers must contribute. The former was controversial with workers, the latter with employers: the deal was a partnership.

Of course, the Pensions Commission has been held up as a policy success for a long time: this note by the Institute for Government summarises the findings of a review they did back in 2010. So celebrated is the Commission in policy circles that the Starmer government revived it last summer to help address the next generation’s pension problems.

The simplest story is one of expertise: bring in some clever outsiders who can navigate the complex politics of controversial, long term change. My interest is in some of the details that get a bit less attention.

First: for ministers - as the IfG reports, it was a lot of hard work, including for ministers. John Hutton, the Secretary of State, and James Purnell, the Pensions Minister, played critical roles. The PM himself devoted 5-6 hours a week during crunch periods to getting the deal done.

Second: while politics has been all over the shop in the last twenty years, on this the politics held firm. David Cameron did wobble a few times during the coalition years as auto-enrolment kicked in and businesses grumbled a bit about the costs. But he never surrendered to the temptation to sabotage long term gain for immediate benefit that was indulged on the topic of social care reform by George Osborne himself in 2009 (“death tax!”), and by Jeremy Corbyn (“dementia tax!”) in 2018. Why?

My hunch is that it was the central deal which helped: matching the stronger pension system with the increased pension age. No side wanted to put their gain at risk by breaking the link.

Third: the investment in narrative building has been extraordinary. The original Commission spent years sharing evidence, constructing dialogue and engaging with the public at scale, and in detail before they finalised their recommendations. But the story didn’t end there. Serious resources have been poured into advertising the scheme - in remarkably clever ways that tell a story of mutual collaboration. When you put money in, your employer does too, and the government. It’s a story of citizenship and participation - a story of give and take, not dependency or entitlement. That narrative building has a public policy objective: to get people to stay in the system. But it also serves a wider agenda of telling people something about what it might mean to be part of a society - something government should do far more of (as I argued here).

Fourth: and this is what interests me most of all - this has been an exercise in institution-building.

NEST is the UK’s largest pension fund by membership; it is the default pension scheme for auto-enrolment. It was set up because it was clear there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled by a mission-driven organisation. One that could act in the market - NEST invests in all the normal things that pension funds invest in - but could serve a set of customers (both pension savers and employers) who were just too small and complicated to be viable for the mainstream pensions sector.

Institution-building is an under-developed skill for the British state. We either try to outsource to the market, or insource to the public sector, under-valuing the possibility of creating something that has the strengths of both. NEST was ambitious not just because of its intent, but its model: the savings trust is owned and controlled by a public entity - with a clear public interest mandate. This institution-building is another thing I’ve argued we should do more of: a starting point, not a last gasp idea for what quality capacity building should look like.

Nest Insight

And that’s where NEST Insight comes in. They are the in-house think tank of the NEST system, and of course they are not the main thing that NEST has achieved in the last 15 years. But:

• I think their change model is more interesting than most think tanks.

• Their very existence demonstrates the value that public interest corporations can create because of their liminal status - belonging to the nation but not fully a part of government.

On the model: NEST Insight has made the most of its relationship with its parent organisation. Instead of thinking about change, they have played a part in it. They have run large trials and pilots with customers and partners; they’ve used behavioural insights to test, learn and grow what works; and they’ve used those live insights to influence policy upstream and help DWP build wider models for financial inclusion and resilience across the population.

Yes: they are able to do this because they have the privilege of operating inside a giant consumer services business. But NEST’s privilege is a feature of good institution-building, not an accident. Government can’t lobby itself, and when it publishes research findings they often become hugely controversial. Building ‘test learn and grow’ capacity within government is essential but challenging - as Nick Kimber writes beautifully here. When the coalition tried to create a ‘contestable policy fund’ to commission policy work from outsiders, most of the civil service loathed it and tried to sabotage it.

Think tanking is national capacity, but it is weak in the UK. We are chronically underfunded and undercapitalised; in much of Europe state funding goes to think tanks; in the US, vast quantities of philanthropy support policy making. The UK landscape is patchy, dependent on short term funding, commercial research income and (too often) selling of political access rather than policy insight.

So the genius idea of adding think tank capacity to the build-out of NEST should be celebrated. We should do it again. Where else do we need teams of ambitious, data-rich, liberated thinkers? I’d love to know what nationally-funded think tank capacity you’d build, if you had the chance.

Unwritten substacks:

• We need a new model of vulnerability. The debate about banning social media for the under 16s highlights the chaotic way we think about human capacity - absolute in most circumstances, absent in others. From Power of Attorney to the Mental Capacity Act, and now these rules for children, we want to draw fixed lines that make life easy for systems. But human capacity and vulnerability are dynamic and complex. What would it take for us to construct alternative legal models appropriate for regulating addictive and habit forming products and services in the light of a deeper model of human frailty?

• Mavericks. Steve Hilton, my old deskmate, is running for Governor of California and for a couple of weeks I was bombarded by journalists asking for anecdotes about him. I disagree with Steve on multiple fronts and his temperamentalism got in his way when he was in government. But I’m still not a hater: I think mavericks have a critical role to play in disrupting stuck systems. But how do you get the value of a Steve (or a Dom) without breaking everything?

• Blended finance. I’ve been thinking a lot about money recently: as I’ve mentioned before, I’m involved in building a National Pain Institute and a donor collective on End of Life Care. Both are ‘wicked’ problems: requiring co-ordination and collaboration across different parts of the public sector, as well as between individuals and institutions. They are social as well as technical. And they need a combination of public, private and philanthropic capital. The normal ways we put money into these systems don’t solve problems: they pay for the consequences of those problems. Is re-engineering the financial system the key to unlocking change?

So it’s no surprise, politically, that our putative next Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised to ‘tear up the contracts’ with hoteliers. What’s more of a surprise is his lack of any real solution. He suggests putting local authorities in charge, even though localising the issue to councils does nothing to resolve it. After all, you are still looking for buildings with roofs and beds, and councils have no more ability to magic them up than national government does. Local authorities already house homeless families in B&Bs when they have to: give them a new set of people to house and they will face the same limited options.

After all: government did not start putting asylum seekers into hotels because they thought it would be fun. They did it because they were out of options. And housing asylum seekers is not the only problem for which this is true.

For an increasing number of the most politically challenging and expensive things the state needs to provide, there is no provider that works. Private provision is frequently worse: extractive, expensive, and structurally incentivised to cut corners. We have watched this play out in children’s homes, in social care, in probation: outsourced public services that cost more than the thing they replaced and deliver less. The simple answer from the left is to insource everything. But public provision carries all the disadvantages of sclerotic bureaucracy: restrictive employment contracts, constrained public balance sheets, and the kind of low public trust that makes every failure a front page and every innovation a risk nobody will sign off.

Today I want to argue that government – and philanthropists – need to think very differently if we are to rebuild not just state but national capacity. We need a movement to build alternative provision: large-scale, mission-driven capacity to solve the problems that the state cannot.

An old idea

This is a pretty old idea. Most public services started out as charitable endeavours, funded philanthropically, by the communities who benefited, or both. All our oldest hospitals and social housing providers. The great mutual insurers and friendly societies. The Scouts and the Guides. Citizens Advice. The Open University. The Consumers’ Association (now Which?).

These were not government programmes and not private companies. They were something else: mission-driven institutions built to last, governed for public benefit. That separation made, and continues to make them, capable of attracting volunteers and philanthropic capital in a way that the state never can. It also enables them to build and hold public trust in combinations that neither the state nor the market can replicate.

We have not built anything like this for a generation. The assumption that has dominated social policy for thirty years is that the state should commission and the market should deliver - and where the market fails, you regulate it harder, or you replace the contractor, or you set up a new inspection regime. What you do not do is build something different from scratch, because that is slow and uncertain and requires a tolerance for risk and a time horizon that the political cycle does not naturally support.

Having tidied up all the hospitals into the NHS, all the housing providers into Registered Social Landlords, we have started to believe that the state’s job is to standardise, rather than enable. We have imagined that all the important things already exist and just need to be kept in line. What a failure of imagination.

The result is a landscape of gaps: things the country needs that nobody is building, because the economics don’t work for private capital and the politics don’t work for direct public provision. Those gaps are structural and they are getting worse.

Let’s be specific

First, let’s go back to asylum housing. Remember some of Britain’s proudest stories about refugees: the families that took in Jewish children sent on the Kinder Transport, or the rural families that took in evacuees. Think of Ukraine, where volunteers stepped forward in droves to offer spare bedrooms and homes to people fleeing the invasion. How have we forgotten this when it comes to asylum seekers? Why do we only want big contracts with big providers to hide people away? If I were one of the many serious philanthropists interested in refugee policy, I’d be taking the first risk and investing the first capital in a new provider, charitable in purpose, human in approach, and free to take the risks the state cannot.

Residential care shares much of the same market structure: high-touch human services running inside real estate businesses. The people you are caring for – whether they are frail elderly, learning disabled, or children in care - are vulnerable. The buildings they live in are the assets on the balance sheet. In a purely commercial model, the incentive is always to sweat the asset and cut the care - to do the minimum that regulation requires and bank the rest. We have watched this dynamic play out in children’s homes for two decades: a market dominated by a small number of private equity-backed providers, with occupancy rates that make the economics work only when the homes are full regardless of need, and inspection regimes that catch the worst but cannot change the underlying incentive structure.

If we want to bring the cost of the state back in line with what voters are willing to pay for – we need to address that structural gap. Collaborate with philanthropists and volunteers to build mission-driven providers we can turn to instead of the private equity industry.

High street housebuilding is stuck for a different reason. Small urban sites - the gap between two shops, the three floors above the estate agent, the car park behind the high street – all have enormous potential for housebuilding, with none of the downsides of urban sprawl. By bringing more people into denser town centres we can bring life back to high streets.

But small sites have high costs: complex planning, difficult ground conditions, bespoke design requirements, awkward logistics. Large private housebuilders will not touch them because the margins are too thin. Small developers will, but they lack the capacity to build expertise across multiple sites, and their cost of capital is higher.

What Britain needs is a mission-driven developer, founded and capitalised by a new George Peabody that specialises in small urban sites. It would build expertise by working across many of them, develop standard approaches that reduce costs without sacrificing quality, and go relentlessly after the sites with social as well as economic value, because its board is not required to make a profit, just recycle capital for public good.

Civic technology. The technology that public services run on is dominated by a small number of large suppliers whose lock-in is near-total and whose interests are their own. We have supplier capture for technology, driving up the costs of everyday services across the education, health and local government sectors. This is not going to be resolved by the market. Public sector commissioners and operators need to collaborate to build technology they collectively own.

Local media is the informational infrastructure of democratic life, and it remains in crisis. I often wish Facebook had gone local, making the most of its unique insight into who lives near whom and shares their interests; it could have been the dominant force for rebuilding community life. But instead it turned into ad slop and misinformation provision for the elderly. Imagination and talent is now going into great local reporting with outlets like Manchester Mill and London Centric, but philanthropy should be getting behind them at scale, just as Victorians did.

Repair cafes (and other franchise models). Many of you will think this is niche but I am a super-fan of repair cafes. They enable community, save money for people, protect the environment, and increase our connection to the objects that make up so much of our daily lives. While they are thriving in many places, it seems to me many would benefit from the back-up of a national infrastructure. I’m endlessly impressed by the Felix Project, which merged with Fare Share, with huge ambition to bring wasted food to people who need it. That scale enables innovation to solve the hardest problems, whether that’s what to do with a national glut of courgettes or how to manage logistics for perishables across multiple sites. What other great local provision could be enabled by building this kind of ‘spine’?

OK, but how?

I’m talking about building up things that the nation wants, but the government doesn’t directly control. So my starting intellectual model is not public service reform but industrial strategy, for which there is an increasingly clear playbook.

It rests on four interconnected components, which can each be seen in programmes like Sovereign AI, the National Security Strategic Innovation Fund, and the UKRI Missions Accelerator:

• Demand side support: a commitment to be ‘customer zero’ for the innovations the market or society need.

• Supply side support: direct support for early stage innovations, including proof of concept and first of a kind trials.

• Financing availability: equity investment and loan support for start-up and scale-up innovations, which for civil society can be enabled by Better Society Capital.

• Learning infrastructure and regulatory space: access to data and opportunities to test and learn with regulators and commissioners.

Crucially, Innovate UK is moving away from supporting everything a little bit to concentrate its resources on the biggest bets: the highest potential companies and the most critical sectors.

We need more of that mindset when it comes to building civil society assets. Yes: we need to support the grassroots capability of the small, but we also need to place big bets. ‘Charitable’ and ‘mission driven’ do not need to mean small. Lloyds of London. Novo Nordisk. Both are global companies, but locked into a structure that secures their governance for public good.

Instead of assuming that the answer is grand new state bureaucracies like Great British Energy or Great British Railways, we should be building capacity that stands beyond the political and financial boundaries of government: institutions that can outlast administrations, attract multiple forms of capital, and serve the public interest permanently.

So what would each component of an industrial strategy for civil society look like?

Demand-side support means government making long-term purchasing commitments that give mission-driven providers the revenue certainty to capitalise properly. Government as anchor customer is a powerful tool it has barely used in this space. The great Victorian civic institutions were not built on single year grants at loss-making margins.

Supply-side support means early investment in proving models that the market will not fund and the state will not risk. This is where philanthropy has the clearest role: as first-loss capital, willing to back proof-of-concept work - but Innovate UK should also step in, backing the most important social as well as commercial innovation.

Financing availability means not just grants, but loans, and blended finance structures that can hold together philanthropic, public and private capital in the right combination. Better Society Capital was set up to do this - with greater ambition and more clarity it can be a lynchpin of building the nation’s next generation of civic institutions.

Learning infrastructure and regulatory space means creating the conditions for new models to be tested without being crushed by the compliance demands designed for mature providers. A new model of community palliative care needs commissioners willing to fund learning, not just delivery. A mission-driven housebuilder working across multiple high street sites needs a planning system that can process small sites at speed.

I’m looking at you, my richest friends

To make this possible, philanthropists needs to step up their ambition. The British philanthropic tradition has become too cautious, too focused on the small and the local, too comfortable with funding pilots that never scale. Science is having a moment when it comes to bigger ambitions from donors - look at Renaissance Philanthropy, the Ellison Institute, Coefficient Giving. But no-one is placing similar size bets on civic capacity, and they must.

How much longer can we stand paralysed and baffled by the collapse of confidence in the state? How much longer can we make promises of tearing up the contracts we don’t like without a serious plan to structure contracts that we do like?

The Victorians did not wring their hands about the inadequacy of the state and then vote for whoever promised to be toughest on the undeserving poor. They built things. They founded institutions that are still here, still serving the public, still attracting volunteers and donors and trust, long after the politicians of that era have been forgotten. They understood that the gaps the state cannot fill and the market will not fill are not someone else’s problem. They are ours.

We have the philanthropists. We have the policy tools. We have, in many cases, a reasonably clear idea of what needs to be built. What we have lacked is the ambition to think at the right scale, and the patience to build for the long term rather than the political cycle.

So what are we waiting for?

PS I’m building a couple of modest institutions myself (thanks to very generous support from donors). If you’re interested in getting involved with the National Pain Institute or our emerging donor collaborative on End of Life Care, drop me a line.

Talking about the weather is the iconic British small talk option, designed to keep us away from the awkwardness of talking about politics. The problem is that weather now is politics. Because what’s happening is what the scientists have been predicting.

This week the Climate Change Committee published its fourth independent assessment of UK climate risk. Their findings are not hedged. By 2050, 92% of existing homes will overheat. Up to 10,000 people a year will die from heat. We face catastrophic flood and drought risk on a scale that will fundamentally alter where people can live, whether food is affordable, and whether insurance exists at all.

But before you despair, the CCC is also clear that there are changes we can make to mitigate this risk. Yes, they conclude that Britain’s infrastructure and land management are not fit for the climate we have now, let alone the one that is coming. But we can make changes. We can redesign our homes with shutters, reflective roofing and heat pumps that cool as well as heat. We can line our streets and urban spaces with tree canopy that naturally brings temperatures down. We can stop building on flood plains, and protect the homes already there with flood doors and barriers, and stop installing kitchens made of particle board that falls to pieces when it gets wet. We can restore wetlands and rewild river corridors to slow water and reduce flood risk downstream. We can shift farming toward drought-resistant crops and water-retaining soil practices. We can build reservoirs.

What we lack is not solutions. It is the will, the institutions and the political courage to do them at the speed and scale the situation demands.

This is an archetype of today’s public policy problems. It is a slow moving disaster. It is a collective action problem. It requires coordination not just between government departments but between businesses, civil society, government and individuals. And we have been polarised out of action by the culture war (radical environmentalists think adaptation is surrender, while climate hoaxers think the problem isn’t real).

We will never settle the question of what, out of all the things that humans need, are best paid for by individuals and what are best paid for collectively. But it is a perverse truth that some things which can only be paid for collectively are the hardest to summon public consent for. A response to the problem of heat is one of them.

Why we can’t feel it

Like many families, mine has the embodied folk memory of the 1976 heatwave. My mother was pregnant for the first time that summer; my sister was born that September. The year is a kind of reference point for heat, and sometimes used by climate sceptics to prove that nothing is new. But we have already exceeded those temperatures, and it is only May.

We are pretty good at recalibrating. Each new summer becomes the new normal. The 2022 heatwave - 40 degrees, nearly three thousand excess deaths, multiple fire services declaring major incidents - has already settled into memory as a remarkable event rather than a warning. The science of this is well established. Psychologists call it shifting baseline syndrome: we set our definition of normal to what we have personally experienced, which means that each generation inherits a warmer world and experiences it as simply the world.

This is one of several ways in which human cognition is badly designed for the problem of slow catastrophe. Sunder Pichai, the Google CEO, sparked controversy this week by saying humans were not evolved to cope with the fast pace of change prompted by AI, and that is why people are angry about data centres and job losses. But that anger is a reminder that we’re actually good at noticing fast threats. It’s the slow ones we can’t respond to.

Why politics can’t fix it

The behavioural explanation only goes so far. Even if the public were perfectly rational about heat risk, our political system would struggle to respond. The CCC report states, with notable directness, that whether or not to prepare for the changing climate is now solely ‘a political choice’. That is a remarkable sentence for an independent advisory body to publish. It is the sound of experts having exhausted the language of evidence and reaching for the language of accountability.

But dealing with long-term, diffuse problems like adaptation is the weak underbelly of democracy.

• Clock speed: Electoral cycles run on four to five-year rhythms. The infrastructure required to adapt to climate change runs on twenty-five-year ones.

• Credit: No politician gets to cuts the ribbon on something that takes 25 years to build. No chancellor secures credit for a flood that didn’t happen.

• Costs and benefits: Adaptation spending hurts specific people, now: higher water bills, planning restrictions that prevent development, taxes to fund flood defences. The benefits are shared across everyone, in the future, invisibly.

This is not a communications challenge that better framing can solve. It is a genuine conflict between present interests and future ones, and our political system is almost entirely structured around the former. My own suggestion that we give votes to babies would only be a partial corrective; Wales tried to navigate the problem by creating a Future Generations Commissioner to represent the needs of those yet to be born in the nation’s political choices. But the problem will be present until all of us are willing to value the future differently.

Why the state can’t deliver it

Nevertheless: let us imagine a government that understood all of this and wanted to act. Imagine a political leader with genuine conviction, a compelling story about greener urban spaces and safer, cooler homes, a public mandate and a full parliamentary term ahead. Would they be able to deliver?

Yes: but only if they are willing to redesign the architecture of the state.

I’ve said that heat is an archetypal public policy problem. It is not just the politics and the psychology that makes it so: it is the need to act across departmental and government lines to bring about the change we need.

Heat doesn’t have a departmental address. It kills people in homes regulated by one ministry, overwhelms hospitals run by another, and cascades through water infrastructure, insurance markets and energy systems overseen by three more. Every department is partially responsible, which means in practice none of them are.

This is not unique to climate adaptation. The things we struggle with are the things that defeat the departmental model. Social care. Homelessness. Food security. Suicide prevention. The housing crisis. My own current projects on pain and end of life care.

In each case, the problem is real and well-documented, the solutions are broadly understood, and the institutional machinery for delivering them at the necessary scale and speed doesn’t exist. We know that politicians are frustrated by the pace and responsiveness of the civil service. But whipping it to go faster without solving this architectural problem will not work.

New ideas are circulating. One is the lead department model: designating a single secretary of state and permanent secretary with authority to direct resource and official time across departmental lines on the most complex cross-cutting issues. This sounds simpler than it is: Cabinet committees and sub-committees already exist to coordinate activity, but officials report in verticals to their permanent secretary and unless that changes, coordination will remain the exception rather than the rule.

To make it work, we need to go beyond reporting lines to think about budgets. In civil service land, a permanent secretary is the Accounting Officer for their department, responsible for every penny it spends. This makes it structurally rational to refuse investments whose benefits land in someone else’s budget. Rebuilding financial accountability around outcomes and objectives rather than departmental perimeters would be a more profound change to how government actually works than almost anything else currently being discussed.

The current civil service reform debate is dominated by AI adoption, productivity, and headcount. These are not unimportant questions. But they are second-order questions about how efficiently the system runs. The first-order question remains whether the system is the right shape for the problems it now has to solve.

Heat, social care, food security, the housing crisis: these are not policy failures in the conventional sense. They are failures of institutional architecture. And they will keep defeating us, whichever party is in power, until we are willing to treat the state itself as a reform project of the same urgency as everything it is supposed to deliver.

The machinery of government is infrastructure too. And like our housing stock, our transport network, our flood defences - it was built for a climate that no longer exists.

These words are the opening of a policy pamphlet, Dying Matters, written by Charlie Leadbeater and published by my old shop, Demos, in late 2010. They are about the death of his father. The introduction - and you should read it if you have time, because it is an extraordinary piece of writing - goes on to chronicle the death of his mother, Olive, just a few weeks later.

“My mother’s was a good death: she lived a long life; she was not in pain; she was surrounded by friends and family; she was in control and so she died with dignity.”

I read the whole pamphlet again last night. It was published nearly sixteen years ago. It feels as fresh as if it were written yesterday. That is not a good thing.

The policy problems Charlie identified are almost entirely stuck. Plenty of research has been done to define what a good death looks like. We know that most people would prefer to die at home or in a familiar community setting. We know that most do not - that hospitals absorb 81% of end-of-life spending even as successive governments have promised for decades to shift care into the community. We know that care homes are on track to become the leading place of death by 2040, and carry no statutory requirement to provide palliative care. We know that the social and relational dimensions of dying matter as much as the clinical ones. We know all of this. We have known it, in broad terms, for a very long time. And yet: what changes?

I am not writing about death today as a tortured and perverse metaphor for the political events of the week. But as the circus surrounding a political death once again dominates our national conversation, I choose to remember the consequences of our inability to pay attention to the complexity of making change on issues that - in the case of death - affect every one of us.

On this matter, I was radicalised by the death of Gloria Foster.

Gloria died on 4 February 2013. She was an 81-year-old widow who needed help getting out of bed. She died after an immigration raid shut down the care agency responsible for sending the helpers. No-one took on responsibilty for their clients. Gloria was trapped alone - starving, dehydrated, unable to reach help - for nine days. By the time she was found, soaked in urine, it was too late to save her.

I first heard about Gloria when I was working in the Cabinet Office. There were television screens in the open-plan office playing rolling news, and the story ran on the hour, all day. It stays with me because of what else was happening that same day: ministers were deciding to press ahead with a social care investment plan recommended by Andrew Dilnot, the economist they had put in charge of the question. The so-called Dilnot plan was going to cost taxpayers around £4 billion to protect the assets of those with high care costs. It would not have made a blind bit of difference to Gloria.

Another twelve years on, and we haven’t even implemented the Dilnot reforms, or put any real money into the care system, let alone done anything to address the catastrophic dysfunction of a state that cannot talk to itself.

When I wrote about pain a few months ago, I said that if the modern state could solve for this, it could solve for anything. The same patterns are at work here.

The problem belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. End-of-life care cuts across the NHS, social care, housing, the voluntary sector and family networks, with costs falling on one part of the system while benefits accrue elsewhere.

Prevention is structurally disadvantaged. The investments that would produce better deaths - earlier conversations, community care infrastructure, lay carer support, care home capability - are abstract, slow and hard to measure. The crisis at the end )the emergency admission nobody wanted, the ambulance called because there was no other option) is concrete, immediate and expensive. The system reliably pays more, later, for worse outcomes.

And knowledge exists - in abundance - but doesn’t travel. The UK has world-class centres of excellence in palliative care research. The hospice movement, which began here, has produced clinical and human insights that have shaped practice globally. But there is little infrastructure to turn knowledge into sustained, equitable practice at scale.

Compounding all of that is an obvious truth. Death is harder to talk about than almost anything else in public life. Who among us wants to confront our own mortality and that of our loved ones until the reality is upon us? As a result, the conversation about what we owe each other at the end of life - about what the state should provide, what families should be expected to bear, and what the market can and cannot do - has never really been had.

Policy is not enough

I have been working in public policy since I was 23. But as a way of making change, it is profoundly limited. How many pamphlets and pdfs have really made a difference to what happens in the real lives of people? Even the writing of Charlie Leadbetter - who brings those humans to life in his work better than any other policy author I know - can’t touch the sides of real change.

Campaigning matters - but campaigning on these wicked, cross-cutting problems is relentless, sisyphean work. Keeping the agenda alive requires constant energy in the face of a political culture that would prefer to look elsewhere. The brilliant people doing it deserve more than a system that forces them to fight the same battles over and over.

So as I think about the next twenty years of my working life, I find myself wanting to build as well as argue. To put things into the world that change the conditions, not just the conversation.

When I was at Money and Mental Health, we built a tool for our community called the Shopper Stopper. It was a browser plugin that met a real need our research had identified: it enabled people to block retail websites to help control binge spending. We ran it for a few months and then the board insisted we close it down: we were a research and policy organisation, not a service provider. So we treated the product as a research experiment and campaigned for others to build.

That was the right decision, given our mandate, but I’m tired of staying in that lane. It’s why I joined Zinc, a venture builder, which has helped dozens of people start new commercial and social enterprises over the last eight years. We’re trying to work out how to build the things the world needs most. And, thanks to the support of a generous donor, we’re starting a programme that will look at transforming end of life care.

Innovating end of life

Death, like pain, sits at the intersection of complex medical innovation and the most human of interactions. Clearly: medical innovation matters when it comes to chronic illness and pain. And spending time in a hospice recently I couldn’t help but notice the tech - the hoists, the sensors, the software, the sophisticated machinery that helped keep people (including the staff) safe and comfortable.

So commercial innovation pathways matter here. But you also need to redesign human systems, build relational infrastructure, change what care homes expect of themselves and what families know to ask for. Those changes are not investable propositions.

That means blended finance: philanthropy willing to act as first-loss capital, taking the greatest risk in the earliest stages. Government intervention that can buy proven innovations, redesign commissioning markets, and fund care for the long term. And private capital where the model supports it. Getting those three to work together, in sequence and in combination, is the job.

It will be challenging - obviously. But when I look the social and economic landscape the thing that feels most missing is coordination between the different lanes in which people are trying to drive change. Each domain contains talented, committed people but most are locked into their sector, mode and favoured solution-set.

Academic research remains academic research. Charities remain charities. Venture capital looks for venture-scale returns. Policy organisations focus on policy reform. Each operates within its own incentives, timelines and accountabilities and without coordination each fails to meet the ambition of our time.

So I want to build an investment thesis (and a donor pool) that is ‘solution agnostic’. Supporting the best innovations regardless of the pathway they have to make a difference. Investing where there is a commercial return (like a new medical device), donating where there’s none (like a what works evidence review), and structuring finance in new ways for the messy middle between those two poles, and most importantly coordinating and amplifying across the field.

This is, perhaps, the role that government should take, convening organisations and people behind common societal goals. It was once called “mission-driven government” and it was a good idea. But it isn’t happening, at least not yet. So why not get started and see what a motivated set of donors and investors can achieve?

I am - as always - keen to hear from anyone interested in joining the journey. (And I hope to have new news on our similar programme on Pain in the next few weeks).

I’ll leave the last words to Charlie:

“For thousands of years people have honoured the dead with special rituals and in special zones, from burial mounds to humanist funerals. These rites of passage first developed when life was usually nasty, brutish and short and death was sudden. The modern, long lives that we lead have created both an opportunity and responsibility for us to do more than that: we are the first society in human history that can plan to honour people while they are dying not just after they are dead. That is why we need to find better ways to die.”

The story was Reform’s proposal to build large-scale immigration detention centres: enough capacity, they said, for 28,000 people. They went on to promise that none of these centres will be built in places that vote for Reform, as they will all be located in Green-voting constituencies as a piece of collective punishment.

They were clearly thrilled with the cleverness of the politics. I expect they were inspired by Ron de Santis’ airlift of 50 Venezuelan immigrants from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, but thought it would be even more exciting if the migrants were locked up at taxpayers’ expense.

Readers’ views will vary about whether immigration detention facilities are important national infrastructure or a profound moral wrong. I have my own views, but my objection to this policy goes deeper than that - it fuels my more general malaise about our inability to have real conversations between politicians and citizens about the boundaries of the possible, let alone the sensible.

“I want this thing, but I don’t want it here” has become a universal grammar of British politics, going beyond NIMBYism to full on geo-spatial denial.

Politics is still local

The local elections were, of course, influenced by national political swing. But if they were about anything else, it wasn’t bins. It was spatial planning. Because it always is.

I’ve delivered enough leaflets to know what a ground campaign looks like, from every party. The new flats at the end of the road that will be (shock horror) five storeys high. The out of town “executive homes” that look like ordinary red brick semis to me. The mobile phone mast. The traveller site. The solar farm that will ruin the view. The pylons that will cut across the fields. The prison that nobody asked for. The probation hostel. The alternative provision school.

When you read the leaflets, there’s always an excuse. Yes, housing, but that site is particularly challenging because that particular roundabout isn’t being upgraded. Yes, probation hostels but actually there’s a school a mile away and sometimes teenagers walk along that road. Yes to solar power but can we put it all on buildings, even if it’s three times as expensive to install and maintain?

The Greens want renewable energy but only if it’s small scale and no-one makes a profit. Reform wants cheaper energy but only if it isn’t that woke, renewable kind - and definitely no pylons. The Liberal Democrats campaign against solar farms and housebuilding just as loudly as the others. Labour has made housing its central economic argument and then watched its councillors fight developments in their own wards. No party is clean. No party has found a way to have the honest conversation with its own voters that the situation requires.

And this isn’t just politically annoying: it’s actively holding back growth, energy investment and national resilience. From today more councils are in “no overall control” and so it’s probably even going to get worse.

Cheer up

However! This newsletter tries to be optimistic. There is no space here for complaining about the deficits of my fellow citizens. I have a lot of sympathy for politicians, who in the end are only trying to get elected, something at which I have never had much success.

In fact, I once had a heated argument at a “Big Lunch” in my street because I was the only attendee who refused to sign a petition against a new housing development around the corner. Of course I could have just said “no” and left it, but instead I went full tilt. This was low value industrial land: it was mostly vacant, and about a fifth was a police car park that usually had two or three squad cars sitting in it. The 400 new flat owners would bring footfall to the cafes and pubs struggling on our street for customers. People need homes! I persuaded no-one. I won only the opprobrium of my neighbours for my lack of social skills.

In other words, NIMBYism goes deep. It might look like selfishness, but there’s more to it. As this academic article suggests, the deep emotional bonds people form with their residential environments, operate not just at the level of preference but at the level of identity. When something threatens the character of a place you are attached to, you are not just defending a view or a property value. You are defending part of yourself.

The research also points to the role of perceived inequity. People don’t just ask “do I want this near me?” They ask “why me?” Most people seem to sense that the costs of nationally necessary infrastructure are being distributed unfairly, and of course given that putting up buildings is expensive, it often is left-behind places where land is cheap that get asked to take on a higher proportion of the difficult stuff than anyone else.

Whatever you think of Reform’s proposal, they are channeling real feelings. Complaining about the voters’ opinions will get us nowhere. Instead, we need to ask how we can navigate and change those feelings.

So what do we do?

I’ve written before that tax is a story. I’ve come to believe that planning permission is cold hard cash.

Twelve years ago, the Wolfson Prize - a semi-regular economics prize that rewards ambitious thinking - ran a competition to develop proposals for a new Garden City. I remember it for two reasons. I went to the prize dinner and found myself sitting next to Lord Wolfson himself. We talked about the labels in Next clothing that say “if it isn’t dirty, wash at thirty” - encouraging people to use lower temperature settings on their washing machines. I made the point that if the clothes aren’t dirty, you shouldn’t wash them at all. Alas, the ceremony started before he could reply.

The much more important thing that sticks in my memory is a standout entry to the competition, put forward by Toby Lloyd, then at Shelter, the housing charity.

Their proposal was built around a simple insight: that the people most likely to oppose new development are the people who live nearest to it, and that the way to convert opponents into supporters is not to persuade them the development is harmless - it is to give them a financial stake in its success. In Shelter’s model for a new settlement on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, local residents could invest early and see real returns as the community grew. A community trust would own local assets and fund local services. The development wouldn’t arrive in the community. It would belong to it.

The “YIMBY” movement is less specific but it’s been built around similar stories: designing planning policies that financially and practically incentivise people to build more, instead of less.

This is the direction we need to travel, and not just for housing. Planning permission is a transfer of enormous financial value - from the community that grants it to the developer who receives it. We have spent decades arguing about how to claw some of that value back through section 106 agreements and community infrastructure levies, producing a system so complex and adversarial that it satisfies nobody and funds almost nothing people actually want. What if instead we made the deal explicit and direct? Real money in people’s pockets - reduced council tax or lower energy bills. Make people feel special when they do something good for the country, instead of put upon.

The same logic runs in reverse for the genuinely unwanted. If a community is asked to host a prison, a detention centre, a waste facility, a pylon route: the honest conversation is not about whether it’s really so bad. It is about what they get in return. If we want communities to accept a national cost, we should offer them a national benefit, transparently negotiated, genuinely theirs.

This is not a bribe. A bribe is what you offer someone to do something wrong. This is a social contract - one that starts from the honest acknowledgment that every one of us lives on land that was once a field. Someone let our home be built. The people who need somewhere to live, somewhere to receive treatment, somewhere to put their solar panels, deserve the same consideration that was extended, however reluctantly, to the rest of us. But maybe we need a bit of a psychological nudge to be reminded of that truth.

Of course: that conversation is harder than the one we’re having. But until we have it, we will be stuck between stagnation and using planning consent as a punishment beating for our enemies.

These days it seems everyone has a dim view of the civil service. Keir Starmer’s angry about reckless security procedures as well as frustrated by excessive caution and a blocker mentality. Danny Kruger makes videos of himself wandering around Whitehall pointing at buildings and telling us how many people Reform UK will sack. Kemi Badenoch has conceded that 10% of civil servants are good, but says 10% should be in prison. Liz Truss still believes she was taken out by the deep state. Ed Davey says he was lied to about Post Offices.

But most proposals I see for civil service reform rest on magical thinking. That mass redundancies will make the state more effective. That shouting at people to obey you is a useful motivational tool. That people who come into the office are always highly productive. That all we need is an injection of genius-level talent at the top. That there are levers to pull to make things happen.

I am, by instinct, a reformer. I believe the civil service needs to change, and radically. But serious proposals need to engage with some immutable realities. I’ve got eight; and then I’ll put forward some ideas for reform that might actually work.

1. People have to want to work for you

This is the most important. Most politicians act as if the problem with the civil service is that it doesn’t pick the right people. But picking people is easy if the right people apply and stick around. Talented people have options. Political leaders need to take responsibility for making the civil service a place that talented people want to be. You cannot simultaneously tell people the civil service is a nest of incompetents and expect the competent to queue up to join.

2. Selection effects matter

People are not randomly sorted into professions and careers. Every organisation has characteristics, and those characteristics affect who works there: this isn’t the deep state it’s human behaviour. Universities are not filled with rapacious capitalists because the pay isn’t great and there’s no commercial upside. Police officers are (on average) more interested in law enforcement than nursery school teachers. Many of the civil service’s characteristics are intrinsic to the kind of work that the civil service does. You can shift this a bit but most private-sectory risk-takers want to work in a risky private-sector environment.

3. Organisational culture is sticky

Culture is the accumulated residue of thousands of decisions, incentives, stories and norms, laid down over years and encoded in the behaviour of people at every level of the organisation. It is not changed by announcement and organograms. This is even true in small organisations: at Demos I changed almost all the staff, all the trustees and changed offices but there was still an intrinsic Demos-y ness about the place, for good and ill.

4. Senior tenures are short, and short tenures produce bad incentives

Linked to this, is that the average tenure of a permanent secretary is under five years. Ministers last, on average, less than two. Special advisers turn over faster still. If you have two years in a role, the correct strategy is not to fix the system. It is to find something you can credibly claim credit for within two years, and make sure the claim is visible. This produces a very particular kind of activity: announcements, reviews, pilots, new units, reorganisations - all the things that can be initiated in a short tenure and attributed to the person who initiated them. It systematically underproduces cultural change, capability building, the steady unglamorous work of making large systems function better. The rational response of the people below this high-churn leadership layer is to consent and evade. You nod. You produce the required documentation. You wait. The minister moves on and the initiative quietly dies, and you were never going to be rewarded for taking a risk on something that might fail anyway. Short tenures at the top produce a form of learned helplessness in the middle - and learned helplessness, once established, is very difficult to treat.

5. No organisation relies only on geniuses

There is a fantasy version of civil service reform in which the mediocre are swept out and replaced with exceptional people, and the exceptional people then do exceptional things. This fantasy misunderstands how organisations work. The most effective organisations are not the ones with the sparkliest stars; they are the ones that make it possible for ordinary people to do their jobs well. That requires clear processes, good management, psychological safety, and a reasonable relationship between effort and reward. None of these are glamorous. All of them matter more than the quality of the top five percent.

6. Initiating ideas is a lot easier than delivering them

This is particularly true when it comes to the pathway from genius idea to practical change. Every change needs to be initiated, but initiating things can easily become a pathology of its own. Politicians and special advisers don’t just have short tenures: they have short attention spans. Politics selects for people who like pace, thrive on adrenalin and score a zero in the “completer finisher” box on psychological assessments. If these people want to actually deliver things, they do not need more people like them around them: they need people who think and behave differently.

7. Government is not the private sector (and it’s definitely not a start-up)

The private sector comparison is irresistible to reformers and almost always misleading. Businesses can choose their customers. They can exit unprofitable markets. They can let failing products die. Government cannot. It is responsible for everybody - including, and especially, the people that no profitable business would touch. It operates under a degree of public scrutiny and democratic accountability that has no private sector equivalent. It cannot offer equity or uncapped bonuses. Its “shareholders” vote every five years and have radically divergent views on what the organisation should be doing. Importing private sector management techniques wholesale ignores all of this. Some things transfer well: a focus on user needs, clearer accountability, better data. Others transfer badly or not at all.

And the start-up comparison is not even wrong - it is a different category of error. Start-ups are defined by their freedom from the constraints that define government. Using one as a model for the other is like studying cheetahs to improve the performance of container ships.

8. Running large organisations is materially different from running small ones

In part because of this. The skills that make someone brilliant at building something from scratch are not the skills required to run it at scale. This is one of the best-documented findings in organisational psychology and one of the least applied lessons in politics. Founders and political leaders share a particular profile: high vision, high risk tolerance, strong personal authority, the ability to move fast and demand the same from others. These qualities are not just valuable but essential at the initiation stage. They become actively harmful at scale, where the job is not to inspire but to coordinate - to get hundreds of thousands of people with different motivations, different capabilities and different ideas about what matters, working together well enough to deliver things.

Don’t despair

OK: that’s 1000 words of why it’s hard. Do we just give up? No. We stop bashing the civil service for not being like politicians, and instead invest time and energy in building it to become what politicians actually need. Suggestions:

1. Secure cross party consent. This is often the policy refuge of the scoundrel, so I mention it with trepidation, but I can’t see a way forward without it. Every incumbent government’s effectiveness is undermined by the opposition’s threatening radical reforms or making accusations that the state is corrupt and failing. It affects their ability to attract and retain talent, and it distorts incentives. It is better to cede some control over the future of the civil service.

And if you expect to be the incoming government: there is so much more to be gained from having an effective civil service than there is to be gained by political name-calling about the ‘deep’ or ‘lazy’ state. Those short term gains in opposition will be no comfort when you get into power and discover it wasn’t true, and that you have over-promised. If you honestly believe the only reason problems haven’t been solved is because you weren’t in charge, you need a therapist, not a job in Downing Street.

2. Reform of terms and conditions. It is really hard to restructure teams in the civil service. It is even harder to get rid of mediocre performers. The timescales for reform, and the scale of redundancy payments needed to downsize are too onerous. This is hard to change especially for the ‘stock’ of civil servants but it is far more important a problem than supposedly gold-plated pensions which receive far more public attention.

3. Get real about pay. Public servants are not (mostly) overpaid. In fact, we tend to underpay for critical functions, so we rely on external expertise in the shape of consultants that costs five times as much, and get outmanoeuvred into total dependence on them. The political dynamic that says we should pay less for the sake of ‘efficiency’ is nonsense. Salaries should go up, especially for specialist skills. We need to build internal, publicly governed, capacity for complex roles.

4. Turn the reform process upside down. This one’s a bit harder to explain. It’s grounded in what I’ve heard called the ‘new co’ model of delivery.

Here’s the playbook: set up a new unit, give it proximity to power, protection from the usual rules, and the best people you can find, and let it rip. This has become the default delivery model for ambitious reformers and it’s easy to see why. When tenures are short and the underlying system is resistant to change, carving out a protected space where things can actually happen is a rational response. Whole careers have been made by leading a “new co” team: it gives you brand and reputation as someone who knows how to make things happen.

But it means that fixing the underlying system remains permanently nobody’s job. It leaves the rest of the system not just unreformed but unreformable: stripped of the attention and access it needs to get anything done. It pulls the best talent away from the core, concentrating capability at the edges of the system while the centre continues to calcify. New co is where you make your name. Old co is where careers go to die.

Our new Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo has been brought in to fix the civil service. Will she? Or will she look for some demonstrable early wins by setting up some shiny new-cos? You tell me.

I don’t see how you fix the politics of this. Every minister (and perm sec) will want their shiny thing.

The best answer, I think, is reverse acquisition. In the private sector, large companies often buy small companies. But sometimes small, high-growth, effective - companies sometimes buy large ones. They bring their culture to bear on the assets and infrastructure of the large organisation.

What if the Behavioural Insights Team hadn’t spun out as a global consultancy but taken over the prevention functions of the Department of Health? What if the team that ran London 2012 hadn’t been disbanded, but had taken over DCMS? What if the high-performing passport office took over the constantly-failing immigration and nationality service? (I don’t mean just move the high-performing boss into a new job.)

I don’t know if these are the correct specific ideas but I’m proposing a mentality shift. There is energy and ambition when you start a new thing, with the freedom that a blank page affords. But too often we leave these things as shining examples at the edge of the system, useful to someone’s CV, and comfortable only for those inside the bubble of high-performance. Instead, let the edge cannibalise the centre, chewing up the dysfunctional bureaucracies and turning them into something digestible.

We’ve talked about community organisations. We’ve talked about housing. But I believe there’s a third answer: the state.

Remember the Hartlepool by-election? It was 2021, Labour lost a seat they should have held, and lost it to the Conservatives in the biggest swing to an incumbent government in history. Keir Starmer reportedly had a crisis of confidence and considered quitting, leading to a substantial strategic reset. But let’s not follow that story.

Instead let’s go back to one vox pop that sticks in my mind. It was Sky News, interviewing locals on the Hartlepool docks. One man went on an eloquent rant. He was furious that the town had lost its police station. Furious it had lost its court. In his view, the state had walked away from Hartlepool: no longer present, no longer visible. I remember it in part because it seemed pretty perverse to blame the Labour party for decisions made by the Conservative government, but that was his truth. His experience was decades of decline, all while Labour MPs had been returned dutifully by the people of Hartlepool. He wanted change and voting for a pro-Brexit Conservative under Boris Johnson felt like change to him.

We often talk about coastal and ex-industrial towns as “left behind” places, as if there was a party they simply weren’t invited to. But this visceral anger felt like something worse than not invited. It was an active retreat: a decision to move the party out of town.

For thirty years, public sector estate reform has meant one thing: consolidate, centralise, reduce. Close the local tax office and move the staff to a regional hub. Shut the magistrates’ court and build a bigger one forty minutes away. Merge the jobcentre with the one in the next town. Close the police station - people can report things online. Each individual decision had logic behind it. The problem is that we applied the same logic, in the same direction, across every service, for three decades, with no countervailing principle to check it.

It’s an example of the ‘dark matter’ cost I’ve written about before. If you draw a border around each individual service and look at efficiency within that border, it makes sense to consolidate. We can have bigger teams, more specialism, fewer tenancies and properties to manage, and everything will look tidier. The saving from each closure appeared in someone’s departmental accounts. The problem is that the cost - in vacancies, lost footfall, decaying buildings and the slow erosion of a town’s sense that the government cares about it - appeared on no balance sheet, was owned by nobody.

We did a couple of reports on this at Demos. We looked at the impacts of the big HMRC consolidation and heard how it had devastated small town employees whose lives as carers and volunteers just wasn’t compatible with an hour commute to a regional hub. We looked at what towns really wanted for themselves and their high streets. With a ridiculous francophile bent, I imagined people would want more independent shops, but a lot of what people wanted was brand names. No longer being important enough for a Dorothy Perkins meant something. No longer being important enough for a court, a police station or an A&E means the same.

So I think it’s time to challenge the assumptions that led to centralisation, consolidation and retreat.

• Yes: technology moved many services online. But it also now enables distribution of workplaces, not just centralisation. The same digital infrastructure that reduced the need for paper-based local transactions also makes it possible to deliver specialist services remotely. Hybrid working has changed the economics of the public sector workforce. Civil servants no longer need to be co-located with their functional teams to do their jobs effectively. The technology argument that justified consolidation now, applied differently, points in the opposite direction.

• The same is true for public-facing services. Even digital engagements often need support: a lay adviser like a librarian helping someone get online and complete a form, a test done in a community pharmacy to support an online consultant appointment, a secure but digitally connect environment for a remote hearing, or to access confidential information. These can now happen in any well-equipped community space, where local support can connect you to the specialists you need.

• The high street vacancy crisis has created an opportunity that did not previously exist. Thirty years ago, returning public services to town centres would have meant displacing commercial activity or constructing expensive new buildings. Today, across much of England, the space is simply there - former banks, former retail units, former anchor stores - available, often at low cost, and in urgent need of anchor tenants who generate consistent footfall.

So the case for a new default is not nostalgic. It is economic, political and operational. The assumptions that made consolidation rational have shifted. The tools that made distribution technically impractical have matured. And the places that bore the cost of the retreat are now, if anything, better positioned to benefit from its reversal.

A Lyons Review

22 years ago, I was a property journalist, and I reported on the big news for the industry: the Lyons Review. Michael Lyons was commissioned by government to get the civil service out of Whitehall, and into the regions. Government understood that this ambition needed external leverage and coordination to get departments to change their behaviour. I believe we need something similar now: a process with the authority and independence to compel cross-departmental coordination, that can develop proposals that no single Secretary of State could commission alone.

The subject here is dispersal back to place. The political narrative - bringing the state back to the high street - is as compelling as Lyons’ ambitions ever were and in the current political climate arguably more so.

• Co-located front-of-house services from every tier of government.

• Bringing justice back to the high street with a place to talk to the police and digitally equipped hearing rooms connected into the court system.

• Further Education colleges as anchor occupiers, bringing footfall and skills together.

• Repair and re-use hubs in shared spaces accessible by public transport, not just to those with cars.

This is a vision of an active high street, anchored by our public services rather than waiting (pointlessly) for the shopping to come back.

As I was wandering in the mild April sunshine on Fleet Street, I found myself staring up at a building that stopped me in my tracks.

It’s an imposing thing. A classical portico, tall windows built to flood a studio with light, red brick rising above the sandstone dressings. Quite grand, in the way that Victorian civic buildings are grand: unapologetically ambitious, built for permanence, built for the public. And across its face, a hot pink banner advertising waffles, crepes and gelato. Beneath that, still legible in stone, a plaque:

Vivian Institute. Enlarged by public subscription as a memorial of Her Majesty’s Jubilee. 188

I’ve since looked it up. The building started life in 1839 as the Salem Chapel, home to a splinter Calvinist sect, the Starkites, named after their leader Robert Stark, who was not a Game of Thrones character whatever you might be thinking. He believed humanity was totally depraved and that Jesus was coming back imminently. Perhaps the large windows were to help spot Him arriving. When Stark died and the sect dissolved, the building was bought by public subscription and converted into the Institute for the Promotion of Science and Art. Then Edward Vivian - banker, magistrate, Liberal, co-explorer of Kent’s Cavern, and one of those Victorians who seemed to have done approximately eleven different jobs simultaneously - got behind it. He believed the working classes faced three problems: lack of education, drunkenness, and low wages. The Institute was his answer to the first. Working men could come here and learn practical skills. It was, by some accounts, one of the most important buildings in Torquay.

Then came South Devon College. Then the Piazza restaurant. Then Blu Cargo. Then a planned Bierkeller that apparently never materialised. And now Mama’s Dessert Kitchen, with its yellow plastic chairs lined up outside and its ground floor windows boarded over with plywood. Is it still trading? The plywood says no. The chairs… maybe?

Of course what’s remarkable about the Vivian institute is that it does not have a remarkable story. This arc happens everywhere.

A community builds something for itself. The community’s needs change. Private enterprise moves in. Private enterprise moves on. The building sits there, wearing its new signage over its old story, waiting to find out what comes next. This story of ancient pride turned to dereliction is everywhere in our seaside and ex-industrial towns. So much potential, but every year, the rain drips in through the unattended ceilings and the costs of realising that potential tick upwards.

A ‘troubled buildings programme’

I wrote about this a few months ago. I argued that it matters: for pride, for identity, for the sense that there are good days ahead of us, not behind. The economics are not simple. There is no easy high-street-shopping answer to bring our broken buildings back into use. But like the Vivian, they were not all built for shopping. They were built for civic life. And that’s what our communities crave.

I said then that what we needed was a Troubled Buildings Programme - something that would do for derelict community assets what the Troubled Families Programme did for families in crisis. Provide central infrastructure to support local capacity building.

Well, since then I’ve been doing my homework. I had a really positive response from dozens of people working in the sector, which led to a host of useful chats and coffees. The National Trust, Historic England, the Architectural Heritage Fund, Power to Change, Hastings Commons, Don’t Waste Buildings, and people who just got in touch to tell me about the building they’re working to reclaim, or the one they wish they could.

I’ve extended my list of policy ideas. My initial suggestions were a legal fund for fighting delinquent owners, more transparent and robust ownership data, and recyclable capital funding to support building acquisition and repairs. I’ve collected five new proposals from my new friends:

• Safe Harbour. Other people had a better idea than mine on recyclable capital: National Trust has proposed a Safe Harbour scheme that could hold assets while communities (or other long term owners) organise the resources to take them over. This could help unstick many campaigns and keep buildings protected (from the weather if nothing else) while they’re in transition.

• The Public Trust. There’s also a fascinating campaign to launch a “People’s Trust” - a bit like the National Trust but responsible for community and neighbourhood assets rather than heritage sites.

• Reform of Bona Vacantia - this one was completely new to me, but when people die without a will or any legal heirs, their property falls ‘Bona Vacantia’ and reverts to the crown. This doesn’t mean the King getting rich - it all gets balanced out through something called the Consolidated Fund. But the government department responsible for disposals just tries to hustle things out of the door for the most money, with no attention paid to community value. These properties could and should go to the community - or if they’re not wanted, the proceeds could be redistributed like other ‘dormant assets’ to the community sector.

• Simplifying regulatory approvals for heritage protected buildings - approving specific changes (like a particular kind of sash window) for all properties of a particular type, for example, instead of making every owner apply individually.

• Putting historic buildings at the heart of the government’s housing delivery plans. Historic England estimates up to 670,000 homes could be built inside pre-1919 buildings that currently lie vacant. (Their calculations are pretty guesstimate-y, but they’re as likely to be too low as they are too high.)

More to life than policy making
In fact, I’ve got at least five more but I’ll lose you if I carry on. The more people I talked to the clearer it was that policy is not the only thing that matters.

Actually - many of the powers exist. The legislation is improving. What’s missing is the connective tissue underneath: the communities that know their rights, the networks of people who’ve fought similar battles and can tell you what worked, the shared legal templates, the map of who owns what and what can be done about it. The infrastructure of a movement, in other words, rather than the architecture of a policy.

That means the first job is not to design the perfect scheme and then mobilise behind it. It is to find the energy that already exists - the communities already fighting for their pub or their library or their swimming pool. Then we connect it, name it, resource it, and let the policy follow from what those communities need rather than precede it.

There are already brilliant organisations doing parts of this. Hastings Commons has been quietly buying up some of the most difficult derelict buildings on the south coast and turning them into permanently affordable homes and workspaces, funded by community shares and patient capital. Don’t Waste Buildings has built a 2,000-strong grassroots movement of architects and engineers making the case for retrofit over demolition, without a single paid member of staff. The Architectural Heritage Fund is backing community groups to take over historic buildings in some of England’s most deprived places. None of them can do the whole thing. None of them is trying to. What they need is not another organisation telling them what to do. It is the movement infrastructure - the map, the network, the shared knowledge - that makes each of their efforts more powerful.

This is the kind of thinking that drew me to the work of James Plunkett, whose new organisation Kinship Works is far more interested in building movements for change than in policy for change.

So he and I are working to join together a movement of movements in this space. Not a coalition of organisations agreeing a joint statement that gets in a newspaper and gets forgotten. Not a campaign with a single ask. But a living network of community campaigns, connected to each other and to the expertise they need, and collectively generating the political pressure and the evidence base that makes systemic change possible.

If you want to be in the gang, do let us know.

But is there a bigger question?

Of course, there’s something a bit surprising about concluding that we need new ways to connect people if we want to make change.

After all, we live in an age of almost total connection. More people have more access to more information, more tools, more ways of finding each other, than at any point in history. The price of initiative is supposed to be falling.

And yet the experience of most people trying to save their local pub or library or swimming pool is one of isolation. They don’t know who else is fighting the same battle. They don’t know what rights they have. They can’t find the legal advice they need, or afford it if they can find it. They are connected to everything except the things that would actually help them.

This is not an accident. The connectivity we have built is, overwhelmingly, connectivity that serves consumption. Platforms that are extraordinarily good at showing you things to buy, opinions to be outraged by, content to scroll past - and extraordinarily bad at helping you find the people in your town who care about the same things you care about, or showing you what you could actually do about the thing that’s making you angry. It channels our energy into reaction rather than action, outrage rather than organisation, and audiences rather than communities.

Or, as Raymond Williams wrote in his 1975 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form:

The earlier period of public technology, best exemplified by the railways and city lighting, was being replaced by a kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet been found: that which served an at once mobile and home-centred way of living: a form of mobile privatisation.

Shared community buildings are a piece of public technology we have lost the art of investing in. The Vivian Institute was built because a community believed it had the capacity to improve itself. The plaque doesn’t say “Her Majesty’s Government provided.” It says “enlarged by public subscription.” That belief - that ordinary people, acting together, can build the things they need - is not gone. What’s gone is the infrastructure that used to support it: the mechanics’ institutes, the friendly societies, the cooperative movements, the local civic organisations that gave people somewhere to bring their energy and something practical to do with it.

We are not going to rebuild past institutions. But we might be able to build their equivalents. And the buildings themselves - the Vivian Institutes, the derelict pubs, the boarded-up libraries - are not a bad place to start. They are, after all, where community life used to happen. They are, in a very literal sense, the infrastructure of civic capacity. And they are, right now, waiting.

It’s not that I disagree: there should be a diversity of experience and identities in any serious decision-making forum, and both politicians and the civil service need to understand the perspective of ‘front line’ business people as much as they understand how ‘front line’ public servants see the world.

But there’s something missing when we think of politicians as simply avatars for factional interests in society. Politics is not like running a business any more than it is like running a hospital. At its best, politics is an attempt to hold together a nation across those factional interests, which requires empathy and understanding for all of them. It is a human and not a technical skill.

I’ve been reflecting on that human skill a lot in the last few weeks. My step-mother Maureen Mackenzie, who served as a county councillor in Powys, has died. Politics was only a small part of her life, and this isn’t her obituary, though you can read tributes from some of her local colleagues here if you’d like. It’s a reflection on what I learned from seeing her operate.

I got involved in politics out of technocratic interest in policy. I was working as a business journalist on a property magazine and while my colleagues loved writing about deals, I found myself most interested in the underpinning financial, legal and planning systems. My first job in Westminster was as housing and local government adviser to Ed Davey where I built an extremely complicated spreadsheet to model the impact Council Tax Revaluation would have on every home in the country’s tax bill, and argued with Tim Leunig about his idea for auctioning planning permission.

Six months after starting work for Ed, I joined the party, and a year later I stood for election in Southwark. I lost (if I’d got 50% more votes, I would still have lost), but I was still filled with evangelical partisan zeal. I suggested Maureen stand in the upcoming county council elections. I expect it was as much to validate my own choices than out of real interest in what she wanted.

But here’s the thing: she was brilliant at it. Brilliant in a way that my approach to politics, with grand theories and policy models could never touch.

Maureen had worked for the NSPCC as a social worker for many years. She had talked her way into the homes of child abusers. So doorstep politics was a cinch for her. She had her deep passions: the local and very tiny Franksbridge school. The Wyeside Arts Centre, where she served as Chair. But more importantly she was simply interested in everyone. She liked to know what was going on. She remembered people. She cared. It was impossible to walk down the local high street with her without someone - usually multiple people - stopping for a chat.

One example sticks in my mind. Because of her experience in children’s social work, Maureen served on the council’s fostering panel. As a result, she had a forensic map in her head of where the vulnerable children lived and what their needs might be. Now, this part of Powys is incredibly rural, and budgets are tight. The question of which roads should be gritted if snow falls is not simple and the basic logic is to grit the biggest ones. It was Maureen who put roads policy and children’s policy together and made sure children with serious health conditions could be reached by ambulance when it snowed.

And this is what politics can do: it connects.

I wrote last week about the ‘dark matter’ of societies: the relationships, organisations and activity that are invisible to the technocratic systems we have built to run our country and inform decisions. Great politics increases our ability to sense that dark matter. It increases the surface area of bureaucracies, and it nudges or cajoles them into human decisions when the technical readouts are missing the critical or moral centre of a decision.

After all, you don’t need to be a gritting expert or a children’s expert to connect the two systems together - you need to be a human with empathy and imagination.

Of course, you may say: that’s local politics. National politics requires big systems thinkers: people who can hold a whole economy in their head, navigate international negotiations, understand how a decision in one department ripples through six others. What does a councillor who remembers which roads to grit have to do with running a country?

More than you might think. Because the skills are not different in kind, only in scale. Scale does not reduce the need for human understanding - it increases it. The further you get from the ground, the easier it is to mistake the map for the territory, to govern by data rather than by knowledge of what the data is failing to capture. A politician who has never been interested in people - who has never stopped on a high street to actually find out what is going on - does not become better at national policy because the stakes are higher. They become worse, because the feedback loops are longer and the dark matter is harder to see.

Running a country needs a lot of technical work. But in fact, that’s the part that can be outsourced and delegated to the people who do it best. We don’t need business people around the Cabinet Table any more than we need Social Workers. We need people around the Cabinet Table who are capable of listening to both.

The politicians who have shaped things the most have almost always been the ones who were genuinely curious about people - about the actual texture of lives different from their own. That curiosity is not a soft supplement to political skill. It is the source of the stories and ideas and connections that make political argument real rather than technical, persuasive rather than correct. You cannot bridge across difference if you have never tried to understand it. You cannot hold a nation together if you find its constituent parts faintly boring.

Which brings me back to local politics - which is so much more than a nursery slope for the real thing. National politics will always carry a certain distance and illegibility. A minister cannot know the roads. A secretary of state cannot know the children. That is fine. That is what local government is for. But local government only does that job if it is genuinely local: if the unit is small enough that a councillor can have the kind of map in their head that Maureen had, the kind of forensic knowledge that comes from being embedded in a place over years.

We worry too much about postcode lotteries. The horror at variation - at the idea that people in one place might be served differently from people in another - has driven a centralising instinct that has produced not fairness but illegibility. A messy patchwork of local choices, made by people accountable to the communities they know, is almost always preferable to a uniform system so complicated that no one understands why anything is the way it is. At least in the patchwork, someone knows whose decision it was. At least there is a person to stop on the high street and ask.

What we need is more of that: more politics at the scale where the connection is possible, where individuals can be drawn to service not as a career but as a contribution to the life they are already living, where the distance between a decision and its consequences is short enough to be felt. Not politics as the centre of life, but politics as the place where life’s connections get made.

Maureen’s funeral service is today. I won’t ask for donations in her memory because you didn’t know her. Let me ask you to do something else instead. If you know a woman like her, (and I bet you do): ask her to stand.

This sounds like a small mistake. But for me, it’s a symptom of a blind spot so embedded in how we measure value that we keep reproducing it across almost every domain of public policy, usually without noticing. We build systems for the things we can see, instead of the things that are there.

Informal dementia care costs the economy over £20 billion a year. That figure represents millions of people - partners, children, siblings - who have reorganised their lives, reduced their working hours, exhausted their savings, and quietly absorbed the kind of stress and loss that doesn’t appear in any clinical trial.

The reason is simple: our databases record individuals, not relationships. Every person has a record. Nobody’s record is connected to information about the people whose lives are shaped by their illness. Carers are invisible because the instruments we use to count things were not built to see them.

But care is not the only thing we’re missing. This kind of blind spot is everywhere.

The maths doesn’t work

You have probably heard of the astrophysics concept of ‘dark matter’ - an invisible, unknown substance that makes up about 27% of the universe’s mass-energy content and roughly 85% of its total matter.

It was not discovered by observing it. It was inferred: the observable universe didn’t behave as it should if only visible matter existed. The gravitational calculations didn’t add up. Stars moved in ways that made no sense unless there was something there that the telescopes couldn’t detect. Dark matter was hypothesised not as a curiosity but as a necessity: the model required it.

I want to suggest that something similar is happening across large parts of public policy and economic life. The model doesn’t predict observed behaviour. The numbers don’t add up. And the reason, in each case, is the same: there is something there - doing real work, bearing real weight, shaping real outcomes - that our instruments were not built to see.

The NICE decision is one example. Let me give you two more.

Our standard methodology for understanding the prevalence of gambling harm is to ask people whether they are showing symptoms of problem gambling. We do not, as a rule, ask the partners and children and parents and friends - the people who might be experiencing the harm most acutely, who might be able to see it when the addict themselves cannot, and who are certainly bearing costs that the official count never captures. So we get the estimates wrong, systematically and in the same direction. The dark matter of gambling harm - the affected network around each addict - is there, is real, is measurable in principle, and is almost entirely absent from our policy models.

The social care funding debate is the largest version of the same problem. The national conversation is almost entirely about formal care: the packages, the assessments, the funding thresholds, the funding gaps. But most care is informal. It is provided by families and neighbours and friends, at no cost to the public purse, in ways that the state neither funds nor counts nor, for the most part, even sees. Crucially, the size of the demand on formal care varies enormously according to the capacity of the informal care networks that surround each person. A person with a strong family network and a supportive community needs less from the state. A person who is isolated and alone needs more. But our models treat need as a property of the individual, not of the relational system they are embedded in. So our projections for what social care will cost are consistently wrong, in a consistent direction, for a consistent reason.

These are not three different problems. They are the same problem. I’ve seen it in every policy area I’ve studied in depth - financial services, employment support, health care, transport, housing, energy markets. Our systems are calibrated to see organisations, not relationships; formal structures, not informal ones; individuals, not the networks they inhabit.

The institutional monoculture

These care examples are about relationships: people whose costs and contributions don’t appear in the model. But there is a second kind of invisibility, one level up: entire organisational forms that don’t register because the instruments were built to see something else.

My friend James Plunkett, whose work on the relational state I’ve written about before, has been thinking about why good ideas at the edges of the system struggle to spread. His diagnosis is sharp: bureaucracy has changed the soil conditions. Over decades, public systems have built measurement frameworks, funding mechanisms, accountability structures, and policy discourse all optimised for a particular organisational form: the large, formal, hierarchical institution. Everything that doesn’t look like that becomes, in a practical sense, invisible.

Land trusts, care cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community enterprises, neighbourhood health initiatives - these are not experimental or unproven. Many are mature, well-evidenced, and extraordinarily effective at doing things the formal system struggles with: building trust, sustaining long-term relationships, reaching people that institutions can’t find, doing preventative work that reduces demand downstream. They do work but stay almost entirely invisible to the national systems that allocate resources, because a commissioning team cannot easily fund something without a standard organisational form, a regulator cannot easily oversee something that operates through relationships rather than rules, and a policy model cannot incorporate something it has no data on.

This is dark matter of a different kind but the effect is the same: the model underestimates what is there, misattributes outcomes, and systematically underfunds the thing that is actually doing a huge chunk of the work.

The same problem in science

The innovation system has a version of this too - one I have been working on directly. The policy conversation about research commercialisation has, quite reasonably, focused on university spin-outs - the companies that emerge from academic labs, supported by technology transfer offices, into a venture ecosystem that has grown considerably in recent years. There has been good policy work here, and it has produced real results.

But university spin-outs represent perhaps a third of the UK’s deep tech ecosystem at most. The majority of science-driven ventures - the companies doing the riskiest translational work between academic discovery and industrial deployment - begin outside universities altogether. They are founded by former academics frustrated by institutional constraints, by clinicians who couldn’t get the NHS to move on innovations they knew would work, by engineers from large firms who got fed up watching ideas get shelved because they didn’t fit the product roadmap.

One founder I know waited a year for her university’s technology transfer office to agree licensing terms, gave up, invented a new solution outside the system entirely, and spent eighteen months doing what she called “spare-bedroom science”: borrowing friends’ labs, scraping together grant funding, building something real without any of the infrastructure that exists to help people like her. She was, for most of that period, entirely invisible to the public innovation system - not because what she was doing was unimportant, but because the instruments for supporting innovation were built around institutions, not around people.

A paper I’ve been working on with my colleagues at Zinc tries to map this population and think seriously about what it would take to support it. The core argument is the same as the argument I am making here: the dark matter of the innovation system is not a niche. It is most of the system. The model doesn’t work without it, and the model will not improve until we build instruments that can see it.

What different instruments would look like

I am not going to pretend this is easy. The reason our systems count what they count is not stupidity. It is that counting relationships is harder than counting individuals; that funding informal networks is harder than funding organisations; that building accountability frameworks for things that work through trust rather than rules is harder than applying standard governance.

And I don’t think there’s a simple choice between “build better models” (shine a light onto the dark matter) or “chill out” (put money into it and hope); we need a bit of both.

Computational capacity to build better models has transformed in recent years; the big challenge is identifying the originating data that would enable us to understand how lives are really lived, time really spent, and relationships really formed. Meta, the RSA and Neighbourly Lab dipped their toe into this recently and created a compelling report - Friends with Benefits - that mostly reminds me of how little we know. But that is no reason not to seek new data sources to map that can underpin a more granular understanding of how social capital is formed and the work it does in our lives.

However, unless (or until…) we know what everyone thinks, feels and does at every moment of the day, our models will always be limited. Modelling protein folding feels easier than modelling human society. So if we want to take the brave leap of putting more money into the dark matter, we will need to change how we think about risk.

Public funding systems are almost entirely oriented around process risk: the risk that the steps we wanted to happen didn’t happen. This is what accountability and audit systems are built to detect, which means the organisations we fund have to be ones capable of producing the data, and the people we fund need to be ones who can prove prior delivery. In practice: people who have already been funded, doing things that have already been done.

We are oddly relaxed about outcome risk - the risk that we did all the steps and got none of the results. A programme can proceed through every stage of a logic chain, tick every compliance box, produce every required report, and deliver almost nothing of value to the people it was meant to serve.

Rebalancing this is a precondition for making the dark matter fundable. A funding culture that took outcome risk as seriously as process risk - that asked “did it work?” as urgently as it asks “did the receipts arrive?” - would find the invisible infrastructure much easier to see, and much easier to support. It would also, over time, be less likely to fund the things that do all the steps and arrive nowhere in particular.

The dark matter is doing work

I want to end by going back to the metaphor.

Dark matter is not passive. It is not an absence. It is matter, exerting gravitational force, shaping the structure of everything around it. The universe has the shape it has partly because of something we cannot directly observe. Remove it from the model and the maths stops working.

The same is true of society’s dark matter, at every level. It’s the carers, the friends, the second cousins, the pub landlord who always knows which businesses are hiring, the aunty at the library who knows where to get debt advice, housing support or a great cheap meal. It’s the peculiar housing co-operative with its informal rules and incredible track record, the community association that does flood prevention as well as running a food bank for reasons that have been lost in time, the dance class that’s really a refuge for dozens of teenage girls. And it’s the scientist tinkering on a borrowed lab bench, the engineer inventing in his garage, determined to solve problems but eligible for no support.

They all emit energy that can drive change, but instead they bounce off bureaucracies designed for controlling the visible, and far less curious than they should be about why it isn’t working.

I know that when I say state capacity needs to expand to reach these less legible, institutional and relational forms, I sound a bit woo-woo. But it’s the science, not the sentiment, that takes me there.

Come and join me.

PS: I mentioned a paper I’ve been working on. It’s called Innovation without Walls: Supporting Venture Science in the UK, written with my colleague Rachel Carey at Zinc Innovation Partners. It maps the population of venture scientists working outside universities, explains why they are systematically underserved by existing policy infrastructure, and proposes three new models for supporting them: a demand-led Technology Transfer Office that works across institutional boundaries, a place-based Civic Enterprise Building model that uses public procurement to call new firms into existence, and a Slingshot Network of nimble, time-limited innovation hubs organised around specific challenges rather than geographies. If any of that sounds relevant to your work, I’d love to hear from you.

This kind of work used to be fashionable, and we called it “soft power.” It built resilience, relationships and trust.

But as I sit in the airport Wetherspoons (can’t beat the refillable coffee) and scroll through my social media, I see several people complaining about the excessive coverage given by the BBC to the Oscars, at a time when NATO is being threatened, oil prices are surging, and the causes and consequences of war ought to be front of mind for everyone. Frivolity will be our downfall, as this pretty excellent piece by Geoff Mulgan also argues.

This is the argument against soft power. Soft doesn’t cut it when the bombs are falling.

Many things get lost in times of conflict. Last week I wrote about our tendency to downgrade civic relationships and social infrastructure. Today I want to think about the concept of ‘soft power’ - an international equivalent in many ways - that’s just as much at risk.

What went wrong

In my view, soft power went out of fashion for three reasons.

1. Soft was too soft for people on the right. They stopped listening to military leaders who have often argued that hard power should be a last resort, and that conflicts are only resolved by diplomacy. US General James Mattis said in 2013 before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” That argument doesn’t work if buying ammunition is seen as a good in itself, to prove an individual or a nation’s manliness.

2. Power was too powerful for people on the left. A collective rejection of the errors of colonialism has, for many, turned into a contempt for any attempt to share culture or learning from UK shores. Cultural exchange is perceived as an attempt at cultural dominance; economic collaborations assumed to be extractivist.

3. Soft power advocacy turned into lobbying for the creative industries, pursued in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport rather than across Whitehall, with too much “Cool Britannia” and not enough strategic thinking.

On the third: I am a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the creative industries, and I’d be happy to lobby for them any day of the week. There’s a huge amount of intellectual snobbery from the policy classes about them, that should be trampled on by senior leaders whenever it raises its head.

When I was working at University of the Arts London, I was told repeatedly that if I wanted to be taken seriously by the Department for Business and Trade, I should talk about “fabric and materials” rather than “fabric,” and certainly never “fashion.” The implication was clear: fashion was frivolous (girly?) and talking about it made you look frivolous too.

This is a form of cultural cringe we should reject. The UK’s creative industries - fashion, film, music, architecture, design, video games, publishing - grew 60% faster than the wider economy in the decade before the pandemic. They are one of the few sectors where Britain consistently exports more than it imports. They create jobs, attract foreign direct investment, and generate revenue that shows up in the trade balance just as surely as pharmaceuticals or financial services. They are at the core of our tourism industry, too, underpinning a vast number of jobs. We would never suggest that we should stop talking about widget exports because widgets are not glamorous. There is no reason to stop talking about film exports because they are.

NEVERTHELESS:

Influence in a serious geopolitical contest requires more than cultural cachet, and if we reduce our thinking about soft power to discussions about the Oscars we deserve to be accused of frivolity.

FURTHERMORE:
Those of us who believe in international aid - the funding that sat behind not just the British Council but the World Service and countless institutional partnerships with the developing world - need to acknowledge that, for the moment at least, we have lost the political argument with millions of voters.

An effective soft power strategy needs to actually work and be defensible to a sceptical public much more likely to support defence investment than cultural exchange.

Let me suggest five elements.

Information warfare

During the Cold War, the West invested heavily in the battle over information behind the Iron Curtain. Radio Free Europe. The BBC World Service in Russian, Polish, Czech, reaching millions of people who had no other access to independent news.

We face an equivalent contest now, and we are fighting it with a fraction of the resources and institutional seriousness it requires. Russia and China have treated the information environment as a strategic battleground for decades: not just domestically, through the suppression of independent media, but internationally, through the projection of their own narratives into democracies and developing countries simultaneously.

This is high-investment, technically demanding work in an era of AI-automation and algorithmic gaming. It also requires something that is harder to procure than bandwidth: clarity of narrative and strategic direction. We may baulk at the simple us-versus-them framing that dominated Cold War discourse, but moral equivalence is not an option either. If we believe in the values that underpin open societies - freedom of expression, rule of law, democratic accountability - we need to be willing to defend them clearly, and to fund the infrastructure that does so.

Cultural connection that celebrates the old as much as the new

One of the grievances behind the reaction against cultural soft power is that it can obliterate rather than engage. New fashions, trends, and technologies that travel globally can feel suppressive of national cultural identities: another form of homogenisation that cultural critics of globalisation have always warned about. If British soft power means exporting our culture and receiving nothing in return, it will rightly be experienced as a form of dominance, however benign the intention.

The antidote is partnership built on genuine exchange - one that celebrates unique heritages as equals and makes space for tradition alongside innovation. This is a different posture from ‘Cool Britannia’ and it can be grounded in stronger connection to our domestic heritage, too. It isn’t only the new that is worthy of our attention.

Institutional capacity building - the middle ground

There is a large space between military cooperation on one hand and sport and ballet on the other. The collaborations that happen in the middle of what states do - science and technology partnerships, policing and justice cooperation, regulatory alignment, trading standards, public health infrastructure - are both genuinely valuable and probably easier to defend publicly against charges of frivolity.

Education: the soft power that pays for itself

Britain should (must!) carry on welcoming international students, invest in transnational education partnerships, and stop treating the number of foreign students as a problem to be managed down.

International students are a magical category of soft power: they pay for the privilege of being developed. They fund our universities, our cities, and the research that our economy depends on, while simultaneously becoming, over the course of three or four years, people who know Britain from the inside - who have friends here, who understand how we think, who carry a lived connection to this country that no embassy programme could manufacture.

Britain has educated 59 current heads of state and government, second only to the United States. That is not a coincidence. It is the return on decades of investment in scholarships, university partnerships, and maintaining a higher education system that the world’s best students want to attend.

The risk we are not taking seriously enough is the experience of students who arrive here and leave feeling they paid through the nose and were resented. The soft power logic of education only works if it comes with genuine welcome - a sense that Britain is glad they are here and curious about what they bring, not merely willing to process their fees.

Diasporic relationships as strategic bridges

In times of crisis, diaspora communities can be seen as a complication: our politics is already rife with accusations of divided loyalties and imported conflicts and fantasies of mass deportations.

Far better to see diaspora networks as strategic assets - living bridges between Britain and dozens of countries simultaneously, carrying language, culture, knowledge, capital, and relationships in both directions.

But that means we need to build the capacity to activate these networks: we can’t just assume that connection to and within British culture will happen by default. We need a national story in which Britain’s diversity is understood as a source of international reach, not a threat to national identity. And we need to invest in cultural exchange within Britain as much as between Britain and other countries.

***

None of this is soft in any meaningful sense. It is patient, deliberate, long-term investment in the infrastructure of influence. A serious approach to national security does not stop doing this work: it extends it.

These words are from a speech Nick Clegg gave in December 2008 called “Why I am a Liberal”. I don’t remember now if I wrote them: if they came from my childhood adoration of the Famous Five or his. The speech was controversial at the time because he talked about the impact of the Jamie Bulger murder on penal policy and provoked the ire of the Daily Mail. But I’d forgotten that part until I looked the speech up this morning. It’s the idea of liberalism as a sunny day creed that has echoed in my mind for all these years.

I think it’s one of our most deep-seated cultural assumptions. That, at times of crisis, all this fluffy stuff about liberty, community, relationships and joining in needs to be put aside so that the grown-ups can take charge. That, when things get tough, we need a command and control state, and the rest of us need to sit down, shut up, and do what we are told.

The picnics and the sunny days are over, as Louis Macneice wrote in a 1936 poem. “The sunlight on the garden / hardens and grows cold.” And thus “our freedom as free lances advances towards its end … soon my friend, we shall have no time for dances.”

Since the US and Israel started a war against Iran, I expect many of us have had that creeping sensation. Because the conflict does not arrive in isolation. It lands on top of a European land war that has already reshaped energy markets and defence budgets across the continent; a global tariff shock that is disrupting fragile supply chains and pushing up costs; a climate crisis that is making extreme weather events more frequent and more severe every year. And of course it lands on a society that never fully recovered from 2008: where real wages are still below their pre-crisis peak; where the basic costs of housing, energy and food have consumed an ever-growing share of household budgets; where the buffer that ordinary families once had between stability and crisis has been worn thin by years of stagnation.

We are not, in other words, a resilient society being tested by a single shock. We are a brittle one being hit by several at once. No wonder so many of us yearn for someone to take charge. We’re willing to sacrifice some of that soft stuff for the hope of control.

But here’s the kicker: this instinct is radically and catastrophically wrong.

Yes: at a time of crisis there are things that only the state can do. But the difference between success and failure is national mobilisation, not state capacity. Resilience is something to which we all contribute - or don’t. So it is not time to abandon community thinking, relational public service design, or liberalism for that matter. It’s time to lean into them.

What resilience actually is

The idea that Britain has a proud tradition of top-down civil defence that can be dusted off in a crisis was examined carefully by the national security researcher Charlie Edwards in a brilliant Demos pamphlet from 2009. What he found is that the Cold War civil defence model “is, on closer inspection, largely a myth, but one still propagated by politicians and the mainstream media.” The volunteers were never there in the numbers claimed. The structures didn’t work as advertised. What actually got people through emergencies - in the blitz, in floods, in foot and mouth, in 7/7 - was not the official machinery. It was the fabric of community that existed underneath it, and often despite it.

Resilience, you see, is not a government programme. Edwards defines it as: “the capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure and identity.” The state is one node in that system, but it is not the system.

He gives examples. When the flood wardens in Walcott, Norfolk, spotted the conditions for a storm surge before the Environment Agency had issued any warning, they mobilised at midnight, knocked on every door, and evacuated their village themselves. They could do this because they had been doing it for decades. The father of the man who led the operation had started the tide watch scheme in the 1960s. The knowledge was passed down and the relationships that could stand the strain of a midnight doorknock were already there.

When they called Silver Command to ask for the flood siren to be sounded, they were refused because the police didn’t want to cause panic. A man with MS in a wheelchair wasn’t reached in time, and his bungalow was badly damaged. In other words, the community was ready, but the institution got in the way.

This pattern appears again and again in the evidence. After the King’s Cross fire in 1987, a local priest noticed that clergy were tripping over hoses with no coordination, and hospitals had no pastoral care. He helped build the Islington Faiths Forum over the following years. When 7/7 came, eighteen years later, the faith community had a fully functioning command structure, churches opened on walking routes from the station within hours, and hundreds found shelter. It worked because it had been built, slowly, in peacetime.

Similarly, the Farm Crisis Network - built by farmers to support farmers through the suicide epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s - came into its own during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001. The government’s response was centralised, top-down, and largely ignored local knowledge. The FCN reached directly into farming communities with pastoral and practical support that the official response couldn’t provide, because its volunteers spoke farmer to farmer. As its chief executive put it: “the power of the Farm Crisis Network is really that. It’s people that know farming working with farming people.”

Finland knows this

The most serious national defence posture in Europe belongs to a country that has built its resilience on exactly this distributed, community-rooted model.

Finland’s concept of “comprehensive security” starts from a simple premise: resilience cannot be delivered by the state alone, and attempts to centralise it actively undermine it. Every ministry, every municipality, every major private sector organisation, every NGO, and every household has a defined role. The Martha Association - a women’s civic organisation - actively teaches households how to be self-sufficient for 72 hours in a crisis. This allows the state to concentrate resources on the most vulnerable while communities protect themselves.

Finland runs national defence courses four times a year, bringing together journalists, business leaders, civil servants, NGO workers, and politicians for three weeks of shared comprehensive security education. Over 60 years, tens of thousands of Finns have been through this. The explicit purpose is to build shared understanding and a distributed sense of civic responsibility. There is no serious British equivalent.

The lesson Finland has absorbed is that the societies that mobilise most effectively in a crisis are the ones with the deepest social fabric, the highest trust between citizens and institutions, and the most distributed sense of responsibility. The “grown-ups in charge” model describes how people imagine resilience works. Finland describes how it actually works.

Cost-of-living crisis

The surging oil price that follows from the Iran conflict will worsen our cost of living crisis. It will hit Britain unevenly. There will be people in cold houses, skipping meals, too proud or too exhausted to ask for help, falling through gaps in systems that were never designed to find them.

But we have been through this before: in Covid, after the last energy price crisis, and we know that resilience is found in community networks. Warm banks in community centres, libraries, churches and pubs; mutual aid networks; veterans’ clubs. The state cannot replicate the knowledge these networks have - it needs to nurture and use it. When we imagine that it is soft, or peripheral to the ‘real’ stuff that the government does, we are deluding ourselves. State capacity depends on social capacity.

If the crises are worsening, we need to build both, urgently, not just think about org charts and command structures for people on the government payroll.

The consumer and the citizen

There is a deeper argument underneath all of this.

For generations, we have increasingly organised our politics around a consumer model of citizenship. The state provides services and citizens receive them. Tax is a transactional fee for services rendered, and the measure of good government is customer satisfaction: are the bins collected, is the NHS responsive, does the website form work?

This model is not wrong exactly: of course these things matter. But it is grounded in the assumption that citizens are recipients of security, not contributors to it. That sets an impossible standard for the state and sets us up for the crushing disappointment that is driving political radicalisation in these times.

The state was never designed to be the whole answer to everything. A politics of overpromising that it was has allowed community capacity to atrophy, and a story of dependency to become prevalent instead of a story of inter-dependency.

The national story we need right now is not “the government will handle this,” nor a saccharine promise that “we will get through this together” as the burden of getting through falls on those with the least.

It is something harder and more honest: that the boundary between the governed and the government is not a fixed line, that citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights, that national capacity is bigger, stronger and more complicated than the state.

Neighbours, volunteers, community leaders, faith communities, mutual aid networks: these are not ginger beer professions. They *are* the adults we need in the room.

I find this a useful way of thinking about many of the struggles we’re currently facing in the design of our state. Technology has radically altered what is hard and what is easy. It has done so in jagged ways that don’t tidily match up to what is hard or easy for governments to do. It’s happened over decades, but AI is radically accelerating the pace. And so we find ourselves slipping around on the ice in shoes (or state functions) fit for a different time.

I’m going to tell you how and why I got obsessed with friction in the first place. I’ll give examples of the ways the new wave of frictionlessness is reshaping how the state and our society works, for better and for worse. And I’ll suggest what we might do about it: some design principles for putting friction back where we need it.

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Money and Mental Health

The first big job I had after government was setting up the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. Supported by Martin Lewis, we launched the largest ever survey asking people with experience of mental health problems about their experiences as consumers. It has long been known that there’s a strong correlation between financial difficulties and poor mental health: we wanted to get deep into the complexities of why.

I can’t do justice to all the findings here, but what felt newest to me were the stories people told us of struggling to control their spending at times of crisis. When you’re on a tight budget, even surrendering to the urge for a takeaway can push you into a debt spiral. But we also learned of people who’d got addicted to Kickstarter; who’d taken out credit cards online while drunk; who’d binge shopped at night and found themselves too ashamed to send things back; who’d taken out loans while under section in a psychiatric hospital ward.

This was a time when fintech was booming in London, but the big money was in speeding up payments and accelerating point-of-sale credit (like Klarna). E-commerce was going deep on subscription models, replacing even the decision to buy with a long term commitment. I would hear e-commerce consultants scare retailers into buying new software by asserting that ⅓ of shoppers will abandon their purchase if there’s a three second delay processing their payments.

I wanted to scream: if they can be put off by a three second delay, then maybe they don’t actually want the stuff!

The consumers we spoke to at Money and Mental Health were crying out for friction. They had ideas like putting a block on their own credit rating to say they had bipolar disorder and didn’t want anyone to lend them money. A delayed-despatch setting on their favourite shopping sites so they had a cooling-off period to verify they really could afford things. A notification to a friend if their spending behaviour changed radically or they took out a new loan. A credit card that didn’t work at night or in the pub.

But hardly any of the big market players wanted to build these tools. The dominant vibe remained: ice skates for everyone.

Though, of course, these businesses weren’t purists about transactional costs. They really did want friction when it suited them. If you wanted to cancel a subscription, speak to someone in customer service or register any kind of complaint, you’d find yourself in a doom loop of broken links, unanswered phone calls and complex processes.

I’ll save the rabbit hole of consumer policy for another day. I’m sharing this context to demonstrate that, in the detail of service design, friction is doing work.

That job might be to benefit a vulnerable customer: putting checks around them to reduce the chances of fraud or mistakes.

Or it might be to benefit the service provider: rationing access to expensive human customer support, reducing the number of returned goods, or slowing down contract cancellations.

Either way, eliminating that friction has profound consequences; and AI is doing precisely that.

The price of initiative has collapsed

This phrase is the headline of a recent piece by Martha Lane Fox. She describes how, in thirty minutes with an iPad, she went from idea to working app - no developer, no technical knowledge required. The bottleneck has shifted, she argues, from “can I build this?” to “do I want to try?” The cost of attempting things has fallen towards zero.

So far, so cheerful.

Digital service designer Tom Loosemore makes a similar point, but with a darker underbelly: that agentic AI could destroy the government’s ability to ration access to public services.

Tom starts from the premise that - like the businesses who make it near-impossible to cancel your beauty subscription - government rations public service by creating high-friction access points. This is not the sort of thing governments admit, but it’s the reality of how services operate.

Long benefits applications. Complex processes to get medical appointments. Lengthy appeals forms and hard-to-navigate technical rules. The public sector cannot ration by price like the private sector does, so when budgets are fixed, friction is a low-effort form of triage. A difficult form or stressful process means only those who really want help will bother.

(Some of this logic appears in the Home Office’s belief that a slow, tortuous asylum process will deter applicants, though in fact all it’s secured is misery for those inside the system and outrage from those who pay for it).

But if the price of initiative has fallen to near-zero, the citizen side of the equation changes. It isn’t worth 40 hours of my time to claim an extra £2 a week of benefits, but it’s worth 4 seconds with AI. Tom uses the example of appeals against Council Tax banding. It’s a faff, and you probably won’t win, but if the application costs £0, why not bother?

This doesn’t sound particularly harmful: if the Valuation Office Agency and the DWP “just” automate their side of the process we’ll end up with a better council tax database and more accurate benefit claims. No-one will weep for the demise of inaccuracy. But: what about the taxbase, if it was artificially inflated by all those inaccurate property valuations? Will we have to all pay more Council Tax to make up the difference? And if all £24bn of unclaimed benefits gets applied for: we have a fiscal problem on our hands.

The price of crime has also collapsed

Even more difficult problems arise when we remember that the price of initiative has also fallen for the bad guys.

In my piece on the rule of law earlier this year, I used flashing as an example of how the internet had changed the economics of crime. One man could flash perhaps two or three women in an evening if he put real effort into it. Online, the same impulse can be directed at thousands of people simultaneously. This is a supply curve problem. When the cost of committing a harmful act falls, more harmful acts occur. Not because there are more bad people, but because the ratio of effort to impact has shifted.

AI is doing to crime what the internet did, but faster and more thoroughly. Fraud is experiencing a productivity revolution. The convincing phishing email that used to require a fluent English speaker now takes seconds to generate. The deep fake of a CEO instructing a finance director to transfer funds is trivially easy to produce. The personalised scam, the fake investment platform, the synthetic voice of a grandchild in distress, the counterfeit products: all of these have become cheaper, faster, and more persuasive.

Fraudsters, in short, have had the same efficiency gains that legitimate businesses are just beginning to enjoy. But enforcement hasn’t scaled at all. Local trading standards teams have been gutted. Police fraud units are chronically under-resourced. The ratio between crimes committed and crimes punished has shifted to a degree that would be politically explosive if people properly understood it.

What does this mean for state capacity? We have two options (unless “tolerating endemic crime” qualifies as an option).

1. We find a way to match enforcement in scale and pace to the crime, which means automation far beyond what our criminal justice system is capable of.

2. We think differently about the default of frictionlessness in our financial systems and online environment. The easier online systems are to use for you and me, the easier they are to use for criminals. What is it we want?

Does it feel fair?

A side note on automated justice. We rightly abhor delays in the court system: victims and accused alike waiting years for their case to be heard, with trauma and anxiety compounding through the wait.

But before we design a computer system to take all this away from us, we should remember that a lot of what the justice system does is human, rather than technical.

We have victim impact statements not because they can affect sentences, but simply to enable victims to be heard in a formal setting. This is a kind of friction: it slows things down, because doing so makes space for emotion and recognition.

Fast forward to an automated justice system which uses AI and data to determine within minutes whether I have committed a crime, or who the wronged party is in a civil case. How would that feel to perpetrator and to victim? I don’t think I know.

’Computer says no’ became an iconic symbol of bureaucracy gone wrong for a reason: the problem is not just the no, but the computer. How will justice feel to the losers if it’s illegible and non-human? Does pace improve legitimacy, or deny the time for the grieving process to run its course?

One more for the road

The other place friction does work is in human relationships. My friend Elizabeth Oldfield writes with great clarity about what she calls neighbouring - the entire web of human relationships beyond the romantic ones. Her argument is that these relationships are what human beings need to flourish. Not the close, chosen ones, but the full, untidy, demanding constellation.

Her point is not that relationships matter despite the friction: it’s that the friction (the discomfort, the complexity) *is* the relationship.

By contrast, a chatbot never misunderstands you, never prioritises itself over you, and never fails to say the right thing. This is not a real relationship and it doesn’t build the muscles for surviving real relationships.

If you believe (as I do) that we need strong social bonds to hold a society together, then the availability of smooth, comfortable companionship from AI as an alternative to real, awkward and difficult friendships is a problem: it will eat away at people’s willingness to forge those friendships.

Designing for the right amount

In each of these examples, AI is making some things easier: building a business, learning a skill, fighting the government, scamming a granny, finding someone to talk to.

The problem is the mismatch between what has become easy and what we (as humans, and as a society) are set up to cope with being easy.

The consumer who needs a spending brake finds the technology effortless to spend and effortful to stop. The citizen who needs a service finds the application trivial and the system overwhelmed. The fraudster finds committing the crime easy and the chance of being caught remote.

In each case, the friction was doing work, and we are at risk of eliminating it without considering whether that work was valuable, or genuinely just inefficiency.

I’m not going to pretend there’s a tidy policy solution. But I think there are some shifts in how we ask the question that would help.

1. Stop treating friction as a cost to be minimised, and start asking what it was for. Every time a system is streamlined, someone should be required to answer: what was the difficulty doing? Was it rationing a service that can’t actually meet full demand? Creating time to reconsider? Making harmful activity costly enough to deter? If the answer to any of those is yes, removing the friction without replacing its function is not an efficiency gain. It’s a deferred crisis. Let’s make a plan before we take down the fences.

2. Give people tools to set their own friction environment: the cooling-off period you can switch on yourself; he purchase delay you can apply to your own account; the friend-notification you can set up and revoke. These are not paternalistic restrictions - they are instruments of self-governance. We all need ways of giving our considered self some authority over our impulsive self. Platforms won’t build these voluntarily, because friction usually costs them money. Regulators should require them to.

3. When the price of harmful action falls, the price of enforcement has to rise to match. We have done the opposite for twenty years: cutting enforcement while the supply curve of harm bent sharply downward. A law we cannot enforce is not a neutral baseline. It is worse than no law, because it teaches people that the rules don’t apply, and once that lesson is learned, it generalises.

And then, underneath all of it, I think we need to change our disposition. Not every problem needs to be frictionless. Some things are better for being slow, difficult, or resistant to easy solutions. Sometimes the work is the point of it: or, as they say, “the real treasure is the friends we made along the way.”

The case I’m making is not for more friction everywhere. It is for the right friction, in the right places, chosen rather than by accident. A world in which everything is effortless, immediate, and smooth is not a world optimised for human beings.

Right now, that decision is being made for us: by platforms optimising for conversion, by AI systems optimising for completion, by a market logic that has only one answer to the question of friction, and it is always less.

We are back on Leslie Knope’s ice rink. The carpet is disappearing. So what shoes do we need?

As he says, we first met at a lunch where I gave a speech. He introduced himself to me and then pointed out a major hole in the argument I’d been making. We have often both agreed and disagreed since then, but I always find him worth listening to. So I offered him a guest post exploring some things we’ve often discussed: whether you can simply split ‘facts’ and ‘feelings’ in public policy, whether feelings can usefully be measured, and how best to navigate the messy conflicts that occur when evidence and preference get elided.

(Nigel’s suggestion was that we think of the State as more like an octopus than a machine, which I am not persuaded by but it makes a good picture.)

Polly and I first met several years ago at a fancy lunch for accountants (though I’m not one and neither, as far as I know, is she). Polly was giving the speech, the thrust of which was that public policy must distinguish between “what’s the quickest way to the station” questions, and “what colour carpet would we like” questions. In other words – some matters of public policy have an objective, right answer, that is discoverable through careful observation, whereas others are a matter of opinion – requiring discussion, negotiation and compromise to resolve.

My opinion is a little different. I believe that every matter of public policy needs to be informed both by objective, observed evidence, and by public discussion and compromise. Medical drugs are the perfect example. Science must tell us if a drug works, and who for. But society must decide how much it is willing to pay for that drug through its public health system. The way we currently do this in the UK is Quality-Adjusted Life Years, or QALYs. Each one is valued at around £20,000. That’s the amount that regulators think it is reasonable for UK taxpayers to pay for one more year of good quality life for one person.

The process of deciding this is fraught with complex ethical questions that read like a list of essay topics for philosophy undergraduates. And when we look a little deeper, we soon realise that no question of public policy can be straightforwardly solved by science alone.

A salient debate at the moment is the discussion on whether to ban smartphones for children and teens. Vocal parent campaign groups are cropping up all over the world, and have so far secured a ban on social media for under-16s in Australia, and a proposal for something similar from the European Parliament. Opponents of these bans – and there are plenty – cite high-quality academic studies that show little to no link between amount of time spent on social media and poor wellbeing among teens. But this counter-argument treats the matter purely as a disprovable hypothesis about observable harms: “TikTok’s making my kid depressed”. In fact, these parent-led movements are more informed by evanescent instincts of right and wrong, which add to up a general feeling that this type of online world is not what we want for our teens, nor they for themselves. It is right to question whether an outright ban borne of moral panic is the right course of action. But it is just as important to properly understand the values that have driven the backlash in the first place.

This faith in the scientific method to provide a source of incontestable truth in social policy can be taken to the extreme. Polly once proposed on this Substack that government should “optimise for wellbeing”, that being its national purpose. It is not a mad idea: there is a rich seam of highly credible science attempting to turn our subjective experience of the world into something that can be observed, quantified and compared. That is useful to public policy in all sorts of ways. But can we really elevate it as the ultimate goal of government, or indeed society? That seems like overreach to me. Since the start of recorded history about five millennia ago, art, literature and religion have attempted to make sense of what it means to be alive, and I dare say we might be waiting five more for that White Paper to come out. Many world religions teach that fulfilment at an individual level comes through overcoming our competing impulses to good and evil: nirvana in Buddhism, absolution in Christianity, the Book of Life in Judaism. But I am yet to come across anyone arguing we should have a measure of Gross National Sin.

Understanding our collective purpose has long been a philosophers’ obsession: for Mill it was liberty; for Rawls, justice; for Hobbes, order. The point is – this is a “what carpet would we like” question. We shouldn’t turn it into a “what’s the quickest way to the station” question, without stopping to ask if the station is where everyone wants to go.

Is all this questioning the idea of one objective truth just another way of saying we have had enough of experts? In a way, yes, it is. The bitter fact for us wonks is that many of the public really have had enough of us. Our insistence on a single source of truth isn’t matching up with the realities that people see when they step out of their front door. If you are told GDP is still growing but your friends’ school leavers are all struggling to find decent work, it makes you wonder why these experts can’t see what you are seeing. It is natural for us to crave validation of our own experience of the world, and perhaps not surprising that we increasingly feel drawn into algorithmic echo chambers to find it.

Unfortunately, though, the solution is definitely not to lurch to the other extreme, and make all public policy based on people’s beliefs, because people’s beliefs can be harmful. Political parties already listen to the voices of real people all the time, and it isn’t working out too well. Successive rounds of government-by-focus-group in the UK seems only to have led us into ever more short-termist, copycat policymaking, where the main parties all fight for the same groups of supposed swing voters in marginal constituencies.

What we need is a way to escape from the trap of a policy ecosystem addicted to an illusion of pure objectivity, and a political culture addicted to the idea that the voter is always right. One tool which I think could be used more is deliberative democracy – something I have experimented with at a small scale in my work at University of the Arts London. This can take different forms but the basic idea is that when you get a group of citizens together, don’t just ask them what they think, but first spend a chunk of time presenting a balanced diet of good quality, methodologically robust evidence to them. Then you facilitate rounds of structured discussion. The objective is not so much to hone a political message, as in a traditional focus group, but (in Polly’s words) to arrive at an “answer we can agree on”. That might be a set of recommendations, or it might be a yes/no question requiring a vote.

Deliberation is not the only answer – and is only useful when paired with genuine government power. But if we want the right answers for society, both scientifically and ethically, we must learn to take a much broader view of what counts as good quality evidence.

You can follow Nigel on LinkedIn and I’d love to know what you think.

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They laughed. Then they said no. To be fair my children also laughed at the idea. Mid, you see, is a youth slang insult: it means mediocre, forgettable, beneath notice. The word has migrated from neutral descriptor to quiet insult. But that’s precisely why I loved the idea of reclaiming it.

The middle is not boring. The middle is the crispy bit in the Malteser. It’s the ham in the sandwich. The jam in the dodger. And more importantly: the strength in the economy. So if even those trying to focus policy attention on the middle are reluctant to speak its name, we really are in trouble. We have internalised the idea that the middle is something to apologise for.

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Macro, micro… mid-cro?

Across business, investment and public policy we are binary in our instincts. We celebrate the extremes: the unicorn start-up, the global giant, the breakthrough technology, at one end, and the corner shop or the community social enterprise at the other. All of these are important, but they’re not the whole.

Most of the economy, most public sector organisations and most charitable activity sit, structurally and statistically, in the middle where they do not get the attention they deserve.

One way to see this is in the way capital and talent are allocated. The logic of the UK’s innovation ecosystem is increasingly non-linear. If you are founding a company, you are expected to signal venture scale. The path must plausibly lead to a 10x or 100x return, or the machinery does not really engage.

Angels, funds and university commercialisation offices all operate within an ecosystem optimised for exponential outcomes. If your ambition is to build a £30m or £80m business over ten years - a business that employs a few hundred people and anchors a supply chain - you will struggle to find a natural home in that architecture. We get excited about multi-exited founders who’ve built and sold business after business - and great! They’re exciting! But why aren’t we also excited about the founders who want to build a multi-generational family business, or an anchor employer that regenerates their (mid-sized) town?

This is particularly visible in the sphere of university ‘tech transfer’ where I’m doing most of my work at the moment: the teams that help inventions and knowledge created in our universities to reach the real world.

British universities have become more sophisticated at spinning out venture-backed companies. In some places there is funding available for social enterprises, but between those poles lies an oddly underdeveloped terrain: commercially viable, technology-based businesses that are not venture scale and do not aspire to be. People working in tech transfer tell me they have no choice but leave these opportunities on the table.

As a result, many such companies are never built. Not because they lack merit, but because they are insufficiently extreme. This is a problem because the country is full of mid-sized problems that need mid-sized solutions.

• Mid-sized towns who want mid-sized employers

• Mid-sized diseases affecting middling numbers of people who want mid-sized treatments and diagnostics

• Mid-sized social problems that need mid-sized solutions

• Mid-volume waste streams that need mid-sized recycling facilities

You get the picture.

Of course, none of these mid-sized problems are as big as the big problems: but together they are the big sized problems.

It’s in the way that we feel

This preference for extremes is not entirely irrational. Outliers are easier to understand; they generate compelling stories. But this preference creates structural fragility. Economies are not sustained by a thin slice of extraordinary firms at the top and a churn of fragile experimentation at the bottom. They are sustained by a thick and capable middle layer: companies that compound value over time, institutions that improve steadily, places that develop depth rather than spikes.

What makes this harder to correct is that the analysis is not especially new. Economists have worried about the “missing middle” for decades and if you’ve worked in think tank land for more than a month without hearing someone say “mittelstand” then I’m impressed. Industrial strategists understand that scaling firms from £10m to £100m turnover is often harder than launching them.

The problem is not intellectual. It is psychological.

There is something about the word “middle” that triggers discomfort in political and commercial life. We are world-leading or world-beating, or we are broken. We are exceptional or in crisis. Hunting for unicorns or cherishing our neighbourhood coffee cart. No minister wants to describe Britain as mid-ranked (even though we are). No vice-chancellor wants to champion mid-scale commercialisation (even though there’s plenty of money to be made and jobs to create). No founder wants to say their ambition is to build a very good, £50m company serving a regional market well (because they won’t get funded). And this is daft!

We should be proud when we make it to the middle.

Oh, Canada1

Recently, Mark Carney offered a different model when speaking about what it means for a country to be a middle power. He did not inflate Canada into something it is not. Nor did he treat “middle” as decline. He treated scale as fact, and drew strategic conclusions from it. Middle powers, he argued, succeed not by pretending to be superpowers but by being disciplined, networked and capable.

The tone mattered as much as the content. There was no flinch. Sure, I’d have loved it more if he’d said the middle was the jam in the dodger, but he got there in spirit.

Some will object that this sounds dangerously relaxed in an era defined by technological competition. Shouldn’t we be aiming for leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, not rehearsing the virtues of middleness?

But here too the language distorts the choice. For a country of Britain’s size, sovereign capability in frontier technology will, by definition, be middle-sized. We are unlikely to outspend the United States or outscale China. The serious question is whether we possess enough indigenous capability - scientific depth, industrial capacity, regulatory credibility - to shape and absorb these technologies in ways aligned with our interests. Our goal is to be safe and prosperous in the world, not to take it over.

That is not mediocrity. It is proportional ambition. The middle may never be glamorous. But it is powerful.

And if we could speak about it without embarrassment - in business, in public services, in frontier technology, and even in geopolitics - we might find that the path to renewal lies less in chasing extremes and more in strengthening the broad, capable centre on which everything else depends.

I carry no candle for Matt Goodwin. But I find the horror slightly baffling, and it confirms something I’ve believed for a long time, and want to explore today: tax is as much about story as it is about maths.

If you think the current child benefit system is a good one, then you support something pretty similar to what Matt Goodwin proposes and should probably reconsider your horror.

Under the current rules, people who don’t have children pay more net tax than people who do have children. It’s called child benefit: we all contribute to the big bucket of gold in the Treasury1, and some of that gold is given back solely to the people who have children.

This is, in narrative terms, a reward for having children rather than a punishment for not having children. But maths being what it is: the result is the same. Those without children transfer some of their earnings to the people with children, and no-one construes this as a dystopia or gets out the red capes.

If you want to pick holes - fair enough - here are three big ones:

• Not everyone with children gets child benefit any more because of the high earners charge.

• Only those with current children get child benefit; maybe Goodwin wants people with adult children to also be exempt from his new charge - this would be a bit like continuing child benefit for life.

• Child benefit is a lump sum per child; maybe Goodwin is proposing a lump sum tax on the childless; this would be less progressive than funding child benefit through the tax system as a whole as happens now.

But these are details. The visceral response does not come from the policy’s technical impact, but because it is designed to tell a story people do not like.

This is because no-one thinks about the tax and welfare system as a set of net transfers between citizens and the state. We respond to a deep story of tax as punishment, and benefits as reward. At a time of profound fiscal challenges, (I’m not going to bore you with repeating numbers, just read something depressing from the IFS if you want reminding), we need to engage with those deep stories and find new ones.

In other words: we’re going to need to do some things that the Treasury won’t like. Introduce more hypothecated taxes. Grant fiscal freedoms to local authorities. Abolish the horrors of the student loan system. And have more referendums.

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Up is down

I know several academics who specialise in tax theory, and one of their particular skills seems to be explaining why things that don’t seem true are, in fact, technically so. For example, when I buy clothes for my husband he is benefiting from a tax relief - because if he had to buy the clothes-purchasing-labour, he would pay tax on the transaction either as a customer or an employer.

It’s the same logic that means mortgage-holders benefit from tax relief on the ‘imputed’ (normal people would say non-existent) income they get from owning their home and not having to pay rent to occupy it.

And of course nothing makes tax academics more cross than hearing people say that National Insurance pays for the NHS, or gets saved up to pay for individuals’ pensions.

Tax policy is often imbued with a feeling of contempt for the inexpert voters with all their mythologies and misunderstandings. The Treasury has been dreaming of a well-designed road pricing system for decades, despairing of voters who thing it sounds intrusive and expensive rather than a genius system for the economic optimisation of a national asset.

The problem with contempt for the voters is that legitimacy is the foundation stone of taxation. You cannot expert-splain your way to legitimacy. You have to follow the desire lines and belief systems of the people who form your nation. We always end up tweaking and exempting to manage the politics of ‘tampon tax’ or ‘pasty tax’, while still trying to hold onto tax orthodoxy for as much of the system as possible. I say: let’s give up on orthodoxy. There is no orthodox route to fiscal probity.

A why for the what

We need a tax system that tells a story - a story that legitimises tax now and builds a narrative of empathy, citizenship and generosity to foster greater legitimacy in the future. In my world:

• Hypothecation is good, because it gives a ‘why’ for the what. I know why the Treasury wants a slush fund - it’s needed to manage risk and cost variation, and it ensure there’s money for boring things. But we’re at the limit to what people will pay into a slush fund - so if we need more, we need to open our minds to closed funds.

• Fiscal devolution is good, because it brings the person asking for the tax closer to the person paying it. The Treasury worries about fiscal risk - a city going bankrupt because it borrowed too much. But the real fiscal risk comes at the national level, when a Chancellor reaches the political ceiling for tax and loses the confidence of the bond markets.

• Tax referendums are good, particularly for hypothecated and local taxes, because they give voters the choice whether they want nice things.

• Clarity about how my taxes benefit me is good, but clarity about how my taxes benefit people I care about are better, because they foster a sense that citizenship is about what we do for one another, not a customer service proposition.

With those principles in mind, here are eight ideas for tax reform that don’t attempt to sneak money away from citizens without them noticing. I’ve focused on personal taxation because corporations tend to behave a bit differently. Some of these are big reform ideas, and some are pretty trivial - but they seek to tell a better story that might make us mind a little less about the burdens we all need to carry.

• Home Town Tax: this is built on a Japanese idea, where those who move away from their elderly relatives to the big cities still pay local taxes to their home town, to cover the costs of the caring responsibilities they have left behind. In the UK, we worry about ‘brain drain’ when people upskill and leave their home town but we don’t want to deny people the chance to follow their dreams. Why not ask them to maintain their connection to their local council through a hypothecated tax either for the elderly or for the next generation of learners.

• Graduate Endowment Fund. The tuition fees system is broken, beyond repair. A simple graduate tax feels unjust, especially if you continue to believe that tax is punishment - tuition fees at least tell a story of contribution to the education from which you benefit. My solution would be a graduate payment, structured as a percentage of earnings, but ringfenced into an endowment fund for universities. Instead of paying ‘back’ for your own education, you’d be paying ‘forward’ for the next generation’s.

• Pylon Eradication Tax. Many parts of the country are in political turmoil about pylons. People want to put the cabling underground to protect their views, but it’s ruinously expensive. I say: put it to a referendum. Allow communities to choose underground cabling if they are willing to stump up for it - let them pay over 10 or 20 years through a Council Tax Levy, as we did for the Olympics. We could have done this with the Cotswold tunnel for HS2: if you want to enhance national infrastructure with local benefit, great! Join together and pay the bill.

  

• National Defence Bonds. OK, the Lib Dems have already got there on this, and it’s not a tax, but it’s in the narrative-fiscal-policy space so I’m counting it. Of course, I already own gilts through my pension and tracker funds where they make a sensible part of my mixed risk portfolio. And a National Defence Bond might be - in a technical sense - almost identical. The magic is in the narrative. I’m not going to shift £1000 from my cash savings account for a gilt. It’s literally too boring. But if asked as a citizen to help the nation fund its security? It’s a different question.

• Inheritance Fund. Most people hate inheritance tax because they think it’s unfair not to be able to pass something on to the next generation. So let’s create a way to capture asset wealth at death and convert it into something that is for the next generation - but more equitably. Passing housing wealth from 85 year olds to 55 year olds is a huge missed opportunity: if we took 5% out of every estate over (say) £20,000, we could fund an inheritance for every 18 year old.

• Net Zero dividend. Most energy policy would be better if we could just have a simple price for carbon, created through a carbon tax. It’s not easy to do for a very long list of reasons, but in principle it would be best if the money was recycled to a per-head payment to everyone in the country. That way everyone gets the cash in their pocket to pay for the emissions they cause, and a sharper incentive to reduce those emissions.

• National Care Insurance. Orthodoxy says that National Insurance is an aberration because people have constructed a set of fictions about what it pays for, even though like all the other taxes it just goes into the slush fund. I disagree. I think National Insurance has a genius character to it: people have constructed a story which makes them feel good about paying for it. So let’s not scrap NI: let’s have another NI. Adult social care is in crisis and it needs resources as well as reform. Let’s just tell the truth about it. NCI should apply from 40 to death (NI stops at retirement).

• Abstention Charge. I’m pretty much persuaded of the value of compulsory voting, but I’m willing to compromise: let people pay £50 if they don’t want to vote. The money can go to fund citizenship teaching at schools.

Tax will never be popular. It will never be fun. No society in history has cheered when the bill arrived. But that does not mean tax is neutral, or merely technical, or destined to be resented in the same thin, uniform way.

What the mythologies around National Insurance reveal - and what the horror at Matt Goodwin’s provocation inadvertently confirms - is that tax is already carrying a rich moral load. People may misunderstand the mechanics, but they understand the meaning. They intuitively distinguish between punishment and contribution, between solidarity and coercion, between being squeezed and being asked to play their part.

That instinct matters. It tells us that taxation is one of the few remaining spaces in public life where we still negotiate, implicitly and emotionally, the terms of citizenship: who carries risk, who supports whom, how we recognise care, continuity and contribution across a lifetime. We already tell stories through tax, we just pretend we don’t, and leave them to accrete accidentally, full of contradictions and quiet injustices.

If we are serious about sustaining the state, we need to be serious about the stories it tells. About what we owe one another across generations, across places, across luck and circumstance. That means crafting the narrative of taxation as deliberately as we craft the technicalities of the tax code itself - not to make paying tax painless, but to make it intelligible, defensible, and, at times, something we can recognise ourselves in.

My motto remains: cheer up, be brave, join in. So I thought I’d add a footer covering the things I’m working on where a bit of joining in would be particularly welcome - I’ve mentioned them in previous articles. I’m after any of the three Ts - Time, Talent and Treasure - but for full disclosure, I’m still assembling project budgets, so this isn’t an offer of employment. I don’t want to overpromise.

National Pain Institute - to accelerate the pathway from research to practical benefits for people living with pain. We’ve got a particular early focus on working-age people as part of efforts to “Keep Britain Working”.

Troubled Buildings Programme - mobilising citizens, lawyers, engineers and investors to address derelict and abandoned buildings blighting our communities.

Making the most of later life - a new initiative on healthy ageing and late life care - this in its very early days.

I’ll be adding more things to this list soon. If there are other things you think I should be working on, do let me know.

But there are other reasons why I haven’t sought more help than I have. Pain is slippery; when it’s gone, you can’t quite remember it. You start to doubt if it was really that bad. And you know that the doubt is there in others. Medical professionals. Bosses. Colleagues. Even friends. Pain is invisible, and when the thing that causes it is invisible too, it can feel exhausting to assert your own reality. Better to hunker down and wait it out.

Mine is not an interesting story. But pain is an interesting story - one I have been planning to write about for some time, and today became the right day. Pain is an almost canonical example of the kind of problem the modern state should be able to address, and cannot.

The thing you need to know is that, in the academic realm, the UK really excels at pain research: we are searingly good across a staggering range of sub-disciplines from public health to new drugs and treatments. The puzzle is why we can’t marry up that advanced knowledge with real-world change.

The answer is a vignette of the system failures that I’m determined for us to crack: if we find a way to solve for pain, I believe we can solve for most things.

Pain matters
First: why. Pain is one of the most common, persistent, and socially consequential human experiences. In the UK, around one in four adults lives with chronic pain. Many more experience recurrent or poorly managed pain that quietly reshapes their lives: limiting what work they can do, how they learn, who they depend on, and how they participate in family and civic life.

So you don’t have to care about individual wellbeing to believe this is important. Pain threads through almost every domain our political leaders claim to care about. It fills GP waiting rooms and specialist clinics; it drives repeat appointments, long-term medication use and, too often, avoidable or escalating interventions and all the costs associated with them. It shapes working lives through sickness absence, reduced productivity, early exit from the labour market and the distribution of care responsibilities within families. When pain begins early, it interrupts education and learning, altering life chances long before policy ever notices. It is part of the story of youth unemployment.

And of course, pain bears down unevenly, falling hardest on women, on lower-income families, on disabled people and on people from Black and minority ethnic communities. All these are more likely to be disbelieved when they say they are in pain. They seek less help, and suffer more, to keep themselves safe from the experience of being judged and doubted.

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If we know a lot about this, and a lot about how to address is: why aren’t we doing it well? Seven habitual state failures explain why:

1. The problem belongs to everyone, and therefore to no one

Pain cuts across departments, budgets and mandates. The costs of reducing it are typically borne by one part of the system, while the benefits accrue elsewhere: to employers, families, the welfare system, or the tax base years later. Even within healthcare, pain rarely has a natural home. It is a symptom of almost everything, and so becomes everyone’s responsibility and no one’s incentive.

We see this across the state: siloed institutions and misaligned incentives make it rational for individuals in the system to do nothing different.

2. Prevention is structurally disadvantaged

Pain illustrates a dynamic that recurs across public policy: prevention is always celebrated in principle and sacrificed in practice. Resources intended for early intervention and coordination are steadily absorbed by acute demand which is so much more politically poignant. Treatment is easy to measure and see; prevention is often abstract and much harder to quantify. In pain, the consequences are stark: early, manageable pain becomes complex, chronic pain; chronic pain becomes disability. The system pays more, later, for worse outcomes.

3. Policy is shaped by moral narratives rather than evidence

There is broad agreement that more people should be able to work, participate and live with dignity. But political energy has increasingly flowed into coercion rather than support: tougher assessments, harsher conditionality, and suspicion in place of trust. This persists despite weak evidence that punishment improves outcomes, particularly where pain and fluctuating conditions are concerned.

Every part of the enforcement state suffers from this challenge: performative toughness appeals more than empirically grounded policy.

4. Trust is low

Pain has an acute relationship with the crisis of trust in institutions and expertise. So many people living with chronic pain have had awful experiences in the healthcare system. So many people without chronic pain believe there must be malingering and fraud in a welfare state that spends so much on invisible problems.

That is compounded when large sums flow into research ecosystems that feel distant from lived experience, protected by technical language and institutional prestige, but unable to demonstrate real-world change. People in pain can feel more studied than helped. When publicly funded knowledge repeatedly fails to close the loop back to public benefit, faith in institutions weakens.

5. Knowledge exists - but doesn’t travel

The UK is world-class at pain research, spanning discovery science, clinical trials, public health, data and emerging technologies. Yet translation into practice is slow, partial, and uneven. This is part of a chronic problem: universities are rewarded for discovery, not adoption. No institution owns the path from evidence to sustained impact.

Some universities have very successful technology transfer offices, creating spin-outs that commercialise research into real-world change and bring in cash that can fund the next generation of research. But in most universities these functions are small and short of capacity, leaving plenty of research stuck in the lab.

And almost everywhere, the primary focus is on spinning out ‘venture scale’ businesses: new drugs or technologies with investable intellectual property. But this isn’t the majority of the new knowledge UK science generates: treatments that rely on behavioural interventions or talking therapies, for example, can rarely be patented. There’s no investment model for this kind of innovation.

6. Institutions struggle to adopt new ways of working

Even when evidence is strong and shared widely, translation is uneven. Of course, brilliant practice exists in places. But pilots proliferate and rarely scale. Large systems lack the mechanisms, incentives, and accountability structures needed to routinely retire outdated practice and replace it with better ones. I wrote about how hard it is to do that translation work here.

7. Transactional public services can’t manage chronic problems

Pain is longitudinal, relational and context-dependent. It responds to trust, continuity, expectation, work conditions, and social support, not just to discrete clinical interventions. Systems designed around transactions, episodes and hand-offs inevitably fragment it. I wrote about the need to design relational service models here.

Seven problems: one answer

This is where pain becomes so interesting as a design challenge. I think there’s a strong case for making pain a national priority for its own sake - particularly for working age people, given how politically and economically important it is that we support people back to work. But that’s not the case I’m making here.

Let’s imagine we, the nation, set ourselves a serious goal - say, reducing the prevalence and impact of chronic pain by 25 per cent over a decade. To deliver it, we’d need to think radically differently about the mechanisms of the state. It would force us to confront the problems we’re leaving unaddressed.

• We’d need to rebalance funding systems towards prevention.

• We’d need to rebuild trust in public institutions.

• We’d need to unite public services, charities and the private sector behind common goals.

• We’d need to have the political courage to argue for evidence-based policy making.

• We’d need to redesign the incentives and mechanisms for research funding to connect them to real world impact.

• We’d need an investment model for commercialising and translating research that has higher social than commercial value.

• We’d need public bureaucracies that were agile and adaptive, set up to absorb innovation not reject it.

• We’d need public services that know how to build and sustain relationships with citizens and across communities.

• We’d need to break down the silos between government departments, probably by pooling budgets and forcing collaborations at local level.

In other words, if the state could organise itself to reduce pain - coordinating across sectors, investing early, translating knowledge into practice, rebuilding trust - it would have learned how to deal with a whole class of challenges it currently fails at: long-term mental ill health, caring, disability, crime prevention, early childhood adversity, and more.

If it cannot, then no amount of excellence in individual departments or disciplines will compensate.

I understand the desire to hunker down and wait for the pain of state failure to go away. But chronic problems only get worse when you ignore them.

An invitation: A new model for pain research
I’m currently working with some new friends on a project that would be one piece of this puzzle. Provisionally dubbed a new National Pain Institute, it would be a new way of organising research and innovation on many of these issues. We’re trying to design a model that would accelerate the journey from knowledge to impact. We believe this would help reshape the relationship between research and public trust, both by involving citizens and by delivering practical change.

We’re already working with a small group of academics and charities, but are eager to hear from anyone else who wants to be involved or hear updates on our progress.

For Milton, the darkness was literal. Blindness arrived just as his ambitions as a poet seemed most fully within reach. His great fear was not physical incapacity, but uselessness: that the world no longer needed what he had to give. “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” he asks, bitterly. And then comes the answer that has been quoted ever since: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

For Auden, the darkness was political. Writing from self-imposed exile in New York, he watched Europe collapse into war as “the clever hopes expire / Of a low, dishonest decade”. His response was not to retreat into quietism, but to insist, stubbornly, that even when history is brutal, the human voice still matters: “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie.”

I like to write. It helps me think. And yet, Wystan, John: I am uneasy. Because while personal wellbeing comes from accepting what you cannot change, there are moments in history when that feels like a cop-out. When standing and waiting is not enough. When testifying, however important, is not enough.

This feels like one of those moments.

The world is at an inflection point. And the question now being put to each of us - quietly but insistently - is whether we are prepared to make an inflection of our own.

This is not my war, but it is my world

I know that Minnesota is not my fight, in the narrow sense. I am not American. I do not vote in their elections. I do not shape their courts.

But the malaise that fed Trumpism is not foreign to me. It is present in my town, my country, my people. The same loss of trust, the same exhaustion with institutions, the same hunger for certainty and control. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can watch from the sidelines.

Because whichever of our problems I consider, the answer keeps coming back the same way: we will not get through this without the mobilisation of citizen capacity.

Our public services, as I’ve written before, simply aren’t affordable unless we can shift effort upstream - toward prevention, community care, and mutual support - through deeper collaboration between citizens and the state, and between citizens themselves.

Our civic and social cohesion, though stronger than in many similarly diverse countries, is visibly fracturing. A toxic information environment, the normalisation of explicit racial and religious hatred, and the steady erosion of shared norms all weaken the web of trust on which democracy depends. Repairing that web is not something the state can outsource, regulate or legislate into existence. It is slow, relational work by people, with people, across every divide.

Crime, too, is ultimately a communal phenomenon. Law enforcement matters enormously, but perceived lawlessness is worsened when communities feel anonymous, disconnected, and indifferent to one another. Safer societies are built not only through punishment, but through belonging.

And then there is what lurks on the horizon: the possibility that we are entering not just a geopolitical cold snap, but a second Cold War. One in which Britain is no longer securely sheltered on one side, but awkwardly pinned between competing powers. Preparing for that world would require a reallocation of time, treasure and talent on a scale we have barely begun to contemplate: higher defence spending, yes, but also lower consumption, different priorities, and - again - citizen mobilisation.

This is not just a question of politics or activism: voting, taking sides, protesting. This is a question of citizenship: participation, contribution, service.

The question of purpose

What all of this adds up to is a quieter, harder question than “what do you believe?”
It is: where will you show up?

I started my working life wanting to be a writer. I heard the call to service when I began writing about politics, because observing felt insufficient. Since then I’ve worked in government, founded a feminist political party, started a mental health charity, rescued a think tank from bankruptcy, led on ‘social purpose’ at a large university, and now support academics, founders and innovators trying to bring something new into the world.

So I’ve seen how questions of purpose can be answered, in infinite different ways. And I can tell you that power, capacity and leverage exist everywhere. Every sector has pressure points; every role offers moments where decisions compound; every institution bends slightly in response to who occupies it and how they behave. The question comes to all of us, every day: what will I do? And the answer must not be: stand and wait.

The Japanese talk about ikigai: finding the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you financially. In calmer times, that idea felt like a comfortable challenge. In darker times, it sharpens. The weight of ‘what the world needs’ is greater. It needs all of us to ask that question of ourselves.

Don’t just stand and wait

If we were serious about responding to this moment, we would stop treating purpose as a private lifestyle question and start seeing it as a source of national capacity. That would mean volunteering networks that use skills, not just spare time. Coaching, mentoring and professional networks treated as civic infrastructure. Employers that create space for contribution rather than quietly penalising it. Professional bodies, unions, faith groups, universities and councils acting as matching systems between people who want to help and places that need them.

This isn’t about turning everyone into an activist. In fact, activism at its worst can drive communities apart. Society needs participation more than polarisation - contribution more than purity. It’s about stepping up to the moment and asking what we want Britain to be. The arc of history will only bend toward justice if we put our shoulders to it, together.

This is an inflection point. Future generations will ask versions of the same old question: what did you do in the war, Daddy?

These problems are not the state’s to solve alone. They are ours.
You have more than a voice.
Don’t just stand and wait.

Cheer up. Be brave. Join in.

Some resources

• The lovely people at NCVO link to a number of different places where you can find volunteering opportunities.

• I never tire of connecting people with Jon Alexander and his thinking on citizenship. He’s got a podcast How to Save Democracy here - my favourite episode is with Baratunde Thurston, an American activist who teaches us that citizen is a VERB not just a noun.

• I recently connected with the team behind Feds Forward, a platform helping former federal workers find their next chapter - I would love to see something similar in the UK if anyone wants to collaborate.

• My colleagues at Zinc run a programme for professionals seeking to maximise their impact in their career. (This is a paid for programme, but we’re working with a number of charities to support free and discounted places). It’s called Inflection, which is mostly why I used the word. It’s living rent-free in my head along with Wystan and John’s rhymes.

The rules-based international order is dismissed in the latest US National Defense Strategy as a “cloud-castle abstraction”. At home, courts are denounced as political actors, judges are accused of thwarting the will of the people, and legal constraint is recast as elite sabotage. I shuddered a little when a minister I like and respect said at a recent conference that democracy was more important than the rule of law (an interesting debate) so politicians should be able to do whatever they want (not an interesting debate).

Full disclosure: I have a dog in this fight. I once burst into tears on a date because my dining companion - a lawyer no less - said there was no such thing as international law. But defensiveness is bad strategy. As well as reminding ourselves why the rule of law matters we also need to understand why it’s gone out of fashion and how we might win back popular as well as elite consent for a set of rules that constrain power.

I’ve talked to too many democracy and constitutional campaigners who believe a Reform government will tear apart the rule of law, but whose proactive response is some sort of pro-law advocacy campaign. This will fail. We can’t just say that law is good, in the abstract. We have to demonstrate that law is consistent - and that’s where we’re failing.

In academic circles, constitutional law may sit apart from criminal law. But to citizens, failings in one bleed easily into the other. So this article is mostly about crime.

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Law protects the powerful

First: why is the rule of law important enough to ruin a date?

Too many arguments focus on the benefits for the vulnerable. They are real, and they matter to me. But woke-coding the legal system is a way to lose the argument. The rule of law is not a progressive affectation or a post-war add-on to the state. It is the oldest technology of government. Long before constitutions, welfare states or human rights, societies discovered a simple truth: unconstrained power destroys value.

A world in which outcomes are determined by force, favour or fear is not just immoral; it is inefficient. It misallocates capital, talent and time. It forces everyone to spend energy defending themselves instead of creating, trading or building. Warlordism is not merely violent, it is economically illiterate.

The rule of law attempts to solve that problem by making power predictable. It replaces arbitrary rule with known rules; private revenge with public adjudication; short-term domination with long-term stability. That stability is what makes trust possible between citizens, between firms, between generations. And trust is the precondition for growth as well as soggy stuff like not being killed on the battlefield and getting to raise a family.

This is why even the powerful, historically, have often (though not always, of course) submitted to legal constraint not out of altruism, but out of enlightened self-interest. The rule of law allows those with power today to believe they will still have a system tomorrow. Law is not anti-power; it is power thinking beyond the end of its own nose.

The powerful who choose to exercise arbitrary power can protect themselves for a time with threats of violence, of course, and they can shutter democratic processes. But in the end, a state that is perceived by its inhabitants to be illegitimate will be threatened from below, or outside.

This is why the rule of law is, in my view, more important than democracy, and in fact a necessary condition for it, as argued by the US journalist and writer Fareed Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom.

But if the rule of law is such a critical piece of national infrastructure, how did it fall so far out of favour?

I can see you doing that

Most people are talking about two things:

• The accretion of proceduralism, in which legality is increasingly experienced not as fairness, but as delay. To citizens, this looks like a state that is confident about what it can block but hesitant about what it can deliver.

• Actual corruption. The expenses scandal, pandemic-era fraud, pandemic-era parties, the furore about Taylor Swift tickets. Most MPs don’t have their ‘snouts in the trough’ but enough do that people have stopped caring about individual infractions. If they’re all bastards you might as well have the fun bastard in charge.

Both are important, but I think they miss something even more corrosive. This does not feel like a lawful society. This is in part an argument about both crime and the information environment around crime.

Let’s take a single type of crime as an example: flashing. There are four core differences between this in the real-world and online.

1. The supply curve.
   One man can perhaps flash two or three women in a single evening if he tries. Online, he can expose himself to thousands in minutes.

2. Triviality.
   Online flashing is widely treated as less serious. Victims are less likely to report it. Platforms are more likely to minimise it. Police are more likely to see it as noise rather than crime.

3. Enforcement.
   Enforcement against online crime is a nightmare of international jurisdictions, data disclosure, anonymity and technical skills for which the police still have very limited capacity.

4. Visibility.
   Real world flashing tends to have only a victim and a perpetrator. Online, many crimes also have bystanders: offensive photos posted to offend one user, but visible to potentially millions of scrollers.

The result is more crime, more visible crime, less punished crime, and, most corrosively, less visibly punished crime. Compound that across fraud, scams, illegal trading, threats of violence and abuse, and you arrive at an online environment that does not merely contain illegality, but appears to run on it.

This matters because the rule of law is not sustained by statutes alone. It is sustained by expectation: the shared belief that rules apply, that breaches are taken seriously, and that no one is systematically profiting from their violation. Online, that expectation is steadily evaporating.

Platforms routinely make money from activity that is plainly illegal. Scam adverts, counterfeit goods, fraudulent investment schemes and impersonation are not rare edge cases; they are a predictable, lucrative feature of the advertising ecosystem that you will even see on mainstream news outlets. Martin Lewis took Facebook to court to stop his face being used by fraudsters in ads from which Facebook made money. Which? has done a series of investigations into the quantity of fake goods sold on mainstream platforms - a staggering two thirds of high end beauty products. The platforms have clever legal structures which defray accountability while retaining profit.

Local government’s trading standards departments have been gutted, making it harder to keep up with real world dodgy goods, but they’re still hundreds of times more effective than efforts to tackle online fraud.

In fact: recent governments have been so keen to ignore the rise in online fraud that they almost always separate it out, so they can claim that crime is falling.

And then there is the information environment itself. The same systems that struggle to remove illegal content actively reward the creation of false allegations of criminal behaviour. Outrage-bait stories accusing individuals of heinous acts - often untrue, sometimes fabricated wholesale - travel faster and further than corrections ever could. Once again, Jim Waterson’s investigations for London Centric give a compelling example.

Taken together, this is why so many people feel that we no longer live in a lawful society. Not because laws have disappeared, but because the ratio between crimes experienced (once you count the thousands we experience as bystanders) and crimes punished has escalated beyond control. I can go months without witnessing a crime in real life; I get scam calls every day; I am reminded of the prevalence of fraud every time I make a bank payment; and I see adverts for crypto scams and dodgy diet pills every time I visit a local news website.

It is no wonder people feel peevish when the law gets in the way of them, or their elected representatives doing the thing they want. All the other crimes seem to be tolerated.

Law as if we meant it

Every so often, I appear on Matt Chorley’s R5 show for a slot he calls All the Small Things. Listeners call in with their ideas for small policy fixes to make Britain better: mostly they involve banning things, like flavoured hot cross buns (actually, that was my idea). What I always say is that you should never ban something until you have a plan for how enforcement will work. When you use the law as a moral gesture - signalling what’s right and wrong - rather than as an actual boundary for what will be permitted, you bring the law into contempt.

That is exactly what we have done with online crime. But the perverse truth is we have not done so because enforcing the law online is too hard. Online enforcement is challenging in our current legal setup, but it has the potential to be easy.

• Online offences leave durable traces: every message, transaction, login, and image is recorded and time-stamped. Unlike offline crime, which disappears into memory or testimony, online crime exists as data. Everything is auditable, retrievable, and evidence-rich.

• Real world police officers are as constrained by time and geography as real world criminals. Technological enforcement can be infinite. Speeding, for example, could be abolished remotely through speed-limiters in onboard computers, or punished automatically through data reporting.

• Online harm is almost always intermediated by platforms: social networks, marketplaces, payment systems, and app stores. These intermediaries can be regulated and punished more efficiently; or they can act as outsourced enforcement agencies, removing content, suspending accounts, reducing access or clawing back funds.

The price of full enforcement, however, would be high. Liberty, experimentation, and growth all depend on leaving space for things to happen without total surveillance.

We didn’t need to think about this so much when crime happened offline: offline policing contains proportionality by default, constrained by capacity. Online we are forced to make a choice:

• Accept a police state, with all its costs

• Rethink the boundary of what we consider to be legal or illegal, calibrating properly to our enforcement capacity.

That rethink has been a long time coming, but it could not be more urgent.

If the rule of law is to survive the digital age, we cannot tolerate this murky world where we are surrounded by behaviour the government deems illegal but does nothing about. If we value the rule of law, we have to bring it back within the boundary of what we can enforce.

The politics of banning things is easy. We need a politics instead of meaning what we say.