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!

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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 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.

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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!

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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!

Read more

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!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• For the first time on the pod, James makes the case for liberating the Postcode Address File.

• And we speak to Lord Mark Pack about how Secondary Legislation is a hidden problem that is slowing down the business of government.

Mark’s excellent Lord’s Eye View newsletter is here, and The Week In Polls is here.

James’s newsletter is here, and he’ll have a guest post up by the time you’re reading this.

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 dig into another example of BBC local journalism having a weird NIMBY bias, in this case against the new Universal Theme Park. Then I speak to Dan Mead from ThinkLabour, about the case against nationalising Thames Water. 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 lately.

I’m still on holiday, so there won’t be a ‘proper’ essay post for a couple of weeks. But next week I’ll be dropping something I hope you’ll find fun or interesting. And in the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed the excellent guest posts on how Openreach might be inadvertently helping Reform, and on how Chinese robotaxis could create a big security problem for Britain.

Anyway, let’s get on with a slightly shorter selection of links than usual. This time I’m featuring…

• A video featuring my acting debut (!)

• Palantir seemingly working as it should do...

• How AI is helping tackle ‘fatbergs’ in our drains

• Yet another reason Rishi’s HS2 cancellations were disastrous

• And another grim example of the BBC’s NIMBY bias

The road that fell down a cliff (Martin Robbins)

Before the paywall, I wanted to feature my YIMBY Pod co-host Martin’s lates YouTube video. He’s been down to Galley Hill Road, which I wrote about last year, and you might spot a familiar face if you look carefully…

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig into another example of BBC local journalism having a weird NIMBY bias, in this case against the new Universal Theme Park. Then I speak to Dan Mead from ThinkLabour, about the case against nationalising Thames Water. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Following the news that the Treasury is reportedly urging supermarkets to introduce (voluntary) price controls on certain goods, and as I’m still on holiday, I thought it would be a good time to liberate this post from last September from behind the paywall – as it speaks a little to the issue,1 and also I think it is pretty good.

So please enjoy my spirited defence of, er, Big Supermarket!

Sometimes I like to check in on YouTube Shorts to see what the hot new thing is with Gen-Z, so I can pretend that I’m not yet old and out of touch.

That’s how I learned recently that the next ‘Labubu’ could well be Labour MP Liam Byrne, who is the star of this viral short published by the campaign group 38 Degrees.2

As you can see above, it’s a clip from the Business and Trade Committee, which Byrne chairs. In the video, he holds up two identical packs of Weetabix, and explains that one was bought from a Tesco Express in a poorer part of his constituency for £2.20, and the other was bought from a larger Tesco supermarket in a leafier area, for just £2.

At the time of writing, the short has 5.7 million views, demonstrating that it’s an effective piece of theatre, as sitting watching him explain this are two senior executives from Tesco and Sainsbury’s.3

Byrne is also clearly proud of the gotcha. He’s released a longer cut of the exchange on his own YouTube channel and accuses the supermarkets of “two-tier pricing”, which he also connects to the broader themes of his book on wealth inequality.

And it is this unfairness that really animates him.

If you watch the longer video, or read the transcript of the session, you’ll see that Byrne and his fellow Labour MP Matt Western really hammer away at the price disparity between supermarkets and smaller convenience stores, like it is a damning moral indictment of the supermarkets.

“Sainsbury’s made a profit of nearly £1 billion last year. Tesco’s profit was nearly £2.8 billion, so both businesses are extremely profitable. The question for us is why you are charging higher prices for people who can only shop in smaller stores when there is not a profit problem at either of your companies,” says Byrne.

He then turns the screws, asking if ensuring low income customers have access to affordable food is considered an “important mission” for Tesco, and whether the company’s representative thinks the price disparity status quo is “basically fine”.

Now here’s the point where I’m going to make myself unpopular, as I can’t really see what the supermarkets are doing wrong here. I think any attempt to imbue their actions with moral meaning is fundamentally a misdiagnosis of the problem – and if we want to mitigate this disparity, we need to get serious about understanding the actual problem.

So join me behind the paywall as we dive into the economics of supermarkets, the competitiveness of the grocery industry, and the most on-brand solution you could possibly imagine.4

An unusual target

Let’s start with the pricing disparity. Sure, Byrne is accurately describing a bad outcome – it’s bad that poor people are paying more for groceries on a like-for-like basis than rich people. But the explanation why is basic economics: It’s down to operating costs and economies of scale.

Dominic Morrey, the Tesco guy at the committee, said as much in his response to Byrne, which for some reason 38 Degrees neglected to include in their viral clip:

“The differential is based on the fact that those stores have longer trading hours, take different approaches to maintaining, updating and supplying them, and can often be in locations that are more expensive to run than an out-of-town superstore. We have to reflect those price differentials, and that is what we do.”

I think this is basically fair enough.

If you imagine two stores – one a small, town-centre convenience store, and the other a large, out-of-town supermarket – then fixed costs like rent and staff are going to be higher on a per-square-metre basis in the smaller store. Likewise, supplying goods to the smaller store will be costlier too, as instead of one lorry delivering a couple of pallets of Weetabix to one location, boxes will have to be decanted into smaller packages, and then transported to numerous different locations.5

So of course, prices are going to be higher than in larger stores.

And similarly, though the disparity may be an outcome of this reality, I don’t think the blame can really be placed on the supermarkets themselves, as there is no evidence that it is corporate greed driving the supermarkets to rapaciously target low-income customers.

We know this because in July 2023, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published an analysis of the grocery industry in light of the cost-of-living crisis, and found that operating margins had actually fallen since the prior year. This suggests that though supermarkets are also facing higher prices than before the crisis, they are not passing all of the extra costs on to consumers.6

The CMA also notes increased market share for Aldi and Lidl, the lowest-priced stores, which suggests that customers are shopping around – also indicating that prices in the industry can’t easily be hiked without losing customers. So even if the supermarkets wanted to rip off their customers, it would harm them to do so.

And we can even see this in the actual financial results of Sainsbury’s and Tesco, the two supermarkets at the committee.

For example, though Byrne points out that Sainsbury’s profit in the most recent year was £1.8bn and Tesco’s was £2.8bn, this was on a turnover of £32.8bn and £69.9bn respectively – meaning operating margins of under 5% for both. This doesn’t exactly scream ‘evil extractive corporations’ to me.

So in other words, though we may want to paint supermarkets as avatars of the worst excesses of the capitalist machine, the annoying reality is that they’re not. The grocery industry is actually pretty damn competitive, the market is functioning as intended, and selling groceries is pretty capital-intensive for relatively small returns!

The values of the Carphone Warehouse

What I find strange about Byrne’s haranguing of the supermarkets is that… surely he must know everything I’ve said above? Not only is he a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and someone who knows far more than I ever will about economics, but he says as much in his book, The Inequality of Wealth.

The core argument of the book is that the reason we have such an unequal society is because of ‘rent-seeking’, which Byrne describes7 as “the business not only of extracting more in profit than is strictly needed to mobilise effort to achieve some objective, but also an attempt to maximize rewards by securing privileges through the political arena”.

A classic example of this is, well, rent. If you pay rent to a landlord, they earn passive income just by virtue of owning the property – not by actually doing anything (or at least not that much).8

Yet as Byrne appears to recognise in his book, but seems to forget when wielding Weetabix, is that though rent-seeking behaviour often results in bad things, it’s not really a moral choice on the part of corporations per se – it’s just every actor in a given system is responding to incentives.

And to believe otherwise would be the same fallacy as when people pretend that corporations waving pride flags, donating to charity or talking about how much they care about privacy is because they have some underlying values beyond turning a profit. They don’t – they’re just responding to incentives and maximising their position, per whatever rules of the game have been set.9

So surely the more important question for the committee is not whether the supermarket executives agree with Byrne that affordable food is morally an “important mission”, but more about what outcomes the market is structured to deliver, and how it can be shaped to deliver something more desirable?

Supply-side economics

To be clear, I’m not claiming that the grocery industry status quo is great.

There were a number of real problems raised in the same session, for example.

Labour MP Antonia Bance raised the issue of infant formula. There, the CMA found that the market was not functioning effectively, and urged the supermarkets to voluntarily work to address it (before a regulator forces them to).

Similarly, Sarah Edwards, another Labour MP, raised the issue of loyalty card pricing. This is where Nectar/Clubcard users get a discount on a number of goods. She was concerned about how these schemes can be hard to access for people in temporary accommodation, because of the need to register with an address.10

Then more broadly, there are plenty of other long-standing grocery industry problems we can think of too, like monopsony – where supermarkets are in a disproportionately advantaged position when negotiating with farmers and other suppliers, because the grocery industry is so consolidated. And I haven’t even mentioned the scourge of England’s Sunday trading laws.

And in fact, I do think Byrne is right here that the status quo is bad. It really is unfortunate that the poorest people in his constituency are getting hit with the highest prices. But ultimately his moral outrage feels a bit misplaced. The problem isn’t rent-seeking – it’s economics.

However, acknowledging this gets us to the more interesting question: What policy interventions could we make to remedy this unfortunate outcome?

One option could be for the government to force supermarkets to charge the same prices in convenience store formats as they do in larger supermarkets. But I’m not sure that wouldn’t have unintended consequences – as the grocery business model works on relatively small margins. So why wouldn’t Tesco just close its Express stores?

Another could be to directly subsidise stores in poor areas to cut prices – but this would be a strange use of taxpayers’ money. Or perhaps we could increase welfare spending, so that people on low incomes have more money to start with? In principle, I’m extremely supportive of having a wildly more generous safety net, but you don’t need to be a sophisticated scholar of British politics to understand why that might be… politically tricky.

So ultimately any lasting intervention is going to have to be on the supply-side: If the underlying costs associated with convenience formats can be cut, so can prices! I’m not sure exactly how this could be done, as most stores like this are already pretty lean and running with minimal staff – most checkouts at stores like this are now self-service, for instance.

Though perhaps more could be done in terms of delivery? If self-driving lorries become a reality, the cost of supplying smaller stores could fall. Or if autonomous cars and delivery drones take off, and if we achieve abundant mobility, the cost of home delivery will fall, and deliveries will be more ubiquitous. That would mean more people could be served their groceries direct from distribution centres, taking advantage of economies of scale even greater than those at supermarkets.

But as much as I may sincerely believe these things to be plausible in the future, I realise this is a hard sell. And in any case, it is still unlikely to close the gap completely with large format stores – meaning the disparity will persist, because economics is a real thing that exists.

One incomplete solution

Unfortunately then, I don’t think there is a clean solution to this problem. Shame won’t work, and the underlying economics of the grocery industry is stacked against any solution.

But there is something that I think the government could do, which may mitigate the problem at least a little bit. And that’s to make pricing more transparent.

There is a precedent for this. A couple of years ago, the CMA created a voluntary scheme in which fuel retailers would share their pricing data, and publish it as a machine-readable file.

You can see the datasets here, and the upshot is that it means that anyone can go online and see the price of fuel at any petrol station in the country. And collecting the data in one place makes it possible to make maps like the one below, which reveal that if you fill up at the Esso in Camden Town, you’ll pay 137.9p per litre – but if you instead head to the Asda on the Old Kent Road, it’s only 132.7p.

At the moment, the scheme is only voluntary and is only updated once per day. But the government has said that by the end of 2025, it’ll be a legal requirement, and there will be an API that updates in real-time. So by next year, you can probably expect to start seeing fuel prices in Google Maps and on your in-car Satnav.

Anyway – you can probably see where I’m going with this. Why can’t we make supermarkets do the same for groceries?

It wouldn’t be technically difficult. All of the major supermarket chains already carefully manage their inventory in enormous databases, and every product already has a barcode number (or ‘SKU’). So adding some code to export or publish pricing data for even hundreds of thousands of products would be relatively trivial.11

But if it were to happen, it would instantly prove useful to price-sensitive consumers, as it would tell them where to find the cheapest goods. It would drive down prices as differences are made stark. And it would no doubt lead to an entire ecosystem of third-party price comparison apps, to help customers find the best deals.

Sounds crazy? Perhaps. But not only has the CMA been exploring price transparency schemes, there are already some countries where supermarket pricing data is published. Israel, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico already have laws demanding transparency, and there have been proposals for similar in Australia and Austria.

It appears the laws may work too. According to one study of the Israeli law, it ended up reducing prices by around 4-5%.

So though I don’t think this would solve everything, perhaps this could be a better cause for Liam Byrne to take up with the supermarkets? I’m not convinced that moralising will reduce prices – but I think a little more price transparency just might.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig into another example of BBC local journalism having a weird NIMBY bias, in this case against the new Universal Theme Park. Then I speak to Dan Mead from ThinkLabour, about the case against nationalising Thames Water. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

I’m on holiday for the next few weeks but worry not, I have recruited a few of my smartest friends to write guest posts! This week’s is from Tym Syrytczyk from a new think tank, the Institute for Driverless Transport. Tym also writes his own fantastic Substack at Self Driving Insights, so make sure to subscribe if you want to understand the brave new, autonomous world that we’re heading into.

Last month, the first of a new fleet of robotaxis arrived in London. The cars are made by Apollo Go, an autonomous vehicle company owned by Chinese tech-giant Baidu. It’s the third company with Robotaxi ambitions in Britain, following Google-owned Waymo, and British ‘unicorn’ Wayve, both of which have begun testing in the capital in recent months.

What makes Apollo Go different is that it means for the first time, Londoners could one day soon find themselves hailing a ride in a vehicle designed, built, and driven by software that’s entirely made in China.

This is, unsurprisingly, controversial, because though China is a key trade partner for Britain, it is also a strategic adversary. So it seems sensible to ask the questions: Should we worry? Are there any risks here? And if there are, how can we mitigate them?

The Chinese threat

So why does it matter that these robotaxis are Chinese? One reason for concern is that last year, the Norwegian transport agency, Ruter, found remote-access kill-switches buried inside its own Chinese-made buses.

Arguably, this is not a reason to worry. It is standard practice for manufacturers to update the software in modern vehicles remotely. ‘Over-The-Air’ updates are common for cybersecurity patches and are widespread for autonomous vehicles and robotaxis.

But in this case, a Romanian eSIM was discovered on the buses that could conceivably switch off the power supply – a capability that’s hard to justify for normal vehicle maintenance. That’s why Ruter claims that the buses could conceivably have been stopped remotely if a command were to be sent by the manufacturer.

So the worry is the same vulnerability could exist in Chinese-made autonomous vehicles here in Britain.1

And though there is no evidence of any foul play on the part of Apollo Go or other Chinese operators in the UK, there are more circumstantial reasons this should, in principle, concern us. For example, China’s 2017 national intelligence law requires Chinese organisations and citizens to support state intelligence work when required – conceivably obliging Chinese companies to follow the Chinese government’s orders.

So this essentially elevates the risk. The more deeply Chinese firms are embedded into Britain’s transport infrastructure, the greater the potential for Chinese national security operations to make use of this infrastructure against us, if tensions between China and the west were to rise.

National security

The security risks also go well beyond simply powering down buses or robotaxis. Autonomous vehicles, if misused, can create both new surveillance and physical security risks.

For example, Robotaxis are designed to track human motion. They can scan hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles around them. This makes them potentially useful as mobile surveillance or for the extended tracking of specific individuals. One does not even have to use the robotaxi service to conceivably be tracked, as autonomous vehicles scan public roads. They could even be routed to prioritise surveilling key buildings, to keep watch on who goes in and out.

Then there’s also a direct physical security risk.

Many autonomous vehicle companies, though not all, have remote control features as part of their services. In Apollo Go’s case, a single remote operator reportedly has access to multiple vehicles. In principle, the intended uses are uncontroversial, such as making way for emergency vehicles or helping Apollo’s vehicles not get stuck. But this same remote control capability could also conceivably be used with bad intentions that can be easily imagined, from terrorist attacks to simply blocking traffic.

But this is not the only risk. The bigger problem is that autonomous driving behaviour is largely determined by shared software deployed across the fleet, perhaps with local modifications for particular cities.

This means a single bug, flawed update, or a cyber attack can make many vehicles behave in the same risky way at the same time, potentially creating chaos.

In fact, we’ve seen this happen already. Earlier this year in Wuhan, hundreds of Apollo Go robotaxis stopped suddenly, including in live traffic, during what was described as a cybersecurity incident.

So even if Apollo Go stores all service data in the UK as the company has promised, that alone should not be enough to reassure regulators. Instead the more important question is whether the UK can trust the company operating the fleet, and the company controlling the autonomy software, to both defend their fleet from cyber attacks, and to never to misuse that access themselves.

The counterargument

This all sounds pretty scary, but there is a plausible counter-argument: that Britain already uses plenty of Chinese technology. Pretty much every piece of modern tech is manufactured in China – the device you’re reading this on now was probably made in China.

But once again, this comes back to ownership and perceptions of risk. We already have millions of Chinese-manufactured iPhones in the UK, all with cameras and Face ID features. However, a camera manufactured in China alone does not necessarily create large-scale surveillance risk. In this case, the product owner, Apple, and its manufacturing partner, Foxconn, are trusted actors. And though iPhones are assembled in China, the operating system, data governance and product control sit with Apple, an American company.

That’s why policymakers care more about TikTok, in which a Chinese company owns the data going through the app, rather than the phones themselves.

And this brings us to perhaps the best analogy for the Chinese autonomous car situation – the case of Huawei, the Chinese company that makes much of the phone network infrastructure that makes 5G possible.

For the initial 5G rollout, Huawei’s equipment was used in UK phone networks, potentially giving the company (and therefore the Chinese government) a direct window into the mobile traffic of millions of British people.

But in 2020, the government ordered that Huawei’s equipment be ripped out and replaced, to limit the perceived risks. Arguably there is a case for doing the same with Chinese-owned robotaxis – and some important players are indeed taking this seriously.

For example, some parts of the Ministry of Defence consider Chinese-made electric vehicles to be a surveillance risk, and although there is no central national-level policy restricting Chinese vehicles on MOD land, some military officials have banned personnel from connecting their phones to Chinese vehicles or having conversations above ‘Official’ classification in Chinese cars.

Hiding behind brands

London is not the first place to face this dilemma. Back in March, the first robotaxi service in Europe began operating in Zagreb, Croatia. Another Chinese firm, Pony.AI, is supplying both the car, and the self driving software – but in this case, the service is operated by Verne, a Croatian company within the Rimac Group, even though there is little Croatian technology involved. So effectively, what Verne has done is ‘scrub' the national identity of Zagreb’s autonomous deployment with its own branding.

And this has created some ambiguity. Publicly available information does not make clear how much control Verne actually has over its vehicles, or the extent to which Pony.ai retains access to the robotaxis. It is also unclear how much scrutiny Verne placed on Pony.ai’s vehicle supply chain as the whole service announcement and deployment was likely to have been rushed to meet a EU grant deadline.

But for the companies involved, it’s a win-win. Verne has branded the service as its own, and Pony.ai is happy to successfully partner with a European firm, as it enables future market share in Europe. But what it ultimately means is that to the public and many regulators, the service may look Croatian, even if the underlying technology is Chinese.

And why this matters to us is that a similar dynamic is emerging in London through Uber and Lyft’s role in Apollo Go’s deployment, as the ‘country of origin scrubbing’ is happening here.

This is because there won’t be ‘Apollo Go’ robotaxis on the streets of London, like there will be for Waymo. Instead, they will be made available through Uber and Lyft’s ride-hailing platforms. So even if a Chinese company controls the cars under the hood – for most of users, it will appear as though the vehicles are operated by familiar American companies.

The Swiss example

The choice for politicians then, is complicated. It’s a difficult trade-off between embracing new technology and managing the risk posed by a strategic rival.

But there could also be a third way, where we get the best of both worlds, and that’s the approach taken in Switzerland.

Over there, the Swiss public transport operator, PostAuto AG, has signed a deal with Baidu to provide a robotaxi and ride-pooling service from 2027. The cars and the technology are exactly the same as Apollo Go’s proposed London service. However, what’s different is that PostAuto will be forced to comply with strict requirements on operations, for instance ensuring that all remote operators are based in Switzerland and have a Swiss driving licence. PostAuto also owns the vehicles, has full operational control, and has the ability to dismantle them to check for kill-switches if it wishes to do so. The Swiss firm also retains full ownership over the data that’s collected by the vehicles.

This focus on trusted ownership could lead to a more secure service. The Norwegian transport operator owned the buses which allowed for the kill-switch discovery. By analogy, this is also why the US has pushed for American ownership of TikTok on security and oversight grounds.

So could we do the same in Britain too?

On the surface Apollo Go’s British deal may already look like the Swiss model. Rather than operating the service itself, evidence suggests that it has handed that role to Lyft and possibly Uber. So the similarities are there, a trusted Western firm owns the fleet, and Apollo Go supplies the technology.

But there are crucial differences too: PostAuto is a public transport operator with full operational control and a clear mandate to serve Swiss citizens. Lyft and Uber are commercial firms whose primary incentive is growth. The details of Apollo Go’s partnership with Uber remain opaque, but the Lyft press release is revealing. The announcement states that Apollo Go’s role will be to provide vehicles, validate the technology and provide “comprehensive technical support”. Unlike in the PostAuto deployment, Apollo Go’s control over the autonomy software is not explicitly ruled out.

So it remains publicly unclear how much control either firm will have over the software, such as which firm can send an over-the-air update.

A question of risk

In practice, the extent to which Chinese firms contribute to British autonomous vehicle services should depend on the scale of the risk, the strength of oversight, and the degree of operational control held in the UK or by trusted partners.

Right now, Waymo has a hundred vehicles in London, and Apollo Go could scale beyond that size in less than a year. As robotaxi services grow they will inevitably become critical national infrastructure. So now is the time to work out our approach – so that one day in the future, when robotaxis are carrying thousands of people every day, we’re not forced to do an awkward Huawei-style U-turn.

With thanks to Otto for an early reading of this draft and James H for later review.

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• Martin reveals the extraordinary grip one Bedfordshire councillor has on BBC coverage of the new Universal theme park.

• And James speaks to Dan Mead from Labour Together about why nationalising Thames Water might not be the best use of the cash, when can build trams instead.

Dan’s post about Thames Water is here.

James’s newsletter is here, and he’ll have a guest post up by the time you’re reading this.

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.

Hey everyone, I’m still on holiday, so this week I have a guest post from my excellent friend David Landon Cole. Dave is an astute observer of politics, an expert on populist nationalism, and a Labour councillor in Huntingdon. This week, he’s written this fascinating piece for me about how something as innocuous as an infrastructure upgrade could inadvertently fuel discontent.

Earlier this year, a set of legal notices went up around Huntingdon. Openreach, the BT-owned telecoms infrastructure provider, was installing a number of 10m telegraph poles to deliver faster internet to homes, using a bit of law that meant they didn’t have to go through the usual planning process.1 The notices explained that Openreach had also notified the planning department at Huntingdonshire County Council, and that one of the streets where work was due to take place was Bradfield Close.

The problem was, however, that the notices didn’t explain this. They didn’t explain what the telegraph poles were actually for, or what they might look like. They confused Huntingdonshire for a county council, when it is a district council.2 And the Bradfield Close that was mentioned? It doesn’t exist.

What came next was predictable. Residents thought that they were going to have 5G masts outside their homes. These notices were not about 5G masts; they were wooden telegraph poles. Indeed, 5G masts go through the usual planning procedure. Unfortunately, the notice just read ‘five new BT 10m poles’. But if you don’t deal with, well, telegraph poles all day, it’s not obvious what a ‘BT 10m pole’ is or looks like.

To make it worse, the email address on the notices didn’t work. Getting hold of Openreach3 was surprisingly difficult and resulted in boilerplate emails that didn’t acknowledge the mistakes, let alone try to correct them.

However, from Openreach’s point of view, and possibly from yours, this might look like nothing more than a minor clerical error of no real consequence, beyond minor embarrassment for Openreach. I’m guessing that if you’re reading this, you are engaged in public policy, know how to look up legislation, have a lot of social capital, and may even work for Openreach.4 And, anyway, it’s obvious that they meant Huntingdonshire District Council, as the district council is the planning authority, and a quick look at the map will reveal a Bradshaw Close, on the Oxmoor estate.5

Unfortunately, not everyone feels this way. I’ve heard as much from the residents I represent.

What is no doubt legally compliant and efficiently handled inside Openreach looks careless at best and contemptuous at worst if you’re on the receiving end. And it’s hard to have confidence that any objection you raise will be taken seriously.

If you live on Bradshaw Close, it’s easy to feel like a mushroom: you’re kept in the dark and occasionally have shit thrown over you. Though to be honest, it’s true for a lot of people across the country – not because Openreach is uniquely awful, or because Huntingdon is uniquely afflicted, but because there are countless large organisations that affect us every day.

That’s the real issue here – not that people are hacked off with Openreach, but that people are hacked off with the system. Openreach is technically a private company, not part of the state. From the pavement, though, it doesn’t matter; it all looks like the system.

Large organisations, public and private, do things that you have no say over, and it’s hard to understand the mess6 of local7 government, contracted out services, privatised services, and private businesses that affect your day-to-day.

What people see is the asymmetry. When ‘they’ make a mistake, it’s ignored, but when you make a mistake, you get a fine from HMRC.

The path from scepticism to mistrust and distrust is made shorter by repeated institutional interactions that suggest it’s one rule for them and another for you. If you put Bradfield Close on your driving licence instead of Bradshaw Close, you’d be worried about a hefty fine. Openreach can apparently make the same mistake with impunity.

Repeated experiences of bureaucracies not saying what they’re doing, not explaining why they’re doing it, and not holding up their hands when they make a mistake are never going to make someone think the system works for them. In an era of declining trust not just in politics, but in society generally, this reinforces the belief that ‘the system’ will do what it wants. It’s easy to feel that the system was not designed with you in mind, will do what it wants without regard to what you need or want, and will proceed regardless of whether you understand or consent.

Healthy democracies run on scepticism; that is to say, on watching what institutions are doing, partly so they can be held to account and partly because the fact of being watched makes people and institutions behave better. Mistrust is what develops when that scepticism goes unanswered; it is when people conclude that the system is simply indifferent, that engaging with it is a waste of time, and that the most rational response is to stop trying. Distrust is a step further again; it is the belief that the system is not merely unresponsive but self-serving, that it is actively working in its own interests at your expense, and that anyone who tells you otherwise is either naive or in on it.

And it’s not just this one organisation. From having a Facebook post taken down for reasons you don’t understand and with no way of giving your side of the story, to planning applications that go through apparently irrespective of what people nearby think, it can seem like we are perpetually shouting into the void. The fact that a lot of services that look like things the state should do, from water to council housing to fixing potholes, are one way or another done by private companies just adds to the feeling that anything that might look like accountability is carefully excised by the powers that be.

We are not yet a low-trust society8 but it would not surprise anyone to see the 2026 World Values Survey or European Values Survey showing declining confidence in institutions or, indeed, in each other. When co-operation and legitimacy are weakened, we open the door to populism9 and authoritarianism. We are seeing that already with the rise of the Greens and Reform in the UK.

What’s particularly frustrating is that it’s not ideology or malice but institutional habits that stop them from communicating better. There are some really simple things that institutions could do to improve this. These small fixes won’t reverse the populist tide by themselves, but they’re the part each institution actually controls, and continuing to fail at them is a kind of unilateral disarmament; a small daily concession to the people who say the system is contemptuous of you because, in this small instance, they’re right.

So, first up, pay attention to the perspective of the recipient. How does your institution’s notice, your institution’s email, your institution’s letter look to someone encountering them in the wild who doesn’t have the knowledge of someone working inside the system? How does it look to someone who isn’t as well-informed or well-educated as you? How does it look to someone whose Facebook feed is populated by posts from pages titled with things like ‘Council Tax is a Scam’?

Secondly, you should provide more information than you are strictly required to give. The legal requirement may be met by a formal notice, but a lot of problems could be avoided by saying that you’re putting in a wooden pole for faster internet and not a 5G mast like the ones you’ve seen installed around town.

Thirdly, and obviously, acknowledge mistakes openly and correct them. It’s an opportunity to build trust, not just a legal risk.

It’s always going to be difficult for large institutions to respond to every message they get. I’m sure it’s frustrating to have to respond to endless emails that are just not very well-informed. But being more forthcoming with information could actually help reduce those emails. If the various utilities, councils, government departments, banks, and so on took that kind of approach to communication, they could materially strengthen public trust.

In a low-trust society, boring competence, clarity, and courtesy may be among the most important democratic virtues we have.

So, please – put the right email address on your scary-looking legal notice.

You can find David on his Facebook page, or head to his website for bus route maps of Huntingdon, which I feel my audience would be very into.

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

I’m on holiday for the next three weeks, but I will have some guest posts coming up – the first one should be dropping tomorrow. And below the paywall today is indeed an extremely hot short take.

So please do read on, as this time I’m featuring:

• My view on the current Labour leadership drama (including who I think is probably Labour’s best bet).

• A major report from the Labour faction that’s pitching an abundance agenda

• The NHS has made a mad decision about open source software

• A frankly horrifying realisation about the Lower Thames Crossing’s planning process

• And vertical farming... in London?!

But first, a couple of things involving, er, me.

Labour Tribes Mapped: Interactive guide to Labour’s MPs (LabourList)

I’ve been helping the team at LabourList build this incredibly cool interactive that attempts to map all of Labour’s ‘tribes’ – think all of the different categories you can split Labour MPs into, such as their faction (Mainstream, LabourFirst, Blue Labour, etc), or other things like the size of their majority or whether they are calling for Keir Starmer to resign.

Using the tribes tool you can visualise the divisions in the party, and see how the different tribes and interests intersect – which is going to be invaluable for understanding the forthcoming leadership contest. And even more useful if you’re a Labour MP plotting a leadership bid. Click through to LabourList to try it for yourself.

WATCH: Me on a panel with Jimmy Wales!

Excitingly, a few weeks ago I was invited to be on a panel at Kings College London, alongside none other than Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, discussing trust in the age of generative AI.

I thought it was a super fun event – and now the video has now been posted online. I’ll be honest – I’m pretty horrified by the state of my (lack of) hair, to the point where I’m realising I just need to bite the bullet and shave my head. But if you can ignore that, I think it’s a pretty interesting chat!1

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin dig into some astonishing YouGov polling that reveals a huge gender gap in support for nuclear energy… and desperately try not to get cancelled while talking about it.

• And we speak to Tym Syrytczyk from the Institute for Driverless Transport to check in on Britain’s autonomous vehicle progress.

James’s newsletter is here, and by the time you’re reading this, he’ll hopefully have something published!

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video will be 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.

Hello! I’m on holiday for the next few weeks. I’ve got some cool guest posts coming up from some excellent people, and will still hopefully be publishing my ‘Odds and Ends’ links newsletter.

But I couldn’t let you go without a local elections take. It’s lucky, then, that… I’ve already written one. I first published this as a paid post back in March, and now it is more relevant than ever. So please enjoy my take on why now could, conceivably, be the moment for proportional representation.

(And if you value my work, please consider joining as a paid subscriber, as it is only with your support that I’m able to write every week (er, aside from the weeks I’m on holiday).

British politics is in flux.

Reform is slowly sapping support from the Tories on the right, and as the Gorton and Denton by-election evidenced, the Greens are now a serious force on the left, capable of stealing even the safest of seats from Labour.

Then there’s the LibDems, who are still there, occupying the lane of being a suitably inoffensive vessel for people who don’t mind immigrants and don’t like houses.

Together, this adds up to something unprecedented. For better or worse, we’re now living in an era of five-party politics – but this isn’t the interesting part.

What’s more notable is how these unusual circumstances have quietly aligned the incentives of all five major parties so that today, in theory at least, they would all stand to benefit from electoral reform, and a shift to proportional representation (PR).

So I know this sounds mad, but I can’t help but wonder if this means we’re at the closest point we’ve ever been to a change in the electoral system.

And now I’m going to explain why.

Five-party politics

The fragmentation of British politics isn’t a new trend. It’s arguably been happening for a generation – save for the weird blip of the 2019 election.1 Perhaps the starkest illustration of this recently is a YouGov poll that was published earlier this week. Shockingly, it shows the Greens overtaking Labour and leaping into second place – behind Reform, the other insurgent party.

I’m guessing this poll will turn out to be an outlier2 – but it does illustrate the general trajectory we’re on. And the upshot of this is that now they all have credibly high polling numbers, the potential range of outcomes in a general election becomes absolutely chaotic.3

A good way to illustrate this is with Ben Ansell’s excellent seat calculator, which takes projected vote shares like you might find in a poll, and translates them to how many seats each party would expect to win.

So let’s imagine for a moment that the Tories are on 16.8%, Labour on 16.7%, LibDems on 15.8%, and the upstart Greens are on 21.5%, and Reform leads the pack with 23% – numbers that aren’t a million miles away from the YouGov poll above.

According to the calculator, those numbers would result in the right-wing bloc – Reform and the Tories – having a combined total of 273 seats, and the left-wing bloc – Labour, the LibDems, and Greens would have 279. Both are below the threshold for an outright majority, but it would give the left coalition first dibs on forming a government.

Now let’s take just one percentage point from the Tories and give it to Reform. A microscopic shift, yet suddenly the right bloc wins 293 seats to the left’s 260, and Nigel Farage is heading for Downing Street instead.4

In a nutshell, then, this highlights the problem with five-party politics under our First Past The Post (FPTP) system. Five parties in competition basically destroys any connection between vote share and the number of seats won.

As Rob Ford wrote, a few months after the last election:

“Aggregate poll numbers are all but useless as a guide when so much turns on geography and local variations in opponents’ strength. Labour, for example, could win another big majority with a lower overall vote share than now, or lose their majority altogether with a higher overall vote share - everything depends on where the gains and losses fall, and how local competitors fare.”

And this… seems like a bad situation to be in, as it works for basically nobody.

For voters, it turns politics into a meta-game of guessing how to vote tactically (as we saw in Gorton and Denton). For parties, it makes it difficult to campaign, as it isn’t clear who the enemy is, and how best to attack them.5

And for everyone else, it just creates a huge amount of uncertainty about the future. Which isn’t great whether you’re an election junkie reading a politics newsletter, or a business trying to make an investment decision.6

Why PR is more possible than ever now

This brings me back to proportional representation.

As you can probably sense, I’m broadly in favour of PR. I wouldn’t necessarily rank it on my list of the most important political issues, and a bit like the people who worry about the birth rate, I think if you make it your main thing it probably makes you a bit of an oddball.

But I’m not interested in making the case for or against PR in this piece – I know about 40 people (most of whom are LibDems) who could bore on at punishing length on the merits of different voting systems.7

The point I want to make here is like I say at the top – whether good or bad, I think the current circumstances are the best they have ever been, in terms of making the case for PR.

And I say this not because I’m looking at a poll going and thinking that it would be much simpler that way, but because if you look at the incentives and objectives of each of the five major parties, you can see the stars aligning in support of PR.

For the LibDems, Reform and Greens, the case for reform8 is obvious: It’s an opportunity to bag themselves more seats, and lock in a permanent place at the top table of British politics. If we switched to PR, every election would result in coalition negotiations, where the insurgent parties could score themselves cabinet seats and policy commitments.9

But what about Labour and the Tories? Unusually, both parties are bleeding support at the same time to insurgent parties on their flanks, and this flips their incentives.

For the Tories, Reform is at this point an existential threat. There’s a very real possibility that by 2029, Reform is the undisputed dominant party of the right.10 If that were to happen, there would be good reasons for the remaining Tories in Parliament to cast aside the party’s historic support for FPTP, and back PR as a survival strategy. This would be the best chance of avoiding total destruction, as it will be easier to scrape together a Parliamentary Party from the dregs of every seat, rather than hoping for wins in specific places.

Then this is more speculative, but for Labour, the situation could be similar. The Greens have not made quite the same inroads yet, and the structure and demographics of Green support could put a ceiling on just how many voters the party can conceivably steal. But if the Greens continue to poll strongly, it could scare the hell out of plenty of Labour MPs in urban centres, and push them to look for an emergency brake.

And this is not to mention that the party also faces significantly more internal pressure, as many Labour activists and MPs have long campaigned for PR as a point of principle. In fact, Labour MPs were raising the issue in Parliament just last week.

So this is all to say that taken together, we’re in the strange position where all five parties could conceivably align around changing the electoral system. Because of the unique circumstances they’ve all found themselves in, there could soon be an increasingly strong incentive to change. And given that the parties who stand to lose the most by not changing, are the ones who – until 2029 – hold most of the power then… I won’t be surprised if those parties start taking the PR option seriously.

It still won’t happen

So what I’m observing here is a historically unusual alignment of incentives, and this is notable because it is in situations like this when dramatic changes can happen.

In fact, this sort of alignment of interests is why we ended up as a Parliamentary Democracy in the first place.

As Francis Fukuyama argues in The Origins of Political Order, in 1688 as a result of the Glorious Revolution, constitutional government emerged almost accidentally, as it just so happened that the balance of power at the time did not advantage either the aristocracy or the emerging class of business elites and tradespeople. One side could not completely dismantle the other, so an early form of modern constitutional government arose as basically a compromise.

But this isn’t to say that I think a change to PR is likely.

The problem with electoral reform has always been the fundamental coordination problem – and that applies even when on paper, everyone should be aligned. For the party in power, even though it might make rational sense to change course, when looking at polling evidence, status quo bias is very powerful, and MPs may still be reluctant to roll the dice on change.

The same goes for individual politicians, as unless the expected outcome is total wipeout, there will still be MPs who resist because of either their own personal circumstances (ie, an enormous majority) and the irrational belief they have a special personal vote that is immune to political trends, or simply because of principle-driven support for First Past The Post.

Then there’s the fact this alignment I’ve identified is fragile, and the polls could still shift dramatically. Who knows what impact a new Labour or Conservative leader might have? What if Ed Davey is forced to retire after a waterskiing accident, and a chaotic LibDem conference anoints Lembit Opik as the new party leader?11 What if Reform receives some proper scrutiny from the press and everyone realises that an ideologically incoherent party of Putinists and weirdos isn’t as appealing as it once appeared?

And this isn’t even to say anything about the process by which the electoral system would change. Every spod in Westminster would be wading in on the merits of different proportioning systems, which would be unbearable. And then it might have to (God forbid) go to a referendum.

So to be clear, my argument here isn’t that it will happen. What I’m arguing is that the underlying circumstances of British politics are the best they have ever been for electoral reform.

It’s a bit like how if I were to lose half my body weight, I’d technically be in the best position I’ve ever been in to win an Olympic medal. But actually doing so would still be vanishingly unlikely.

So electoral reform might not happen. It probably won’t happen. But if it is ever going to happen – now might be the time.

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