Business is the wealth generator of the UK, and small and family businesses are the often neglected heart of the UK economy, with family businesses alone employing nearly four in ten of the UK’s workforce. We propose ways to make the UK an economy all businesses can thrive in.
The Great Grid Gamble
Ed Miliband hailed a recent report from the National Energy System Operator (NESO) as vindicating his plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030. But new analysis shows that the NESO report is built around a series of assumptions designed to cast Miliband’s plans in the best possible light, rather than reflecting the reality of the… View Article
Capital Losses: Why increasing CGT will deter investment, slow growth and reduce revenue
The Chancellor is reportedly considering hiking capital gains tax (CGT) in next week’s Budget, as part of plans to find £40 billion in spending cuts and tax rises CGT is widely accepted to be a damaging tax – hampering investment and economic growth and raising relatively little Recent modelling by the Centre for Policy Studies… View Article
Accelerating Infrastructure
One of Britain’s most pressing problems, as the new government has acknowledged, is how difficult it is to build the infrastructure we need. Infrastructure in Britain is much harder to build than it was historically or than it is today in continental Europe Notoriously, the Lower Thames Crossing has spent 15 years in planning, at… View Article
A Cheaper Route to Net Zero
Despite international gas prices coming back down in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, British households are still struggling with high energy bills because of outdated regulations pushing up costs. ‘A Cheaper Route to Net Zero’ by John Penrose, former Conservative MP and minister, Competition Tsar, leading an independent review of UK competition policy,… View Article
Why the EU is Not the Answer to Britain’s Growth Challenge
All major parties acknowledge that achieving sustained economic growth is key to the country’s success but disagree on how to achieve it The Government is seeking a new deal with the EU, with the Prime Minister talking of resetting relationships at the recent European Political Community conference In some quarters, Brexit is still blamed for… View Article
The Future of Regulation
A major report from the Centre for Policy Studies, ‘The Future of Regulation’, has shown that the cost of regulation increased significantly during the 2010s – despite repeated promises from Government to shrink the regulatory burden. The report by Tom Clougherty & Robert Colvile is the first to go line by line through the official impact assessments produced… View Article
Shaping the Debate: The Centre for Policy Studies in 50 Papers
To mark the 25th anniversary of the CPS in 1999, Matthew d’Ancona – then on the CPS board – compiled a catalogue of CPS reports, published as ‘The First Modernisers: The Centre for Policy Studies, Past & Future’. It contained a list of 298 CPS publications published up until that point, organised thematically and each… View Article
Justice for the Young
The gap between young and old has become the defining political and economic issue of our time, argues a new essay collection from the Centre for Policy Studies ‘Justice for the Young’ sets out the staggering extent of the challenge facing the country in paying for an ageing population while delivering a better life for… View Article
The Power of Ownership
Ownership is at the heart of conservatism but the country is at risk of forgetting lessons learned after the Second World War ‘The Power of Ownership’ by Sir John Redwood MP warns that the UK is at risk of slipping back into nationalised industry, government-directed companies, and reliance on Whitehall to generate solutions Instead, politicians… View Article
The Case Against the Energy Price Cap
Although introduced with the best intentions, the Energy Price Cap (EPC) has gone far beyond its intended purpose and is actively harming competition The EPC was originally brought in as a time-limited intervention to protect a specific group of customers from price-gouging The recent energy crisis has meant it now functions not as a price… View Article
Retail Therapy
Britons like to save – but too many of us are saving in cash, despite the more attractive returns which might be available through investing in shares There is £1.8 trillion of cash in savings accounts – roughly equivalent to the entire market capitalisation of the FTSE 100 – and approximately £300m in National Savings… View Article
Investing for Prosperity
Reforms made to British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution, have made it one of the great success stories of British policy-making in the last decade. BII has created a million jobs and generated tens of billions of pounds in economic activity in some of the poorest countries of the world in the… View Article
Where are the Workers?
Economic inactivity has become a huge issue in politics – and is expected to be a key area of focus in this week’s Budget. But many of the most common claims about inactivity turn out to be mistaken, or capture only part of a more complex picture. ‘Where are the Workers? A new diagnosis of… View Article
Does Britain mean Business?
Britain is about to become a significantly worse place to do business, as corporation tax rises and the super-deduction expires. Modelling by the CPS and US-based Tax Foundation suggests that the corporation tax rise will reduce long-run GDP by 1.2%. The combination of the two will be even worse, seeing us fall from 10th to… View Article
Cashing in our Chips
A secure supply of high-end semiconductor chips underpins the modern world. Ahead of the Government’s long awaited semiconductor strategy, a new CPS report ‘Cashing in our chips’ sets out how the UK can support the industry without entering into a subsidy arms race. While the UK develops its policy, the US, the EU and Taiwan… View Article
The Case for Housebuilding
The report was updated on 24th January 2023, shortly after publication, to correct discrepancies in some of the data. In recent months, housing has become an increasingly contentious issue A major new CPS report, ‘The Case for Housebuilding’, takes on and demolishes many of the most common myths about Britain’s housing crisis It shows that… View Article
