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 definitely think it's right to start with just sharing the revenues, not touching the rates at present.
As we've just been discussing, it gets very complicated once you start allowing different places to vary rates between places.
We may want to get to there in future, and we see other places do allow places to vary their rates.
But simply having a tax sharing basis with some degree of...
again, the wonks call equalization, so guaranteeing a minimum floor of resource in some places, is what places like Poland do, is what places like Switzerland do.
There's lots of models around the world for how this could work well.
But to your question about do we want a very complicated system,
Absolutely not.
We want to keep it as simple as possible to give quite clear incentives to local leaders, help local voters hold their elected leaders accountable for the money that they're raising.
But I think one key thing we would stress is that
Every part of the country is good at something.
So we don't need to expect the tax regime to be designed to accommodate very different parts of the country and supporting very specific types of businesses.
What we need to do with fiscal devolution is set up clear incentives that allow places, if they grow, if they do well and become a better version of themselves, they get a bit more resource so they can invest back into public services, wherever they are and wherever they're starting from.
Yeah, sure thing.
So back before the Bus Services Act was passed in the middle of the 2010s, you had essentially one bus regime for London and a different one in other parts of the country.
In other parts of the country, you could either have local authorities run their own buses, which was expensive and difficult, or you had kind of a private market, free-for-all, in terms of competition for routes.
That's right.
And the situation in London was different in that the Mayor of London and TfL had the power to designate specific routes and contract out, essentially franchise out those routes to different companies who were in competition with each other to bid for the right to operate those routes, but under the strategic guidance and operation of Transport for London, who ultimately controlled the fare box, which was the revenue stream that comes from the passengers.
What this meant was that they could provide a kind of much more integrated network across the whole of London and particularly kind of think about cross-subsidizing the kind of most kind of profitable, use the most profitable routes to help pay for subsidies for less popular routes, which are ultimately still an important part of a network.
That's right.
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