Last month we focused on the deeper architecture of inequality, considering how wealth translates into power, how Britain’s economic model entrenches rent extraction, and how the design of policy is felt in people’s everyday lives. Across four pieces, we examined wealth as freedom, the politics of rentier capitalism, why progressives need a sharper argument about wealth, and what fairness (or the lack of it) really looks like from the perspective of those affected most by public policy decisions.

In February, we co-hosted a roundtable with the UCL Policy Lab to discuss Stuart White’s new book, The Wealth of Freedom. Bringing together academics, policymakers and campaigners, the conversation took the republican idea of freedom as non-domination and asked what follows when that ideal is taken seriously in an economy marked by large concentrations of wealth.

Stuart’s contribution to Fair Comment sets out the core of his argument. Wealth, he reminds us, is power: those who lack it are more dependent on employers, landlords, creditors and the state, and therefore more vulnerable to domination. Those with extreme wealth, meanwhile, can use it to buy political influence, through party donations, media ownership or patronage, and so come to dominate the rest of us in our political life. A democracy, on this view, requires both a robust economic floor and a robust economic ceiling.

Stuart is candid that policy alone cannot deliver this. Public trust in politics is low, and the institutions needed to limit wealth inequality are themselves shaped by oligarchic power. The way out is to combine an economic reform agenda (such as universal basic income, inheritance and wealth taxes, and stronger trade unions) with a programme of democratic renewal: tightening rules on lobbying and party funding, exploring Citizens’ Assemblies, and rebuilding popular trust in the democratic state. The project of freedom and the project of equality, in short, cannot be pulled apart.

Read the full piece

In a long-form interview with our Senior Researcher Jack Jeffrey, Brett Christophers, Professor of Human Geography at Uppsala University and author of Rentier Capitalism, argues that Britain’s post‑1970s shift was not really about rolling back the state. It was an active political construction of protected zones of rent extraction in housing, land, energy, water and infrastructure. Ownership, more than markets, is the story he wants us to tell.

The interview ranges across Right to Buy, the rise of the buy‑to‑let market, and the extraordinary growth of asset managers like Blackstone, Macquarie and BlackRock as owners of British infrastructure. Brett is careful to resist an overly moralistic account: the typical buy‑to‑let landlord is on a median or below‑median income, not a billionaire, and is responding rationally to a chronically stagnant economy in which other routes to security have been largely closed off. Rent extraction is a symptom of Britain’s political economy, not its cause.

Monetary policy plays a starring role. Years of low interest rates after the 2008 crisis pushed institutional investors out of bonds and into real assets, water utilities, toll roads, housing, locking rentier dynamics into the heart of the economy. With governments now reluctant to invest publicly at scale, ministers find themselves courting asset managers to deliver climate and infrastructure investment, and quietly de‑risking their returns. Without compulsory or quasi‑nationalised investment, Brett warns, there is little credible alternative.

Read the full interview

Cross-posted with HopeWorks, this piece by Jack Jeffrey builds on our roundtable on Stuart White’s book and asks a fundamental question: why, more than a decade after Piketty, has public opinion not caught up with what we know about wealth inequality?

Jack’s argument is, in part, that progressives have leaned too heavily on statistics. Restating the numbers, the soaring share of wealth held by the top 1%, the racial wealth gap, the generational gulf, has not, on its own, produced a constituency for serious reform. Part of the reason, drawing on Mike Savage and others, is that people do not experience wealth in purely monetary terms. Wealth is associated with security, future possibility and the capacity to provide for those they love. Distributive critiques framed around fair shares struggle to connect with that.

This is where republican political theory may help. Following Philip Pettit and Stuart White, the republican tradition asks not only how wealth is distributed but whether it creates relationships of dependence and domination. On this view, having too little wealth matters because it leaves people unable to challenge a landlord, leave a bad job, or absorb a financial shock. Having too much matters because it enables a few to bend the political system to their will. That is an argument, Jack suggests, that travels better in public debate than another graph of Gini coefficients, and is one that progressives may need if they are to win the next phase of the inequality debate.

Read the full piece on HopeWorks

Our final post of the month is a guest contribution by Charlie Chan, Director of United Communities, drawing on a conversation with our CEO Will Snell at the Anthropy National Gathering. It is a different kind of piece from the rest of our April output. In it, Charlie traces her own journey through housing benefit, statutory maternity pay, tax credits, child trust funds and student finance, beginning with becoming a parent at 17 and being legally too young to enter a tenancy agreement, even as she was old enough to raise a child. The result is a portrait of policy not as something abstract or distant, but as a set of overlapping rules that quietly shape whether a young mother can find a home, hold down a job, train for a career, or have access to housing.

Two themes stand out. First, the importance of human discretion: a manager called Andrea looked past the stereotype of a teenage mum and changed the trajectory of Charlie’s life. Second, the way policies designed in isolation collide in practice, a small bonus pushing a family over a tax‑credit threshold, repayment notices that exceed the bonus itself, food banks rationed by paperwork. As we continue our work on tax, wealth and economic reform, Charlie’s piece is a reminder that fairness, in the end, is judged from the perspectives of those most affected by policy.

Read Charlie's full piece

If you'd like to discuss any of this month's work, collaborate on future projects, or share your reflections, we'd love to hear from you - just reply to this email.

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This month, we deepened our focus on the structural inequalities shaping people’s lives. Across our work, we explored how Britain’s economic model continues to entrench unfairness, and considered how policymakers can help to set out a clearer path towards a fairer future.

On 19 March we launched Escaping the State We’re In, a major new report by Will Hutton, Chair of our Advisory Board. It revisits, and radically updates, the arguments that he first made thirty years ago in The State We’re In, setting out how Britain can rebuild an economy capable of delivering prosperity, fairness and long‑term investment. In the process, Will argues for a new model of capitalism that can deliver economic and social good outcomes, based on the unifying value of fairness.

In the report, Will argues that Britain’s economic malaise is the result of decades of underinvestment, policy failure and a political system that has failed to reform. The consequences are now visible in stagnant living standards, declining public health, and a business environment in which too many promising firms are sold abroad or never scale at all.

The report lands at a moment when debates about Britain’s economic model are intensifying, and then the country needs a fundamental rethink of its political economy.

Across think tanks, business groups and even parts of government, there is a growing recognition that the UK’s low‑investment, low‑productivity equilibrium is unsustainable, leaving the country more exposed, more unequal and less capable. It also connects directly to our wider programme of work on wealth, extraction and democratic reform.

Our model of capitalism is currently shifting economic activity away from public markets. Instead of backing entrepreneurial businesses that create value, the system has become skewed towards industries that extract wealth. An economy that relies on asset inflation rather than productive investment inevitably concentrates power, undermines trust and produces zero-sum outcomes.

The report argues that Britain can still become a fairer, stronger and more confident country, but only if it ‘grips the reins’ of capitalism more firmly by mobilising investment, disciplining extraction, rebuilding state capacity and aligning growth with the common good.

Earlier in the month we published A Tale of Two City‑Dwellers, a joint report with the Black Equity Organisation that examines the racial wealth gap. It combines facts and figures on this pernicious gap with two detailed case studies to bring the evidence to life.

In the report, “Josh”, a White British charity worker, and “Anthony”, a Black Caribbean railway shunter are both 30, live in London, and earn similar salaries, but their life chances diverge sharply because of unequal access to family wealth. The case studies illustrate how wealth, or the lack of it, compounds across education, work, housing and mental wellbeing. They also show how racial inequality and wealth inequality intersect, creating a feedback loop that reinforces disadvantage over time.

The report reveals how wealth inequality now shapes life chances more decisively than income, exacerbating a range of racial inequalities which are the product of both historical discrimination and contemporary policy failures.

The report draws on other research, such as The Runnymede Trust’s Colour of Money report from 2020, which analysed ONS data to show that for every £1 owned by White British households, Black African and Bangladeshi households hold only 10p. It also includes contributions on ethnicity pay gap reporting, timely given the recent Cabinet Office consultation on the issue, with the government’s positive response published last week.

We’re grateful to the cross-party MPs who joined us in Westminster to launch the report at a breakfast roundtable this month (and particularly to our host Adam Jogee MP for sponsoring the event). As Britain prepares for major debates on tax, housing and economic reform, this work reminds us that racial inequality remains central to the conversation.

We also published a long‑form interview with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester. In a wide‑ranging conversation with our Advocacy Manager, Jason Bunting, the Mayor discussed how devolution can help unlock fair growth, and how political reform is needed to drive a fairer economy across the country.

He drew a sharp distinction between growth that enriches communities and growth that extracts value without building long‑term prosperity, mirroring our own work on wealth extraction and the need for an economy that rewards innovation, not rent‑seeking. The Mayor also made the case for devolving land, property and business taxation as a way to give places the tools they need to shape their own futures. This aligns closely with our December report A Fair Share, which argued for a long‑term vision for fiscal powers at the local level.

Read the full interview

Perhaps most striking was the Mayor’s argument that meaningful devolution would be best unlocked through Westminster reform, including an elected second chamber representing the nations and regions.

Of course, regional inequality remains one of Britain’s most persistent structural problems- and one of the most obvious and pressing examples of unfairness in the economy. The Mayor’s comments helped to connect the dots between fairness, devolution and national renewal, a theme we’ll continue to explore.

Fortunately, the argument for greater fiscal devolution appears to be gaining momentum, as evidenced through the Chancellor’s announcement in her Mais lecture that she will develop a roadmap for future fiscal devolution, including plans to give regional leaders control of a share of some national taxes.

This month we also published a new blog by our Senior Researcher Jack Jeffrey. It explores why Britain’s property tax system is widely acknowledged as unfair, outdated and distortionary, yet has proven so resistant to reform.

As Jack lays out, property taxation is, of course, a political issue which is rooted in the central role that home ownership plays in Britain’s social imagination. For many people, property is not just an asset but a symbol of security, independence and moral worth. Any reform is therefore interpreted not as a system fix but as a personal threat. Yet Britain’s reliance on property wealth has distorted the economy, widened generational divides, and entrenched inequality.

As Lisa Adkins and others have argued, we now live in an “asset economy” in which access to appreciating assets matters more than wages or productivity. This helps explain why even modest reforms, such as revaluing council tax bands, face fierce resistance, despite widespread recognition that the current system is unfair and notwithstanding recent developments such as the introduction of the High Value Council Tax Surcharge.

Those are issues that have been advanced at length by a range of campaigners and organisations, notably the Fairer Share campaign which has built significant momentum for reform and is currently running a petition calling on the Government to replace Council Tax, Stamp Duty and the Bedroom Tax with a Proportional Property Tax.

The politics of property taxation sits at the intersection of several themes we’ve been exploring, such as the rise of wealth over income as the driver of inequality, the difficulty of reforming systems that benefit powerful groups and the need for a new political economy that reduces reliance on asset inflation.

If you’d like to discuss any of this month’s work, collaborate on future projects, or share your reflections, we’d love to hear from you.

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This month, we’ve published new polling, interviews and commentary, focused on the impact of wealth inequality on our economy and society. From our ‘Making or Taking?’ research to our call for donation caps in the Elections Bill and our work on student loans, the message is clear: if we want a stronger economy and a healthier democracy, we must privilege wealth creation over wealth extraction, and not allow extreme wealth to distort politics itself.

Last week, we released new nationally representative polling that explored public attitudes to wealth creation and extraction. Overall we found that:

• A clear majority (64%) of the British public support entrepreneurship and genuinely innovative companies

• Around 2/3 oppose business models based on natural monopolies or enabled by tax avoidance, with majority opposition across every voting bloc

• Only 10% of respondents consider business models based on exploiting scarcity (e.g. ticket touting) or tax loopholes to be acceptable

• When people are asked why they consider some business models negatively, by far the most popular reason is that “they are exploiting consumers, workers, or society more broadly”

We believe that the overall pattern suggests a clear mandate for policymakers to support genuine wealth creation, while cracking down on extractive and exploitative practices that undermine fairness and public trust.

The findings will contribute to our focus this year on wealth creation and extraction, and how both are linked to inequality. It’s a subject that is receiving a growing focus within Parliament, including from MPs such as Yuan Yang, who has suggested that there are too many companies in her constituency that make money from wealth extraction instead of innovation or producing valued services. A forthcoming report from the Labour Growth Group will argue that Britain has become an “extraction economy”.

The issue has been the subject of a range of previous reports, including from the New Economics Foundation in its report ‘Ending Extraction in the UK Care System’ and from Common Wealth in its excellent interactive report ‘Who Owns Britain?’. It’s an issue that is at the heart of a fairer economy, and one which we intend to explore at length in the months ahead.

In our recent contribution to Bearly Politics, we argue that the Mandelson–Epstein affair should not be understood simply as an individual scandal, but as a warning sign of a deeper structural problem in British democracy: the growing ability of extreme wealth to shape political decision-making.

Read the full article here:

Bearly Politics

Is the Mandelson-Epstein Affair a Symptom of Plutocracy?

Editor’s Note: Today’s contribution to Bearly Politics comes from Will Snell, CEO of the Fairness Foundation - a UK based think tank that’s focused on the structural consequences of socio-economic inequality. The Foundation’s work, including its Wealth Gap Risk Register and weekly…

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3 months ago · 87 likes · 28 comments · Will Snell

We explore how this dynamic undermines democratic trust and can become self-reinforcing over time, as rising wealth inequality translates into growing political inequality. We argue that practical reforms, including caps on political donations and stronger lobbying rules, are needed to reduce the spillover effects of economic inequality on political power and restore confidence that government acts in the public interest.

It’s a diagnosis shared with Tax Justice UK, who accurately describe the challenge when they say that the scandal “is not the personal failings of a few individuals, but the structural rot of a political system that no longer serves the public, but the private interests of a powerful and privileged few.”

In making those arguments, we drew on the research of transparency and corruption campaigners who have been sounding the alarm on this issue. For example, Spotlight on Corruption have found that businesses are 23 times more likely than civil society groups to get meetings with Treasury officials. That study is backed by US research which shows that if the wealthy support a policy, it has a 45% chance of becoming law, but if they oppose a policy, the likelihood of it making it onto the statute book is just 18%.

The public have a keen sense of some of these challenges. According to the ONS, 69% of people say they have no say in what the government does, while our own polling shows that 75% of people are concerned that people with net wealth of £10m or more have too much influence on the political sway.

After the events of the last week, it seems unlikely that the scandal provoked by the Epstein files will fade any time soon.

In our response to the Government’s Representation of the People Bill, we welcomed the opportunity to make the UK’s democratic system fairer, but helped to sound the alarm about the absence of a cap on political donations. In refusing to include this widely supported measure, the Government has missed a key opportunity to rebalance our political system by reducing the disproportionate influence of extreme wealth on decision-making.

The reality is that without a cap, wealth will continue to buy disproportionate influence in politics. While the Bill strengthens checks on donations and ensures that donors are genuinely connected to the UK, these measures fall short of securing an equal voice for all.

Together with Transparency International UK, we’ve previously written about how fair politics needs fair limits, including through an annual cap of £50,000. The call reflects the findings of the the independent Hayden Phillips Review and the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and is supported by 67% of the public.

Radix Big Tent provided a full rundown of the reactions to the Bill from pro-democracy and anti-corruption campaigners as they emerged, and the consensus is clear: the Bill falls short in protecting our democracy. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with campaigners of all stripes to make the case that caps on political donations are essentially to safeguarding public faith in our democracy.

In Getting Down to Brass Tax, our Chief Executive Will Snell sat down with Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Helen Miller to explore how the UK’s tax system can be reformed to support long-term investment and wealth creation while maintaining fairness and public trust.

Will and Helen discussed where the tax system currently falls short, as well as some of the reasons why more ambitious reforms don’t make more progress in our current system - including in the recent Budget. They also discussed the distinction between wealth creation and wealth extraction, and how to encourage innovation while addressing economic rents. AI and automation also featured in the conversation, as did a consideration of the remaining evidence gaps on inequality and whether economics has focused too much on efficiency.

A reminder that Will’s interview with Helen is part of our monthly series with interviewees working across issues related to a fair economy.

Last month, the Chancellor provoked consternation and anger among graduates when she described the student loan system as “fair and reasonable”. It’s a view that doesn’t appear to be widely shared. In fact, it was loudly repudiated, not least by the millions of graduates - particularly those on Plan 2 loans in England and Wales - who were aghast at the idea that such a system could be considered fair.

Given the unfair impacts of the changes made in the Budget for graduates, we spoke out in The Observer, calling for the Chancellor to reverse the freezes to repayment thresholds which will hit lower earners hardest. The Intergenerational Foundation has found that lower-earning graduates will repay 68% more across their lifetimes as a result of those changes.

In contrast to the Chancellor’s comments, it appears totally unreasonable to many people that a graduate is expected to earn £66,000 just to start paying down the capital of their loan.

The Government maintains that since graduates can expect to earn over £100,000 more over their lifetime than non-graduates, they should be expected to make a contribution to the cost of their studies. Yet many graduates would argue they will do so anyway as higher earners through progressive taxation.

They also point to the use of RPI to calculate interest on student loans as particularly unfair, given that it is generally discouraged by the ONS. Equally, many students feel they were duped and mis-sold student loans at a young age, when they lacked the financial capability to make such a significant decision. It’s a cause that has been backed by consumer expert Martin Lewis.

Campaigners like Rethink Repayment are rightly shining a light on this issue, and campaigning for a better deal for graduates and students. We think the Government should listen to their demands and commit to meaningful reform before an entire generation loses faith in the system altogether.

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At the beginning of 2026, we’ve chosen to explore some of the biggest forces undermining the fairness of our economy, including the capture of economic interests by the wealthy and powerful, and the need for a national shared culture to overcome our economic and social challenges.

A reminder that this is a new feature that we are running once a month, at the end of every month, as one of our regular weekly posts (the rest of which will continue to alternate between opinion articles and report summaries, but will also feature interviews with key experts and thinkers). If you would prefer to hear from us monthly rather than weekly (or to stay on weekly but minus the monthly roundups), you can change this by editing your email preferences, but by default you are still opted in to the regular weekly posts (‘Fair Comment’) as well as these monthly roundups.

Harnessing fairness as the foundation of social cohesion

In a guest post, Fairness Foundation Senior Adviser Emeka Forbes made a compelling case for fairness as one of the civic values that can make collective life possible.

At a time when Britain faces a growing crisis of social cohesion, marked by rising polarisation and weakening trust, this argument feels especially urgent. While governments often seek to strengthen communities through targeted investment, Emeka argued that such interventions tend to address symptoms rather than root causes. Upstream lies a more fundamental challenge - a weakening sense of who belongs to a shared national “we”.

Fairness, he suggests, can provide the civic foundation on which rules, norms and expectations rest. A widely held sense of sense of fairness helps establish common rules of the game, anchors a shared national direction, and offers a unifying narrative that can cut across political and cultural divides.

Importantly, it allows people with differing values to recognise one another as sharing the same social space. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for thicker forms of culture, and for a stronger sense of collective ownership over the country we share and the direction it should take.

“Societies that struggle to live together to act together.”

His analysis echoes a growing body of evidence showing how the perception of unfairness is corroding the social bonds that hold communities together. A widespread sense that the economy is rigged, reinforced by extreme wealth inequality and a lack of asset ownership, is undermining trust and driving pessimism.

These themes emerge strongly in the work of the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion. Its recent report, The State of Us, highlights how interconnected pressures are compounded by a failure to sustain meaningful action on cohesion and community life.

Its findings are bolstered by the report produced by This Place Matters, a project led by UCL Policy Lab, Citizens’ Lab and More in Common. Polling for that work last May found that 44% of Britons said they sometimes feel like they are a stranger to those around them, with lower income Britons more likely to feel less trusting and more disconnected from society.

The challenge of cohesion is profound, and forms one part of the Government’s landmark Pride in Place Strategy. Yet as Emeka suggests, such efforts will only be fully successful if the country shares a sense of a national mission, grounded in common values like fairness.

The capture of economic policy by elite interests

This month, we also examined the alignment between economic elites in the UK and political decision-making in an opinion piece by Will Snell.

Lobbying in the UK has long been criticised as opaque, weakly regulated and dominated by wealthy commercial interests.

In recent years, a number of government proposals have been widely perceived to have been diluted by sustained industry pressure - from abandoned plans to tackle carried interest to the decision to spare the banking sector from tax rises.

The mechanisms through which powerful economic interests shape policy are not always straightforward. Distinguishing between overt lobbying, structural bias, and deeper forms of ideological influence is often difficult.

Our piece builds on earlier research by Spotlight on Corruption, which revealed a stark imbalance in access to policymakers. That research found that business and commercial stakeholders secured meetings with decision-makers at a ratio of 23 to one compared with civil society and consumer groups.

Will unpicks the drivers of this gross disparity, pointing not only to lobbying power but to a range of structural factors, including limited state capacity, skewed media incentives, and chronic short-termism in Whitehall. Beyond this, he argues that ideological capture narrows the range of policies considered legitimate, privileging certain economic interests while marginalising others.

The result is a vicious cycle linking economic inequality with political inequality. It is little surprise, then, that our polling suggests that 63% of people believe the very rich wield too much influence over UK politics. Similarly, ONS data shows that 69 per cent of people feel they have little or no say in what the government does.

These perceptions were only sharpened last week as global economic elites convened in Davos for the World Economic Forum. As the event began, new Oxfam research highlighted that billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and that since 2020 billionaire wealth has increased by 81%. Against this backdrop, the concentration of wealth alongside democratic power feels increasingly stark.

Fortunately, the publication of the forthcoming Elections Bill presents an opportunity for the UK government to begin addressing some of these structural failures. For our part, we have been working alongside Transparency International UK to make the case for caps on political donations - a reform supported by 67% of the public in polling released earlier this month.

These measures would represent a meaningful step towards rebuilding trust and curbing the outsized influence of money in British politics.

Interview with Claire Godfrey about monopoly power

Meanwhile, our Senior Researcher Jack Jeffrey sat down with Claire Godfrey from the Balanced Economy Project, an anti-monopoly, pro-democracy organisation, to discuss some of the biggest forces shaping our unequal economy today. You can read the full interview here.

Drawing on her research, Claire set out a clear argument that when too much power is concentrated in too few hands, the consequences are damaging for society as well as for the economy. She outlined how dominant firms gain an outsized influence over public policy, with structural and strategic advantages that allow them to shape markets and limit competition. The result is an economy that stifles genuine entrepreneurship, innovation and dynamism.

Claire illustrated the real-world consequences of anti-competitive markets across a range of sectors - from farmers operating on razor-thin margins while surplus is captured by agribusiness monopolies, to cartel-like behaviour in pharmaceuticals and the growing market-shaping role of large asset managers.

Claire linked the forces of monopolisation directly to rising inequality and the growing public sense that the deck is stacked against ordinary people.

She also reminded us that far from being a natural outcome, market concentration is the result of deliberate policy choices from government. The good news is that policymakers already have the tools to tackle the extreme monopolisation that fuels political influence and reinforces wealth concentration in a self-perpetuating cycle.

However, challenging this settlement requires greater political imagination. As Claire highlighted, the UK has never truly experienced free and fair competition, with rent-seeking and extraction long embedded in the structure of our economy.

“A vibrant economy built on small businesses, entrepreneurship, and dynamism is good for innovation and good for society. But that is impossible without a level playing field.”

A genuinely productive economy with sustainable and inclusive growth will depend on competitive markets and inclusive economic models. Jack’s interview with Claire built on our previous research exploring the flaws of corporate and financial governance, as well as work by the Co-operative Party exploring what ‘Grassroots Growth’ looks like in practice (research that we were delighted to contribute towards).

Claire’s analysis of the need for inclusive growth also complements the research conducted by the Good Growth Foundation in Mind the Growth Gap, which looked at ordinary people’s perceptions of broad-based growth.

This was the first interview of our new monthly series. If you have suggestions for who we might interview next, we’d love to hear from you.

Looking ahead

This month, we examined inequality, the capture of economic policy by powerful elites and the case for a more balanced economy - all underpinned by a shared commitment to fairness as a core civic value. In the coming months, we’ll continue to focus on these challenges and the ideas needed to address them.

Thank you for following our work and being part of the conversation.

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As 2025 draws to a close, we’ve been contributing to conversations about fiscal devolution, accountability in the tax system, and political transparency. Here’s a quick roundup of what we wrote about in December, and what others had to say on the same topics.

This is a new feature that we’ll run once a month, at the end of every month, as one of our regular weekly posts (the rest of which will continue to alternate between opinion articles and report summaries, but will also feature interviews with key experts and thinkers). If you would prefer to hear from us monthly rather than weekly, you can change this by editing your email preferences, but by default you are still opted in to the regular weekly posts (‘Fair Comment’) as well as these monthly roundups.

Exploring fiscal devolution in our new report

December brought the release of our new report, A Fair Share. The report is based on interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, including Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon, and explores the link between greater fiscal devolution and narrower regional inequalities. It outlines how to end the UK’s status as one of the most fiscally centralised economies in the developed world, and how to share wealth more fairly throughout the economy to benefit every community.

While momentum on fiscal devolution has grown in recent months, not least through the Budget’s announcement of new devolved tourism levy powers, the Government’s current legislation - the English Devolution & Community Empowerment Bill - sidesteps the issue altogether. That’s despite Secretary of State Steve Reed previously indicating his support for fiscal devolution. In fact, the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, Florence Eshalomi MP, has called fiscal devolution “the one omission from the Bill”.

Of course, tourism levy powers are welcome. They have been called “the acceptable face of fiscal devolution” and, as the Institute for Government has said, represent “an important step towards greater fiscal devolution”. Yet they are no substitute for the kind of “bold and ambitious” progress on fiscal devolution that is needed. As the report argues, if further progress on fiscal devolution isn’t secured, the UK will remain an outlier on this issue.

In our report, we call for a new direction through a long-term approach, exploring a series of possible measures, including a Tax Devolution Commission to review the tax code and new legislation to ensure that no area is left behind.

Our findings reflect previous comments from the Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse, who has called fiscal devolution “a critical next step in strengthening the powers of mayors”, previous calls from Mayors such as Andy Burnham to accelerate fiscal devolution, and a report from Labour Together that called for greater devolved revenue-raising powers for major cities.

You can read the full report here and our op-ed in the Yorkshire Post here.

Calling for political donation caps

This month, we also took the opportunity to call for a fairer democracy, by highlighting the UK’s status as one of the few major democracies that hasn’t set a limit on political donations, in a new joint op-ed with Transparency International UK (TIUK).

This followed new TIUK polling, which revealed that 84% of people believe that wealthy individuals use political donations to advance their personal interests, echoing our previous research, which found that 75% of people think the very rich have too much influence on politics.

We argue that caps on political donations of more than £50,000 could help to build a fairer system where politicians are more accountable to the public, and where integrity and transparency protect democratic decision-making.

Our comments follow news of the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party, and the previous confirmation that last year’s poll was the most expensive general election in history.

Earlier this month, the Government published its UK Anti-Corruption Strategy 2025. The strategy aims to protect against corrupt actors seeking to exploit the UK’s political financing framework, and includes strengthened rules on company political donations, among other measures. However, it stops short of introducing caps on donations. Next year, the Government will introduce its Elections Bill and will host an Illicit Finance Summit to marshal a global effort against flows of dirty money. A previous petition to cap donations reached almost 145,000 signatures and was debated in Parliament last year.

You can read our full joint op-ed with Transparency International UK here.

Making HMRC work fairly for everyone

In a guest post, the Director of TaxWatch, Mike Lewis, outlined the importance of improvements to HMRC to boost fairness and improve the state of public finances. As Mike’s piece highlighted, one in 10 individuals and small businesses surveyed by HMRC last year reported that the tax authority had made an error in their dealings with them, while the proportion of people who reported a good experience in dealing with HMRC stood at 52%, an eight-year low.

In fact, only 27% of surveyed individuals felt that HMRC applies penalties and sanctions fairly to all taxpayers. The piece argues that HMRC needs to make individual and small business taxpayers believe that they are being treated fairly in order to improve trust in the institution and to improve compliance in the long run.

This follows a suite of new measures announced in the Budget to enforce tax compliance, which, as the piece points out, represents the third-largest revenue-raising mechanism in the Budget. However, TaxWatch has previously found that there are serious questions over whether HMRC is effectively using its current tools and resources to chase avoidance and evasion.

Moreover, the announcements followed a “year of drift on offshore secrecy”, earlier calls from an MP for HMRC to reveal the data it holds on the overall offshore tax gap, and suggestions that the gap - which has grown to around £47bn - could be a serious underestimate.

You can read TaxWatch’s annual ‘State of Tax Administration 2025’ here.

From fiscal devolution to political transparency, our December work reflects part of our bigger mission at the Fairness Foundation: building a fairer economy that shares wealth and power equitably throughout society. Thank you for following us! Next year, we’ll build on the progress we’ve made by looking in more detail at the difference between wealth extraction and wealth creation.