Foundations

Debt interest is not a background statistic — it is now competing directly with the money available to fund everything else in this platform. In 2025/26, the UK spent approximately £110 billion on debt interest, equivalent to 3.6% of GDP and 8.1% of total public spending — the fourth-largest area of government expenditure, after social security, health, and education. Public sector net debt stands at roughly 94–95% of GDP, and on current policy the Office for Budget Responsibility does not expect the debt-to-GDP ratio to begin falling until 2029/30, and even then only marginally.

The margin for error is razor-thin, which is what makes this urgent rather than merely desirable. At the Spring Statement in March 2026, the government left itself only £9.9 billion of headroom against its fiscal rule to reach a forecast current budget surplus by 2029/30 — a historically low margin, less than 0.3% of national income, that a single piece of bad economic news could eliminate entirely. The position gets harder from here, not easier, because of how the debt itself is structured: roughly £168 billion of existing government gilts matured and required refinancing in 2025/26 alone, out of a total financing requirement of over £300 billion for the year. Much of that maturing debt was issued years ago at far lower interest rates than the government pays on new borrowing today, so every pound of old, cheap debt that rolls over becomes a pound of new, more expensive debt — a mechanical ratchet on the interest bill that operates regardless of any single Budget decision.

Closing this gap requires more than the incremental "efficiency savings" every government promises and few deliver. This platform's position is that debt reduction needs a genuinely radical spending review: a zero-based examination of departmental budgets that tests every major spending line against defined productivity and outcome metrics, rather than assuming the previous year's baseline is the correct starting point simply because it existed. Government spending should be judged the way this platform judges everything else — by what it demonstrably produces — with published, multi-year targets for reducing debt-to-GDP specific enough to hold successive governments to account. Savings identified through this review should not simply lower the headline deficit; a defined share should be explicitly redirected into the productivity- and growth-generating pillars of this platform, so that fiscal discipline and economic growth are pursued as the same programme.

Two supporting fiscal reforms

A statutory "golden rule" separating capital and current spending — borrowing only to invest, not to fund day-to-day expenditure — would make the distinction between productive infrastructure spend and unproductive deficit spend visible and enforceable, rather than left to political framing each Budget. Alongside it, extending the OBR's forecast horizon beyond its current window would force policy decisions to be judged against their longer-run fiscal effect rather than the five-year window that currently rewards front-loaded giveaways and back-loaded costs.

Public services: output, not just input

The same scrutiny this platform applies to Whitehall spending generally should apply specifically to the NHS and schools, the two largest departmental budgets. The mechanism already partly exists: government has set a 2% annual efficiency and productivity target for the NHS, backed by £10 billion in NHS digital technology investment, and the Office for Value for Money has already identified £14 billion of public service efficiencies, with a further £2.8 billion planned for 2028-29. This platform's position is that this existing machinery should be enforced with the same rigour applied elsewhere in this document, not treated as a one-off announcement. AI adoption specifically has a credible efficiency case behind it: modelling by the Tony Blair Institute estimated up to £12 billion a year in achievable public-sector savings, including nearly £1 billion a year in the Department for Work and Pensions alone through faster claims processing — savings that should be captured and redirected into the productivity-generating pillars of this platform, on the same principle as the spending review above.

Special educational needs provision is the clearest single example of a public service where spending has grown fastest and results have arguably weakened for the majority. The number of children with an Education, Health and Care Plan has risen from 354,000 in 2018 to nearly 640,000 by January 2026, with total SEND spending on course to reach £21 billion by 2029. Because EHCPs create individually enforceable legal entitlements with little regard for affordability, councils have built up cumulative deficits estimated at £8 billion by March 2027 — kept off their books through an accounting mechanism (the "statutory override") that has already been extended twice and does not resolve the underlying gap. Government's own February 2026 White Paper already points in the direction this platform would recommend — nearly £4 billion in additional funding alongside a plan to reserve EHCPs for the most complex needs by 2035 — but the timeline is slow relative to the scale of the deficit, and every year of delay pushes more of the cost onto councils already running unsustainable budgets, or increasingly, onto the willingness of other parents to see mainstream provision funded at all as SEND absorbs an ever-larger share of the same schools budget. This platform's position is to accelerate the reform timeline government has already set, not to invent a new one, on the basis that a system creating enforceable individual entitlements without a matching enforceable budget constraint cannot be sustainable regardless of how much is added to it.

Two targeted VAT changes worth considering

This platform generally avoids proposing broad VAT rate rises, since VAT falls hardest on people who spend most of what they earn. Two narrower changes are different in character. A new luxury rate — a higher rate of VAT applied only to single items costing over roughly £10,000, such as high-end cars, jewellery, and premium kitchens — raises revenue from discretionary spending at the top of the market without touching ordinary household budgets, provided genuine anti-avoidance rules stop large purchases being artificially split into smaller ones. Separately, replacing Air Passenger Duty and the aviation fuel exemption with a single VAT rate on flights and holidays would simplify a notoriously complex regime, remove an anomaly that currently taxes rail more consistently than flying, and — because VAT scales with the price paid — ask more from premium and long-haul travel than from a family's one annual flight.

No amount too small: minor but real savings

A platform that asks for a genuinely radical spending review has to apply that standard to small sums as readily as large ones — the discipline is the point, not just the money recovered. None of the following would meaningfully dent the £110 billion annual debt interest bill on its own, but a government serious about scrutinising every area of expenditure examines them anyway, rather than treating them as beneath attention. The sale of government-owned "grace-and-favour" properties used by MPs could raise an estimated £40-50 million — small money, but a symbolically useful test of whether ministers apply the same standard to themselves that they ask of everyone else. HMRC holds a historic account of unmatched funds built up over decades that could be reconciled and applied to the debt. UK law enforcement holds seized cryptocurrency from criminal proceeds that should be sold rather than held. And a specific, published review of Royal Household funding arrangements, conducted on the same value-for-money terms this platform applies to every other institution, is a reasonable ask rather than a hostile one. None of these items changes the fiscal trajectory by itself; together, and as a matter of principle, they are exactly the kind of scrutiny a platform arguing for discipline everywhere else cannot credibly skip.

The UK's electricity grid connection queue currently stands at roughly 738GW of proposed capacity — several times what the system actually needs — and despite active reform efforts, Ofgem has warned that as much as two-thirds of projects due to connect by 2027 remain at risk of delay. Reform is already under way (the "Gate 2" prioritisation process has removed over 300GW of non-viable "zombie" projects from the queue), but the practical reality is stark: tidal power, floating solar, and next-generation nuclear are worthless on paper if they cannot physically connect to the grid within a usable timeframe.

Grid connection is the electrical bottleneck; planning permission is the physical one. Tidal lagoons, vertical farms, reactor sites, and reindustrialisation factories all depend on the same planning system that is separately constraining housebuilding. A faster, more predictable planning and consenting process is infrastructure for the whole industrial programme, not a housing-only reform.

The same culture of unnecessary delay shows up at the household level, in the process of buying and selling a home, and it belongs in this platform for the same reason: it is a solvable, government-caused delay that has been tolerated for far too long. England and Wales operate a conveyancing system that allows deals to collapse late in the process, unlike Scotland, where contracts become binding once certain conditions are met and only around 9% of transactions fail as a result. A large share of the delay sits squarely with the public sector: local authority search turnaround times vary enormously between councils, with some authorities now taking longer than 90 working days — well over three months — to return basic property information that other councils return within days. There is no defensible reason a local authority search should take two months rather than two days; the variation between councils shows the two-day outcome is already achievable, just not universal. Fixing this requires a shift in how public bodies understand their role in the economy: a local authority search is a service to a citizen trying to move house, not an administrative queue to be cleared at the council's convenience.

The UK's largest transport project is also its clearest cautionary tale on delivery discipline. HS2 was originally costed at £32.7bn in 2012; the current cost-to-complete estimate stands at £87.7-102.7bn, with the Manchester and Leeds legs both cancelled and the remaining London-to-Birmingham line not expected to open in full until 2036-2043 — over a decade beyond original projections. The lesson is directly relevant to this platform's other long-horizon commitments: fixed statutory scope and transparent cost tracking need to be built in from the outset, not retrofitted after a decade of overrun.

HS2 is also, on its own terms, a mismatch with what the industrial pillars in this platform actually need. It was designed around passenger speed between two cities, not freight capacity or regional connectivity. Moving Cornwall lithium to a battery plant, tidal infrastructure components to the Severn, or manufactured goods to ports for EU export depends on freight rail and road capacity — largely untouched by the HS2 programme. The more economically significant gap is east-west connectivity between Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds, which remains poorly served despite each city being well connected to London individually. A Northern Powerhouse Rail-style investment in freight and east-west regional rail, prioritised over further high-speed north-south passenger spend, would serve the industrial pillars in this platform more directly.

ContestedHeathrow expansion — why it matters

A third runway at Heathrow has been proposed, approved, cancelled, and reinstated across five governments since 2009, and the case for and against it has hardened rather than resolved. The case for: Heathrow is the UK's only hub airport, already enabling over £200bn in trade annually, and is operating at full capacity while rival European hubs continue to grow — proponents argue expansion would inject billions into the economy and support thousands of apprenticeships. The case against is now, unusually, being made by the government's own analysis: the Department for Transport's Green Book cost-benefit assessment for the current proposal found a net present value of between minus £23.4bn and minus £62.5bn over 60 years, a GDP impact revised down to just 0.03–0.05% by 2056, and modelling by the New Economics Foundation suggesting the scheme would displace a net 15,200 jobs from the wider UK into London and the South East by 2050, rather than create new ones nationally. This platform's position is not to take a side on a decision this genuinely contested, but to flag that "why it matters" cuts both ways — it matters as a potential trade and connectivity asset, and it matters as a test of whether the UK's infrastructure appraisal process is taken seriously when its own numbers cut against a politically popular project.

Tidal lagoons, nuclear fleets, and a sovereign wealth fund are 10-30 year undertakings, but UK governments plan on 5-year electoral cycles. The precedent for solving this is well established — the Bank of England's operational independence and the Office for Budget Responsibility's statutory role both survive changes of government by design.

The UK's coal phase-out is worth holding up as a working template for exactly this kind of durability on a difficult, contested issue. The commitment to end coal power was set by a Conservative government, carried through a change of government, and delivered on schedule in September 2024 under Labour, making the UK the first G7 nation to fully phase out coal power — a rare example of a genuinely difficult, economically disruptive commitment surviving a change of government intact. Several of the harder proposals in this platform depend on the same kind of durable, cross-party commitment. The coal phase-out demonstrates it is achievable when the target is specific, the timeline is fixed, and successive governments are held to the same standard rather than each being given room to redefine it.

A larger-scale historical precedent makes the same point at greater stakes. In 1945, UK national debt stood at roughly 270% of GDP — more than double today's level — yet the incoming government built the NHS and the welfare state anyway, while debt-to-GDP fell steadily for three decades as growth outpaced the debt. When the opposing party returned to power in 1951, it kept almost all of it, a continuity historians call the post-war consensus. This is the coal phase-out's argument at national-refoundation scale: genuinely difficult, expensive commitments can survive a change of government when the public mandate for them is real and the target is specific enough that reversing it would be its own political cost.

Every pillar in this platform assumes a workforce that can physically staff it, and that assumption is under growing strain. Economic inactivity due to long-term sickness has risen almost continuously since 2019, described by the Resolution Foundation as the longest sustained rise since the 1990s — around 2.7 million working-age adults are currently too sick to work, up from roughly 2.1 million in mid-2019. The government's own "Get Britain Working" white paper targets raising the employment rate from 75.8% toward 80%. The relevant levers — occupational health capacity, earlier intervention in the health system, and welfare-to-work programme design — sit outside the scope of any single industrial pillar, but without progress here, every pillar in this platform will compete for a shrinking pool of available workers.

The employment-cost side of the same problem

Labour supply has a cost dimension as well as a headcount one — the October 2024 employer National Insurance and minimum wage changes described in Understand the Past raised the cost of employing people at the same moment the available workforce was shrinking. This platform's position is not that either measure was wrong in isolation, but that a partial reversal of the threshold cut, or a more generous, tiered Employment Allowance favouring small and micro-businesses, would ease the compounding effect without reopening the wider argument about minimum wage levels.

Every pillar in this platform — battery plants, reactor fabrication, vertical farming, biologics manufacturing — requires technicians and skilled tradespeople, not only graduates. Germany's dual apprenticeship system is the standard international reference point, credited with sustaining manufacturing employment because the skills pipeline was never allowed to atrophy in the way the UK's was after deindustrialisation from the 1980s onward.

This creates a genuine tension worth resolving explicitly. Current government policy commits to reducing overall net migration while simultaneously reforming the immigration system to align with industry skills needs — right as a long-term strategy but too slow for the near-term hiring needs of several pillars here. The resolution is a narrow, sector-specific skilled visa route tied explicitly to the pillars in this platform, filling a defined, temporary gap rather than reopening general skilled migration policy.

Corporate listings

The London Stock Exchange has lost a steady stream of large companies to New York in 2026 alone — Smurfit Westrock, CRH, and Flutter Entertainment have all delisted, joining Wise, Just Eat Takeaway, Ashtead, Shein, ARM, TUI, and Marsh & McLennan. Even AstraZeneca has launched a direct New York listing alongside its London one. If the successful companies emerging from the reindustrialisation pillars in this platform default to a US listing once they scale, the UK keeps the jobs but loses the capital gains, headquarters gravity, and wider investment cluster. A competitive package on capital gains treatment, listing rules, and UK pension fund allocation would help keep those companies anchored to UK capital markets.

Individual wealth migration

Genuinely contested. Some analyses claim large-scale departure of wealthy individuals following the abolition of non-dom status; other analysis based on HMRC's own data found departure numbers in line with or below official forecasts, with significant methodological problems in the higher "exodus" figures. What is not seriously disputed is that UK tax treatment of new residents is less internationally competitive than Italy, Switzerland, or the UAE — a case for a more competitive regime targeted at productive investment, regardless of how large the current outflow turns out to be.

Three domestic-capital levers, alongside retention

Capital gains tax rationalisation — aligning rates and reliefs so investment decisions are made on their merits rather than around a rate boundary — reduces the incentive to structure transactions around the tax system rather than genuine business logic. A UK-focused ISA product gives retail savers a tax-advantaged reason to hold UK equities specifically. And pension fund investment mandates directing a defined share of UK pension assets toward domestic productive investment — infrastructure, the reindustrialisation pillars, UK-listed growth companies — would put some of Britain's own savings behind this platform's other proposals, rather than relying solely on foreign capital or the sovereign wealth fund described later in this document.

Cryptocurrency: a boundary, not a strategy

Unlike every other item in this Foundation, this platform's position on cryptocurrency is what government should not do: it should not hold crypto assets in reserve, promote adoption, or treat the sector as a source of national competitive advantage to chase. The core problem is structural rather than technological — most cryptocurrency value is not backed by production, cash flow, or a claim on any underlying asset, and returns for later entrants depend on continued new buying rather than anything the asset itself generates, which is the same structural pattern regulators use to define a Ponzi scheme, just operating at a systemic rather than a single-firm scale. This does not mean banning private crypto activity, which is a separate question about individual risk-taking; it means government itself staying out of it as a matter of policy, rather than lending the state's credibility to an asset class with this structural profile.

Inheritance tax: certainty over the current lottery

The current rule exempting lifetime gifts from Inheritance Tax only if the giver survives seven years creates a genuine, needless anxiety — families effectively gamble on a parent's survival for the better part of a decade. A fixed, short taper — full liability immediately after a gift, reducing by a set amount for every month survived, reaching zero after a defined and much shorter window — would keep the same revenue-protection principle while removing years of uncertainty for ordinary families making entirely legitimate decisions about their own money. Pensions deserve the same certainty in the other direction: since pension contributions are already taxed as income whenever they are drawn, a firm, permanent commitment that pensions will never separately attract Inheritance Tax removes a reasonable fear that the rules on retirement savings can simply be changed after the fact. And the protection already proposed elsewhere for genuinely working farms and trading businesses only works if it is precisely targeted — protecting productive enterprises passed to the next generation, not functioning as a shelter for land or company structures held purely to reduce a tax bill.

Devolution is often presented as a growth strategy in its own right. The evidence for that claim, as currently implemented, is weak. A 2026 academic study using a difference-in-differences design across England's six original Mayoral Combined Authorities found little evidence that mayoral devolution accelerated economic growth in its first six years — once initial conditions were accounted for, the effect turned negative.

The likely reason is structural: the UK remains the most fiscally centralised country in the G7, with roughly 95% of tax revenue flowing straight to Whitehall. Metro mayors compete against one another for the same centrally-held funding pots — a model that pits city-regions against each other for a fixed sum rather than giving each a reason to grow its own base. This platform's position is specific: back fiscal devolution — sharing tax revenue actually generated within a mayoral area — over administrative devolution alone.

Local government structure itself

Devolution above is about power moving between Whitehall and the regions; a separate, smaller question is whether the current map of local authorities is the right shape to receive it. Combining specific councils into larger unitary authorities where the case for doing so is genuinely about reducing duplicated overhead — not simply about cutting services — has a real, if modest, efficiency case behind it. Alongside that, giving residents a clear statutory expectation of core local services (parks, libraries, and open spaces genuinely available, not eroded by stealth) sets a floor beneath devolution rather than leaving service levels entirely to individual council discretion once more power and money moves down.

What not to do

US tariff policy since 2025 is the clear cautionary example. Tariffs were imposed broadly, adjusted unpredictably, and in February 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled a significant portion had exceeded presidential authority. The Fed attributed a measurable surge in inflation to the tariffs, and independent modelling suggests retaliation could more than double the resulting economic losses.

What this platform proposes instead

Every tariff in this document is narrow, targeted at a specific identified gap, forward-dated with a statutorily fixed timeline, and paired with capital grants — a long-term demand-rebalancing tool, not a short-term negotiating weapon.

Buy British procurement

The Procurement Act 2023 replaced EU-derived procurement rules with a UK-only framework governing over £300 billion in annual public spending. In practice this freedom remains under-used — around 90% of contracts nominally reserved for SMEs are still awarded to large corporations. The right use is deliberate sequencing: guaranteed early demand while reindustrialisation pillars mature, shifting to open competition as domestic capacity matures.

The Subsidy Control Act 2022

Every grant and subsidy proposed elsewhere in this platform is possible on its current scale because leaving the EU removed the UK from EU state aid law, replaced by a UK-only regime with materially more freedom to support domestic industry.

Trade deal utilisation, not signing, as the measure of success

The UK's negotiators have been genuinely successful at signing agreements — CPTPP, Australia, New Zealand — but signing is not using. Many UK businesses aren't taking advantage of agreements already in force, citing complex rules of origin and paperwork. Success should be measured by growth in actual exports under existing agreements, directing trade support at removing the barriers exporters actually report.

EU sanitary and phytosanitary alignment

A narrower, more technical proposal worth including on its own merits: aligning UK food and agricultural standards with the EU's sanitary and phytosanitary regime would remove a large share of the border friction currently facing food exporters, without reopening the wider single market or customs union debate. This is a case where a fairly narrow regulatory alignment decision has an outsized effect on the food and agri-food pillars covered later in this platform, simply by making the EU export route administratively usable again.

Britain's place in the world

Trade policy above is one half of this; the other is defence and the broader European relationship. The UK is committed to raising NATO-qualifying defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5-2.6% by 2027 and 3.5% by 2035 — a real-terms increase equivalent to roughly £36 billion, or £500 per person, a year by the end of that path. Delivering this credibly matters for this platform's institutional-durability principle just as much as tidal energy or a sovereign wealth fund: two senior defence ministers resigning within the same year over funding disagreements is exactly the kind of instability Foundation 5 argues against. Alongside defence, a deeper EU relationship reset — beyond the narrow SPS alignment above — including closer mutual recognition of qualifications and a youth mobility scheme, would reduce friction for the trade and labour-supply pillars elsewhere in this platform without reopening single market or customs union membership.

Spending more on defence only strengthens the country if the money is spent well. A "UK-First" defence procurement standard — a clear, published minimum share of contract value delivered by British firms, similar in spirit to the Buy British procurement principle in this Foundation's trade policy — turns the rising defence budget into a direct driver of the reindustrialisation pillars elsewhere in this platform, rather than money that simply flows to whichever supplier is cheapest globally regardless of where the jobs land. A genuinely improved recruitment process matters just as much as the budget, since a defence increase that can't be turned into trained personnel doesn't translate into capability. And an annual, rather than occasional, Strategic Defence Review would keep pace with a security environment that this platform's own diagnosis already treats as fast-moving, rather than reassessing risk only once every few years by convention.

Propping up the high street rather than letting it transform

Current business rates policy protects traditional retail by cross-subsidy: a mid-sized high street shop now pays roughly 38p in the pound against around 51p for a large warehouse. This platform's position is to back the high street's transformation — housing conversion, mixed-use development, experience-led retail — rather than its preservation as retail-only space.

Civil service growth that contradicts stated policy

The civil service has expanded in nearly every quarter since 2016, including after an explicit 2023 headcount cap and a 2025 commitment to cut administrative costs by 15%. The total instead rose to approximately 524,000 by March 2026 — the first candidate for the radical spending review in Foundation 1.

Fragmenting technology governance

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been dissolved, its responsibilities split across two departments — described in Parliament as a "phenomenal waste of time." This platform's position is that technology policy needs a single, empowered coordinating body.

The last foundation is the one that funds the others. Revenue from North Sea licensing, tidal energy, and critical minerals extraction — all covered in Build the Future — ring-fenced into a permanent investment fund on the Norwegian model, rather than absorbed into day-to-day public spending, is the UK's well-documented missed opportunity with North Sea revenue the first time round. This fund becomes the source of patient capital for the higher-risk elements of this platform: battery manufacturing, Cornwall-style mineral extraction, and nuclear fleet build-out, tying the energy and industrial pillars together financially rather than leaving each to compete separately for annual Treasury allocation.

Working from home

Home working has not fully normalised back to pre-pandemic office patterns, and the effects are uneven rather than simply positive or negative: some roles and people gained genuine flexibility, but many head offices report a persistent drop in spontaneous collaboration and a harder-to-measure erosion of team cohesion and mentoring for junior staff, alongside real added costs in monitoring output remotely. Government itself has been notably resistant to setting a clear benchmark for its own departments, despite being one of the country's largest employers, which weakens its position to legislate for the private sector. This platform's position is that the law should give employers a clearer, faster route to set and change working-location policy for their own organisation — current flexible-working request rules tilt heavily toward the employee's right to ask, with limited practical room for an employer to set a consistent company-wide standard and enforce it. This is a genuine rebalancing, not a return to five-days-in-office by default: it gives employers the power to set a policy and hold to it, not a mandate for what that policy should be.

Part-time employment costs

The October 2024 employer National Insurance changes described in Understand the Past hit part-time and lower-earning roles disproportionately, because the £5,000 threshold is a fixed amount regardless of hours worked — the effective cost per hour of employing someone part-time rose by more than the cost of employing someone full-time on the same hourly rate. Part-time work matters disproportionately to people managing caring responsibilities, health conditions, or study alongside work, and a tax change that quietly makes flexible hours more expensive to offer works directly against the labour-supply goals set out in Foundation 6.

Under-21 and youth unemployment

Youth NEET numbers passed one million in early 2026 for the first time since 2013 — 13.5% of 16-24 year-olds, a 12-year high, with the Milburn Review warning of a rise to 1.25 million by 2031 costing the economy an estimated £125 billion a year if unaddressed. It is worth correcting a common misconception here: employers already pay no National Insurance on under-21 employees earning below £50,270, so the NI relief lever many assume is missing already exists for that specific age band. The live policy gap identified by the Work and Pensions Select Committee is the next age band up — 21 to 24 year-olds, including non-apprentices, still incur the standard 15% employer NI rate above £5,000, and MPs have specifically recommended extending the existing under-21 relief to cover this group. Existing measures (a Jobs Guarantee covering employer costs for 18-21 year-olds on Universal Credit, a £3,000 Youth Jobs Grant) are welcome but reach a small fraction of the NEET population — nearly half of NEETs are not even benefit claimants and fall outside the current schemes' eligibility entirely, a gap this platform's proposed NI extension for 21-24 year-olds would help close since it applies to the hiring decision itself rather than to a specific benefit history.

Dismissal rules

Both private and public sector employers describe the current unfair dismissal framework as unpredictable and slow enough to actively deter hiring and restructuring decisions that would otherwise happen. This platform's position is that dismissal law needs clearer, faster, more predictable rules for genuine cases of poor performance or redundancy — not the removal of protection against discriminatory or retaliatory dismissal, which is a different and separate legal question. A process businesses can plan around, even a stricter one, is less growth-inhibiting than one whose outcome and timeline are both hard to predict.

PIP and the work link

Working-age disability and incapacity benefit spending stood at roughly £55.1bn in 2025/26 and is forecast to reach £60.7bn by 2029/30, against a caseload projected to roughly double this decade from 2 million to 4.3 million claimants. The government's own figures show fewer than 1 in 100 people on the Universal Credit health element move into work each month, and around 26% have been on that support for over a decade. This is a genuinely difficult and contested area — the government's own attempt to tighten PIP eligibility criteria in 2025 was withdrawn after significant backlash, and a full review (the Timms Review, co-produced with disabled people's organisations) is underway with results expected by autumn 2026. This platform does not propose pre-empting that review's conclusions, but does think its central question is the right one: for claimants whose condition is compatible with some form of work — which is not all claimants, and any reform has to distinguish clearly between those groups — the current system offers very little practical pathway or incentive toward it, and a wider range of remote and flexible roles now exist than when the eligibility rules were last fundamentally redesigned.

Student debt

Total outstanding UK student loan debt stands at roughly £292 billion, held mostly by government and growing through interest accrual faster than most borrowers can pay it down. Some of that interest, particularly on loans taken out between 2012 and 2023, was set at rates well above the government's own cost of borrowing — closer to a stealth tax on graduates than a reflection of actual cost, and worth reducing specifically for that cohort. A genuine discount for early repayment, alongside a more active, better-managed collection effort, would accelerate recovery of a debt this platform's own Fiscal Space foundation already treats as a first-order problem — while past sales of parts of the loan book to private investors at steep discounts, flagged by the National Audit Office as questionable value for money, argue for recovering directly rather than repeating that approach.

Democratic accountability

Institutional durability, covered in Foundation 5, is about commitments surviving a change of government. A related but distinct problem is whether citizens can see and trust how institutions behave in the first place — standards in public life, the independence and resourcing of bodies like the Electoral Commission, and the transparency of arm's-length public bodies that spend public money with limited direct accountability to Parliament. This platform's position is that delivery reform and accountability reform have to run together: an institution that delivers efficiently but opaquely will not rebuild the trust this platform is ultimately trying to restore.

Learning from unintended consequences

Government decisions regularly produce effects nobody accounted for at the point of legislating — the employer National Insurance and minimum wage interaction described in Understand the Past is one live example. This platform's position is that AI-assisted analysis should become a standing part of the legislative process on both ends: retrospectively, to systematically review past decisions for unintended consequences that were never formally traced back to their cause, building a public record of what actually happened versus what was predicted; and prospectively, screening proposed legislation for foreseeable second-order effects before it passes, in the same way a business case is now expected to model financial risk before a large capital decision is approved. The aim is not to remove political judgement from lawmaking, but to raise the floor of what evidence that judgement is exercised against.

A mechanism for common sense

There is currently no reliable route for a well-reasoned idea from an ordinary member of the public to reach the political process — a gap Dominic Cummings attempted to address during his time as a Downing Street adviser, with limited lasting institutional result. This platform does not propose a specific new institution to solve this, partly because this platform's own existence is itself one attempt at the same problem: a way to set out costed, evidence-based ideas and invite scrutiny and debate on them outside party structures. The broader point stands regardless of this platform's own role in it — a functioning democracy benefits from more, not fewer, low-friction channels for public ideas to reach people who can act on them.

Whistleblower protection, extended

Strengthening whistleblower protection across both the private and public sectors — including, specifically, within the civil service itself — would accelerate the identification of the kind of waste this platform's spending review (Foundation 1) and "What This Platform Would Stop" (Foundation 11) are aimed at: low-value recurring tasks, unrealistic or gamed productivity targets, and process for its own sake. The people best placed to identify this are often those doing the work, not those auditing it from outside, and current protections are not strong or fast enough to make that a safe thing to raise.

Outstanding redress: three cases worth naming directly

Some institutional failures have gone on long enough that resolving them, one way or the other, is itself part of rebuilding trust. UK nuclear test veterans have campaigned for decades for fuller recognition and compensation relating to Cold War-era weapons testing; a commemorative medal was introduced in 2022, but full resolution of outstanding claims remains unfinished business. The Post Office Horizon scandal is frequently described as settled following the 2024 quashing of wrongful convictions, but this is not accurate: as of January 2026 around £1.44 billion had been paid to just over 11,300 claimants across three separate compensation schemes, the criminal investigation into the Post Office and Fujitsu remains short of the funding it says it needs, the statutory public inquiry's final report — including its recommendations on compensation — has itself been delayed, and Fujitsu has not yet paid anything toward compensation despite stating a moral obligation to do so. Women affected by the acceleration of state pension age changes (the WASPI campaign) present the most genuinely contested of the three: the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman concluded, after a six-year investigation, that the Department for Work and Pensions failed to adequately communicate the changes and that affected women are owed compensation — a finding the government has not accepted, excluding WASPI from a 2024 Budget package that did compensate victims of the infected blood and Post Office scandals. Reasonable people disagree on where the line sits between inadequate communication and a change that was, ultimately, lawfully legislated years in advance. This platform's position is not to adjudicate that dispute here, but that all three cases share the same underlying problem — years of drift without a final, honest resolution — and that a platform arguing for institutional durability and accountability elsewhere cannot credibly stay silent on cases where the state's own processes have visibly failed to conclude.

Parliament's own working practices

Accountability is also a question of how Parliament itself operates, not only how it holds other institutions to account. A shorter parliamentary recess — currently around 19 weeks a year — would leave more time to clear legislative backlogs and scrutinise government, without pretending MPs' constituency work doesn't matter. Structured training for newly elected MPs and ministers, most of whom arrive with no prior experience of running a department or a legislative process, is a low-cost, common-sense addition that most large organisations would consider basic practice. And a genuine, practical review of the House of Lords' role — not another round of abolition debate that goes nowhere, but a focused look at what it currently does well and what it doesn't — is overdue precisely because it has been deferred by every government for decades.