Stagnation solutions: what drives UK growth
Britain has diagnosed its stagnation to death and, unusually, has now legislated against it: planning reform, new towns, pension capital, cheaper industrial power. Yet a high-speed railway here costs many times what France pays, and the law that could add tens of thousands of homes sits enacted but switched off. Passing acts turned out to be the easy part.
The gaps below live in the unglamorous middle between statute and spade: commencement orders never laid, planning departments short of planners, data platforms dismantled mid-crisis, pension billions pledged to funds that barely exist. Most need no new argument, only an owner, a budget and a date.
Full landscape notes (July 2026)
Productivity is the central fact: UK multifactor productivity grew ~0.1% a year over 2008–21 versus 1.3% pre-crisis, and in November 2025 the OBR cut its medium-term productivity assumption to 1.0% and potential growth to 1.5%. Diagnoses compete: weak public and private investment, a TFP slowdown concentrated in manufacturing, ICT and finance, poor diffusion, and the 'Foundations' thesis that Britain has effectively banned investment in housing, transport and energy. 2024–26 produced an unusually dense reform wave: the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Royal Assent 18 December 2025), a New Towns programme (seven shortlisted sites, three priority), a 10-year Infrastructure Strategy (£725bn) under the new NISTA, an Industrial Strategy cutting industrial electricity costs by up to 25% from April 2027 (BICS), grid connection queue reform (first 'first ready, first connected' Gate 2 offers issued 2026), rejection of zonal pricing in favour of reformed national pricing (July 2025), the Pension Schemes Act 2026 with a sunset-limited mandation reserve power behind the Mansion House Accord, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, ARIA (~£1bn), and government acceptance of all 47 nuclear regulatory taskforce recommendations. A new civic growth ecosystem (Britain Remade, Looking for Growth, Centre for British Progress, YIMBY groups) has shifted the debate. The binding constraints are now delivery-side: planner and civil-service capacity, infrastructure unit costs, legacy levies on electricity, thin fiscal devolution, and collapsing research-data infrastructure.
The gaps (11)
No open unit-cost benchmarking observatory for UK infrastructure
High-speed rail costs Britain eight times what France pays. The state keeps no score.
Planning reform without planners: no workforce pipeline at the scale required
The planning revolution has arrived. The planners have not.
Street votes: an enacted densification tool with no commencement regulations
Street votes could add 30,000 homes a year. The law exists. Nobody switched it on.
No legislated pathway to move legacy policy levies off electricity bills for everyone outside BICS
Electricity carries the levies. Gas doesn't. And Britain needs to electrify.
After zonal pricing's rejection, no working locational signal for siting demand or generation
Data centres want cheap power. Nothing points them at Scotland's wasted wind.
Secure research-data infrastructure for diagnosing the growth problem is going backwards
Britain is dismantling the research data it needs to diagnose its own stagnation.
No standing mass-transit delivery unit or rolling tram programme for second cities
France built trams in 25 cities by repetition. Britain reinvents the tram every time.
Nothing rewards civil servants for staying in post: churn as an anti-capability machine
A fifth of the Treasury quits or moves every year. The pay system rewards exactly that.
Innovation procurement has no statutory teeth: SBRI is a shadow of SBIR
America makes agencies buy from startups. It seeded Qualcomm. Britain's copy is starved.
New towns without patient capital: development corporations not yet capitalised
Post-war new towns ran on 60-year loans. Today's get annual grants instead.
Pension capital has been promised to UK growth assets that barely exist at scale
Pension savers' billions are pledged to British growth. The vehicles barely exist.
Also surfaced by this domain’s research (1)
Who is already here: key actors (15)
- NISTA (National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority) (government body): Joint HMT/Cabinet Office unit created April 2025 from the NIC and IPA; owns the 10-year Infrastructure Strategy and the public pipeline portal (734 projects, £718bn) and project delivery assurance.
- ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) (government R&D funder): ~£1bn programme-director-led high-risk R&D agency (Scaling Compute, Forecasting Tipping Points, Scaling Trust); the live UK test of DARPA-style funding autonomy.
- British Business Bank / British Growth Partnership (state development bank): Channels DC pension capital into UK venture/growth equity; BGP Fund I reached a £200m first close (Nov 2025) with Aegon UK, NatWest Cushon and M&G.
- National Wealth Fund (state investor): Policy bank (rebranded from UK Infrastructure Bank, Oct 2024) with ~£27bn capacity to crowd private capital into energy, industry and infrastructure.
- Britain Remade (campaign / think tank): Pro-building campaign; built the authoritative UK infrastructure cost datasets (138 tram/metro/rail and 104 road projects across 14 countries) showing UK builds at multiples of EU costs.
- Looking for Growth (campaign / movement): Founded 2024 by Lawrence Newport; anti-decline activist movement whose National Priority Infrastructure Bill had four pillars adopted in the government's planning legislation.
- Centre for British Progress (think tank): Relaunched from UK Day One in April 2025; produces concrete growth policy (e.g. the 2026 street votes briefing) bridging tech/science communities and Westminster.
- YIMBY Alliance / London YIMBY (network): Grassroots pro-housing movement; designed the street votes mechanism legislated in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.
- Centre for Cities (think tank): The evidence base on agglomeration: shows big UK cities underperform (Manchester vs same-sized Rome ~55% less productive) and quantifies a ~£23bn/yr prize from European-level effective city size.
- The Productivity Institute (research institute): £32m ESRC-funded UK-wide research hub at Alliance Manchester Business School; its Productivity Commission is the closest thing the UK has to a standing productivity body.
- Institute for Government (think tank): Whitehall Monitor documents state capacity as a growth constraint: 12.7% civil service churn in 2023/24, 21.8% in HM Treasury.
- What Works Growth (What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth) (evidence centre): LSE/Centre for Cities-hosted centre systematically reviewing which local growth interventions actually work; the evaluation backbone for devolved growth spending.
- NESO (National Energy System Operator) (public corporation): Runs grid connections reform ('first ready and needed, first connected'; Gate 2 offers from 2026) and is producing the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan.
- TenU (university network): Collaboration of leading tech-transfer offices; its USIT and USIT-for-Software guides standardised spinout deal terms, adopted alongside the 2023 spinout review by 39+ universities.
- Resolution Foundation (think tank): Living standards and growth-strategy research; co-ran the Nuffield-funded Economy 2030 Inquiry with LSE that framed the UK's 'toxic combination' of low growth and high inequality.
Funders active or plausible here (12)
- HM Treasury (Infrastructure Strategy £725bn; New Towns; fiscal devolution roadmap)
- DSIT and UKRI (ESRC, Innovate UK, Research England): public R&D at ~£20bn/yr, funder of The Productivity Institute and spinout reform
- ARIA (~£1bn high-risk R&D)
- British Business Bank / British Growth Partnership (state-anchored growth capital)
- National Wealth Fund (~£27bn policy bank for energy/industry infrastructure)
- Homes England (housing and development corporation delivery funding)
- Mansion House Accord pension providers (Aegon UK, NatWest Cushon, M&G among first movers into UK growth funds)
- Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy): $120m Abundance & Growth Fund covering housing, energy and innovation policy advocacy
- Nuffield Foundation (funded the Resolution Foundation/LSE Economy 2030 Inquiry)
- Nesta (innovation and mission-led funder)
- Gatsby Foundation (skills and industrial policy research)
- Founders Pledge and individual tech philanthropists backing the new UK growth/abundance ecosystem
Policy notes
An unusually active legislative period closed several long-argued gaps on paper: the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (staged commencement through 2026), the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, the Pension Schemes Act 2026, and a nuclear regulatory reset (all 47 taskforce recommendations accepted, implementation by end-2027). The holes are now in commencement and delivery: street votes remain uncommenced; many PIA provisions await commencement orders; the fiscal devolution roadmap is promised for autumn 2026 but unwritten; TNUoS reform and the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan will determine whether 'reformed national pricing' delivers locational efficiency; BICS starts April 2027 but leaves levy rebalancing for all other users unresolved. Institutional churn is itself a policy risk: NISTA is barely a year old, the Integrated Data Service was wound down without a stated successor, the mandation reserve power sunsets by 2032, and no statutory body owns productivity diagnosis (a UK Productivity Commission is regularly proposed, never created).