Roger Lee

speaker

221 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Roger Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Merryn Talks Money · What Is 'Manchesterism'— And Will It Boost Britain's Economy? · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

well-known, attracted a significant number of inward investment as a result of that.

A bit closer to home, Switzerland is a classic example of competitive federalism amongst the cantons.

Now, of course, there is the famous canton, which is perhaps the most attractive for inward investment, and that's Zug.

And I have to confess, I'm not totally sure where Zug

is but it does what is a common feature of this competitive federalism is that devolved regions are able to set a regulatory burden and most importantly they're able to set a fiscal tax burden and so the competitive federalism comes as being a great example florida texas being example as well of setting low taxation and low regulatory burden

Now, if devolution, and we stress that again, so I'm not being dismissive about devolution.

If devolution was, let's say, we were going to set up Wales as the ZUG of the UK and the Welsh National Assembly were going to slash corporation tax to zero and they were going to slash personal income tax to 15% and they were going to remove a lot of the corporate regulatory burden that the rest of the UK suffers from,

I could strongly predict that the Welsh economy would grow very quickly.

I didn't sense in Andy Burnham's speech that was the direction of travel because he actually talks about tax-raising powers amongst the regents.

Tax-raising.

I don't sense that the good burgers of Zug would be talking about tax-raising powers.

Well, yes, this is the other interesting... And again, it's a good job there weren't any questions yesterday because if you are thinking about devolution in terms of establishing competing metropolitan regions...

then that sounds like awfully similar to Singapore on Thames that was the fantasy or the objective, depending on where you sit in the Brexit debate.

Of course, this idea of competitive federalism, devolution really only works outside the EU anyway.

I think there's a couple of observations here, a couple of risks that I'm not sure he addressed.

The danger is, is if you are literally just moving forward,

desks from Whitehall to Town Hall, then you double up the bureaucratic burden.

There is a cost to devolution, so how is that going to be paid for?

There must be extra layers of regulation that will be applied here.

He's already talking about trying to get value for money, broader value criteria for assigning government contracts.

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