Ant Breach
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Ant Breach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We are a think tank that looks at cities and particularly their role in the national economy, why they differ, and trying to come up with ideas on how to make them better and how to make the national economy more prosperous as well.
So what they're saying when they say the UK is unusually centralised is that we're quite unusual for a big democracy of our size.
Just how many powers are concentrated within Westminster?
That touches, you know,
many different areas of public policy, whether that's health, whether that's education, whether that's things like transport.
Lots of these decisions are taken in other countries at a more local level.
Actually, the ministers are very important in the British system.
in making decisions in Westminster.
But I think maybe one of the kind of starkest ways of illustrating this divide is of G7 countries, so the big countries that are probably closest to our peers internationally, we are by far the most fiscally centralized.
So only 5% of our taxes are collected at the local level.
That compares to about 11% in Italy, 25% in Japan, and then way more in places like Germany or the United States that have much more federal constitutions.
Yeah, I think on both of those claims, both the democratic claims and the economic claims, I think there's increasingly good evidence that political alienation is increased by centralisation, that the number of people who can actually make a difference in British politics is low because our state is so centralised.
The idea that somebody can, in their community or in their city, get stuck and get involved and shape outcomes in their place is quite limited.
But also I think the economic case is in some ways kind of where, I mean, Burnham is making quite a novel case in the UK context where the idea that because our tax system is so centralised, the incentives for places to pursue economic growth are quite limited insofar as if you are a city council or if you're a metro mayor, if you grow your local economy, if you create jobs, if you support businesses, if you invest in your area,
it doesn't actually mean that much for your budget as a local leader, which means you can't pay for more public services by taking tough decisions on growth, on investments and jobs, which means ultimately there's money left lying on the table that we're not picking up.
Yeah, precisely.
And, you know, while it's obviously the case that local leaders up and down the country are trying to work hard for their area, the fact that there's no link between the local economy and local public services means that even if a place does do well, if it does create jobs, because we hand money on the basis that money should flow to poorer areas, places get penalised, that they actually lose money if they do a good job for their local area.
So local authorities currently have two major taxes that drive lots of their revenue.
There's council tax and there's business rates.
However, both of these are subject to pretty extensive control by central government.
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