What if Andrew Adonis and George Osborne are right? What if the key question for re-balancing the economy (not a phrase Adonis used) was to force through a major new devolution of economic power to the city regions? What if Michael Heseltine’s was right in his 2012...
Our blogs
The next devolution is economic
We have been working with the New Banking group, and the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, to develop practical policy detail about how to develop a more effective banking system in the UK - one that works for SMEs and local economies. The present banking system is...
Why the future of regeneration is small
The term ‘inner cities’ seems to have disappeared from the vocabulary of educated debate. The Guardian itself says so. Why, given that it dominated political discussion in the 1980s? The answer is, I think, that – certainly in London – the poor don’t live there any...
The wide variety of time banks across Europe
Time banks. Edgar Cahn launched the first six in the USA in 1987. Martin Simon launched the first one in the UK at the end of 1998, but you can find them now all over Europe. When I was writing our new report for the European Commission's research centre on...
The New Foodie
This blog was meant to be about the recipes of William Cobbett and so it will be but I want to take a short deviation about the way we eat our food now. As long as I live, may I never read another restaurant review. There are two minor problems with them. One is the...
The William Cobbett Cookbook
This blog was meant to be about the recipes of William Cobbett and so it will be but I want to take a short deviation about the way we eat our food now. As long as I live, may I never read another restaurant review. There are two minor problems with them. One is the...
Why we need to think about the next crash now
This is cross-posted from New Banking UK Financial regulators have to be adept at shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted – and especially so in England, where decades of persuasion are usually required to persuade politicians that the horse has left the...
Two big decisions required for SMEs
Over the past six months, and thanks to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, and others, I’ve immersed myself in the issue of local banks. It can be a frustrating business, because politicians often prefer the convenience of people to blame (greedy bankers) rather...
Are payday loans making places poorer?
There is a central moral conundrum at the heart of the payday loan phenomenon, as our report Can You Imagine an Ethical Wonga? sets out. It is that payday loan companies are designed to help people through what are intended to be unusual and temporary periods of...
Imagining an ethical Wonga
The central conundrum about payday loan companies is that they are designed to help people through what are intended to be unusual and temporary periods of financial difficulty. Long-term and repeated use of payday loans is seriously expensive. Yet the business...