On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin get unusually mad about the latest developments in the West Yorkshire team saga. We just want a tram!

• Then James speaks to Andrew Greenway, a partner at Public Digital about his fantastic essay on fixing the Civil Service, titled ‘In Permanence Crisis’.

Noah Vickers’ reporting on the West Yorkshire tram is here.

James’s newsletter is here, his latest is not as billed on the show, but actually all about Artemis II, and why he’s still inspired despite, well, you know…

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video, visiting the actual Bat Tunnel, 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 talk about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’ and how AI can be used to spot potholes and Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save a car park. Plus we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of EV charger company BE.EV, who explains to us why building out the public charger network can be a nightmare. Listen here!

The contrast over the last ten days has been almost too much to bear.

On the one hand, we watched as NASA’s Artemis II astronauts travelled further from the Earth than anyone ever has before. It was an incredible feat of science and engineering. A tangible manifestation of what humans can achieve when they work together.

But at the same time we witnessed the worst person on the planet threatening to wipe out Iranian civilisation in its entirety. Whether the ceasefire has held or not by the time you’re reading this, it was another grim milestone in the unravelling of the post-1945 world order.

Given the latter, along with everything else Trump has done, some people had a very understandable reaction. They were keen to make it clear that they did not feel the same sense of excitement and wonder about this latest moonshot, as we associate with the Apollo missions of the 1960s.

And it wasn’t just the people you might expect saying this.

In fact, despondency was the response of a couple of Britain’s highest profile science communicators – the sorts of people you might expect to be particularly excited by the Artemis programme.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’ and how AI can be used to spot potholes and Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save a car park. Plus we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of EV charger company BE.EV, who explains to us why building out the public charger network can be a nightmare. Listen here!

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

Apologies for the lack of longer essay post so far this week – it’s nearly done, and I’ll hopefully be dropping it as a rare weekend post, either tomorrow or Sunday (it has been one of those weeks).

In the meantime, here’s some links, where this time I’m featuring:

• Martin’s visit to a notorious tunnel

• Psychic James striking again

• The infuriating reason the Leeds Tram was delayed

• Why “Kebabs” are stopping Britain building trams

• A valiant attempt to kill a new bullshit claim about data centres at birth

• Why I’m mad at a billionaire philanthropist

• And my brief power-user review of the new MacBook Neo

Now let’s get on with it!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James talks about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’, and explains how AI can be used to detect potholes.

• Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save… a car park.

• And we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of BE.EV, about the bureaucratic and political challenges of rolling out electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

James’s newsletter is here, his latest on the AI/copyright debate is here.

You might also like his written piece on how AI can be used to spot potholes is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video 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 speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

I thought I was going crazy during the Brexit wars.

For several years as Britain attempted to negotiate its exit from the European Union, the connection between the political debate and material reality seemed to be completely severed, to the point that there was a real sense of unreality about it.

If you followed the coverage closely, like I wasted my life doing, you’d have witnessed politicians and lobby journalists getting bogged down in Westminster parlour games about backstops and Malthouse Compromises, yet once you pushed the bullshit aside, the reality was an alarmingly simple, binary choice.

Britain had to either choose to draw the customs and regulatory border on the island of Ireland, separating Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic with a hard border, or it had to choose to place it in the Irish Sea, keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s regulatory orbit.

One option would result in more internal trade friction with the rest of the United Kingdom. The other would result in border infrastructure dividing the island of Ireland. Both were pretty unpalatable, but those were the only options on the table – and everything else was just noise.

This remained true, even when the Windsor Framework was eventually agreed, seemingly settling the issue. However, this was not a magic solution that somehow subverted the binary choice; it just obfuscated it, with procedural mechanisms like the ‘Retail Movement Scheme’ and the ‘Stormont Break’.

This is because, fundamentally, the ‘Framework’ only holds because Northern Ireland remains de facto in the Single Market for goods, and Britain has implicitly accepted a degree of permanent regulatory alignment to ease border checks and avoid significant physical infrastructure. What nobody wants to really say aloud is that if the British government did, for some reason, decide to diverge significantly from the EU, it would just reopen the same wounds and the same divisions, and the status of Northern Ireland would be a crisis once again.

Anyway, I mention this not because I want to give us all trauma flashbacks, but because there’s another binary choice that Britain is currently weighing.

Like the status of Northern Ireland, this choice sits on a red-hot culture war issue, and is the subject of a deafening amount of noise and magical thinking.

That’s right, I’m talking about the interminable question of what to do about AI training on copyrighted works. And it’s time for everyone to get a grip, as like Brexit there is a clear choice – and in my view, only one credible decision we can make.

Press subscribe now before you know my opinion!

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The question at hand

For Britain, the AI/copyright debate is not an academic debate. It’s a live policy issue.

As things stand, we do not have a settled legal regime to handle what is technically referred to as Text and Data Mining (TDM) – the act of scraping existing works to train AI models.

That’s why since 2021,1 successive governments have been attempting to figure out the best way to do it. Should we protect the creative industries with tight intellectual property protections? Or should we unleash the AI companies to train on whatever they’d like?

It’s a question with vested interests on both sides, and in recent months as it seemed as though a decision was going to be made, both opponents and proponents have been flexing their lobbying muscles.

For example, on the pro-TDM side, Microsoft hired the agency Public First to make the case for a more permissive training regime, putting together a slick website that outlines the different policy options along with a calculation of how each would impact the British economy. It claims that under the most permissive training regime, it could add £510bn to Britain’s GDP – that’s around a 15% boost. Conversely, if training is highly restricted, the uplift could be limited to just £290bn.

And on the other side, the News Media Association, which represents publishers who want to retain strict copyright protections, hired Oliver and Ohlbaum to make the case that the supposed economic uplift is overstated – and they’ve put out a long document taking issue with many of the assumptions in Public First’s modelling.

So this is basically why there’s a binary choice. Whatever the government decides to do, whether it likes it or not, it is going to make a whole bunch of people extremely unhappy.

That’s probably why last month, just as it looked like the government might take a firm position it decided to… not make a decision.

This was notable in itself, as it marked a backtrack from being quite keen on a permissive TDM regime. And it means for the time being at least, the government’s official position is “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”.

However, it wasn’t a total non-event, as at the same time it also published two important documents: a report on AI and copyright, which rounds up responses to the earlier consultation, and an impact assessment outlining the different policy options the government will have to choose from.

And to be fair to the government, I do understand why this feels like a difficult decision. The creative industries represent around 5.5% of the British economy in the here and now,2 and are an area where we punch well above our weight on the world stage – whereas conceivably, a permissive TDM regime would be placing a bet on a promising, but not-completely-proven technology.

In other words, doing anything that might disrupt this major sector of the British economy might feel unwise. And that’s before you even think about how it would inevitably lead to clips on the news of Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and Mark Rylance et al slagging off the government.

So you can understand why Ministers may be reluctant to do anything which could conceivably harm one of our biggest cash cows.

However, I’m not sure the decision is actually that difficult once you strip away the noise.

The more I think about the issue, and the more heated I see the debate become, the more I can’t help but see the startling unreality in the discourse, that reminds me so much of the bluster and bullshit during the Brexit process.

And though I’m about a trillion times more sympathetic on an emotional level towards the creative industries than I was towards the Brexiteers, I can’t help but conclude that the only real option we have is to let the AI companies train.

Worst opinion alert

Hold your pitchforks steady – hear me out first!

Let’s imagine a world where the rights-holders get what they want, and training AI models using copyrighted data is banned or heavily restricted in Britain. Does this prevent British creative works from being ripped off, or protect the creative industries from the AI tsunami?

Assuming the rest of the world continues to exist, no.

The reason copyright has worked effectively over the last century or so is that it has been governed by a series of international treaties like the 1886 Berne Convention, and more recently the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organisation treaty. These agreements enshrined mutual recognition of intellectual property rights across 180 countries, including all of the largest and most important players like the United States and China.

But there is no equivalent consensus for TDM. There is no similar agreement, and several major jurisdictions have already enshrined extremely permissive training rules. For example, Japan, Singapore and the United States all variously allow AI training on copyrighted works, under the rules they have set.

And this reality means the die has already been cast. If a model is trained in one of these more permissive countries, if a British work is also available there (and it likely will be because this is the modern world), then it will be fair game to sweep it up for training a model, whether we like it or not.

The only way to stop it would be for Britain – a middle power – to talk the other countries into changing their rules, and forge some massive new international agreement. And it should go without saying that, obviously, this isn’t going to happen because… why would anyone go along with it? America is home to the major AI companies, China is also competing to be the AI leaders, and even in the fantasy reality where the superpowers could be persuaded to restrict training, every other country would have a strong incentive to stake out a more permissive position in order to attract some of that AI cash.

To think otherwise is, I think, like when the more delusional Brexiteers claimed that the German car makers would somehow save us, and persuade the EU to compromise the integrity of the Single Market for our sake.

Anyway, let’s go with the fantasy for one last point, and imagine a world where the British government was magically able to protect British creative works from AI training, by putting some sort of forcefield around Abbey Road, Pinewood Studios, Rockstar North and the Bake Off Tent.

Would this stop AI from transforming Britain’s creative industries? Of course not.

The reason the creative industries are such a big part of our economy is that British-made stuff is extremely popular around the world. So when AI changes what people consume, or how cultural works are produced, it is inconceivable that it won’t have a profound effect on Britain too. Regardless of whether we allow training or not, the reality is that jobs are going to change, business models are going to have to adapt, and the economics of creativity will shift.

The AI opportunity

I want to be clear, I’m not saying that creative types are wrong to feel aggrieved by the turmoil that AI will unleash on their industry. Or that it won’t feel like a violation to have your work scraped and trained on, if that’s not what you want.

But my point is that the real policy question here is not whether the anger is legitimate, but whether a restrictive TDM regime would actually protect the creative industries. I’m just not convinced that it will.

And anyway, equally importantly, the feelings of creators are not the only thing that matters here. The more important reason to allow training is that, without it, Britain would hobble its ability to take advantage of the opportunities presented by AI. Restricting training would carry real costs, to no advantage.

So why is this so important? The problem as things stand – and the entire reason the government wants to establish a legal regime for TDM in the first place – is that if an AI company wanted to train a model here in Britain using copyrighted works, it would carry huge legal uncertainties, compared to countries where the rules are clearer.

Without clearer permissions, the fear then is that it would push innovative AI companies abroad, and make Britain a less attractive place to build a tech business. Whereas if we get the rules right, there’s potentially a huge economic boost.

And this is not just an academic debate. At the moment, the government in Westminster, and Sadiq Khan in City Hall are currently courting Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and are trying to persuade it to move its headquarters to London.

This could be an easy win. The company definitely has a strong reason to want to move out of the US – just weeks ago there was the spectacular fall-out with US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who threatened to punish the company for not allowing its tech to be used for mass surveillance.

So this is a big opportunity. If Britain could persuade Anthropic to make the move, it would be a huge win for the British tech industry, not to mention future tax receipts if the company continues rapidly scaling. But will it make the move? Maybe, but it will surely be significantly less likely to do so if training its frontier models could land the company in hot water.

However, this argument isn’t just about the big names in AI. The uncertainty is also affecting AI deployment in ‘normal’ companies too. For example, the Treasury Select Committee has already identified a lack of clarity over liability as a problem for the financial sector. The government’s own impact assessment, linked above, concludes that “under the status quo, UK copyright law would continue to act as a significant constraint on competitive general-purpose model training in the UK and could inhibit wider AI development and adoption.”

And the assessment also reveals why a much hoped for potential compromise option – requiring AI companies to licence content from creators – does not really work in the real world either.

Leaving aside the technical difficulty (and arguably impossibility) of identifying what training data was used when generating AI responses to prompts3 (which would be required to pay royalties), the impact assessment concludes that even this compromise wouldn’t be good for the economy, concluding that:

“This could dampen UK development and adoption of AI, reduce the productivity benefits of AI and hold back economic growth across the whole economy, including the [creative industries].”

We should take this point seriously. It doesn’t mean that the creative industries should simply suck it up and just take the pain. But it does mean that we’re going to have to think more carefully about what policy tools we do have to support creators – rather than reach for something which won’t work, and will harm the broader economy in the process.

We don’t have to like it

I’m writing this knowing that some people reading will likely be raging by this point.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t love that we face this difficult, binary decision either. I, too, am a normal human who enjoys watching human-made films and reading human-written books. And hell, as you can tell from reading my newsletter, I have a direct vested interest in people continuing to pay for human-created content in the future! (Don’t forget, it’s your last chance to get 25% off annual subscriptions!)

But the above is my honest analysis of the world as it is, and will continue to be. The fact is, we are in the midst of a technological transition, and even if OpenAI, Anthropic et al fail, and the current bubble bursts, the fact is that we are never going to un-invent Large Language Models and generative AI.

So the disruption is coming for better or worse, and the British government alone cannot hold back the tide. Whether we like it or not, our creative industries will be reshaped by forces much bigger than ourselves.

Given this, then, the real choice is not about whether to ‘protect’ the creative industries or not by restricting TDM. The choice is whether we let this transformation happen to us, or whether we try to adapt to the new reality, and seize the opportunities created by the change.

And that’s why creating a legal regime that reflects this new reality makes sense. We should try to capture the potential economic uplift from AI here in Britain – so that if the technology does prove as transformative as expected, we can use some of that extra cash to, say, subsidise things that are nice to have but unprofitable, like the arts and creative works.

Creatives are not doomed

All the above said, I don’t think that even if we accept the reality of the AI situation, it means that human-made creative works are doomed.

That’s because I think what will prove most valuable in an economy transformed by AI won’t be the visuals on the screen, or the noises coming from the speakers – it will be the connection between the artist and consumers of their art.

I genuinely believe that even if generating ‘content’ carries zero marginal cost, and Hollywood-quality visuals can be spat out with a few taps on a phone, people will still want to pay a premium for human-made works, both online and in real life.

This is because what’s going to matter most isn’t the art in and of itself, but the parasocial connection we feel with the artists and creators we like. It’s human nature to crave connections with people, and personalised AI can never replace collective experiences like being in the crowd at a gig where everyone is belting out the same song.

I think there’s already strong evidence of this. Look at the explosion of YouTube as a platform, which makes the direct connection between artists and fans way more tangible than traditional media. If you enjoy someone’s work, you become invested in their success.

And you can tell I mean this, because this is literally my business model too. I’m betting that people will still pay to hear my opinions, not because of a utilitarian desire to obtain factual information, but because you are interested in what flesh and blood human James O’Malley has to say.

So let’s get beyond the unreality of the current debate and admit what is real, and what the choices actually are in a world reshaped by AI. Let’s not be like the Brexiteers, denying reality because it is inconvenient. And let’s figure out new ways to support the creative industries, instead of making doomed attempts to cling on to the old.

Whether you’re nodding furiously in agreement or are simply just furious, you read all the way to the end. So support human content by subscribing to my newsletter (for free!) to get more politics, policy and tech takes direct to your inbox.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

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. Don’t worry, I’ve got a new essay post dropping tomorrow – I just need to add the finishing touches and brace for the reaction.

So in the meantime, here’s some links. This time I’m featuring:

• Why running a council is a nightmare game you simply cannot win.

• Everything you need to know ahead of the imminent launch of Artemis II.

• An awesome map revealing how grimly expensive your local area is.

• Why the Iran war makes things… even worse than you thought.

• A prototype for how the National Data Library could work.

• How hearing aid technology is about to become dramatically better.

• What happened when a practicing Mormon was given $10,000 to gamble.

• And a guy who is attempting to speed-run Tesco.

And don’t forget, this is your last chance to take advantage of my biggest special offer ever – click this button and you can bag yourself 25% off an annual subscription so you can read Odds and Ends every week! If you value my work, I really appreciate the support.

Get 25% off for 1 year

See me on a panel with... Jimmy Wales!

One last plug before we hit the links, as it’s pretty mad – I’ve been invited to join a panel discussion on AI at King’s College London on 24th April, with Professor Elena Simperl and none other than... Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia!

It’s an event to discuss Jimmy’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, and tickets are free. So do come along and watch as I try to think of something clever to say in the presence of an internet legend and an eminent academic.

Now let’s get on with the links!

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

Today there is very big bin news! In England, new rules are now in force requiring councils to provide weekly food waste collections, which in practice means that you now need to have a fourth bin outside your house.

So to, er, celebrate, I thought I’d send out again this fantastic guest post that my partner, Dr Liz Lutgendorff, wrote for me just over a year ago. (Don’t worry, a brand new essay on an extremely controversial topic and your regular Odds and Ends links newsletter will be landing later this week. So stay tuned!)

Anyway, back when Liz wrote this, she was working in local government, attempting to digitise London’s waste management, so I had to ask her… How many bins do we actually need? Why do some people think we need seven?! And how many bins is too many?

So here she is with… the seven things you need to know about seven bins.

1. It’s easier if you separate at source

How many bins do we need? The answer… is complicated.

Generally, from the perspective of the waste management industry, the more bins we have the better. The best way to increase recycling is to separate waste at source, because it means that you do the hard work.

This is because it’s very difficult to separate different types of waste when they are all mixed together, and the more work the local authority has to do when it receives your waste, the more expensive it gets.

And it is especially the case when there's ‘residual’ waste – basically everything that doesn’t go into your recycling bin. It just isn’t economical, safe or sanitary to separate out food waste from random plastic wrappers, nappies, cat litter, or ‘Free the PAF’ badges.

This is why I think new rules that mandate separate food waste collections from next year are a good thing, because if food is properly separated, it can be composted and therefore turned into something that can be reused.

2. It’s all about money

Legislation prescribes the types of collections that can be made available in your local authority, but what happens to waste in your area is mostly up to your council. And that can be dictated by a number of things, but one of them is the cost of disposal.

Recycling is better to dispose of because there’s often a commodity at the end that can be sold on, so the overall cost of the disposal of your grass clippings or baked bean tins is lower than the disposal of your kitchen black bag waste. 1

But not everything is as saleable or easy to dispose of.

For example. extracting metals from waste electronics is, in theory, valuable. There are people willing to pay for copper, aluminium, and so on. But the problem is that the disposal cost might still be relatively high if the device requires multiple different recovery processes to be run.

So if you want to recycle something that is hard to recycle, the cost of this disposal is also higher.

3. Dirty power is better than the alternatives

When your bins are collected, the trash is taken either to a Materials Recovery Facility for recycling – or sent on for either landfill or incineration. Crucially though, the latter is now the cheapest way to dispose of waste.

Big items, like a knackered old sofa, can be shredded first, but ultimately everything sent to the incinerator is going up in smoke.2

And this can be controversial.

There was an article on the BBC in 2024 on how incinerators are now the UK’s dirtiest form of power.3

That might sound bad, but it’s important to remember that an incinerator is not an intentional energy source. Energy is just a byproduct of the most environmentally friendly and lowest cost method of disposing waste that doesn’t have any saleable value after processing or recycling.4

And there are safeguards on this. All incinerators have permitted levels of what pollutants they can release, it’s heavily monitored, and anytime there’s a breach of those levels, the Environment Agency needs to be notified.5

That’s why nitrous oxide – laughing gas – is so annoying. Lately there’s been an epidemic across the country of nitrous oxide bottles ending up in incinerators, exploding during incineration, and instantly breaching the emissions allowed for the day.6

Incineration then is not perfect, but landfill is worse,7 and it’s what we’ve got to work with right now if we don’t want rubbish piling up in the streets.

4. Capitalism is garbage

If you want to get philosophical about things, you might wonder why we have to pay for so much waste disposal?

The answer is because of the way that products are manufactured and sold to us.

Most things (or the packaging they come in) aren’t recyclable8 and the companies that produce them generally don’t have to care about that. The end result is that the cost of disposal is passed on to us, through councils, who have statutory obligations to reduce waste and to ensure it’s properly disposed of. So pound shop tat, fast fashion and Temu purchases aren’t the deals they appear to be, at least when looked at from a whole-systems point of view.

One small step that the UK is taking however,9 is the introduction of Extended Producer Responsibilities for those companies that have plastic packaging. Essentially, companies will have to pay the government when they use certain types of plastic, and the government will give councils a proportion of that cash, as they will have to pay for its disposal.

But the problem is not just plastic packaging, it’s the entire ecosystem that encourages excessive consumption. And working out what is the least wasteful way of doing things is often tricky.

For example, there’s a popular idea now about ‘cost per use’ - not just from a monetary point of view but from the environmental cost associated with production. If you buy a canvas bag, the materials and production costs mean that you probably have to use that bag about 1,400 times for it to have a net environmental benefit.

Similarly, buying glass or (even worse) metal containers is not necessarily more environmentally friendly than plastic because of the greater effort / processing involved in its creation.10 Driving across a city to go to that one store that allows you to fill your own containers may not be worth it for the petrol you are using to get there.

And if you want some tragic news about your compostable cutlery, it’s often not actually compostable. Common recycling processes like anaerobic digestion or open row composting don’t break down the materials in the same way as organic matter. In fact, most ‘compostable’ packaging needs a specialist recycling facility, so your ‘biodegradable’ spork will probably be treated as a contaminant and will be incinerated.

So there’s mismatches between what is perceived to be environmentally friendly and what is perceived as the least friendly.

However, this doesn’t meant that trying to be sustainable is impossible. The best way to deal with your trash is not to ‘wishcycle’11 by throwing stuff in the recycling, and hoping that the material processing facility will be able to deal with it. Just throw the spork in the bin, as at least it’ll be turned into energy.12

5. It’s commodities trading all the way down

The best way to think about waste is as an industry. Everything around the disposal of your household waste is big business.

Firstly, your council will have one or multiple contracts for the disposal of what is picked up from your kerbside. Then there are more specialised recycling organisations for more niche recycling products, like paint, ink cartridges, car batteries or even used oil.

These organisations will either be the place where these commodities get recycled, or they will be a middleman, selling it onto another company, who can turn it into another product.13

There has been a lot of consolidation in this space, and today many waste organisations are huge multinational conglomerates. And this means that there is a trade-off.

On the downside, this consolidation could mean that waste will travel further to be processed, as we’ve seen with waste being shipped abroad just to be incinerated. And it could conceivably be bad news for local democracy, as it means there is less choice and competition for your council to get the best deal for their residents. 

But there is a potential upside too, as having a larger company involved makes it easier to aggregate difficult materials, thus making recycling more profitable – meaning that in theory, more stuff will get recycled.

And of course, there are also a lot of community led organisations that will recycle niche products that are hard to deal with too.14 But these tend to rely on the good will of individuals, councils or grants to continue operations (not to mention space to store stock).

6. Recycling rates are class war

To bring it all back to bins, recycling is arguably the pastime of relatively affluent, sometimes rural, middle-class people.

The way local authorities are measured on recycling is with a ‘waste data flow’ return.15  This is a statutory obligation to report the final disposal destination of every type of waste that is collected.

So it might record, for example, that your residual waste ends up as ash and gets turned into some aggregates, or that your paper gets shredded and ends up in Indonesia.16

But one other thing that gets included in a local authority’s recycling rate calculation is ‘green’ waste: Your lawn mowing clippings or garden pruning. And this can hugely impact top-line recycling figures.

For example, rural areas with large gardens and fields have a much higher recycling rate. But inner city boroughs generally don’t have sizeable gardens or lawns to mow, so their recycling rates are usually lower.

However, this isn’t the only coefficient on the figures. Something else that affects whether your local authority has a higher recycling rate is how many people ‘participate’ in recycling programmes, and follow the rules instead of just dumping everything arbitrarily into their bins.

Some of what drives participation is socio-economic - some people don’t have space or time to bother. And some of it is also cultural - where handling waste is not culturally acceptable. So those communities will have higher recycling ‘contamination’ rates. 

And this means that even if we have more bins, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to more recycling, in every case.

7. We need to build better to recycle more

If you want to help your council and feel virtuous about your impact on the environment, then you have to learn to love your bins, and also your local recycling centre. You should want more bins, as it will mean more things will get diverted from incineration.17

However, more bins is not practical for so many people - namely because they have no space, live above shops or just have really poor collection cycles.18

So if as a society we really want to minimise waste to the irreducible core, we’re going to have to think about the practical everyday lives of people and the built environment. The UK’s housing stock wasn’t built for multiple bins, and even today new builds aren’t prepared in many cases.

This means we’ve got to live with the trade offs of waste incineration if we don’t engineer our built environment to store multiple types of recycling in a straightforward way. That needs to be balanced against the cost of collection for local authorities and whether that can be reasonably collected in a time that people would find acceptable.

So in the end then, the number of bins isn’t the point. The real takeaway is that we all need to separate better—and that includes food waste, plastics, and our unrealistic expectations about compostable sporks.

Liz Lutgendorff is a digital transformation leader. Follow her on LinkedIn, Bluesky – and make sure to subscribe to her Substack, where she’ll be writing irregularly about how technology can drag institutions into the twenty-first century. You might also like this other one she wrote for me on why fixing the government can be a tech nightmare.

Liz Lutgendorff

Just a person on the internet doing digtal transformation things.

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James gets annoyed his new build was saddled with old technology.

• Martin tells the story of the surprisingly futuristic British wine industry

• And we speak to Thomas Ableman about his proposal for Mini-Switzerland, a plan that could make rural trains and buses… actually good?!

James’s newsletter is here, his latest picking a fight with Dorian Lynskey is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video 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, how mayors could soon be receiving a slice of income tax, more BBC NIMBY bias, and why we need to redraw London’s boroughs! Listen/subscribe here!

Dorian Lynskey, whose work I mostly really like,1 has written a piece for The Nerve, Carole Cadwalladr’s new outfit.

It’s a publication that I’ve only previously encountered when looking for a reminder that Stewart Lee is a much better stand-up comedian than he is a political thinker.

Anyway, in a polemic titled “In a world of war, abuse and rising fascism, ‘woke’ was never the enemy”, Dorian makes the case that the writers and intellectuals who spent time worrying about ‘wokeness’ were wrong. The real enemy all along has now clearly been revealed to be, of course, Trump, Farage and right-wing authoritarianism.

Dorian writes:

It seems absurd to lambast “snowflake” students when Trump is strong-arming universities; Critical Race Theory when he openly promotes white nationalism; leftwing hostility to free speech when he targets everyone from student protesters to talkshow hosts; politically correct language-policing when words such as “equity” and “oppression” have been scrubbed from government websites; or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street.

He then goes on to look back at the culture wars of recent years, and ends by concluding that:

[C]entrists, too, need to confront reality and ask themselves if truffling out low-stakes campus controversies and bad tweets was the best use of their time when fascism was hurtling down the tracks. What unites the woke and the repentant anti-woke is an urgent need to get their priorities straight and identify the correct enemies. With fundamental values such as decency, solidarity and justice under savage attack, they can’t afford to make the same mistakes again.1

Now, I don’t think I’m one of the ‘centrists’ Dorian had in mind when writing the piece. If he knows who I am at all, it’ll be as a second-tier character on British Politics Bluesky – a face he occasionally scrolls past on his timeline.

But politically, I am a member of the class of people he has in his crosshairs. Over the years, I’ve unwisely waded in numerous times on culture war issues, and have punched left towards a number of ‘woke’ positions, even though as a centre-left type, I’m on the same ‘team’.

And worse still, I’ve done this despite the fact that I share Dorian’s view that Trump, Farage, Goodwin, and the rising tide of fascism is – obviously – a wildly more significant threat to our society than anything ‘woke’ ever was.

But where I disagree with Dorian is that I don’t think this means that criticism of ‘woke’ ideas and their proponents were absurd, misguided or disproportionate. In fact, I think these criticisms from within the left-of-centre coalition are critical if we want a left that can stand up to the threat posed by the worst people in the universe.

So please join me below the paywall as I breakdown Dorian’s argument and explain why, in my view, it doesn’t really hold up.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, how mayors could soon be receiving a slice of income tax, more BBC NIMBY bias, and why we need to redraw London’s boroughs! Listen/subscribe here!

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 time I’m featuring:

• My take on SNL UK

• Rachel Reeves is doing some good (maybe)

• Why HS2 is being slowed down

• How to pay for an energy price cap

• A brief review of Project Hail Mary

• How irony is fuelling the Trump regime

• A major YouTuber talking about address data!

Now let’s get started!

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James talks about how Rachel Reeves’ plan to give mayor a slice of income tax could help get infrastructure built.

• Martin digs into two more BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service stories with an alarming NIMBY slant

• And we speak to Simon Kaye, Director of Policy and Research at Re:State, about his new report, arguing for a more powerful London Mayor and fewer London boroughs!

James’s newsletter is here, his latest on our geospatial data mess is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video 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 rather controversially arguing that Reform has a point about one, very specific policy proposal. Martin tells the story of a playground that has been closed for over two years for a maddening planning reason. And we speak to Laurel Boxall and Neil Ross from Public First, who make the case for opening up the copyright laws for AI training. Aim your pitchforks at them, not me! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

ESSAY! Don’t forget to catch up with my big essay this week, arguing that Britain’s geospatial data is a total mess.

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 time I’m featuring:

• How the government is going to fix something I complained about just this week!

• Why good government is about choosing winners and losers

• The news you may have missed from Rachel Reeves’ EU alignment speech

• Why the unprecedented AI investment may not be a bubble after all

• The strange nature of open source software in 2026

• Robots playing tennis

• What to do with NCP car parks now the company has gone bust

• And I bravely tell the truth about David Hockney (that his most recent art is crap).

Now let’s get started!

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I’m old enough to remember paper maps.

When I first started driving, if I was heading on a long journey I’d look up directions on the AA route planner on Windows, and I’d print out the instructions, occasionally pulling over en route to check that I was still heading in the right direction.

It’s strange to think about now, as with only this prehistoric technology, I attempted trips I couldn’t even conceive of trying today without the aid of GPS, such as heading into central Birmingham’s nightmarish inner ring-road system in search of the Carling Academy.1 It was a world where a single wrong turn could send me on a mystery tour around the West Midlands.

So this is all to say it was a relief when consumer GPS devices first started appearing in the late 2000s. Thanks to a network of two-dozen-or-so satellites in the sky,2 I’ll never get truly lost again. And today the technology guides me on every significant car trip – even on routes I know well, as I like the reassurance that Google Maps will identify potential traffic problems or road closures ahead of me.

However, my navigation woes were not the most important thing about the emergence of GPS technology. The satellites had originally been created for military use, and civilian use was limited by the data being made deliberately fuzzy, reducing the accuracy and making it unworkable for many use cases. But in the year 2000, with the stroke of a pen Bill Clinton ordered the end of ‘selective availability’, and unlocked a huge amount of economic and social value that today benefits the entire world.

With GPS signals freely available to any device with a compatible chip, countless new use cases for the technology emerged. This ranged from big-deal things, like tracking aeroplanes and ships, and new industrial uses like precision agriculture, to small improvements to how we live. For example, it’s thanks to Bill Clinton that the McDonalds app can tell you which of their restaurants is nearest, without the need for you to enter an address first.3

What’s most important about the value created, though, was that none of these uses were strictly envisioned by the creators of the GPS system. Nobody in the Pentagon in the early 1970s was thinking “one day, our grandchildren will catch Pokémon with this technology”.4 But these new capabilities simply emerged as smart, innovative people took this new freely available source of data, and built new things with it.

And as a global society, we’re all richer and have easier lives because of it.

GPS is, then, the perfect parable for why freely accessible geospatial data is good. And it’s my view that opening up more geospatial data can only be a good thing. In a sense, this is the exact thing a government should be doing: It has the scale and capability to collect and maintain datasets that no start-up can match. And if it gives people the opportunity to play with our most fundamental geospatial data, they might just invent the next big thing.

However, this brings me to Britain’s huge geospatial problem. Even though the potential value to society of geospatial data the government already holds is enormous, too much of it remains locked away. Geospatial datasets are often hard to obtain, and eye-wateringly expensive. And some of our best data is trapped inside institutions that were designed for a world of analogue, paper-based maps.

And it’s really time for us to fix it.

Let’s be real, if you’ve read this far into an article about geospatial data, my newsletter is for you. Subscribe – for free – to get my stuff in your inbox.

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A broken landscape

Let’s start with something basic like address data. That’s right, regular readers, I’m going there again.

Say you’re a small business, or a hobbyist coder in a bedroom, and you have a great idea for a new app or service, which relies on address data to do something clever. Maybe it’s something futuristic, like a drone delivery service. Or maybe it’s something more mundane, like an app that reminds you when it is bin night.

Either way, the data you’ll need – the address of almost every building in the country – is in the Postcode Address File (PAF). To license the PAF, before you can even publish your project, you’ll need to find £7,525 a year to pay to Royal Mail for the privilege.5

I won’t bore on, as I’ve written about the PAF problem once or twice before, but suffice to say that in my view this amounts to a tax on innovation.

However, the PAF is only the tip of the iceberg.

The most important player in terms of geospatial data is probably the Ordnance Survey (OS), the government mapping agency.

This is a very unusual body. Although it is owned by the government, it is a structured as a private limited company, and is obliged to try to pay for itself with its activities, rather than rely on the taxpayer.

And it does this by producing a bunch of different data products, some of which are free to access, and others which are paid.

For example, one product is called AddressBase, which is like an enhanced PAF. It takes PAF data (licensed from Royal Mail), and links addresses to Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), which are unique ID numbers for individual properties.6

But even though the UPRN numbers7 themselves are legally totally free open data, you still have to pay, because AddressBase uses PAF data.

Or another example is roads data. If you like, you can download for free the OS Open Roads dataset, which contains a basic map of Britain’s roads. But if you pay, there’s the OS MasterMap Highways Network dataset, which is the same thing but augmented with other road data, like turn restrictions, weight limits, and the locations of bollards and traffic-calming measures.

In my view, the way the OS splits this data up between free and paid is slightly weird and arbitrary. And having to operate like a private company leads it to doing some very strange things, such as rather than simply make maps and geospatial datasets for public benefit, it spends money on marketing – like this sponsorship with the excellent Map Men.

But this is far from the only weirdness. For example, if you want to work out who owns a given piece of land in England or Wales, that data is stored by the Land Registry, a separate arm’s-length body, and again you have to pay for the privilege.

And remember the UPRNs I mentioned above? The actual designation of a given UPRN to a specific building isn’t done by Ordnance Survey – this is done by another body, called GeoPlace, which is a company that is co-owned by OS and the Local Government Association, the latter of which is a body that represents all local councils together.

I could go on, but to understand the upshot of all of this, think about something as simple as your address: Ordnance Survey (part of the government) own the visual map of where you live, Royal Mail (a Czech-owned private company) own the postal address, GeoPlace (don’t ask) assigns your home’s UPRN, and the Land Registry (a different part of the government) holds the details of who owns your house.

A mad system

If you’re confused, this is the correct reaction, as none of this makes any sense.

This is because it’s an institutional arrangement that has evolved over the decades and, in the case of OS, centuries, because it was first founded in 1791.

And looking at these different datasets is like looking at layers of sediment to date dinosaur skeletons. Why do different organisations maintain and own different bits of geospatial data? Why are some datasets released as free, open data, and others are closely guarded intellectual property that requires a fee? Why are held by the public sector, and others private?

There’s no consistency or logic underlying the design of this arrangement, because it wasn’t designed. It’s simply a reflection of the prevailing business model logic of the time they were created, and bureaucratic inertia since.

For example, you can imagine how charging for Ordnance Survey maps might have made sense in a pre-internet era, when selling paper maps was literally something the government used to do – and when the only notable ‘data’ customers would have been publishers creating road atlases.8

Similarly, of course UPRNs are free and open, because they were created during the digital era, when clarity on specific locations is important for digital tools and nationwide digital services. And it would just seem crazy on its face to lock this behind a paywall.9

Taken together, then, in 2026, none of the ways we handle geospatial data actually makes any rational sense.

And even worse, the current mess isn’t just inelegant. It makes doing anything with geospatial data much more difficult, and leads to some maddening decision making.

For example, a while back I wrote about an effort to digitise Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs). This is a great idea as, over time, it will effectively create a free, open data map of the rules and regulations governing every road in Britain. It’s easy to imagine it being extremely useful for planners, parking apps and autonomous cars.

But as I understand it, when the programme was in development, it reached an impasse with Ordnance Survey. Because there was a concern that, as the database is slowly built up by feeding in TRO data from different local authorities, that it could inadvertently replicate existing address datasets like the PAF and AddressBase, effectively exposing their valuable data for free.10

So to get the digital TRO system launched, a compromise was reached where stored location data would, like pre-2000 GPS, be deliberately fuzzed up and made less accurate by the Department for Transport’s software, knocking each location off by a few dozen centimetres to make it just inaccurate enough to avoid creating any legal problems.

In other words, because of the mad way Britain governs and licenses its geospatial data, we’re creating worse, less accurate datasets, and we’re slowing down their creation with legal paperwork. Which doesn’t seem great.

Stop your messing around

The reason I bang on about geospatial data with frankly alarming regularity is because, though these sound like esoteric data issues, this is important.

There are few more foundational datapoints about Britain than its geography, and if we can make this data free, open, and available for anyone with a good idea to build with, it can catalyse economic growth.

And, like I said above, I think collecting and providing this data is exactly what government should be for in the 21st Century.

Just as the government provides a police service so that individuals do not need to hire security guards, and just as it provides roads so that we can all get around, providing foundational datasets will create new opportunities for innovation.

So the obvious thing to ask is… can we fix this broken system and get a grip on our geospatial data?

The optimistic view is that there could soon be a huge opportunity to do so, thanks to the blank void that is the government’s planned National Data Library (NDL).

I’ve written about the NDL before, but the short version is that it’s basically a catchphrase in search of a policy. Promised in the Labour manifesto, it was essentially a cool-sounding bucket into which the government could throw any vaguely data-related issues, and for the last couple of years there has been a team in DSIT trying to work backwards to figure out what it should be.

And here’s whereI think the opportunity lies. If the government is serious about the NDL making data easier to share – like a library does – then geospatial data is an obvious place to start.

The government should use the NDL as the excuse it needs to wrangle addresses, maps and property datasets into some sort of order, and open them up so that small businesses, start-ups and bedroom coders can use them to build.

So let’s make this Britain’s GPS moment, where we open up our geospatial datasets, unfuzz the current mess – and make it clear where Britain’s most useful data is headed.

If you read this much about geospatial data then you’ll definitely like my newsletter. Subscribe (for free!) to get more like this direct to your inbox.

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Follow me on Bluesky

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James argues that Reform’s idea about politicising the Civil Service could be good, and begs everyone not to hate him.

• Martin tells the maddening story of his local playground, and how two years on kids are still not allowed to use it.

• And we speak to Laurel Boxall and Neil Ross from Public First about text and data mining (TDM), aka the eternal AI/copyright debate.

Laurel and Neil’s TDM report is here.

James’s newsletter is here.

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

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

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

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

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about how to open up NHS data for scientific research, and then I speak to energy guru Adam Bell, about how the transition to Net Zero makes electricity pricing wildly complicated. Listen here!

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

I’ve been struck down by an annoying cold this week, so apologies that the essay post this week hasn’t landed yet – I’m hoping to get it published on Friday, but please forgive any delay on account of me feeling a bit rubbish.

Anyway, links! This time I’m featuring:

Politics: What the collapse of communism should teach the abundance movement, and who are Labour’s ‘hero voters’ really?

Tech: A new EV charging breakthrough? Plus a very satisfying takedown of a terrible AI take, and a fantastic podcast on the history of coal.

Eurovision: What I think of this year’s British entry, and its chances of success. (I know you all turn to me for my musical opinions.)

So let’s get started!

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James tells Martin the story of Open Safely, an incredible tool that scientists can now use to research country-wide NHS GP data.

• And we speak to energy policy guru Adam Bell, partner at Stonehaven, ex-head of the government’s energy strategy, and writer of the excellent Unbalancing Mechanism Substack about the wild complexity of pricing energy as we transition to Net Zero.

James’s newsletter is here. This week he wrote about proportional representation.

James wrote about Open Safely here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his Old Bridge Way video 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.

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.

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MANCHESTER PEOPLE! I am holding a small reader meet-up in Manchester tomorrow night (Thursday 5th March)! If you’d like to come along – free and premium subscribers welcome – fill in this form and I’ll send you the details!

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we have some good news… and some bad. Cornwall is set to become a lithium superpower (good!), Oxford Street is getting pedestrianised (also good!), but then special guest Chris Lintott tells us why funding for astronomy and curiosity-driven research is under threat (very bad!). 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 time I’m featuring…

• Comedy & culture: the second-worst SNL sketch of all time; and a surprisingly charming (and violent) short AI film.

• Energy & prices: what might happen to gas prices given… well, everything.

• AI & the backlash: why the “AI backlash” is mostly fake — and what that says about the wider mood.

• Streets & disruption: how to make roadworks less maddening; unexpectedly good news for Oxford Street; and an extremely wholesome crowdsourcing project.

• Surveillance & data: how the government is “spying” using mobile data.

• WAR! The best website for Monitoring the Situation.

Now let’s get started!

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On YIMBY Pod this week, James and Martin have good news for once: Cornwall might be about to become Britain’s lithium-and-geothermal powerhouse, and London is (finally) getting a pedestrianised Oxford Street — after years of institutional gridlock.

Plus: a celebrity guest! James speaks to Prof. Chris Lintott (Oxford astrophysicist and The Sky at Night presenter) about looming UK science funding cuts that could gut astronomy — and why “curiosity-driven research” is anything but a luxury.

Chris’s piece on the threat to astronomy funding is here.

Chris’s book Our Accidental Universe is here, and details on his upcoming talk in London is here.

James’s newsletter is here. His piece on why we should abolish Natural England is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his Old Bridge Way video 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, why Remainers and YIMBYs could soon be at loggerheads, how HS2 and Wendover Council found the stupidest solution to a long-running disagreement, and we speak to Phil Tinline about why Britain needs a new ‘Theory of Power’. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

ICYMI #1: Don’t forget to check out this week’s big essay post on why we should abolish Natural England, so you can understand why a bunch of people on Bluesky are annoyed by me.

ICYMI #2: A re-up with a new ending for my piece about how to safely use NHS data for scientific research, following the exciting news that OpenSafely has opened its doors to non-Covid projects.

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:

• Another brain breaking AI breakthrough

• How CSS has changed since I first learned it 20 years ago

• A novel use for electric car charging infrastructure

• Why sometimes you need to pick a fight in government

• Dramatic photos of China’s renewables build-out

• A vision of 2010, written in 2001, from the vantage of 2026

• And a musician who really captures what Britain is all about

But first… something important.

How to respond to the DSIT survey on increasing access to public sector data (peterkwells)

The UK Government’s National Data Library team is running a survey to understand the opportunities for responsibly increasing access to data held by the public sector. It closes on Saturday February 28th.

If you care about increasing access to UK address data, or geospatial data more broadly, then this is an opportunity to let the UK government know.

If you’re sick of me banging on about the Postcode Address File, then now is the time to act! The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology is running a consultation on public sector data use, and very helpfully Peter has put together this guide of exactly what we need to tell the department.

So if you care about making one of our most critical national datasets publicly available, to spur innovation and growth, have a read and respond to the consultation!

Now let’s get on with the links!

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