Agglomeration beyond London.
Devolution is working and Britain has many large agglomerations.
Tom Forth
My blog posts about regional economic growth, transport, and tech in the UK and especially in North England.
Latest posts
Recovering from Thatcherism.
How Thatcherism left Britain the poorest country in Northern Europe and how a return to competition could fix it.
Taxing for Growth
Britain's economy is weaker than all of its North European neighbours. It also has lower taxes. It is not insane to think the two may be correlated.
Entrepreneurial Britain
Britain has many regional economic inequalities, but entrepreneurialism isn't one of them.
Truth, Trust, AI, Tech, Universities, and British Policy
How AI is making me less productive and why it reminds me of British policy discussions.
To thrive, Britain must embrace failure.
If London, Oxford, and Cambridge continue to know that they are too big and too cherished to fail, Britain will not thrive. It is neither unpatriotic nor populist to say so.
Yet another dozen.
Yet another dozen people in London thinking about how to return Britain to prosperity is the last thing we need.
Density is done.
Britain's large cities are as densely populated as their European equivalents.
Londonmaxxing
Londonmaxxing is based on huge growth in business R&D spending in London. Britain has much less to be positive about.
British Growth and the Graduate Premium
Britain's economic problems will not be solved by more graduates.
Freedom, Markets, and AOCs.
Protected naming rights and why they're great!
Tram questions.
Answers to the nine most common questions I've had about the Leeds tram proposals.
Welcome to Decline.
The North has been declining since Thatcher. The South since Blair. It's good to be back together again I suppose.
National purpose on AI.
Lovelace Institutes, why I like the idea, and how I think they could work.
Self-driving cars in England's big cities.
Self-driving cars might make England's big cities rich again. Maybe.
The Greatest City on Earth.
London is a great city, it doesn't need to claim it invented the steam locomotive or started the industrial revolution.
Evil or irrelevant: pick one.
Why I'd probably rather have an evil tech company in Leeds than a good one in London.
Controversial opinions.
If Britain cannot reasonably disagree on topics as mundane as transport, what hope do we have on really controversial issues?
The worst city in the Netherlands.
Lessons on New Cities from Almere and Lelystad.
Land Value Tax in England? No thanks.
Why I think every proposal I've ever read for a land value tax in England is a bad idea.
Are American trains better than British ones?
Most people assume that British passenger trains are better than American passenger trains. But are they? And when they aren't why aren't they?
City size and productivity.
French, American, Dutch, and Nordic cities have stronger economies the bigger they get. Britain's cities get poorer and it leaves our national economy much weaker than it should be.
Building a National Data Library.
What I learned from reading 14 reports and blog posts on a National Data Library.
Northern Transport, the Green Book, and BCRs.
Why are North England's politicians repeating the myth that investing in the North is worse value for money than investing in the South?
Clusters and sectors.
What are clusters? Why do they matter? Should we even bother?
Why North England is poor.
And why Thatcher is partly to blame, but not in the way most people argue.
Regional research and development subsidies are working.
But not in the way most people hoped.
Not good, but fine.
How important to UK growth is getting industrial electricity prices down?
Three quick wins.
How could a new UK government show that it wasn't just promoting data, digital, and AI success in London?
HS2. Why, why not, and what now?
HS2 has been a fifteen year failure of British government and UK national instituations. What now?
Can the UK go back to being the richest country in the world?
When the UK was the richest country in the world its regional inequality was unusually low. It's unlikely we could return to being the former without reducing regional inequality.
Focusing on Human Capital has failed to level up Britain.
Focusing on Human Capital has failed to level up Britain. We should change course.
Productivity in transport.
Transport policy for an unproductive country.
Becoming an SW1 NPC.
And why a real start-up party would start in local government
Unreasonable success.
The unreasonable successes, and failures, of Scottish devolution.
Exclusionary complexity.
Appeals to exclusionary complexity reduce public trust in expertise and mainstream politics.
Still not trying.
For another decade the UK government has invested more in growth in London and South East England. As a result, growth has happened there.
One price.
Markets work best with a single advertised price. Should we be worried that we're moving away from that in the UK?
Seven Deadly Bins.
Rishi Sunak is right to avoid the UK government forcing local governments to collect seven bins from people's homes.
Achieving Less with Much Less.
Leeds has achieved less with much less investment than it merited. Imagine if we'd invested properly?
America's superpower.
America's diversity doesn't mean what it thinks and is much more important to its success than it knows.
More Matthew Goodwin.
More of England needs more of the New Elite that Matthew Goodwin describes.
Northern chaos.
Northern rail chaos continues. What to do?
Local government digital.
Reclaiming local government’s digital relationship with residents.
The cost of time
Transpennine Express cancel a quarter of their trains, how much does that cost North England's economy?
Pushing the limits of the possible
What I would do as an ARIA Program Director, and why it would fail.
Jet Engines and National Data
How do the company registers of the British and French states compare?
Fractured
My review of Fractured: Why our societies are coming apart and how we put them back together again.
Transport Open Data in 2023
The transport projects that Open Innovations and I will be working on in 2023.
North England vs. North Rhine-Westphalia
North England has the same population living at the same density as North Rhine-Westphalia. How do their economies compare and why is one so much more prosperous than the other?'