Simon Jeffrey

Think they could still blag some serious income tax/NI revenue ‘within’ their manifesto promises. Leave rate unchanged but cut the personal allowance to £10k. If I’m reading IFS right that’s a 20% reduction in the threshold so £20bn raised. Mitigate with UC boost and taper rate ‘tax cut’.

More teens to get their choice of uni even if they miss their grades, says Ucas A record number of 18-year-olds will get into their first choice, even if they miss their grades.

One clear group of winners from tighter restrictions on international students seems to be UK students getting into the uni of their choice, in the short term at least. I imagine government will want to connect those dots on results day.

Sounds like ~£25m for Wandsworth. So would need >15% a year increases to keep up with that from their base.

Having read the paper, Wandsworth et al, to summarise IFS: would see funding funding fall by over a quarter if the reforms were introduced fully overnight with no funding floor. But it's phased in over three years with a floor so it's real-terms cut 11-12% even if they put up CT by max each year.

Yeah, depends on size of shortfall. Would have to be pretty small with their low base. Wandsworth and Lambeth have same population, but CT requirements of £75m and £230m respectively. So £8m would require >10% which sounds scandalous but is still a smaller cash amount than Lambeth doing ‘normal’ 5%

I suspect the flexibility will be ‘yes Wandsworth, you can raise council tax by 9% this year and every year of this Parliament’.

Does sound quite useful to the UK for the chief execs of Google and Microsoft to now own the London Spirit Hundred Franchise. Hope the Chancellor or business sec will be in the box at Lords whenever they’re in town.

Maybe the first place I read about it was in Midnight’s Children. Possibly the only place too, in fiction certainly. Never stumbled across the topic being covered fully or even just mentioned anywhere else. If you don’t somehow know already and actively look into it further you’d never know.

Think I saw on here that GB News had a whole segment ‘analysing’ it

It’s odd. Taylor makes a good case for all the other factors but just leaves the geography point dangling despite the overwhelming evidence she’s presented that it’s the leadership not the latitude.

Inflation erodes fines income while pushing up salaries and costs for enforcement until, ridiculously, the council service that should never worry about covering its costs - and that govt frets about raising revenue (while relying on that subsidise highways maintenance) - has to make cuts.

Bournemouth a great place to trial it - if there are a few of you heading to the beach on a sunny day, why bother getting the train or trying to find somewhere to park legally but further from the beach if the fine is hardly more or even much cheaper than the alternatives.

Bournemouth secures trial of higher parking fines The government has given the green light for a one-month pilot to run throughout August.

Small but very encouraging: DfT is letting Bournemouth trial London-level parking, clamping and towing fines and fees. The £25 fine for overstaying your time or £35 for parking on a double yellow has not changed since 2002, even as the number of cars on the road and earnings have inflated.

Got to love the thoroughness of the Mayor’s press person maximising name recognition work in that release. But please tell me ‘Mayor Kim’ is not a thing. Have a horrible feeling though that I might have seen a few Mayor Andy’s and Steve’s in official communications.

Minimum wage remit for 2026 now published. As expected, it's mostly a rollover of last year's policy.

1. Adult rate "not to fall below 2/3 median wages" i.e. in practice this means rise in line with forecast average earnings (will have a look at the likely rate later)

...the allotments mentioned are almost all overgrown/abandoned/not used for growing stuff.

Maybe there's a case for reviving these allotments! Maybe there's a principle at stake! But you can see they're abandoned / flytipped on Google Maps!

Look this one is in Hucknall (left) or Ashfield (right).

Dying for gold: who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein? South Africa’s government blockaded hundreds underground. The results were deadly

Extraordinary story. Would fit the pages of sci-fi dystopia as much as the Economist.

136/ No party has done more to undermine the Union than the Conservative and Unionist Party, and this is still true even removing Brexit from the equation.

Freightliner Ltd asking for £400m for the site. Wikipedia says when DfT sold it off in 1996 during rail privatisation, a PE-backed management buy out paid £5.4m for the company. Man U probably need to get moving on the Old Trafford Mayoral Development Corporation to get some CPO leverage.

The one on New Kent Road?
Yeah, always too rammed for me to ever bother but I think it might have been like that since pre-TikTok. Queue might be slightly more impressive cos there’s no inside to queue so it’s all on street. Falafel and Shawarma in Camberwell always min. 10 ppl queuing but’s inside.

That's a bit like complaining that brand new cars are too expensive for most people. Fine - they can buy the secondhand ones that the richer people sell when they buy new. Works exactly the same with houses.

Would be great if Zone 1-2 residents had a box they could tick on some sort of council statement so £20/mth - or better a heavily discounted £10/mth for the first year - could just be added to Mayoral precept to cover an annual TfL Cycle hire.

Free rides offered on Santander Cycles on Sundays in August Londoners are being offered free unlimited 60-minute rides on Santander Cycles on Sundays that month.

Great idea. This might be more attractive to visitors though than workers/residents. TfL Cycles has seemed limited by keeping annual losses to a minimum rather than medium-term market share maxing. Hopefully this sort of thing helps. Should be a no-brainer subscription for Zone 1-2 folks.

Also, platonic ideal of getting a Royal Commission to come in and propose the changes that would deliver the required improvements after exhaustive study that meant it couldn’t be done until after another election. Tories then come in to do their own thing that they still end up hating.

101/ The 1970s local government acts are the platonic ideal of British constitutional reforms in that they change enough that it pisses off traditionalists and not enough to deliver the required improvements, while creating a system that will be dogged by underfunding in the long-run.

This is good. Still feels any ‘weekend’ policies should recognise Thursday’s longstanding role as ‘first night out of the weekend’ and post-Covid supercharged ‘last day in the office’ function.

The most hated stretch of road in the UK? As it is revealed that the government is to scrap the M4 bus lane, we take a closer look at what is perhaps the UK's most controversial 3.5 mile stretch of road.

Even the lobbying power of black cab drivers getting to Heathrow couldn’t save 3.5 miles of motorway bus lane within London sadly.

Cllrs ignore officers’ advice in 600-home Wrexham saga - Place North West The county council has opted to fight against plans for a 70-acre housing scheme when the project heads to appeal later this year, despite being advised by officers not to.

Every paragraph of this is a horror story. Trips to the Supreme Court to overturn a Local Plan, council leaders saying glibly that
'Democracy will always come at a cost', a case so weak (against their own officers' advice of course) that not one of the 6 planning consultants asked will take it on.

Was thinking why don’t Business Improvement Districts just offer to part fund the Flying Squad to avoid cuts like some directly fund BID neighbourhood officers. But realised the money much more useful funding the BID court time and BID prison places first. And that would be more than a bit extreme.

NEW @centreforcities.bsky.social REPORT OUT TODAY!

In Planorama, Luka and I argue that if we want English planning to perform more like its international peers – Germany, France and Japan - it needs to BE more like them.

🧵 on what that means...