Robert Colvile

The most obvious taxes that do that are property and consumption. In an ideal world you'd have a proper council tax (or land value why not), a big, broad consumption tax and cut taxes on work and investment...

Not very popular though. (Also distorting of behaviour, hence eg Sweden getting rid of them. Though I’m personally more of a fan than others on the right are.)

It’s an interesting question - you’d definitely assume so. Also inflation erodes the tax free allowance…

'It is a childish fantasy to pretend that you can raise serious money only from the few rather than the many.' Me for @thetimes.com on the many reasons why a wealth tax won't work www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

The London collapse in new housebuilding shown here is stark.

The reason is largely the disaster that is the building safety regulator - which has processed about 20% of the applications it's been given in the last year.

@rcolvile.bsky.social sums up the issue nicely here. He's definitely right about housing not coming forward at all - I regularly hear about housebuilders and housing associations moving activity away from London. Or keeping buildings below 6 storeys, even when there's potential to go much higher.

We haven’t only made it too difficult to build, but too risky Dick Whittington would find nowhere to live were he to turn up in London today, given the shortage of affordable housing and new homes under construction

Last year we started just 3,990 (vs target of 88,000). The affordable homes figures for Q1 2025-6, out this week, show just 347 homes started, including 64 bought back from the private sector. This is an emergency. See me here www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

In the part of the country that most needs homes, we are building by far the least.

Pretty much anything like that is just moving the timescale for the crunch back or forwards a few years. It’s demographics, not Brexit. (Just look at Germany or France…)

Thank you!

The big problem isn't that Reeves is raising taxes. It's that the fiscal crunch means we'll have to do it again and again and again - and the endless scrabbling around for cash is making things even worse. Me, depressingly, for @thetimes.com www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

'It is a lot easier to list the excitable articles about prime ministerial relaunches, revamps and resets than examples of such resets actually working.' Me for @thetimes.com on a year of Starmer - and why the real problem is never the advisers, and always the king.

The like for like is really hard to do properly, for exactly this reason. But what it boils down to is that the tax wedge stats for most countries include pension contributions, but not ours. So it’s not a fair comparison.

It’s really tricky! All kinds of other things you could throw in. But healthcare is obviously a big chunk of the reason why US taxes are so much lower.

Just raise tax Rachel Reeves cannot tweak her way out of this crisis. The system must be torn down.

So the NS is probably still right that taxes will rise, but predictably wrong to dress it up as some natural act of fairness on a lightly taxed workforce www.newstatesman.com/politics/eco...

This is also, as I've pointed out before, why the argument that state pension is lower than the European average despite the triple lock is such bollocks - because it doesn't include all the money saved via work.

On average across the OECD, private/workplace pensions make up only approx 7% of retirement income. In the UK, it's 5x that. Like Netherlands and Switzerland, we do pension saving largely via private pots (eg auto-enrolment, taking 8% of salary), not compulsory taxation.

This via @taxfoundation.bsky.social shows the tax wedge across OECD countries. But crucially, it includes only compulsory social security contributions, not those which are opt-in/opt-out. taxfoundation.org/data/all/glo...

Bit late to this, but the @newstatesman.com cover story arguing for tax rises on the middle classes makes a pretty big error, which completely invalidates its argument that they are under-taxed - it ignores pension contributions.

Yeah there's a whole series. This is the NHS one www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1337.... (Annoyingly they made a series of really crap public information films in the 1970s with a cat called Charley, which pollute Google)

Why is Keir Starmer Like A Roomba, And Other Questions This week: fine, I will think about British politics again if I must. Also: the partition of Germany that never was; and Charley goes to New Town.

Link to Jonn's Substack here, including a very good line about Starmer jonn.substack.com/p/why-is-kei...

YouTube video by BFI Halas & Batchelor: Charley in New Town (1948) | BFI National Archive

Glad that I could draw more people's attention (via @jonnelledge.bsky.social) to the public information films of the Attlee government. Honestly, it's fascinating, esp if you're into housing policy www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta_n...

They talk about us not building enough houses, not the specific and awful collapse in London housebuilding in the last year or two.

Well, I trust MHCLG more than Google. That said the London Assembly has its own figures, but I went with MHCLG. Historically the starts data hasn't been entirely accurate (the numbers end up slightly higher once figures are revised), but it's almost certainly in the right ballpark.

I don't know about AirBnB, but the number that are long-term vacant is much smaller (250k or so) and we actually have many fewer empty homes than most other countries our size, precisely because housing pressures are so severe.

Interest rates is certainly a factor, but can’t really explain why only one area of the country is building less…

Very much mentioned!

The Government says London needs to build 88,000 homes a year. Last year, it started 3,990. My column today is on the urgent national crisis no one is talking about - the collapse of housebuilding in London www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

The Government says London needs to build 88,000 homes a year. Last year, it started 3,990. My column today is on the urgent national crisis no one is talking about - the collapse of housebuilding in the capital (1/?)

Fun fact: before becoming a well-known historian, Edward Gibbon was part of a successful double act with Griff Rhys Jones