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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Newscast · What’s Andy Burnham’s Plan To Move Power Out Of London? · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Councils are only allowed to increase it by council tax by 5% every year.

which actually means they've got a very strong incentive to increase it by 5% every single year.

Otherwise, they lose that increase forever.

Business rates, it's a bit more complicated in that some of it is kind of recirculated locally temporarily before it's reset by central government.

So even if you build lots of warehouses or office space in your place, you only get a small boost to your funding for a short period of time.

But the other half of business rates is actually allocated by grant to different local authorities around the country based on what government thinks is the gap between their council tax revenue and then their local need as determined by central government.

So it's this kind of very circular system where it's all kind of property tax based and so it's quite difficult to then untangle any bit of the business rates or council tax system without

pulling the whole thing apart.

What that means, I would argue, from a fiscal devolution point of view, is we need to be thinking about how can we share taxes that national government is collecting, particularly ones that are not property taxes, things that are more closely connected to the local economy, and use those as a way to provide a kind of a replacement for some of these grants that places are getting, but that would really reward economic growth.

So what we see quite common across Europe and indeed other G7 countries as kind of a workhorse for local government finance is income tax.

So you could allow places to keep a fixed share of the income tax that's generated in their local area without any ability to kind of increase or decrease the bills.

That gives places a strong incentive to try and increase the number of income taxpayers in that area.

You could do that a few ways.

You could get more people moving into your area.

You could get people who are currently not in work working.

Or indeed, you could try to raise wages in your local area.

And that would all feed into more resource for the local authority.

That can be complemented, we would argue, with actually a share of corporation tax so that as businesses do better in your area, as you get more businesses locating and selling to customers in your patch and abroad, actually that grows the profitability of those businesses and therefore your business tax base as well.

Those two things are quite complementary and provide a very strong incentive for growth.

So I think it's important to stress that I think as we proceed down the fiscal devolution roadmap, which is sort of what some of the wonks are calling it,

Showing 21–40 of 133 · page 2 of 7