Late on Saturday the 27th June, on the Old Kent Road in South London, a Waymo autonomous taxi collided with a motorbike.1

The Waymo was attempting to leave a queue of traffic on the main road to turn right into Marcia Street. The motorbike was heading in the opposite direction.

After it happened, Gautam Kambhampati posted the above photo to Bluesky, and the reaction was, well, exactly what you might expect. It was seen by many people as conclusive proof that autonomous vehicles are dangerous, and shouldn’t be allowed on Britain’s streets.

Here’s a representative sample of responses:

However, there was just one problem with drawing these conclusions. The car, it turns out, was not actually operating autonomously at all. In fact, the crash was the result of a human driving the Waymo, a modified Jaguar I-PACE, in manual mode, exactly like a normal car.

I know this because when I saw the photo, I reached out to the company to clarify the situation. Waymo told me that:

We can confirm that a Waymo vehicle was being manually operated by an autonomous specialist when it was involved in a low-speed collision with a motorcyclist. The motorcyclist was able to stand and walk immediately after the collision and declined ambulance transportation. We are fully cooperating with local authorities to review the incident.

I then posted the statement to Bluesky as a corrective to the narrative that was emerging, but there was still some scepticism about Waymo’s statement.

So to be clear, “autonomous specialist” is just the company’s euphemism for human drivers.2 And to add further context to the incident, I understand that the sequence of events was that the car was driving autonomously as it travelled along Old Kent Road, but when stopped in traffic the human driver chose to disengage the autonomous software and take full manual control, at which point they pulled out and hit the motorcyclist.

In other words, despite appearances, this wasn’t evidence at all that Waymo’s self-driving cars are dangerous. In fact, it’s the opposite – it’s another example of the risk of letting humans pilot heavy lumps of metal around our cities.

And it was important for another reason too. It meant that I got to win an argument on the internet.

I first posted about the Waymo incident before we knew the full story. I suggested that we didn’t yet know if the car was operating autonomously – and it turned out that in doing this, I was picking a fight with basically all of Bluesky. And what was striking was that the vast majority of the anti-autonomy arguments made in response to me were actually the result of some pretty sloppy thinking.

That’s why this week I’m going to follow in the grand tradition that was established by my post defending ‘industrial scale’ solar farms, and make this story all about me.

So let’s go through some of the things people said about autonomous vehicles and pick apart why they are wrong.

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Autonomous cars aren’t safe

This was the most bizarre response I received, which was the claim that the evidence that autonomous cars are safer than humans is all just “marketing”.

The problem is that this claim has no basis in reality, because in mid-2026, autonomy is not just some hypothetical or highly experimental technology. Self-driving cars have already been invented, and are a thing that have existed in the world for some time.

For example, Waymo and other operators are currently running real robotaxi services in a number of American and Chinese cities. There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of autonomous journeys being taken every single day in the real world – and nobody is dying or getting hurt.

If anyone were, we’d be hearing about it on the news – but these services have been running for months, and in some cases years. That’s not to say that the robotaxi rollout has been completely without incident – Waymos and other autonomous cars have blocked traffic and caused other second-order problems. But in terms of keeping the passengers inside and the passengers around them alive? The safety record is remarkably good.

This is even the case for Tesla, the least risk-averse of the autonomous operators. When it first rolled out a supervised “full self-driving” (FSD) mode with private car owners, and likewise when it launched a driverless robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, there were reports of cars behaving erratically at times. But now the software appears to have matured to a point where it basically just works.

If you don’t believe me, type “Tesla” into YouTube, and you will find videos of extremely long and complicated journeys taken without human intervention.3

However, I’ll be generous. Let’s steelman the safety argument. As things stand, it is true that autonomous vehicles are still unproven on the streets of London. It’s common to hear people observe that though autonomous vehicles might work well on the wide highways of California, we don’t know if they’ll work on the unplanned, narrow streets of a European city.

There is at least some ambiguity here, though I’m pretty sceptical there’s really a problem at this point. This is partially because downtown San Francisco is still a pretty dense, complicated city, full of pedestrians, bikes and other hazards just like London.4

But it is also because Waymo’s British rival, the similarly named Wayve, seems to have demonstrably proven that autonomous driving in London is possible.5

If you want another indicator, back in April, Tesla launched FSD mode in the Netherlands – which is just as dense and squirly as Britain is. And the reason you probably didn’t know that unless you follow this stuff closely is because there hasn’t been a glut of news stories about the havoc and devastation that Tesla’s supervised autonomy software is unleashing on the country.6

In fact, according to the Dutch regulator, as of a couple of weeks ago 40,000 Teslas in the country had driven over 24 million kilometres without any serious incidents.

But if you want a more vivid illustration of this, here’s a twenty-minute video (admittedly from a couple of Tesla fanboys), putting FSD through its paces in a number of difficult scenarios which are very analogous to driving in the UK.

However, despite all this, I will concede that it is true that we still don’t know for sure whether or not autonomy will work in London. But you know what might be a good way to figure it out? How about if, say, we let autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo and Wayve test their vehicles on London’s streets with human drivers behind the wheel, to gather data and test their software’s effectiveness?

You know, like we’re doing.

Autonomy creates an America-style hellscape

There wasn’t a perfectly representative single post, but many responses to my post were essentially cycling and walking advocates making the urbanist critique of autonomy. This is basically the argument that autonomous cars won’t solve any problems, they’ll just add yet more congestion, making our cities worse for everyone. Why would we want to turn our streets into an American-style car-dominated hellscapes?

Emotionally, I’m very sympathetic to this concern, but I think the flaw with the argument is that it simply doesn’t have to follow that autonomous vehicles must mean car-dominated cities.

I mean, I also consider myself an urbanist. My favourite urban form is probably Amsterdam or Copenhagen.7 If I had my way, every city would be optimised for pedestrians and ‘active travel’, with wide cycle lanes, and restrictions on the number of cars allowed into the centre.

Where I differ with many people who think like this, though, is that I recognise that we’re still going to need cars, vans and lorries in some places and contexts.8 And if we can make these vehicles autonomous, that could save lives, improve mobility, and create economic growth – even if it doesn’t reduce congestion directly.9

But, you might then ask, what about our inner cities specifically? These are the places where robotaxis like Waymo, Wayve and Chinese operator Apollo Go want to operate. And the problem is that road space is a genuine zero-sum conflict between competing interests. So won’t the sheer convenience of these vehicles induce demand, and cause people to take even more car journeys, at the expense of buses and bikes – and therefore massively increase congestion?

If this was the case, this would be really bad. One example of why is the impact on buses. Average bus speeds in the capital are already getting slower with current technology, so, in theory, throwing hundreds of robotaxis into this mix could make bus services even worse and less attractive to passengers.

However, I simply do not think this is as inevitable as the urbanists fear – thanks to a little something called ‘regulation’.

In fact, I think that if we had a situation where a significant proportion of vehicles were part of autonomous fleets, it could create a much better equilibrium between the different modes of transport than we have now.

(Prepare yourself, I’m about to pitch what I think might be an original, novel policy idea.)

Take London. At the moment, the Mayor only has some relatively blunt controls over traffic. The biggest lever he has is the congestion charge, which is currently fixed at £18, with no hard cap on the total number of vehicles. If he wants fewer vehicles clogging London’s streets, he could raise the price to dissuade people, but it would be politically tricky, as it would upset and inconvenience thousands of individual motorists.

But in a robotaxi world, the political pain melts away, and there’s an enormous opportunity to manage traffic much more dynamically. For example, it would be easy to impose a hard cap on the number of robotaxis allowed into London using the power of market forces.

Just as New York has a fixed number of taxi ‘medallions’ that grant yellow cab drivers the right to operate in the city, London could auction robotaxi slots to operators like Waymo and Wayve,10 with a ceiling on the total number available. And just as we’re all used to surge pricing on Uber, the laws of supply and demand will set robotaxi prices.

This would essentially hand the Mayor a dial he can turn up and down that adjusts exactly how attractive robotaxis are compared to buses and other forms of transport. And it would be politically more straightforward to implement too. If the cap is raised it would directly inconvenience only a handful of large corporations, instead of thousands of human drivers, as would happen if such a system were to be tried today with human-driven private hire taxis.

Taken to its logical extent, I think such a system could be phenomenally effective. If the Mayor wants fewer robotaxis, he increases the medallion price. If he wants more, he reduces it. The market could even work in real time, responding to changes to congestion in London, and could work on a much more granular level than the congestion charge.

For example, late at night, more robotaxis could be allowed in. If a bridge is closed and traffic snarls up? Then the price could rise, sending robotaxis streaming out of the city to free up the roads.11

So, this is all to say that the urbanists should not confuse the technology with the outcome. The congestion argument is mostly a red herring. Robotaxis don’t make congestion inevitable, and we have the power to shape outcomes. And managed effectively, robotaxis will actually make it easier for us to have the best of both worlds.

Who is liable if there’s a crash?

Another pushback was about responsibility. If a normal car hits someone, the driver will face the consequences – they might lose their licence, or even face prison. But who is to blame if a robotaxi hits someone?

For a start, the 2024 Autonomous Vehicles Act has already figured this out in terms of legal liability and insurance and so on. In short, instead of responsibility falling on the person inside the autonomous vehicle, it falls on the companies behind it, such as the software developer or the licensed operator.

But more broadly, I think this is a pretty strange thing to worry about, because there are many situations where harm can be caused by companies or organisations, rather than individuals.

For example, what would happen if a drug company were to produce a new medicine that accidentally killed people? Or what if a new model of car had malfunctioning seatbelts that didn’t keep people safe in a crash?

The answer is that we have well-developed legal and regulatory mechanisms for dealing with them. Regulators can impose fines or withdraw operating licences. In some cases, individuals inside a company can face criminal sanctions.

And sure, we can argue about whether or not these punishments are harsh enough, or how consistently the rules are applied, but… well, that's politics. And I’m just not sure what would make autonomous vehicles uniquely different in this respect.

We can’t trust Big Tech

The most surprising response to my posting came from an elected politician. Caroline Russell is a London Assembly Member, the leader of the Green group and Chair of the Assembly’s Transport Committee.

And her take was… that the human wasn’t at fault even though they were the one driving? Which is certainly an interesting flip on the liability question.

Still, this wasn’t the most frustrating response, as even though I had shared the statement from Waymo, many respondents were clearly desperate to find something about the incident to be mad about, so they resorted to speculation that, basically, Waymo had lied to me.

And this is where the issue becomes genuinely a bit irreconcilable.

I mean, maybe I’m too trusting of Big Tech, because I’m a credulous establishment shill in my old age, but I think it’s unlikely that Waymo would lie about the details to me.

First, lying to journalists is always a bad idea. If the lie is discovered, they can quite easily blow things up into a scandal. Second, the robotaxi trials are supervised by TfL, and traffic accidents are often investigated by the police. Would it really be good for Waymo’s future business if a more official investigation later discovered the company was covering up an incident where a motorcyclist was hurt because of autonomous software?

I can totally believe that the company might use slippery language, as that’s what all corporate PR people do. But Waymo has provided enough basic facts to basically box in an account of what has happened. We know where the car was going, we know when the autonomous software was disengaged, and we know that it was the human’s choice to disengage it.

And if you can’t accept this, and need to rely on a conspiracy explanation instead, I’m not sure what to say.

Taking autonomy seriously

Over the last ten years, there has been an average of around 106 traffic deaths every year in London alone. The numbers are pretty consistent year on year.

But it no longer has to be this way. We have invented the technology that could significantly reduce this number. At some point in the next few years, the safety question is going to flip, and we’re going to ask why we’re allowing anyone to drive the old-fashioned way, given how demonstrably proven autonomous vehicles are.

And that’s why I’ve spent this post settling scores with randos on the internet. Because now that autonomy is arriving, there are real questions ahead about how to manage the transition, and balance the trade-offs this new capability presents.

The congestion issue I describe above is a good example of this. It won’t be a problem if we plan ahead. It could actually work out better.

There are other real issues too. There’s the reality that London currently employs thousands of taxi and private hire drivers. We’ll need to figure out how to manage the technological transition fairly, so that we can take advantage of the new technology, while taking care of the people displaced.

And there are also questions around digital sovereignty. My friend Tym wrote recently in my newsletter about how Chinese robotaxis conceivably present new security challenges that policy-makers will have to grapple with.

If we actually want to build a future that works, then it means being serious, and not just reflexively cynical, in a hazy, reality-denying way, because it is more comfortable to simply assume the new thing is bad.

I think it’s now obvious that autonomous cars are not a false dawn. They have been invented. They work effectively. They can drive more safely than humans. So let’s take advantage of them.

If you enjoy deep dives on politics, policy, tech, infrastructure and media, with some slightly bitter score-settling on the side, then make sure to subscribe (for free) to my newsletter to get more of this.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin talk about a new campaign to ban delivery robots – and why it may prefigure a future political realignment.

• And then we speak to Labour MP Dr Jeevun Sandher about his recent posts on good growth in every postcode, and how Britain’s growth problem isn’t what we think it is.

James’s undercover reporting from his tour of the Amazon warehouse is here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On this week’s YIMBY Pod, we talk to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what ‘Manchesterism’ should be. And Martin and I look into three new energy storage projects, and try to coin the nickname ‘The Electric Arsehole’ for one of them… Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

Last week, I did something I’ve never done before in the pursuit of journalism.

I went undercover.

Back in 2018, I read a fantastic book called Hired by James Bloodworth, which captures the emergence of the gig economy not by simply studying it, but by living it. In the book, James tells the story of how he got a job at an Amazon warehouse – or ‘Fulfilment Centre’ in company parlance – in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and he details what the experience of working there was like, as someone on the front line.

And frankly, it sounds horrible. He describes the precariousness of the job, how sick days counted against your performance, and how colleagues were permanently terrified of not meeting tough targets. He even claims to have heard stories of workers who would urinate in bottles, to avoid taking time out for toilet breaks.

But as a big fat bloke, what made me feel the most stress reading his account was his description of the enormous distances he was forced to walk every day, up and down the aisles of the warehouse, to retrieve the goods that customers had ordered.

Anyway, in the years that followed, thanks in part to James’s book, there was a surge of interest in working conditions at Amazon. In America, the book even piqued the interest of Bernie Sanders.

And the attention did appear to lead to changes in how the company does business. In fact, Amazon went on something of a PR blitz to try and restore its reputation, and today the company makes bold claims about how it has improved employee compensation and employment terms.

But the obvious question to ask is, has this actually made a difference? Is working at an Amazon warehouse any better today? That’s why I, like James Bloodworth, decided to go undercover.

And sure, I know what you’re thinking: Did I really get a job at an Amazon warehouse, like James did?

Er… No, I didn’t. Not only would that take ages, James’s book makes it sound like really hard work.

But I did do something that I, personally, consider equally as journalistically rigorous and impressive.

For the past few years, because of the criticisms, Amazon has been offering free public tours of its warehouses. So I signed up for one at my nearest Amazon warehouse – and crucially I didn’t tell them that I’m a journalist.

I mean, sure, they didn’t actually ask what I did for a living, but I think this still technically counts as undercover work, because I wasn’t just some random member of the public – I was a random member of the public with a blog.1

And frankly, what I saw on my brave, hour-and-a-bit-long undercover investigation surprised me. So read on to find out what I saw on my Amazon propaganda tour.

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POD! On this week’s YIMBY Pod, we talk to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what ‘Manchesterism’ should be. And Martin and I look into three new energy storage projects, and try to coin the nickname ‘The Electric Arsehole’ for one of them… Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

A brand new essay post will be landing later this week (hopefully tomorrow). In the meantime, I thought I’d liberate another paid post from behind the paywall, given that today the government is expected to announce significant new spending on drones.

This was originally published in March 2025. Some of the specific reference may be a little dated now, but the core point is still a good one, I think.

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Finally, Europe has woken up to the new reality.

Like it or not, Britain and our European allies are now participants in a new Cold War – and this time around, we can’t be certain that America will always be on our side.

However, it isn’t just the prospect of Donald Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine that keeps me awake at night – it’s China doing the same.

Obviously, Beijing is not on our side in this fight. Ideologically, China is a part of the emerging authoritarian axis, and in practical terms it is by some distance our most powerful strategic adversary. If Xi Jinping ever sends his troops into Taiwan, it will make events in Ukraine look like little more than a minor skirmish.

But since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale invasion, China hasn’t been entirely helpful to Russia. Instead, it has followed the classic Iran-Iraq war playbook of effectively selling its most valuable weapons to both sides: drones.

I say “effectively”, because on paper, Beijing has imposed restrictions that prevent Chinese companies like DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, selling their gear for use in war. But in practice, both Ukraine and Russia have continued to acquire drones through third-party and grey-market channels.

That’s why today Chinese drones are utterly dominant on the battlefield. For example, in 2023, Ukraine reportedly bought 60% of DJI’s entire global supply of its flagship Mavic drones, and though hard numbers are hard to find, there are clearly thousands in use on the frontlines today.

And this is why I worry. The reliance on Chinese drones puts Ukraine, and the rest of Europe, in a precarious position.

It means that if China were to choose to clamp down on grey-market drone sales to Ukraine, or were to impose broader restrictions on sales to Europe – as it has reportedly tried to do – then Ukraine will lose access to this critical battlefield technology.

And what makes this situation worse is that even if drones can be sourced from other countries, then we might still be at a disadvantage – because China, and DJI specifically, make arguably the best drones in the world.

So what can we do about it?

I think it is time for Britain to take the drone gap seriously, just as we would if we didn’t have the best fighter jets or missiles. That’s why we should establish a new company in the mold of the forthcoming state-backed Great British Railways and Great British Energy.

It’s time for us to create Great British Drones.

The drone paradigm

It’s hard to overstate the impact drones have had on how wars are fought. Crucially, this is not just large “military” drones that look like small planes and are designed to fire missiles or drop bombs. As Ukraine has demonstrated over the last three years small, commercial-grade drones have also proven decisive, for several reasons.

Most obviously, there’s reconnaissance – sending a drone up gives a squad of soldiers better visibility of their surroundings, and helps them spot the enemy. Combined with a technology like Starlink,1 drones can stream live video back to base – giving senior officers the live intelligence they need to make real-time tactical decisions.2

But just as importantly there is the difference these small drones are making to the actual fighting.

For example, drones are extremely useful when paired with artillery, as Ukraine discovered in the early days of the war. The way an artillery gun works is that a shot is taken – and then subsequent shots are ‘corrected’ for accuracy, so that munitions land closer to the target. And unsurprisingly, it turns out that having an extra pair of eyes in the sky makes this trial-and-error process much quicker.

However, this is just the beginning. Now we’re three years in, drone tactics have evolved significantly.

Here’s a video showing what appears to be a deactivated drone lying on the ground. But when the Russian troops in the video find it, it springs to life and attacks them.

And another major innovation has been the rise of first-person-view (FPV) drones, where the pilot wears a pair of VR glasses to fly the drone precisely towards a target, as you can see in this extremely grim video.3

They’re also often used in battle as “kamikaze” drones. Because drones are so comparatively cheap, it makes sense to sacrifice them in order to, for example, drop a grenade through the hatch on top of a tank, or ram into larger aircraft, to knock them out of the sky.

Then finally, the other reason drones have changed how wars are fought is that drone technology itself has been rapidly improving because of the war, just like how World War II accelerated the development of radar and jet planes.

For example, check out the video above, which shows a small military drone made by American firm Skydio. It has cameras on board that can automatically build 3D models of the environment it is operating in. And perhaps more importantly, it can navigate optically using just its cameras – which helps it get around GPS jamming, which has been a permanent feature of the frontlines in Ukraine.

So this is all to say that drones have changed the face of war, and any country that wants to defend itself needs a significant drone capability.

China’s drone advantage

This brings me to China.

It might be tempting to think – because it has been historically true – that the west will always continue to have the technological edge. But this hasn’t been true for some time.

Today, many Chinese-made products are not just on-par with what American and European companies produce – they are in many cases the best in the world. China is no longer just a workshop that churns out plastic widgets, or inferior copies of western technology. Chinese companies are today producing leading edge technology in a number of fields, such as phones, electric cars, and even humanoid robots.

And this is especially the case when it comes to drones.

For example, take a look at this video showing off the DJI Matrice 4. It replicates many of the capabilities of the American Skydio drone above.

I won’t run through a detailed breakdown comparing different makes and models – I’m not writing a buyer’s guide for any warlords reading – but suffice to say, on many dimensions the two companies (and thus, countries) have technological parity. Though Skydio appears to have an edge when it comes to current AI-powered capabilities – on some comparisons, DJI’s drones have better cameras, or can spend longer in the air.

And what’s also notable is that DJI is not just producing well-crafted flying machines. It has also built out a highly sophisticated range of accessories that can be bolted on to their drones. And there’s an entire ecosystem around their products – such as ground transmitters that extend range, and a software backend that makes it easy to process and review captured images and data.

So though the above video is focused on civilian uses – for emergency service uses – you don’t have to think too hard about how these same capabilities could be used during a war. And if we ever end up in a shooting war with China – these capabilities will be deployed against us.

This brings me to my final example of Chinese drone supremacy.

The above video – from China – is awesome. It’s incredibly cool to see thousands of drones perfectly synchronised together.4 But I also think that it should strike fear in us.

This is because the next generation of drone warfare is swarms – autonomous drones acting together, as a team, to take out targets.

Today, swarming technology is only at a very early stage. On the battlefield, there are only anecdotal reports of Ukraine testing swarms of between three and ten drones.

But it seems obvious to me that we’re only a few years away from swarm warfare changing everything about how wars are fought all over again.

For example, imagine if the thousands of drones in the display above did not just have LED lights, but carried explosives. And instead of swirling majestically in the sky, shaped like a dragon, if they were charging together, in formation against a target.

Given how cheap drones are to make, this is obviously where things are heading.

This will make drones even more difficult to defend against. As instead of needing to deflect one missile, or shoot down one plane, war becomes a game of numbers. Say a thousand drones are sent after a high value target – what are the odds of a 100% success rate in taking them out?

The good news for now is that no country or company appears to have yet mastered drone swarms. Despite the eye-catching vision of the future in the video, in reality light shows are much less sophisticated from a software perspective as drone performances are pre-programmed, and follow a fixed path.5

So to make swarms a reality, drones will need to be equipped with sensors to understand their environment, and there will need to be software capable of managing airspace and responding to unexpected events in real time.

But as things stand, China is arguably best placed to get to this place first. We can see from the DJI video above how China can manufacture advanced hardware at scale, and it already has an advanced drone software platform. And if China does get there first, it will be another ‘Sputnik’ moment for America and Europe.

The case for GB Drones

What we face then is a drone gap.

Even if America beats China to mastering drone swarms – which it might, as the Pentagon is reportedly working on it – it will still not be good news for Europe. Either drone supremacy will belong to our biggest strategic adversary – or our newly unreliable friend, who has been going through a very public breakdown.

Given the centrality of drones to the future of warfare, it’s strategically essential for Europe to have its own independent capability, so we are not at the mercy of China or America restricting drone sales, or even remotely triggering the “off” switch if we use them in a war they don’t like.

This is why I think there is a big opportunity for Britain.

At the moment, we have a small drone industry. Big weapons companies, like BAE Systems, sell a number of large, aircraft-like drones for long distance missions – the sorts of drones that replace fighter jets.

But there isn’t much on the smaller end – the commercial-grade quadcopters that are the workhorses in Ukraine. There are a few smaller British companies making them, but none of them are particularly substantial.

The same is true across Europe more broadly. The largest European drone company is Parrot, a French firm, which is of a similar size to Skydio, the American company above. In any case, both are miles behind DJI in terms of scale, revenue and capability.

So what can we do to change this and give Europe the technology it needs? As strange as it might sound to our modern, neoliberal ears – I think the answer could be state intervention.

That’s why we should establish GB Drones – a company that will build and scale small drones, so that Britain and our allies have access to the same capability as our biggest strategic rivals.

As this is only a back-of-the-envelope sketch, I admit that I haven’t got a fully worked out plan for exactly how the new company should be structured. I don’t think it needs to be nationalised, though the government could take an equity stake, like it does with the OneWeb satellite network.

Similarly, I don’t have a strong feeling on whether GB Drones should be started from scratch, or created by acquiring an existing firm, like the UK arm of American firm Anduril, which last week did a drone deal with the Ministry of Defence.6

But however it happens, what’s crucial is that GB Drones, as our “national champion”, should be heavily supported by the British government. It should receive tax breaks, grants, and regulators should treat it favourably – such as by massively liberalising our drones laws – so that it can build up the domestic drone business we need. The goal should be to create a company the size of DJI that sells to both friendly nations’ militaries, and commercially.7

Creating a national champion like this isn’t a new idea. We used to have several “national champion” companies during the twentieth century, until Thatcherism happened. And there are also plenty of examples from around the world.

For example, the reason Taiwan is home to TSMC, the company that makes the world’s most advanced semiconductors, is because Taiwan’s industrial policy in the 1980s was geared towards helping the company grow.

And the same goes for Huawei, the Chinese telecoms company. This is perhaps the best analogy for what I’m proposing.

In Huawei’s case, China decided that it was unacceptable to have foreign companies dominate the country’s telecoms – so it used state subsidies, tax breaks and grants to support the growth of the company. This gave Huawei the room it needed to grow and mature, in a way that may not have been viable in straightforward commercial terms. And as a result of these efforts, today Huawei equipment powers 5G networks around the world, and millions of people use Huawei phones – which conceivably gives China enormous leverage.8

And this is why I think we need GB Drones, and that the government should support such a company. Not because it necessarily makes commercial sense – because it wouldn’t in a pure free market where DJI can manufacture more cheaply and at a larger scale. But because we need it.

As Ukraine has demonstrated, the future of warfare is drones. Europe needs a powerful drone industry. So why can’t it be Britain that makes it happen?

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin talk about some exciting new energy storage schemes to help us during the next heatwave.

• And we speak to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what the much-discussed ‘Manchesterism’ could actually be.

James’s piece reflecting on the Londependence movement is here, and his argument for a Gamer’s Charter is here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Picture credit: Peter McDermott (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig more into plans to use AI to speed up the planning system, speaking to Faculty AI’s Paul Maltby, who is working on the Augmented Planning Decisions programme. Plus – does Wychavon even exist?! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

I was reminded of this post and I still think it’s making a good point, so I thought I’d share it more widely. It was originally published last December as a paid post. So if you enjoy reading it, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support my work.

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Traditional politics has a problem with young men.

Sure, they don’t vote with the same enthusiasm as older generations, but with the rise of the manosphere, the re-election of Donald Trump, and the surprising social media success of Reform UK, it’s clear that something is going on. Today, Nigel Farage is the most followed MP on TikTok, with 1.4m followers.

We can also – possibly – see this in polling data too.

Though Reform only captured 12% of the 18-24-year-old male vote in last year’s General Election, there are signs that Farage’s party is gaining ground with Gen-Z men.

For example, according to JL Partners polling for the think-tank Onward, 31% of men aged 16-25 back Reform – compared to just 18% who support the Labour Party.1

However, I’m not entirely convinced by this polling, as I can’t find similar data elsewhere, because annoyingly the major pollsters only seem to split out their tables by gender or age, not both at the same time.

The closest I’ve found is a reference to More In Common polling by Laura Kuenssberg, where she suggests that in an average of four polls carried out last autumn, Reform was leading among young men who don’t have a degree.2

But in any case, whether or not the above polls are outliers doesn’t really matter. Because we all know that as things stand, at the next election Labour’s primary opponent will be Reform.

And even if Farage only captures a smaller proportion of young men than Labour, it could still be what makes the difference between a Labour majority, a progressive coalition – or Nigel Farage in Downing Street.

So this is all to say that aside from everything else, Labour will need something to offer this group, who are typically thought of as wildly disaffected, and as a cohort who spends more time on their Playstations and Discord servers than they do thinking about politics.

This means that even if Labour does come up with a serious policy offer on important young-people issues like housing, childcare3 and education, it will still struggle to get a hearing, as it will need a way to reach them too.

This is a hard problem, and no one has yet landed on a good solution, because traditional media is a dead-end, and social media – particularly the male-coded parts – are not exactly friendly territory for centre-left politicians. It’s hard to imagine Keir Starmer bantering with the Sidemen, or surviving an ordeal with Triggernometry. And I’m not massively confident about Andy Burnham’s ability to do so either.4

However, I think there could be a way to reach disaffected, Reform-curious young men and get their attention. And the secret is to serve the interests of a wildly underserved interest group, where a significant proportion of members are these hard-to-reach Gen-Zs.

That’s right. I’m actually serious. I think it’s time for Labour to become the party of… gamers.

And I think that Labour should fight the next election with a ‘Gamer’s Charter’.

So let’s dig into what it could include – and why I think it will work.

Green benches zone

It’s hard to overstate just how central videogames are to younger generations. According to Ofcom, 85% of all UK 16-24 year olds say they play games.

And sure, some of those will be casuals who play little more than Solitaire on their phones, but a full 52% say they play on consoles like Playstation or Xbox. This is a mark of a ‘serious’ gamer. And though we don’t know what the gender split is for this age group, for everyone 16+, it’s 32% male, and 16% female.

So I’d bet that, for young men specifically, ‘serious’ gaming is almost completely universal. It’d be far weirder to find a Gen-Z man who doesn’t play games.5

And that’s why I think there’s such a large opportunity here. Because just like other pools of voters, gamers have gripes that politicians could take seriously, and try to fix.

Think of it like how after the Oasis ticket pricing controversy, the government got involved and ordered an investigation. It was obviously not the most important issue, but it was a high-salience, tangible way to capture the headlines and the attention of an important demographic. (In this case, 90s teenagers who are now old and wealthy enough to consider voting Tory).

So what I’m imagining with the Gamer’s Charter is taking this and doing something bigger. Something analogous to Rishi Sunak’s Plan for Drivers – a basket of relatively small-bore policy interventions6 that can be delivered with relative ease, designed to appeal to a very specific interest group.

But now we get to the obvious and most important question. What exactly could a “Gamer’s Charter” contain?

The Gamer’s Charter

The good news for the politicians is that gamers like to complain – a lot. And as a result, there are plenty of games industry controversies to pick through, to look for low-hanging fruit the government could intervene on. Here’s a few to give you a flavour.

More restrictions on loot boxes

Back in 2023, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport updated its guidance on ‘loot boxes’ – a lottery-like game mechanic found in many big-name titles, where players make a small payment in exchange for mystery in-game items that are only revealed after purchase.

Since they first emerged, they have proven hugely controversial because they aren’t a million miles away from gambling. And in some cases, they create an element of “pay to win”. That’s why in 2018 Belgium effectively banned the practice, in response to concerns about the mechanic in that year’s FIFA title.

And over here, the 2023 guidance did make the situation better. For example, it urged publishers to display the odds of winning and to create spending controls for problem gamblers. And in the years since, publishers have voluntarily reined in their worst excesses. In the recent FIFA sequels (renamed EA Sports FC), the game has switched to a system where players can see the inside of loot boxes before purchase.

But the rules could still go further. Guidance is still only guidance, and could conceivably be ignored by publishers. So an easy win for the government could be to turn the guidance into law.

No more server shutdowns

A common frustration with modern games is that they are not just software loaded from a disc. They are live digital services, which only work as long as the developers maintain servers for online play, and so on. This means that when they pull the plug, the game ceases to function.

One particularly high-profile example of this was last year’s closure of The Crew, a mostly single-player racing game that nonetheless required an internet connection. This caused an almighty consumer backlash, and led to the foundation of the ‘Stop Killing Games’ activist group.

So here, the government could create new rules that mandate online services must maintain support for games for a minimum period of time, and only ‘sunset’ them after a prolonged notification period. Or perhaps, more ambitiously, it could oblige (large)7 developers shutting down games to open-source their server-side services, or hand them off to community groups8 to operate instead.9

Statutory cooling-off on digital purchases

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most expensive and hotly anticipated games in history. But when it was released in 2020, gamers quickly realised it was severely broken, and riddled with bugs and problems. At the time, Sony eventually bowed to pressure and offered refunds on digital downloads, but this was not a given. If Sony had wanted, it could have left the game broken, and told buyers to swivel.

So here there’s an opportunity for more pro-gamer regulatory intervention. The government could create new rules that oblige digital storefronts to offer refunds on software for a mandatory ‘cooling-off’ period.10 This would give consumers more protections against broken games, and incentivise developers to make sure what they are releasing is in a robust state.

Legal safeguards for the modding scene

One of the best things about videogames is that often fan communities will figure out how to modify games, and build their own add-ons, enhancements and remixes, long after the original developers have moved on.

In fact, some of the biggest games in the world started this way. Counter-Strike was originally a mod for Half-Life, and PUBG, which invented an entirely new genre of game,11 started life as a hack of ARMA 2.

The problem is though that mods like this always exist in a legal grey area. Some developers embrace their modders, and others often take a heavy-handed approach to shutting down fan projects, such as Take Two going after the “Open IV” Grand Theft Auto mod.

So what the government could do here is essentially offer more legal protections for modders. Perhaps there could be a carve-out in copyright law for non-commercial modifications? Or a voluntary code publishers can sign up to, endorsed by the government, which makes it clear what sort of modding is and isn’t allowed, to at least set some agreed lines that cannot be crossed.

Preserve gaming history

Finally, the government should celebrate Britain as a gaming powerhouse. Not only were we home to many pioneering games developers during the early years of computing, but today the games industry is a rare British tech success story, supporting thousands of high-skilled jobs, and making a huge cultural impact. The forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, which will probably be the single biggest game release of all time, is being developed in Edinburgh.

So what can the government do to support an already thriving industry?

It can help preserve it. Both the games, and the culture that surrounds it. There are already plenty of private projects working on preservation, such as the Video Game History Foundation, and the Video Game Heritage Society, and the government could show that it is on the side of gamers by supporting these efforts.

I’m not sure exactly what form this would take – perhaps it could be as simple as instructing Britain’s state-owned cultural institutions, like the Science Museum and British Library to dedicate more resources to preserving games? Or it could throw cash at places like the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

But either way, it would be a signal of intent – that the interests of gamers matter to the Labour government.

Patch notes

So that’s just a flavour of some gamer-friendly measures. There are many others I could pitch here. Right to repair? Legally mandated cross-play capability? Portable cloud saves? Something about “ethics in games journalism”?12

The details of what the Gamer’s Charter would include are not the most important thing at this point.

In fact, it could conceivably be the case that some of these ideas are bad, in terms of pure policy. If any of the above were tried, perhaps I’d be the person writing the “well actually this is bad” take.

This is because, for example, it’s possible that regulatory tweaks like this could have unintended downstream consequences. Protecting modders could shift the balance of power too far towards the pirates. Extra regulations and requirements could make Britain a more hostile place to develop and publish games. That wouldn’t be good.

But even if this is the case, I still think that a ‘Gamer’s Charter’ would be worth it, because of the vast plain of political opportunity here.

‘Gamer’ is not an ‘identity’ in the same sense as we talk about people with a shared ideology or background, but it is a very real group with shared interests. And just as politicians pander to motorists, farmers and homeowners, they could pander to gamers too. And given that ‘gamer’ is a description of upwards of maybe 90% of men under the age of 25, this would be a highly visible, very salient way to see politics delivering something that matters to them.

With a Gamer’s Charter in hand, it will create earned media for the Labour government. The games media will talk about it in positive terms, and the message will be heard by a group that is largely disaffected and tuned out. And hell, it would give Andy Burnham – or whoever is in charge – something to talk to the Sidemen about.13

Whether or not the appeal of Farage to young men is real or overblown then, I think the need for a Gamer’s Charter, or something like it, is clear. Labour still needs to do everything else to win – and if it can become the party of gamers, maybe it can reduce the odds of 2029 being Game Over.

This was a preview of one of my posts that usually sit behind a paywall. If you enjoy nerdy politics, policy, tech, infrastructure and media content, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support my work.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig more into plans to use AI to speed up the planning system, speaking to Faculty AI’s Paul Maltby, who is working on the Augmented Planning Decisions programme. Plus – does Wychavon even exist?! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

ESSAY! Don’t forget to read my big piece on this week on ten years when I went viral for an incredibly silly reason. (I pressed send instead of schedule on it, so you might have to scroll a bit further in your inbox to find it!).

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes. This week is accidentally a bit of an Andy Burnham special, so I am writing this while wearing a bucket hat and listening to Sonic Boom Six, Manchester’s finest ska-punk band.

Anyway, please do read on as this week I’m featuring:

• An interview with, er, me

• A devastating takedown of Andy Burnham

• ...And the case for a more optimistic view of Burnham

• How Ukraine has embraced open-ish data

• A tool to find out what Burnham thinks about... anything

• How the Swiss would have built HS2

• And Liz Truss’s infamous ‘Jenga’ lectern has been found!

So let’s get started!

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig more into plans to use AI to speed up the planning system, speaking to Faculty AI’s Paul Maltby, who is working on the Augmented Planning Decisions programme. Plus – does Wychavon even exist?! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

It’s ten years this week since I had one of the strangest few days of my life.

It was the early hours of the 24th June 2016, and David Dimbleby had just declared to the nation that the numbers were conclusive: Britain had voted to leave the European Union.

At the time, I was living in Crouch End, the leafy North London suburb that is not just a Remainer heartland, but almost a parody of smug, affluent liberalism. The day before the referendum, I had hung my EU flag out of my window. It was unfortunate, in retrospect, that this was the only thing I did to help the Remain campaign.

So unsurprisingly, I was devastated by the result. It was a gut-punch. The nation was rebutting all of the smug, liberal values I believed in – and still believe in today. And it was made worse knowing the uncertainty it would create for my partner, who is a Canadian and Dutch dual citizen, resident in Britain thanks to her EU passport.

So feeling powerless, I did the only thing that powerless people can do in times of distress. I started a petition.

Heading to Change.org, I hastily typed out a somewhat tongue-in-cheek cry of despair:

I posted the link to Twitter and Facebook, and promptly forgot about it as I continued to scroll through the morose Remainers on my Twitter timeline, collectively trying to make sense of the darkness that was descending on our politics.

Then just as I was about to, finally, go to bed, I remembered the petition and checked to see if anyone had signed. I couldn’t believe my tired eyes. It had somehow accrued over 1,000 virtual signatures in a matter of minutes.

My jaw dropped, and I continued to refresh as the sun began to peek over the horizon. The numbers continued rising… 1,500…. 2,000…. 4,000… 10,000. The petition was starting to snowball.

It appears that half-asleep and not entirely sincerely, I had accidentally sparked a new secessionist movement.

Starting a movement

At some point, I did try to sleep. I think I lasted maybe an hour. But despite having been awake for almost a day at this point, it was impossible not to keep refreshing the petition. The number of signatures continued to rise. Every time I checked the page, another thousand signatures had been added – thanks in part to Change.org’s aggressive Facebook integration.1

And then my inbox started to ping. Journalists around the world wanted to speak to me. So as the numbers continued to soar – I believe reaching over 100,000 in the first day – I was fielding phone calls and trying to explain why I really believed in the cause I had decided that I stood for mere hours earlier.

The Evening Standard, Independent, BBC News, Huffington Post and Newsweek all wrote stories. I was invited to be on London Live’s TV news bulletin, followed by BBC World later that evening. I can’t remember what I said now – I presume I was barely coherent given the lack of sleep.

The momentum continued over the weekend, and the story of the petition went international. TV crews from around the world, who had travelled to London to cover the referendum, wanted to come to our flat and film me – I was the perfect, lighter ‘skateboarding dog’ story for the end of otherwise serious news bulletins.

And because I figured it would be good for my writing career, I accepted every single invitation to draw attention to myself. French TV came first, then Slovak. Then Canadian TV via Skype. Then Al Jazeera. Then Italian TV.2 It is not an exaggeration to say that on that Saturday afternoon, crews were literally queuing outside my house, waiting for the previous one to finish up.

As recordings went on, I think I developed some good lines. I had a good joke about how we could put Barbara Windsor and Michael Caine on the money, and how I didn’t want border guards on the M25. I also got pretty good at pretending to answer my front door, for the sake of the cameras. And I quickly learned the politician’s trick of the pivot: taking whatever I had been asked, and saying something like, “Well, I think what my petition really represents is…”., and then responding to the question that I wished I had been asked instead.

However, what really made this whole weekend the strangest is that while I was rapidly transforming myself into the Che Guevara of a dangerous new liberation movement, my partner’s now-late mother happened to be staying with us, having come over to visit from Canada.

She was a near-deaf, Dutch woman, and I don’t think she ever really understood me. And she most definitely didn’t when she arrived back from a trip out with my partner, to find me in the living room, having a camera pointed at me, with a Japanese TV crew sat on the floor.

My biggest mistake

The petition continued to climb, even if the pace was slowing. By the Sunday morning, I was starting to wonder how to leverage this fleeting fame – and I got a little too high on my own supply.

Clearly, I’d tapped into the public mood on some level – even if it was obviously a bit of a joke. So I wondered… could I make something more out of it? Do I genuinely believe in this cause? Well no, obviously, but could I channel this energy to do something more useful – like campaign for more London devolution? That was something I do definitely believe in.

This was when I did something unwise. I started a crowd-funding campaign.

Blasting out an announcement to the now six-figure Londependence mailing list, I didn’t have a clear plan about what to spend it on. But nevertheless, within minutes, donations began pouring in. Within a couple of hours, it was already on £3,000, even though I’d provided few details on what I intended to do with the money raised.

And this was the glaring problem.

I told myself that I was seizing the moment, but I soon felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. I was now collecting money from people who were as furious about the referendum result as I was – but I had no idea what to do with it. I looked to my partner and my closest friends for advice, hoping they would tell me to carry on, given how potentially lucrative it was.

However, they rightly gave me a cold dose of reality. I was raising money with no plan. I was being irresponsible. I admitted to myself that this was a bad idea. So within a few hours, I’d cancelled the crowd-fund, and refunded every penny. I emailed the mailing list, explaining that I was in over my head.

I curled up on our bed with my head in my hands, feeling the pressure of thousands of eyeballs watching me fuck up. I just wanted the whole thing to go away. And then the Evening Standard wrote it up as a story. On the one hand, I thought they were bastards, but on the other, I guess fair enough.

But in any case, I was lucky. The abandoned crowd-fund was a blip. The petition numbers continued to climb. At some point, they hit over 160,000 virtual signatures, and included my downstairs neighbours, with whom I had until then exchanged barely more than a nod.

Back to obscurity

By the Monday after the referendum, the phone had stopped constantly ringing. Realistically by this point, I knew that I was at serious risk of becoming like Homer Simpson, stepping unwanted onto the stage, asking the audience, “Did somebody say ‘perfect game’?”

However, a tiny bit of media attention did persist in the days and weeks that followed.

ITV London interviewed me at a very rainy Remainer protest in Trafalgar Square. Sky News held a set-piece, Kilroy-style Leave vs Remain debate after the referendum, which I think is the perfect illustration of the weirdness of the moment. I was seated next to Ben Judah, who would later go on to be an adviser to David Lammy when he became Foreign Secretary, jetting off to Davos and the G7. I would go on to be a blogger.3

On the Tuesday after the referendum, the idea of ‘Londependence’ made it to Sadiq Khan. Speaking at an event – I wish I could find the footage now. He quipped that as much as he might like the idea of being called ‘El Presidente’, he didn’t want London to declare its independence. And to be fair, I wasn’t really sure if I actually wanted it to happen either.

Then my final ‘Londependence’-linked engagement came a couple of weeks later, in early July. It was, viewed through the lens of history, the strangest of all.

I was invited to join an on-stage panel discussion at Conway Hall about what’s next now Britain has voted to leave. Amusingly, the panel also featured… future Gorton and Denton Reform candidate, and the most audience-captured man in Britain, Matt Goodwin. Today I very much do not like him.

Timeline-wise though, this was still the old Matt Goodwin, who either was or pretended to be a fairly down-the-line academic. It was long before he was snubbed for dinner by Alan Rusbridger and David Aaronovich,4 and years before the mask slipped to reveal that yes, he really is the absolute worst.

Anyway, I can’t remember much about what I said – though I do remember that Goodwin’s fairly dry explanation of what happened went down like a cup of cold sick in front of an audience of traumatised Remainers.

But this was not the only unusual thing about the evening. As I left the stage, a bunch of people came up to speak to me. Unlike me, they were not jokers or opportunists. They were true believers. They were sincerely interested in pursuing London independence. And they wanted me to help them organise, telling me they had scheduled a meet-up for supporters and wanted me to go along.

What sectarian forces had I inadvertently unleashed on British politics, I wondered? However, I never found out because I didn’t go, as they were just a bit too weird for me.

The aftermath

As the summer of 2016 continued, the country quickly moved on from Londependence. That’s not surprising, as after all it was the same summer when Pokémon Go was released, which as I’ve said before I think was the last time the country was truly happy.

But there is one last coda to the story, which I think is pretty interesting.

Though the petition was, obviously, a joke, it had collected something important. Data. As the petition climbed to 180,000 signatures, I had accidentally created a database of London’s most passionate Remainers. These were the people who would be the foot-soldiers in any second referendum. They could have been valuable in the fight that was to come.

And I wasn’t the only person to realise it. I got an email from someone who had a personal assistant who sent emails on his behalf, requesting a meeting. So, unsure what to expect, I went along to his home, which was a house in Smith Square. That’s an extremely posh square a short walk from Parliament, where nobody normal lives.5

I’m not exaggerating when I say that his house wasn’t like any private home I’d ever visited – it felt more like walking into a museum, with old paintings and antique furniture, instead of an Ikea Poang chair and some billy bookcases. He was clearly a guy with money, a fact that became even more clear when he revealed that he worked at a hedge fund, and he wanted the petition data for the embryonic campaign to stop Brexit.

Unfortunately though, there were two problems. First, unlike other petition platforms, Change.org didn’t let me access the email addresses of the people who signed. Only their names and postcodes. And more importantly, I was familiar with data protection law. So there wasn’t really any viable way that I could hand over the data I did have – the names and postal addresses – even if I’d wanted to.

So all I could really do with it was aggregate the data, and make some nice maps.

The maps

So here’s something fun. Here’s the Londependence map after around 116,000 signatures (the petition eventually rose to 180,000 before Change.org closed it), broken down by council ward.

It’s interesting, because it’s basically a snapshot in time of where London’s most hardcore Remainers were, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. One well-connected political friend who I described the data to suggested that my data might even be better than what the Remain campaign was working with before the vote.

But what do the results tell us? Frankly, I think they are… completely unsurprising. Signatures were concentrated in the inner-London boroughs, with the single highest number of signatures from Brockley ward in Lewisham, with 560 residents signing. That’s a significant slice of the ward’s entire electorate.

And that’s what’s mad about this petition, I think. In fact, it becomes even more striking when you plot a map based on the proportion of residents in each council ward who had signed. It basically creates a perfect map of where the smuggest parts of liberal London really are.6

Though what is surprising is that my old ‘hood, Crouch End, is actually only 12th on the list, with 3.47% of every resident signing the petition7 – or 8th once you exclude the oddity of the City of London, where the number of actual residents measures in the low hundreds.

So where is the most ultra-Remain, ultra-liberal area of London? Again, City of London excepted, it turns out that it is just down the road from Crouch End, in Muswell Hill, where a staggering 3.94% of everyone in the ward signed my stupid petition.

Back to today

So that’s the story of what happened to me, ten years ago this week.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this again is obviously because of the anniversary of the referendum, but also because as stupid as my original petition was, it does hit upon something that is still relevant today.

That’s because what, I think, my petition really represents is the stark fact that London doesn’t have enough control of its own destiny. And that’s something we should still care about today – even if we don’t actually want the capital to break away.8

Sadiq Khan may not want to be El Presidente, but he should be given more powers. If London had more fiscal autonomy, it could raise the money to pay for the much-needed Bakerloo line extension. If London had more planning powers, it could try to get London building again. And if London had more power over licensing, its night-time economy wouldn’t be permanently in a state of crisis.

So no, I don’t think London should declare independence. I never did really. But I’m not sure the London independence movement is quite dead yet. Because just like every other liberation movement complains when its plans don’t pan out, the reality is that real Londependence has never been tried.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We explore why the government has given Cherwell Council a big slap on the wrist.

• James tries to sell Martin on the idea that AI can fix the planning system.

• …And then we speak to Paul Maltby from Faculty AI about how, well, he is using AI to fix the planning system.

Paul Maltby’s blog post on Augmented Planning Decisions (APD) is here.

James’s deep dive into Extract and APD is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I look at Zack Polanski’s claims about the price of food, and I make myself popular by defending, er, the Big Supermarket. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how the Swiss would have built HS2 completely differently. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Building stuff in Britain is a nightmare.

The arguments are well rehearsed by now. Our planning system is wildly bureaucratic with applications sometimes running to thousands of pages, and even the most thoughtful developments can be killed at the behest of a handful of grumpy councillors.

The government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act, which received Royal Assent at the end of last year, was definitely a leap in the right direction, and I do not want to play down its significance. It’s an important law, which reformed environmental mitigation, established a legal basis for creating local development corporations, and it shifted many smaller-scale planning applications from committee meetings to council planning officers’ discretion.

But fundamentally, these are upgrades to the existing system, and we haven’t moved to something bolder, like a system based on zoning, where buildings are effectively approved by default, as long as they meet a given zone’s criteria.

This means that if you want to build something in Britain, even something simple like a loft extension or a garden office, it still requires you to submit a tonne of paperwork to the council, and then to wait for a decision before you can get started.

This is very irritating, as it can involve long, uncertain waits. Officially, the statutory target is an eight-week turnaround time for decisions on small/minor household applications, but in practice it can take longer as councils only have a fixed number of planning officers available to scrutinise and approve the roughly 350,000 applications made every year.

And the impact of this sluggishness shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s essentially a tax on building, and a self-inflicted hit on the economy. Less gets built, productivity falls, and it ties up money earmarked for investment and financing.

However, all of this could be about to change, at least a little bit. Today the government has announced a pair of new projects to help planning officers make decisions faster. One is being built in-house by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT),1 and the other is an £8.2m collaboration with Google and Faculty AI.

And as luck would have it, I’ve got some behind-the-scenes details on how the two systems are going to work.

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Extracting the details

The fundamental bottleneck on planning application processing is the time available to council planning officers. According to MHCLG, the average council planning department has around 40 people,2 which might sound like a lot – but they have a lot to do, and a lot of their work is tedious grunt-work.

For example, many existing historic planning documents are not yet digitised, and are still stored on paper in filing cabinets. Which is bad if you’re a planning officer and need to consult the archives. So before you can even begin to consider an application, you need to digitise the existing documents.

Annoyingly, this is a process that could conceivably take hours, as the planning officer would have to scan the paper map and associated documents, and spend time manually transcribing information, and carefully drawing out a detailed digital map with a mouse.

But this is where the first tool, dubbed ‘Extract’ comes in.

Extract was built in-house by a team at MHCLG. It’s designed to automate the entire digitisation process, and turn paper documents and hand-drawn maps into digital objects that work with modern mapping and planning tools.

For example, above is a scan of the plans for Queen’s Club Gardens, in London. In 1981, it received an ‘Article 4’ designation, which limits what can be modified on the buildings3 – a restriction that is relevant if a planning officer has to make a decision on an application in the area. Once it was fed into Extract, it was transformed into a modern digital shape file in just a couple of minutes.

And the way it does this is incredibly clever, as to do it reliably, there’s a multi-step pipeline, that involves multiple AI models working to turn a flat drawing into something useful.

So first, the PDF scan is run through Google’s Gemini model to extract textual information, such as dates and other details about the area. In principle, this might sound straightforward, as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has existed for a long time – but the reality is many planning documents are messy. Some are handwritten, and many of those that are typed often have hand-written notes scribbled around the edges, or lines crossed out with a pen.

But whereas this would have tripped up older software, it isn’t much of a problem for a modern Large Language Model.

Anyway, after the text, maps are also identified by the AI. They’re then chopped out of the PDF, and fed into Meta’s Segment Anything, a specialist AI model that can take an image and identify different objects within. This is how the system extracts the shapes on the map – like the shape of the perimeter of the Article 4 area above, or the houses on the map below.

But what use is a shape if a system can’t plot it on a map? That’s why next Gemini is used to look at the paper maps and extract things like the names of streets and other geographic features. These are then fed into the Google Maps and Ordnance Survey APIs, to pin-point exactly where the map is supposed to be.

And even at this point, Extract’s job is not quite done. Because the shape file then needs to be placed on the digital map accurately. So here Extract uses another specialist AI model called MatchAnything, which has been trained to identify common points in, well, anything.

Apparently it’s capable of, for example, identifying common points in photos of the same object from different angles, and more relevantly here, it can figure out the common points on two maps of the same place where one map is digital, and the other is hand-drawn and upside-down, as in the above example from Hampstead.4

And once you have these points, it becomes pretty straightforward to work out the longitude and latitude of each of the different points on the extracted shapes. Which means Extract can even super-impose the original scan on top of the digital map, skewing the image so that it matches the digital version.

And if it doesn’t perfectly match at the end, the planning officer can go in and edit the generated shapes manually, to ensure that it is accurate.

This is all to say that there is a lot going on under the surface. But what’s amazing is that apparently the average processing time to turn a scan into a usable digital object is… is 1 minute, 42 seconds, turning a process that would have taken literally hours into something that is almost instantaneous.5

So assuming Extract works as described, that’s going to be an enormous productivity boost in its own right. But this is only the start of the battle – as once all the relevant documents have been assembled, planning officers need to go through them – which is time consuming in its own right.

Sorting through the docs

When a planning application is made, developers have to submit dozens, or even hundreds of pages outlining their plans, depending on the complexity. They have to explain what they want to build, and how it complies with whatever regulations apply to the local area.

Then there are often submissions from other stakeholders, such as statutory consultees like Natural England, or contributions from other residents who want to support or (more likely) oppose construction.

These documents all land on the virtual desk of a planning officer, whose job it is to sift through and compare what the application says with what is contained in the planning system’s many rulebooks, which stretch to thousands of pages.

For example, planning decisions may have to take into account the National Planning Policy Framework, the council’s own Local Plan, or specific local rules around conservation areas that limit how buildings are allowed to look and feel, like the Article 4 area around Queen’s Club Gardens.

So, in effect, in order to make a judgement, the planning officer has to conduct a miniature literature review, comparing guidelines against proposals to work out if the development passes the extremely complicated test or not.

This, though, is where the second AI opportunity lies. This is at a much earlier stage than Extract, but Google and Faculty are currently working with the government to prototype a system dubbed Augmented Planning Decisions – or APD.

The idea here is to take what Large Language Models (in this case, Gemini 3 Pro) are already very good at – comparative text analysis – but apply this skill in a more structured and rigorous way to planning documents. So the plan is that APD will take the hundreds of pages in a planning application, and compare them against the thousands of pages of guidance that they need to be judged against, and present a summary containing everything the planning officer needs to know to make a final decision.

I’ve attempted to mock up something above that looks a bit like it. APD is basically a smart case management system. They can click into any application to see the AI’s reasoning, separated into all of the different criteria that need to be satisfied, each with a deep link to the specific guidance or legislation that justifies whatever conclusion has been drawn.

So all the officer then has to do is review the choices made, and decide whether or not they accept the AI’s recommendations. And even if they disagree with the AI conclusion, and change the decision before signing off on it, the system still saves a tonne of time compared to scrolling through thousands of pages of guidance manually.

Teams of agents

At this point, depending on your level of AI-enthusiasm, you’re either pretty excited, or pretty sceptical.

I am very much in the excited camp.

Because what’s smart about the way both Extract and APD have been designed is that they are not just like if you or I were to slap a planning PDF into ChatGPT (or, I guess, Gemini) and say, “So what do you think of this then?”.

Aside from the fact that Gemini 3 Pro is a sophisticated reasoning model, and thus a cut above the experience most users have of AI models,6 both systems have been carefully designed to break tasks down into multi-step processes, to ensure greater accuracy, and avoid hallucinations.

This is especially the case, as I understand it, for APD, which functions using teams of AI ‘agents’, each given a single discrete task to complete.

For example, an individual agent could be tasked with determining a single basic fact about the proposal like identifying the type of dwelling, to determine whether the application is for a bungalow or a semi-detached house, and so on.

In fact, I understand this can get really granular, with agents spun up by the system to figure out really specific details, such as individual measurements for one wall in one room, or to dig one specific piece of guidance out of a larger document.

And I’ve even heard talk of how Faculty plans to build in “judge” agents, where one AI will critique the work of others, to sense-check it before showing it to a planning officer. And other agents will carefully consider where explicit human judgement is required, such as when planning guidance demands that developments be kept ‘in keeping with the local character’, or whatever NIMBY nonsense councillors demand.

A model for government

So that, in a nutshell, is how the government is planning to use AI to speed up the planning system. To me, it seems like a striking example of how AI can actually be operationalised to boost productivity.

The planning system might still be too weighed down by red tape and too vulnerable to NIMBY locals wielding vetoes, but if decisions can be made faster, the whole system will work a lot more effectively – and hopefully get Britain building faster.

And the good news is that the rollout has already started. Extract is now available to all councils in England, having already been tested in 32 local authorities around the country. APD has already been tested in three areas – Barnet, Camden and Dorset, and the plan is apparently to scale up to ten additional councils later this year, before going nationwide next year – assuming the tests are successful, of course.

Though having said all this, I know what you’re thinking. Planning officers have much more complicated jobs than this, right? They don’t just sit at computers, evaluating loft conversions and conservatories.

In any given week, a planning officer might have to meet with councillors, negotiate with applicants on the phone or on site, or perhaps even don their windbreaker and stab vest, and go out on an enforcement mission.7

Similarly, it’s true that rolling out both Extract and APD will be a bureaucratic challenge in its own right. Similar to Digital Traffic Orders, though the core platforms have been commissioned by the government in Westminster, they will need to be taken up by local authorities on a council-by-council basis.8

But if the AI works as intended, councils try the tools out, and the paperwork side of the job is sped up, this could be transformative. It will give overstretched planning officers more time to do the other parts of their jobs – which will reduce the time from an application going in to spades hitting the ground. And that’s not even to mention how much less annoying it will be to be on the other side of the planning process, as your application won’t be left in limbo for quite so long.

Perhaps though, there is another, even bigger prize if these tools are a success.

Because think about it, if AI can speed up planning, why can’t it speed up other stodgy bits of the public sector too? Planning is far from the only place in government with casework, where an official has to compare an application against a rulebook, and make a judgement.

In fact, there are countless examples to point to. Local authorities have to assess social care and special education needs, Job Centres determine what benefits people receive, the Home Office evaluates visa applications, and the DVLA has to assess whether people are medically fit enough to continue driving.

There’s no reason that similar systems to Extract and APD couldn’t be built in those cases to digitise paperwork and to assist the humans making the decisions. And ‘assist’ is the key word there. It’s important that in all of these examples, that a human also stays in the loop, and that we don’t end up with a government where ‘computer says no’ can have devastating consequences.

But I think that used carefully, like Extract and APD, AI could be transformative for casework.

And hell, planning seems like a particularly great place to demonstrate how AI-assisted casework can work, as though planning is important, the stakes of whether Rupert and Felicity get their kitchen extension are slightly lower than whether someone receives their benefits.9

So I hope that both of these tools are a success. If they work, they could not just help us build, but they could provide a template for the rest of government too.

If you enjoy ultra-nerdy deep dives into politics, policy, tech, transport, and media, then you will like my newsletter. Sign up (for free!) to get more like this direct to your inbox.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I look at Zack Polanski’s claims about the price of food, and I make myself popular by defending, er, the Big Supermarket. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how the Swiss would have built HS2 completely differently. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week - plus some shorter takes.

If everything goes to plan, I should have a very cool story later this week, but in the meantime, here’s a slightly more James-heavy Odds and Ends than usual, as this time I’m featuring:

• My latest vibe-coding adventure

• My take on the “is SpaceX overvalued?” debate

• A scary picture of what Europe’s AI future could look like, if we don’t fix it

• The Brexit documentary that made me mad

• And some good and bad news about climate change.

Now let’s get started!

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I look at Zack Polanski’s claims about the price of food, and I make myself popular by defending, er, the Big Supermarket. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how the Swiss would have build HS2 completely differently, and how they would have done better. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

With the news dominated by discussion of social media bans and other restrictions on social media apps, I thought I’d bring this one back from the archives as I still think it is relevant today – if not more so. So please enjoy this piece, originally published just over a year ago.

(A brand new piece will be arriving tomorrow, on something very exciting!)

I used to be confident that concerns about the impact of phones on people – especially young people – were wildly overstated. “Don’t be crazy,” I’d think, “We have all of the world’s information in the palms of our hands – that’s obviously a net positive!”.

And besides, doesn’t every generation freak out when something new emerges? From comic books, to video games, to rap music – we can look back and laugh at what were clearly just moral panics. The people complaining were just out-of-touch old farts.

But more recently I’ve started to wonder if this time it is different, as I’m pretty convinced that the latest New Thing is actually, for real, a pernicious thing that is making the world worse.

I’m talking, of course, about short-form video on our phones.

You know what I mean – vertically shot clips, lasting no more than a minute or so, that are selected by an algorithm and shoved in our faces. We call them TikToks, or YouTube Shorts, or Reels.1 And I hate them.

I realised this last week when I was on holiday in Switzerland. One night, my partner and I stayed at a hotel high in the Alps on the border with Liechtenstein. Here’s a photo showing the view from the hotel balcony:

However, I didn’t actually see all that much of it.

Despite having the majesty of nature right there in front of my eyes, instead of taking in the view and experiencing the sorts of profound, poetic revelations about the nature of existence that better writers than me would have done, I found myself reaching for my phone.

In an instant, I was no longer present in what should have been quite a moment. Instead, I opened up Facebook – and quickly, almost out of habit, found myself flipping through a few Reels. I watched a Gen-Z man talking about software bugs in a Nintendo 64 game I never played. Then a low-res, pirated version of an old comedy sketch. And then a compilation of cats knocking objects from tables, set to jaunty music.

Then I just… continued. A video would finish playing, and with a flick of the thumb, I was on to the next one, like a glutton reaching for another biscuit, or a cocaine addict sniffing up one more line.

And it was only when a cool mountain breeze reminded me where I was that I realised that I hate myself.

Reels have broken my brain, and I bet they have broken yours too, because this is what the world is now – a buffet of algorithmic sludge, served up so fast that your brain doesn’t have a chance to think about stopping.

I genuinely think this is a specific new technology that is making life worse. And I think we should worry more about it.

What makes Reels worse

I don’t think I’m just being an old man when I complain about Reels.

Sure, I’m 37 39 and every time I look in the mirror and see my haggard face and lack of hair, I realise I’m not young anymore.

But I do genuinely think that Reels are a uniquely bad form of content.

Like all moral panics, this is partially a snobby aesthetic judgement on my part: If Reels were on average educational,2 or at least contained more intellectual content than a head injury, I would probably be less worried about their ubiquity.

But what makes Reels more of a problem than this is that unlike other new forms of content, they’re always there, and they’re wildly addictive.

This is because we can’t just put Reels down or switch them off. We do not watch them on the screen in the corner of the living room – they’re on the screen that we have in our pockets, and carry with us everywhere, from funeral services to toilet cubicles.

And now because Google and Meta are chasing engagement, they’re not just quarantined on TikTok, they’re unavoidable on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. So whether we like it or not, if we use the internet in 2025, we’re going to encounter Reels.

But this isn’t the worst part.

What scares me most is that they are designed to be almost uniquely addictive. They are arguably the first content format that is truly native to mobile devices - which means our phones are particularly well-optimised to make us compulsive consumers.

This is very different to, ahem, podcasts and email newsletters – both of which are also new ways of consuming content. In those cases, they’re not consumed in a radically different way to how we used to listen to the radio or read newspapers. You might, say, have the former play while doing household chores, or read text-based article on the way to work, just like the old days.

And even ‘traditional’ landscape YouTube isn’t so radically addictive in the same way. Though we might sometimes talk about falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, it’s still an experience analogous to television of old, as videos are more ‘long-form’ – typically ten minutes or more,3 which makes watching a ‘lean back’ experience.

Reels though, are very different.

In all of those above cases, though they also employ algorithms to select stuff they think we might like, they are still mostly ‘opt in’ – we have to be active in our choices of what to consume, whether that’s choosing to play a video or a podcast, or click on an article.

Reels, however, make the decision for us. They are less like the world that existed before, and more like injecting crack directly into the bloodstream.

Each short-form video is only seconds long, is instantly replaced by something else the millisecond we get even slightly bored – and what’s next is not based on who we have chosen to follow. Instead, it is based entirely on our revealed preference – the algorithm selects what’s next based on what we actually like to watch, not what we say we want. And because of how human brains work, this inevitably means lapsing into the video equivalent of junk food.

And sure, I admit that individual Reels may be fun – and that like junk food, they can be safely enjoyed in moderation. But the problem is that Reels are not consumed in moderation – it’s more like digital foie gras, and we’re the shackled geese being force fed garbage.

The benefits of friction

Arguing that Reels are bad does make me a bit uncomfortable.

This is because a significant part of my schtick writing on the internet is that we should make it easier for people to have more stuff, and that broadly speaking new technology improves our lives. So in most cases, I’m very keen to reduce the amount of ‘friction’ in our lives, whether it’s the hoops you have to jump through to build a house or interact with government services.

But what my Reels hate has made me appreciate more is that when there are social ills involved, friction can actually be a good thing.

For example, in some American states when you buy a gun, there is a mandatory waiting period before you can get your hands on it. This is a good thing, because if you’re buying it in anger, you’re more likely to have calmed down before you have the opportunity to pull the trigger.

However, perhaps the best analogy for Reels is gambling, as both can be fun, while also being self-destructive.

That’s why in many contexts, gambling is heavily regulated, to try and navigate this tension. For example, it might make sense to ban or restrict gambling apps, while supporting the existence of physical casinos – the theory being that if it is less convenient, it makes it harder for people to become seriously addicted, while still allowing us to have an enjoyable night out playing poker or whatever.

So I guess I’m wondering… do we need some sort of intervention here?

What do I want to happen?

The logic of my argument at this point suggests some sort of regulatory action by the government against the firms peddling Reels – but honestly, I’m not sure what I actually want to happen here.

Instinctively, it feels pretty crazy to suggest that regulators should limit the pernicious impact of Reels4 (beyond banning TikTok, which I think we should do for geopolitical reasons), but there is some precedent, as several countries and the European Union have passed laws imposing certain conditions on the contents of news feeds.

For example, here in the UK, we have the Online Safety Act, which forces a “duty of care” on platform companies like Facebook and YouTube, and obliges them to disclose how their algorithms select what is seen.

And other countries have laws that regulate the types of content offered by platforms – and not just obviously harmful things like content that promotes suicide. For example, France has passed a law which obliges Netflix to ensure at least 30% of its catalogue is European-made.

So given this, it wouldn’t be totally weird for the government to say “stop forcing super-addictive Reels in our faces and offer us something more intellectually nutritious”.

But on the other hand, this seems absurdly nannying. After all, the platforms haven’t really done anything wrong: They’ve just optimised their products to respond to the revealed preferences of their users. The problem isn’t that Facebook wants us to watch Reels. The problem is that we really want to watch Reels.

So perhaps what we ultimately need isn’t a new law, or for regulators to step in. What we need instead is a new cultural norm. We need to train ourselves – and then train others to modify our behaviour, to create a less Reels-addled world.

This means that when we reach for our phones while looking out at the Swiss mountains, we should be shamed by our friends. When we flick through Reels instead of reading a more cerebral email newsletter, we should feel bad about ourselves. And prominent political and cultural figures should speak out and warn people about the evils of Reels.5

In other words, though I think Reels are more than just another moral panic, perhaps a moral panic is, ironically, exactly what we need to make Reels less damaging to society.

If you enjoyed this then make sure you subscribe (for free!) to get my takes direct to your inbox. It’s much more intellectually nutritious than Reels!

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin discuss Zack Polanski’s claim that food is too expensive – and why politicians should face up to difficult trade-offs. And James makes himself popular by defending the poor, beleaguer mega-corporations that own supermarkets.

• And then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how Switzerland would have built HS2 – and why it wouldn’t have been a disaster.

James’s post about Liam Byrne, which was discussed in the episode is here.

James’s newsletter is here, and his post about the Elon Musk debate is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we’re joined by Andrew Hunter Murray to talk about his new book (out this week!), and his experience at the EV charging Select Committee. Plus I try to sell Martin on why he should care about the National Data Library. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

Sometimes when a problem is too difficult to figure out, it’s easier to have a displacement argument instead.

To pick the most wildly contentious possible example, we often see this in debates about the Middle East. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is impossibly complicated, and there is very little the British government can do to influence events in the region. Whether or not we restrict arms sales to Israel, or choose to recognise Palestinian statehood, we are basically completely irrelevant to events on the ground.

That’s why inevitably, when there is controversy over the conflict in Britain, it is often via a displacement argument. We argue about the use of words and symbols. We judge politicians by the positions they express on the conflict, even if it is very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu is nervously refreshing his phone, waiting to find out what the honourable member for Northampton West thinks about what he is doing.

And though, inevitably, these controversies dominate news agendas, spark thousands of furious posts and fray the bonds of countless friendships, at the end of the day the intractable problem of the Middle East remains exactly as it was before.

But no one wants to talk about what actual solutions might look like, because the question is too hard. So we displace it and argue about something else instead.

And the issue of the Middle East isn’t the only place that this happens. We’re also seeing the same thing happen over what should be done about Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter.

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we’re joined by Andrew Hunter Murray to talk about his new book (out this week!), and his experience at the EV charging Select Committee. Plus I try to sell Martin on why he should care about the National Data Library. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

WRITING! Don’t forget to catch up with my piece on the National Data Library, which includes a short interview with digital minister Ian Murray. I posted it on Friday lunchtime, so you might have missed it! Go have a read!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately, plus some shorter takes.

This time I’m featuring:

• A deep-dive into the mind of Andy Burnham and the mystery of Burnhamism.

• A dive into the water usage in British data centres

• My take on the new Steve Coogan show ‘Legends’

• A great video about the infamous Hinckley Point C ‘fish disco’

• The problem with Operation Brock

• Why Wes and Andy promising electoral reform could hang a millstone around their necks

• …And another example of just how mad Britain’s local government is

Now let’s get started!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James tries to persuade Martin that he’s solved the mystery of the National Data Library.

• And we speak to Andrew Hunter Murray about his big day out at the EV charging select committee!

Andrew’s new book, Bad Deeds is out this week! Make sure you buy it!

James’s newsletter is here, and his post about the National Data Library is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

Today is a big day. One of the core mysteries at the heart of British politics might have finally been solved.

No, sadly I’m not talking about the final resting place of the infamous ‘Ed Stone’, nor have we discovered why the Postcode Address File is still trapped in the clutches of Royal Mail, in defiance of all logic.

Instead, I’m talking about the mystery of the National Data Library (NDL).

I’ve written about the NDL before. The phrase first emerged out of various think-tanks and think-pieces spitballing in the run-up to the last General Election about how the government could do better things with data. Then it was hastily adopted by the Labour Party, making its way into the manifesto, which pledged that:

“[W]e will create a National Data Library to bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit.”

In truth though, it was never exactly clear what the Labour Party, and now Labour government, thought the NDL was supposed to be. If I were to be both accurate and unkind, until recently it was mostly an intriguing name, backed by little of substance.

And this was driving me pretty crazy. For the past couple of years I’ve made a habit of asking anyone I encounter even tangentially connected with the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) if they know what the NDL is supposed to be. Not a single person was able to give a clear answer.

But now, everything changes, at least a little bit.

Today the story the government wants to talk about is a new pilot project to better connect health, education and childcare data in three local authorities – Hammersmith, Leeds and Liverpool. The idea is that by facilitating GPs and educators sharing data, kids will not fall through the cracks, and will receive the support they need.

This is undoubtedly a worthy and good project in and of itself. But the real nerds watching closely will also spot something else about today’s announcement: That the government is explicitly drawing a connection between this pilot1 and the plans for the NDL. That’s why, in tandem with this, today the long-neglected government data repository, data.gov.uk, has been officially rebranded as the National Data Library.

And perhaps even more notable, an actual government minister has kindly taken the time to answer some of my questions about it.

So what actually is the NDL? What will it do? How will it work? And what problems will it solve?

To explain, I’m going to split this post into two parts – first, the short chat I had with Digital Minister Ian Murray, and then below that I’ll offer my own analysis and explanation of what it all means.

If you enjoy ultra-nerdy policy coverage like this, then make sure you subscribe to get more of This Sort Of Thing direct to your inbox.

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An interview with Digital Minister Ian Murray

James: Today marks the relaunch of data.gov.uk as the National Data Library. In a nutshell, what do you think are the biggest upgrades that are now coming in because of the NDL?

Murray: The NDL is essentially the top skin for what we’ve already got. So we’ve got data.gov.uk. It’s a bit of a mess. So the first stage of NDL is to get all of those datasets maintained, get them not necessarily standardised, but interoperable, get all the broken links sorted.

The second stage is then to add more datasets and have the NDL as an engine that can search them and bring those datasets together [thematically].

The third thing would be to use the NDL as a source the private sector can use to innovate etc, so the data would have a real value as well not just for innovation but also in terms of a monetisation value too.

James: In the slightly longer term, what sort of problems do you think the NDL will be specifically solving?

Murray: We have a data rich environment in the UK, and data has a huge economic value. But also there’s the value of bringing datasets together for better public policy – being able to understand what’s happening better.

But it’s also about the individuals. I’ve just spoken to parents who try to navigate an impenetrable system, with government departments that don’t talk to each other, because they can’t.

I think the best phrase that somebody gave me today was that ‘parents are experts on their children but not the system, and the [government] are experts on the system but not children’ – and that’s essentially what we’re trying to resolve with the National Data Library.

James: My audience are very much the data-nerds who want to connect things together and go digging through datasets and so on…

Murray: If you think about this from an “I love data” data-nerds perspective, the National Data Library is essentially going to be bringing together all the datasets that government has, and new datasets, giving you the ability to innovate.

James: I know the early years launch today is a project which is technically separate to the NDL, but it’s thematically related. In the longer term, do you see the role of the NDL also going in the direction of handling personal data or more specialist data, with the NDL as the mediating layer? Or is it going to stay focused on high-level, aggregated data sets?

Murray: We’ll always have the aggregated and federated datasets because government departments will still hold [their own] data. But the whole point of the NDL is to try and bring it together.

So from a data perspective, there’s probably four levels of data [that] the NDL, when it’s all operational, and in a utopian world, [will use].

There’s anonymised data that it can bring together for academics and innovators to see what’s going on, and to innovate with new products and services on that. TfL data, for example, is a really good example of open data.

The second level is that personalised data that the public [sector] holds. So the public have all of this data already. It’s just all over the place. So bringing that together for the benefit of the individual in a personalised way is really important. I suppose the One Patient Record for the NHS is a way of thinking about that.

The third thing is to bring data together to allow practitioners to develop services that are much more targeted. And then the fourth thing is for data to come together for governments to put public policy in place that actually responds to problems.

So from a data perspective, you can see how the National Data Library is the building block for which you can try to do all of these things and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

James: Is the NDL team, or are you as the minister, going to have a stick to beat other government departments, or other bits of the public sector, who hold useful data, to tell them to publish it, or improve the way it’s published, or basically wrangle their data into a better shape?

Murray: It’s actually more carrot than stick, because for government departments the carrot is that they end up with better, more efficient services. It saves them money, and they end up with a citizen interaction and engagement that is much more positive and efficient.

It also frees up an awful lot of professional work. If you think about a social worker who deals with the most complex and emotive child protection cases, if they’re able to use data to make sure they can do more [casework] rather than being in the weeds of [being] not quite sure where to target, then you can see how a service at that level can become much better.

A practitioner in children’s health said to me today, if we can find a system that allows data to reach them, and then do something [with] it, then that’s what the data should be used for.

James: Do you have a rule about how you decide what datasets are going to be published freely and openly versus which are going to be made commercially available for a price? I’m very keen on opening up geospatial data. So things like the Postcode Address File….

Murray: Yeah…

James: Is that an endorsement of opening up the Postcode Address File? Can I put you on the spot about that?

Murray: Well, it’s my endorsement of saying that data is very valuable and very useful!

James: So my question there is basically, do you have a rule or a way of differentiating between what data should be put out for free and what should be made commercially available, and where you draw the line?

Murray: No, not yet, but that’s what the NDL is developing. But I suppose to answer your question on that basis, there’s probably three or four [types] of data that government has, isn’t there?

There’s internal government data for government to use. There’s open access data for everyone to use to innovate. There’s then personal data that is held by government that only specific parts of government and individuals should be able to use. And then there’s government data that can be commercialised.

What falls into those four buckets, a lot of it is fairly obvious, but there’ll be other stuff that’s not. So the structure of NDL, and the way I’d like to see it operate, is for as much of it to be open data as possible for innovation purposes.

James: Finally, can you paint me a picture? Imagine the NDL has been going for five years. What role will the NDL be playing?

Murray: We’ve talked a lot about the technicalities of data and the NDL. But if we turn the telescope around and look at it from the other side, it’s got to be outcomes based. And those outcomes, for me, would be much more innovation because we have open data, much better interoperability between government departments, much better personal control of the data that people hold on themselves.

But ultimately, if we look at what we’ve launched today in terms of the [early years pilot], we’re trying to cut the gap of the third of children who go to school without the basic needs met. And that’s a half of the children who are on free school meals. So the [goal] is to lower those figures considerably. I think we want to get to them down to 25 percent, with the trend lower. So if you turn the whole NDL telescope around, it’s about it’s about good outcomes for the public, and I think the NDL will help us deliver that.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, as human speech is inherently messy. I have focused on preserving the substance of the Minister’s answers.

London Gateway Services

So that’s what Minister Ian Murray had to say. Now let’s get into the weeds, and disentangle some of the details of what the NDL actually is.

The reality is that since the government came to power, the question of exactly what the NDL is for has been a subject of pretty intense debate. A year or so ago, I remember being told about how inside the department, there was a fairly long-running plan to figure out how to translate the pledge into policy. At one point, someone described to me how the NDL team was bringing in some hugely talented and competent people – but there was, er, a ‘lack of strategic direction’.

And what’s clear from today’s announcement is that, perhaps reflecting this uncertainty, DSIT has decided to take an incremental approach to figuring out the full scope of what the NDL’s role should be – and it is starting rather modestly.

So what is the NDL today? At its core, it is a relaunched data.gov.uk. This was an open-data gateway launched way back in 2010 by Tim Berners-Lee, the idea being that the government would host and link to public sector datasets, all from one place.

And if you head there today, you’ll see pretty much the same thing, with various datasets and APIs from across government grouped into different thematic areas, for users to poke around in.

This perhaps doesn’t match some of the loftier claims made about the NDL over the past couple of years, but the renewed focus is a useful one. By the Minister’s own admission above, the old data.gov.uk was a mess, with various broken links, out-of-date datasets and so on.2 So the current NDL team has focused on basically bringing the gateway up-to-date, including improving things like the available metadata that describes the datasets that are available, to make them more discoverable, so that more people will make use of them.

Then what’s also notable following today’s launch is that we now also have some clarity about what the NDL is not – or at least not yet.

For example, today’s announcement has been coupled with the early years data-sharing pilot described above. But other than a broad thematic connection (both the pilot and the NDL are something about ‘data’), there isn’t really any connection between the two things.3

Under the current NDL roadmap, there are no plans for the NDL to be the place to go to, say, securely share personal data across public services. It won’t be where GPs and teachers login to connect the datasets. That will presumably happen on separate systems, built by other people, in other places.

Instead, the current intention for the NDL is that it will remain focused on aggregating high-level, open, public datasets of the sort you can see on data.gov.uk now – everything from coastal erosion data to immigration statistics.

In fact, this is where the ‘library’ metaphor perhaps works best – the idea is that the NDL will ‘curate’ the most important datasets, much like how a library has to choose which books it stocks.

Mystery solved?

In the title of this piece I say that we ‘sort of’ know what the National Data Library is now. I say this, because I think what’s also clear is that the future of the NDL is largely still up for grabs.

That’s why everyone from the Minister downwards is talking about what the platform ‘could’ do in the future – and, I assume, why the NDL programme was given £100m last year. That implies something more ambitious than an updated website.

And it’s possible to imagine plenty of futures for the NDL. Could it become the front door to Trusted Research Environments, that does let researchers poke around inside sensitive public sector data, a bit like the excellent OpenSafely?

Or could it become the gateway to government data not just for the human data nerds, but for the AI bots? One idea I particularly like is this proposal by the Open Data Institute, which pitches that the NDL’s job should be wrangling government data into a format so that AI agents, acting autonomously, can access public sector data. This will be particularly important in the future – as government data can provide valuable ground-truth information, that will make AI chatbots and agents more reliable.

And this brings me to what I think is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity with the NDL launch so far – and that’s the government not giving DSIT some form of enforcement power to oblige other government departments and public sector bodies to open up their data where they can, and set the standards for how it should be released.

This is because if you look back at the early 2010s, the reason the Government Digital Service (GDS) was able to transform how the government does digital with the GOV.UK website, it wasn’t just because they had the smartest coders or the boldest vision – it was because they had the power. At the time, GDS was handed the authority from David Cameron to approve or deny any digital spending across the entire government, which meant that every other department had to follow new, user-centric GDS rules.

And my fear is that if the NDL team doesn’t have a baseball bat covered in spikes with which to enforce its will, then it will be harder to persuade the rest of government to get with the programme and open up their datasets and build APIs.

But these are questions for the future. What’s notable today is that we – finally – know what the National Data Library is. Or at least what it is right now. And though the government is starting small, it’s clearly coupled with some pretty bold aspirations in the longer run.

Now, about that postcode data…

If you’ve read this much about the National Data Library, then you will definitely enjoy my newsletter. So make sure that you’re subscribed (for free!) to get more stuff like this.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• The government is proposing new measures to stop NIMBYs vexatiously taking energy projects to judicial review!

• And James tries to persuade Martin that space-based data centres aren’t a completely ridiculous idea.

The Ben Thompson article making the case for space data centres is here.

James’s newsletter is here, and his post about Japan (including the train-bus!) is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I finally find an opportunity to bore on at Martin about the Postcode Address File, and we speak to Lord Mark Pack about the problem with secondary legislation – and how it is slowing down government. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes.

This week, I’m showing incredible restraint by limiting myself to just two short stories from my trip to Japan – one of which is about the mysterious island above. Plus, I’ve got some great reads on:

• The government’s crazy response to the Iran energy crisis

• How AI is flying planes now

• Why data centres in space… might actually work (seriously)

• …and how Japan does railways right!

Now let’s get started!

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Apologies for the unusual service for the last few weeks – I’ve been on holiday to the same place that every other childless millennial visits and makes their entire personality for a while: Japan.

It was a pretty epic, two-and-a-bit-week trip, and I’ll desperately try not to bore you senseless with what-I-did-on-my-holidays content,1 but I can’t let it go entirely, as Japan is a fascinating place if you’re interested in the sort of topics I tend to write about in my newsletter. It’s simultaneously both an urbanist, YIMBY paradise – and a bureaucratic nightmare.

So I thought it would be fun to share some of my observations from my first visit to the country. To be clear, I’m definitely not claiming to be an expert in Japan, and this is very much not journalism – it’s just my observations as I’ve done the usual tourist things of visiting shrines, monorails and the Nintendo Museum. But I hope you’ll enjoy it, as below the paywall I’m offering short takes on:

• Japan’s strange retro-futurist approach to technology.

• How the national transit card works as a de-facto digital ID.

• The benefits of living in a high-trust society.

• The unexpected way that Japanese audiences behave at events.

• And (most exciting of all) a bus that turns into a train!

And if that last one isn’t an unbeatable sell to persuade you to take out a paid subscription, I don’t know what is. So let’s get started!

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