Higher ground: A centre-right vision to raise living standards

Executive Summary

This analysis presents a distinctive centre-right policy prospectus for improving the living standards of low-to-middle income households in the UK. This means focusing on driving down the costs of essentials, not just boosting incomes, to raise living standards.

Low-to-middle income households are defined in this report as those with an income below the UK population median.

This report examines the trends in, and private and public impacts of, stagnant living standards in the UK over the past few decades. It then offers two distinctive centre-right principles to try and boost the living standards of low-to-middle income households:

• Abundance. Abundance is the plentiful supply of all things good. Public policy should make better and more frequent use of supply-side measures, promoting prosperity by producing more of what we value and ensuring its availability.
• Certainty. Avoidable uncertainty is self-inflicted through deliberate government choices. In recent decades, the UK has suffered from pervasive avoidable uncertainty, both politically and economically. Certainty in key essential markets can reduce costs that can lead to savings for low-to-middle income households.

The report focuses on costs rather than incomes as a means of improving living standards for low-to-middle income households. In the UK context, the need for — and potential impact of — lower costs is greatest in two essential markets: housing and energy. Housing and energy costs are the biggest areas of difference between the outgoings of low-to-middle and higher income households. In particular, their housing and energy costs are far higher than those of low-to-middle income households in comparable countries.

To address this, we suggest that the Government introduces eight new policies:

Housing

• Amend The Building Safety Act 2022 so as not to require a second staircase for buildings shorter than 60 metres nor submitting the full design of non-safety critical features for the construction of a building to be able to begin.
• Identify potential council estate redevelopment sites nationwide and fund their redevelopment by cross-subsidising redevelopment where property values are relatively low with the sale of homes from redevelopments where property values are higher.
• Give strategic authorities the power to introduce upzoning policies, and impose them on local authorities which fail to meet their housing targets.
• Revoke the power of Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to block a housing development without the LPA having an active Local Development Order and the power of statutory consultees to stop a development taking place when it is already ongoing or if it is past 21 days of their view being asked for.
• Commit an extra £163 million annually towards the financing of 7,500 new planners in Local Planning Authorities (LPAs). A proportion of this should be ring-fenced towards bonuses for planners, granted for each planning application approved.

Energy

• Urgently set up a government-backed Electricity Pricing Commission to decouple electricity prices from wholesale gas prices within three years of being set up.
• Produce an updated successor to the Control for Low Carbon Levies (CLCL) framework.
• Ofgem to proceed with introducing a new price cap variant which would require energy suppliers to offer customers a tariff with a higher per-unit rate but no daily fixed charges. Said variant should become the default with the option to opt out.

Chapter one: Introduction

Living standards — which refer here, broadly speaking, to the level of material welfare and access to goods, services and opportunities that individuals or households enjoy — are a vital indicator of individuals’ quality of life and their level of participation in society.

Different measures of living standards can be used, but typically they relate to personal finances, such as GDP per capita, real wages and real household disposable income (RHDI).

GDP per capita represents the total value of goods and services produced by an economy, divided by the population size, to measure average individual economic output. Real wages give a slightly clearer picture of individual workers’ purchasing power, measured as earnings adjusted for Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH).¹ Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI), also adjusted for inflation,² adds a further level of detail by looking at the total income available to entire households after taxes and benefits, adjusted for household size. Given that it accounts for both non-wage income as well as regular outgoing such as taxes on income and wealth, RHDI is the most accurate measure of living standards of the three.

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, the UK has experienced stagnation in average living standards according to these three measures.

GDP per capita has gone from $47,396 in 2008 to $52,636 in 2024, yet this modest 11% increase has been almost entirely absorbed by inflation.³

Sixteen years after the crisis, real wages are still below levels seen in 2008 in almost two-thirds of UK local authorities.⁴ Whereas real wages grew by approximately 33% per decade between 1970 and 2007, since 2007 they have grown by less than 4% per decade.⁵ Indeed, it took until 2023 for the UK to recover to pre-financial crisis average real wage levels. London School of Economics analysis from 2024 finds that the cumulative loss in wage growth over this fifteen-year period has cost the average worker almost £11,000 per year.⁶

The story is not much better for RHDI, which has climbed by just 0.6% per year in the 16 years since 2008, compared with 2.3% in the 16 years before.⁷ Indeed, when measured in terms of RHDI per capita — which adjusts the total real disposable income available to households to changes in population size, which has grown in the UK in said period — between 2019 and 2024, living standards fell by 1.8%⁸ — the poorest performance of any Parliament since the 1950s.⁹ The Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) post-Autumn Budget 2025 forecast projects RHDI per capita annual growth of 0.8% per year until 2030,¹⁰ which, although an improvement on the last Parliament, remains modest.

International comparisons highlight the gravity of the UK’s stagnant living standards. For example, between 2007 and 2021, median US household incomes for 20-to-80-year-olds grew by 17% — in the UK, the equivalent figure was just 2%.²⁷

Consequently, the salience of living standards in UK politics is high. Prime Minister Keir Starmer MP has made one of his five objectives — labelled ‘milestones’ — “higher living standards in every region of the country” by 2029.²⁸

Yet the latest forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), published in November 2025, indicate that stagnation is set to continue until the end of the decade, with GDP per capita growth forecast not to surpass 1.2% per year until 2030 at the earliest.²⁹ Likewise, analysis from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) suggests that, rather than representing the bottom of the UK living standards trajectory, the present stagnation could even represent a high point.³⁰ JRF’s report found that, by the year 2030, the average UK family could be £1,400 worse off in real terms.³¹ This would reflect a 3% fall in real disposable income, with incomes falling twice as fast for the lowest income families, which could be set for a 6% fall in real disposable incomes by 2030.³² More recent analysis from the Resolution Foundation similarly projected that median real incomes for 2030 are set to be unchanged as compared to 2020 — an outlook which, if realised, would make the current decade the worst for living standards since the seventies.³³

The focus of this research

This report outlines a fresh and distinctively centre-right approach to raising living standards for those in low-to-middle income households.

On the libertarian right, there is often a failure to recognise the need for the government to intervene and protect individuals from negative market externalities. Meanwhile, on the left, overly statist and redistributive solutions are increasingly unfeasible, with taxes and state spending both at historically high levels.³⁴ The centre-right, therefore, has an opportunity to offer bold but credible ideas to solve one of the most profound problems of recent decades: stagnant living standards, especially for those in low-to-middle income households.

In this report, we are going to focus on reducing costs rather than boosting incomes as a means of improving living standards for low-to-middle income households. This is for three reasons.

First, the centre-right should be more interested in supply-side reform rather than, as is often more characteristic of the political left, the redistribution of incomes and demand-side solutions. This will be a unique approach that will be complementary to existing public policy literature, which tends to focus on how to boost incomes.

Second, we are seeking to focus on the most pressing aspects of the stagnation of living standards for low-to-middle income households in the UK. While real incomes have stagnated for most income brackets in the UK, costs for low-to-middle income households have uniquely risen. What is more, the number of interventions that could be made to improve incomes for low-to-middle income households in the UK is vast — indeed, almost any policy that improves economic growth in the UK will have this effect. The same cannot be said for policies targeting lowering costs for low-to-middle income households.

Third, due to the scope of this report, we cannot cover everything that pertains to the living standards of low-to-middle income households. For example, properly understood, living standards could include numerous non-material factors which we do not have the space to discuss here. We choose to focus deeply just on the two biggest essential costs for these households: housing and energy.

We are focusing on low-to-middle income households because they are the people who feel the effects of stagnating living standards most acutely. Rising living costs, weak wage growth and insecure employment leave them with the least financial resilience.

Low-to-middle income households can be defined in several ways. As already indicated earlier in this chapter, the UK Government defines as low-income any household earning less than 60% of the UK median net equivalised household income — the same as the definition of relative poverty.³⁵ In this context, ’equivalised‘ means that households' income is recalculated to reflect a household’s size and composition — for instance, its relative number of children or working age adults — such that the incomes of all households are comparable.

Defining households up to middle income is more challenging. The OECD, rather bizarrely, defines middle income as households earning between 75% and 200% of the median national income.³⁶ Alternatively, incomes are sometimes broken down into finer segments — for example, breaking households into quintiles based on equivalised disposable income, whereby middle-income could refer to the third quintile (21^st-40^th percentile of households in terms of income distribution).³⁷

For the purposes of this report, we take ‘up to middle income’ literally and define low-to-middle income households as those with disposable income (before housing costs) below the whole population median, that is below the middle of the income distribution. For reference, when calculated using income data from 2023-24 — the latest available — this category includes all households with a disposable income below £36,700.³⁸ Data and evidence referenced in this report pertain to this definition unless explicitly said otherwise. Where different definitions are used in different literature, given the relative breadth of the definition of low-to-middle income households that we are adopting, the arguments and data using another definition will almost always pertain to at least a large part of the low-to-middle income households as under our definition.

The main research questions explored in this project are:

1. What is the state of low-to-middle income households’ living standards?
2. What are the key public policy shortcomings in maintaining and improving living standards for low-to-middle income households?
3. How can the centre-right offer a distinct approach to improving living standards for low-to-middle income households across the UK?
4. What are some original and credible centre-right public policies that could facilitate an improvement in low-to-middle income households’ living standards?

In order to answer these questions, we employed three main research methods.

• Literature review. We conducted an extensive literature review of domestic and international material to examine the state of living standards in the UK and the policy areas impacting it.
• Expert stakeholder consultation. We conducted a series of consultations with relevant experts who generously contributed their time and expertise to advise our research through a process of informal interviews. These are listed in Box 1.2 below.
• Public policy conference. In 2025, we hosted a high-profile living standards conference to generate new centre-right arguments and ideas on living standards. This event convened prominent politicians, thought leaders and industry experts, both as speakers and attendees. It included a keynote speech from Richard Fuller MP, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and three public panels discussing supply-side reforms, taxation and the role of business. These panel sessions are listed in Box 1.3 below.

The report is structured as follows:

• Chapter Two briefly outlines the private and public consequences of stagnant living standards for those in low-to-middle income households.
Chapter Three explains in depth two new principles for the centre-right to adopt when developing public policies to raise living standards for those in low-to-middle income households. Chapter Four describes opportunities to raise living standards for low-to-middle income households by reforming the housing market. Chapter Five looks at how to improve living standards for low-to-middle income households by reforming the energy market.

Chapter two: Consequences

Having outlined the definition of and trends in living standards for those in low-to-middle income households, this chapter examines the consequences of the enduring stagnation of living standards in the UK for such households.

The UK’s stagnation in living standards has wide-ranging negative private and public impacts.

Indebtedness

Low-income households increasingly need to borrow money for essentials such as rent and energy bills. For example, the proportion of households in the first income quintile behind with paying bills in the UK has increased from 9.9% in 2015-16 to 18.2% in 2022-23.³⁹ Indeed, research by JRF in 2023 found that 5.7 million families among the poorest 40% of the population held over £14 billion in unsecured debt through personal loans, credit cards and pay-day lenders; an average of £2,500 per family. Servicing this unsecured debt is very expensive, with an estimated annualised cost of £680 per household on average.⁴⁰

Rising food insecurity

Food insecurity — which refers to households' necessity to reduce the quality, variety or quantity of food in their diet due to a lack of money or other resources — has doubled in the last four years.⁴¹ According to research by the Food Foundation, in June 2025, as many as 11.3% of households — almost eight million persons — were suffering from food insecurity.⁴² Three percent of households reported not eating for at least one full day because they either could not access or could not afford food.⁴³

While a marked decrease in January 2025 — then, 14% of households were food insecure and 5% of households did not eat for a full day — food insecurity is still more prevalent than it was only five years ago. In August 2020, only 7% of households were affected by food insecurity and only 2% of households reported not eating for at least one full day because they could not access food.⁴⁴

Increased mental health problems

Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) national wellbeing survey indicates a gradual increase in anxiety levels in recent years. While in mid-2018 only 35% of people in the UK reported medium or high levels of anxiety (4 or above on a scale of 0 to ten), this proportion has consistently increased, reaching 40% in the second quarter of 2025.⁴⁵ However, given that financial worries are a leading cause of stress and anxiety, this decline is much more pronounced among society’s poorest; while 35% of all households reported poor mental health due to their finances, this rises to 69% among Universal Credit (UC) claimants.⁴⁶

Indeed, academic research consistently demonstrates that lower incomes and adverse income trajectories are strongly associated with poorer mental health in the UK.⁴⁷ Food insecurity has been specifically linked with elevated levels of stress and depression.⁴⁸ Likewise, indebtedness has profound negative mental health effects: recent research from National Debtline — an independent charity run by the Money Advice Trust — found that people who have fallen behind on household bills are ”more than twice as likely to struggle with very poor mental health”.⁴⁹

Rising poverty levels

The Resolution Foundation projected in 2025 that, without policy changes, an extra 1.5 million people would enter relative poverty after housing costs, as defined earlier, by 2029-30.⁵⁰

Indeed, in 2022-23, as many as 24 million people in the UK were living below the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) — an annually updated metric, calculated by the Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), measuring how much money a household needs to live at a socially acceptable standard in the UK, this defined in terms of people’s ability to meet basic material needs, maintain social relationships and live independently.⁵¹ As such, the MIS is exposed not just to changes in median household income levels, as is the case with relative poverty, but also to changes in living costs. The 2022-23 MIS figure, which is the latest available, represents a 45% increase since 2008-09.⁵²

Declining family formation

Stagnating living standards do not just lead to undesirable personal consequences, but to public ones too. Indeed, family formation in the UK has been negatively affected by the stagnation in real incomes among young people, particularly when combined with high childcare and housing costs. Although there have recently been modest increases in home ownership among young adults,⁵³ the proportion of 30-to-34-year-olds who own their homes in the UK fell by 20 percentage points between 1986 and 2021.⁵⁴ At least partly as a result of housing costs, as of 2023, around 40% of women at typical childbearing age were renting, up from under 15% in 1996.⁵⁵ Fertility rates have dropped by a quarter over the past decade,⁵⁶ and a record share of household income is currently absorbed by housing costs, leaving less available for child-rearing costs.⁵⁷

Political distrust

Stagnant living standards seem to have had a destabilising impact on British politics, contributing to widespread public dissatisfaction with government and politics more generally. In 2025, the British Social Attitudes Survey — conducted annually since 1983 — recorded its lowest ever levels of trust in Government, specifically linking these findings to the fact that “for the first time since 1945, living standards failed to improve over the course of the Parliament”.⁵⁸ The BSA survey found that 59% of respondents reported that they “almost never” trust politicians of any party to tell the truth when “in a tight corner,” a ten-percentage-point increase since 2008.⁵⁹ Crucially, this distrust is even more pronounced among those on low incomes, rising to 72% among this group as compared to 49% of those living “comfortably”.⁶⁰

This feeds into a broader institutional trust gap between the poorest and the wealthiest that has widened significantly over the past decade. An annual Trust Barometer run by the global communications firm Edelman found that, while 2012 saw just a two-percentage-point difference between the wealthiest and poorest quartiles in its institutional trust index — an annual survey which measures public trust in government, business, NGOs and the media — in 2025 this gap had widened to eleven points.⁶¹

The inability of governing parties to oversee higher living standards also provides a clear opening for populist parties to grow their support bases — particularly in deindustrialised, ‘left-behind’ areas. In the UK context, the term ‘left-behind’ refers to areas facing double deprivation — both economic decline and social deprivation. Academic evidence suggests that emigration from left-behind regions impoverishes remaining residents, thus creating a social mobility doom-loop that fuels resentment towards mainstream political parties seen as responsible for the decline.⁶²

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which began as a populist right-wing outfit, has been able to capitalise on this very phenomenon, explicitly targeting — and performing well in⁶³ — deindustrialised areas where people feel let down by mainstream Governments’ inability to raise living standards.⁶⁴ Indeed, in the May 2025 local authority elections, Reform’s highest vote shares came in deindustrialised, former coalfield wards such as Thornley & Wheatley Hill in Durham (65%) and Chadsmoor in Staffordshire (63%)⁶⁵ — areas with household incomes significantly below the national median, 23% and 21% lower respectively.⁶⁶ This effect is also visible elsewhere in Europe, with Germany’s populist right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) serving as an example. In Germany’s latest federal election in February 2025, AfD came second nationally with 21% of the vote but dominated the deprived former East German states where living standards are lower — citizens in these states have on average 11% less disposable income than those in the west⁶⁷ — winning over 30% in each East German state and as much as 39% in Thuringia.⁶⁸

Indeed, a recent Bright Blue report found that a major part of the historic appeal of mainstream centre-right parties has been the credibility of their economic record which, in turn, helps raise living standards.⁶⁹ Across the report’s five case studies (UK, France, Germany, Poland and Ireland), four of them found that the loss of a reputation for economic competence has been central to the reversal of the local centre-right’s electoral fortunes.

Conclusion

Having outlined the two key areas where the living standards of low-to-middle income households are most affected — the costs of housing and energy — in the first chapter, and the profound public and private consequences of stagnant living standards for such households in this chapter, this report now explains in detail two overarching centre-right principles which should guide new policy to raise living standards of low-to-middle income households in the next chapter.

Chapter three: Principles

The last chapter illustrated the private and public consequences of enduring stagnant living standards for those in low-to-middle income households. This chapter identifies two distinctively centre-right principles around which policies to deliver an improvement in living standards approach should be built.

Abundance

As previously mentioned, we will adopt a distinctively centre-right approach by focusing on reducing costs for essential expenditures rather than just examining how to boost incomes.

A major part of this is increasing abundance, our first principle. Abundance is the plentiful supply of all things good. Public policy should make better and more frequent use of supply-side measures, promoting prosperity by producing more of what we value and ensuring its availability.⁷⁰ This reflects the belief that, often, a more effective and enduring approach to help low-to-middle income households is not just to increase redistributive measures or alter the demand for what is needed, but rather to produce more of what is needed — in particular housing and energy — and to make it more affordable. Abundance is about striving for plenty rather than managing scarcity.

The idea of abundance can apply to a wide range of goods and services, including healthcare, transport infrastructure and employment opportunities. Increasing the supply and accessibility of each would help to improve the living standards of low-to-middle income households, but we choose to focus on the most important, not least because we do not have the capacity for this paper to comprehensively cover each good and service.

In the UK context, the need for — and potential impact of — abundance is greatest in two areas: housing and energy; indeed, the two together are the biggest areas of difference between the outgoings of low-to-middle and higher income households, and the combined costs of both are 44% higher in the UK than across the OECD.⁷¹

Alongside consultations with experts who stressed the central importance of housing buildouts and cheap energy for raising living standards, the role of abundance came through strongly in our living standards conference. Kevin Hollinrake MP and Harriet Cross MP both firmly supported the idea of abundance in terms of housing and energy, echoing Archie Hall’s message that the centre-right needs to capitalise on the growing national consensus that it’s “time to build.”

However, our speakers made the important qualification that this abundance agenda must be targeted in order to achieve tangible results and combat what Richard Fuller MP identified in his keynote speech as the centre-right’s recent problem of “over-promising and under-delivering.” Centre-right abundance should be ambitious in scope, but focused on the areas of greatest impact and opportunity.

Certainty

In public policy, there is both unavoidable and avoidable uncertainty. Unavoidable uncertainty arises from both international and domestic events. There are countless examples of such uncertainties: electoral surprises, global supply chain disruptions, natural disasters and pandemics. Government can attempt to mitigate against such risk only to a certain extent. Avoidable uncertainty, on the other hand, is self-inflicted through deliberate government choices. Indeed, the outcomes of every avoidable uncertainty can be alleviated or minimised via effective and targeted policy interventions.

In recent decades, the UK has suffered from pervasive avoidable uncertainty — both politically and economically. Ministerial churn and shifting governmental priorities undermine the UK’s appeal to foreign investors and the ability of businesses to plan effectively; indeed, the UK is subject to perpetual lag in markets responding to the changes in demand caused by shifts in government policy. Thus, achieving greater certainty through public policymaking is our second centre-right principle. Particularly as pertaining to the essential expenditures in markets we are focusing on, unpredictable planning approval processes hamstring much-needed housing projects and exposure to global energy price shifts means businesses’ operating expenses can become untenable almost overnight.

This impinges on living standards itself in different ways. In some areas, such as housing, it contributes to increased housing costs by limiting the build-out rates of new homes. Elsewhere, unpredictable spikes in energy costs translate to higher prices as businesses are forced to pass on the costs to consumers — this on top of higher bills. In order to address these shortcomings and raise UK living standards, centre-right policymaking must put greater value on certainty in housing and energy policy.

The importance of certainty was strongly evidenced across all three of this project’s research methods. Certainty was a central theme of Richard Fuller MP’s keynote speech, where he argued that in an era where technological change and national security dilemmas generate “new waves of uncertainty,” centre-right policies must offer stability through a decluttered state that does — and amends — fewer things, but does them better. This reflects what the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch MP, said to the FTSE250 in 2025: “We want a state,” she said, “that does fewer things but does them well”.⁷² Indeed, one of the core findings of the 2024 Infrastructure Progress Review from the National Infrastructure Commission — since replaced by the National Infrastructure and Services Transformation Authority (NISTA) — was that the Government needs to “provide policy stability, making faster decisions and committing to them for the long term,” highlighting the costs of rising uncertainty in the UK infrastructure pipeline.⁷³

Research on the UK’s housing crisis likewise consistently shows that the unpredictable, complex nature of our case-by-case planning system is a major factor contributing to the UK’s housing shortfall.⁷⁴ These sentiments appeared consistently throughout our consultation process, with interviewees in particular stressing how damaging uncertainty is for investor confidence, with heightened risk increasing the cost of financing major projects.

This report attempts to bridge the gap between principles and policies in centre-right approaches to raising living standards. Richard Fuller’s speech at our conference stressed that, while centre-right principles must be longstanding and recognisable, applying them to achieve a tangible impact demands a refreshed, innovative policy toolkit. This report marries these two essential elements — the vision and the toolkit — with each principle backed up by specific policy recommendations for the housing and energy markets.

Conclusion

Having set out the two principles of our new centre-right vision for raising living standards, this report now moves on in the next chapter to detail in depth the leading problems in the housing market before suggesting new policies — guided by our principles — that could reduce the costs of housing for those in low-to-middle income households.

Chapter four: Housing

Having explained distinct centre-right principles for improving living standards for those in low-to-middle income households in the last chapter, this chapter examines the first key area in which living standards of low-to-middle income households could be improved: housing.

Housing policy in the UK is plagued by two main problems: the lack of certainty as to what decision will be made by Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) in response to a housing development planning application; and, even when the guidance on whether an application will be approved or not leaves no room for uncertainty, an excessive focus on factors which limit the abundance of housing.

As a major portion of regular household expenditure, housing costs have a significant impact on limiting the living standards of low-to-middle income households. One of the most fundamental reasons for this is the long-term shortage of houses in the UK. As it stands, UK housing demand outstrips supply by approximately 6.5 million homes.⁷⁵

What is more, the UK also requires an abundance of housing types and tenures. As identified in Sir Oliver Letwin’s 2018 Independent Review of Build Out, a core contributor to the housing crisis is the lack of a variety of home tenures — ownership structures — and types — for example, their design and size — which limits market absorption rates — the speed at which homes are sold — and thus slows the supply of new homes.⁷⁶

The effects of the housing crisis are especially pronounced for low-to-middle income households given that the distribution of housing supply is increasingly skewed towards those on higher incomes. Demand for affordable housing — generally defined as housing which, if rented, would cost 80% or less of local market rent — is rising, with the number of households on social housing waiting lists at over 1.3 million, the highest level since 2014.⁷⁷ Meanwhile, the proportion of housing available for social rent in England has fallen from around 20% in 2000 to just 16% in 2023, though this is still one of the highest proportions of any country in Europe.⁷⁸

Indeed, as Chart 4.1 below illustrates, households in the two lowest income quintiles are considerably less likely to hold a mortgage, with only 11% having one in England as of 2024. Conversely, they are far more likely to rent, with 31% being social renters and 21% being private renters.⁷⁹ Moreover, they are forced to spend a higher percentage of their income on either renting or mortgage costs than the average household. As of 2021, households in the bottom income quartile spent just over 21% of their disposable income on housing as compared to just 6% for the richest quartile.⁸⁰

Chart 4.1. Housing tenure by income quintile, 2023-24

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Housing shortages impact low-to-middle income households most acutely in our biggest cities — and above all in London. This is both because poverty rates in the UK are the highest in urban areas;⁸¹ and because it is in UK cities where the disparity between housing supply and demand is the highest.

Greater London, for example, has the largest number of households on social housing waiting lists of all English regions, accounting for a quarter of England’s total despite Greater London accounting for less than a sixth of England’s population.⁸² London is estimated to have provided less than 16% of England’s net additional dwellings in 2024-25 ⁸³ and just under 21% of affordable completions.⁸⁴ This is set to get even worse. In the year to March 2025, London saw the largest decrease in housing starts of any English region, seeing a 73% drop from the previous year,⁸⁵ accounting for less than 10% of total affordable housing starts.⁸⁶ The number of London homes under construction has consequently collapsed from an average of 60,000 per year between 2015 and 2020 to less than 40,000 as of 2025.⁸⁷ But the number of construction starts has recently decreased over all of England, from 176,510 in 2022-23 to only 112,880 in 2024-25.⁸⁸

This collapse in housing starts reflects in part a planning regime of overregulation that has undermined the viability of new developments, hampered housing abundance and thus limited potential living standards improvements for low-to-middle income households. One example is London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s attempt to boost the provision of affordable housing by raising the minimum affordable housing requirements — the minimum proportion of any housing development roughly larger than ten homes which must be composed of affordable housing, as defined earlier — for developments seeking fast-track planning approval from 20% to 35%, and 50% for developments on public or industrial land. This had been a major barrier to building, with the Home Builders Federation (HBF) stating that the requirements are “simply not viable” on most sites.⁸⁹ The requirements were nominally watered down in October 2025,⁹⁰ but the conditions attached to the change are so strict that some developers who chose to remain unnamed have dubbed them effectively “impossible”.⁹¹ Indeed, in much of the country — and in particular in London — developing affordable housing is guaranteed to lose money. As of December 2025, the average affordable home in the UK would sell for about £220,000, but, in the most favourable possible setting, and excluding the price of land, the cost of building a home in the UK amounts to over £250,000 — and rising in areas likely to have higher home values due to higher labour costs.⁹²

The collapse in housing starts is not because of the lack of space. Despite the UK being one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, our cities are far less dense than comparable urban centres on the Continent. Paris, for example, has a population density of roughly 20,000 people per square kilometre — this is despite its population declining each year in the past decade.⁹³ Meanwhile, London’s most densely populated borough — Tower Hamlets — has a density of just 16,787/km².⁹⁴ The city-wide figure is just 5,782/km².⁹⁵ London’s density of 2,900 dwellings per km² is nevertheless far ahead of the closest UK comparisons — Liverpool and Manchester — which have just 2,100/km².⁹⁶

Since coming to power, the current Labour Government has made major steps towards fixing this through planning reform, particularly as a part of its aim to ‘get Britain building again’,⁹⁷ as detailed below.⁹⁸ However, this planning reform has focused primarily on greenfield, semi-rural or peripheral sites, facilitating urban extensions and new towns rather than urban densification.

Current Government planning policy

The 2025 Planning and Infrastructure Act has removed some of the obstacles to urban and rural development that were inserted towards the end of Conservatives’ 14 years in power.

First, the number of statutory consultees for the planning process in the UK is being reduced. Bodies including Sport England, Theatres Trust, and The Gardens Trust are no longer required to input on planning decisions, while seven other non-governmental public bodies will have the scope of their input reduced. A moratorium on the creation of new statutory consultees has also been announced. The impact of this can be very significant — Sport England alone, for example, objected to 30% of all planning applications it was consulted on.⁹⁹ Some statutory consultees, however, such as Natural England, still have the power to effectively veto developments.¹⁰⁰ There are still 24 statutory consultees remaining¹⁰¹ and the legal situation around at least some of their powers is unclear,¹⁰² but LPAs often treat a negative assessment of a development by a statutory consultee as a veto on said development.¹⁰³

The Planning and Infrastructure Act also requires all planning authorities to notify the Secretary of State for Housing of every refusal of the planning application for 150 or more houses. This measure will provide them with the opportunity to revise the decision and approve the development.¹⁰⁴

Another major change is the introduction of the Nature Restoration Fund, set to replace Habitats Regulations — explained in Box 4.2 below — which will ease and speed up the application process for developers. This will allow developers to pay a levy set by Natural England, rather than conducting an environmental harm assessment for every planning application.¹⁰⁵ The revenue accumulated by the fund will be used to implement conservation measures determined by Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs).¹⁰⁶ With that said, developers are still set to be forced to specify the “anticipated sequencing of the implementation of conservation measures” and, in some cases, still implement costly mitigation plans before development can even begin.¹⁰⁷

On top of this, several major changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) were announced in December 2025.

First, a significant simplification of development around rail and tram stations by providing a default permission in favour of all developments within 800 metres of each, including in the green belt. What is more, those developments must exceed minimum density standards of 40 dwellings per hectare. Lichfields estimate that this change could unlock 632,600 new homes.¹¹⁴

Second, the new NPPF gives “substantial weight to the benefits of [additional] development” within existing building plots, so long as they take no more than twice the footprint of the original building. This includes both building up, for example by adding extra units on top of an existing house, and infill development.¹¹⁵

Third, sites of under a fifth of a hectare will be exempt from Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements — explained in Box 4.3 below — though this is lower than the half a hectare limit that was initially consulted on.¹¹⁶

Fourth, local authorities will be limited in their ability to deviate from national policy in local plans — frameworks for future local development that serve as the starting point for development in an area — and unable to block developments on so-called ‘gold plating’ grounds.¹²⁰ Gold plating refers to local authorities only permitting development if it represents a nationally exemplary standard in respect of some building standard, for example by requiring a specific internal building layout.¹²¹ In one example, in Hackney, a 9,084-page planning application was absurdly refused on the grounds that it did not contain enough detail.¹²² In another, in Croydon, a relatively small 20-home development had to pass 43 separate assessments before a planning application could be submitted. A different list of assessments will now be uniform nationally and local authorities will be unable to add to it,¹²³ except to manage accessibility and water shortages.¹²⁴

Besides, in September 2025, the Government confirmed that it will progress with the building of 12 new towns, each with at least 10,000 homes. A new New Towns Unit in the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) will be established to progress development on them.¹²⁵

Finally, in 2024, the Government announced that some Green Belt land — land on which planning restrictions make development particularly difficult and expensive, but much of which surrounds cities with expensive housing costs, including London, Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol¹²⁶ — will become ‘grey belt’ land, where said restrictions do not apply; a policy Bright Blue has long called for.¹²⁷ The grey belt includes all brownfield Green Belt land, as well as all land in the Green Belt that neither prevents urban sprawl, prevents the merging of towns or preserves the historic character of a town.¹²⁸ However, LPAs are in charge of defining what land classifies as grey belt, limiting the impact of the measure where LPAs are incentivised by electoral considerations or ideology to block housing developments.

Several other positive measures are currently under discussion,¹²⁹ such as the implementation of ‘brownfield passports’ — a measure designed to fast-track development of brownfield sites, with ideas set out in a working paper published in February 2025.¹³⁰ These passports would set pre-approved rules for developments on brownfield sites — that is, sites which have been previously developed on — with criteria such as design, minimum density and quality, ensuring that, upon meeting these conditions, developments are approved by default — a form of zoning;¹³¹ a planning practice that divides land into designated areas and pre-approves each for a particular type of use and development, as opposed to discretionary planning, which considers all applications in all places on a case-by-case basis. Zoning is used in most developed countries including, among others, France, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, most cities in the US and England prior to 1947.¹³²

Building on the progress made by the Labour Government, this report has identified five key ways in which housing abundance could be enhanced and uncertainty reduced in the UK:

Abundance

• Amend The Building Safety Act 2022 so as not to require a second staircase for buildings shorter than 60 metres nor submitting the full design of non-safety critical features for the construction of a building to be able to begin.
• Identify potential council estate redevelopment sites nationwide and fund their redevelopment by cross-subsidising redevelopment where property values are relatively low with the sale of homes from redevelopments where property values are higher.

Certainty

• Give strategic authorities the power to introduce upzoning policies, and impose them on local authorities which fail to meet their housing targets.
• Revoke the power of Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to block a housing development without the LPA having an active Local Development Order (LDO) and the power of statutory consultees to stop a development taking place when it is already ongoing or if it is past 21 days of their view being asked for.
• Commit an extra £163 million annually towards the financing of 7,500 new planners in Local Planning Authorities (LPAs). A proportion of this should be ring-fenced towards bonuses for planners, granted for each planning application approved.

Amend The Building Safety Act 2022 so as not to require a second staircase for buildings shorter than 60 metres.

The Building Safety Act 2022 represents a planning regulation that limits housing abundance by raising compliance costs for developers. Introduced in the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, the Act introduced the Building Safety Levy; a charge imposed on certain new residential developments to help fund the remediation of unsafe buildings, particularly those affected by cladding and fire safety defects, which applies to all developments of more than nine residential units.¹³³ It also established more stringent building requirements to improve the safety of high-risk buildings — new residential buildings that are over 18 metres tall or over seven-storeys high with at least two residential units — after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.¹³⁴

The impacts of this have been detrimental. Since coming into effect in October 2023, the body responsible for managing these new regulations — the Building Control Authority (BCA), formerly known as the Building Safety Regulator — has become a major development bottleneck. The percentage of high-risk building development applications being delayed by the BCA doubled from just 30% in Q1 of 2024 to 60% in Q1 of 2025.¹³⁵ Late last year, the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee published The Building Safety Regulator: Building a better regulator report which was scathing in its assessment of the delays with approvals submitted to the BCA, calling the situation “unacceptable”.¹³⁶

Most applications are not just delayed; the BCA’s planning application rejection rate, as of June 2025, was a staggering 70%.¹³⁷ By comparison, in the planning system as a whole — which already sees an excessively high rejection rate, as discussed earlier in this report — only sees a rejection rate of 13%.¹³⁸ Indeed, since tall buildings are generally only viable in cities — which is where low-to-middle income households are most likely to live, as discussed earlier in this chapter — the true impact of the BCA on low-to-middle income households’ living standards is disproportional.

A particularly harmful aspect of the BSA is the influence it has had on the ‘second staircase rule.’ The rule, introduced in 2024 through statutory guidance, mandates that all new residential buildings more than 18 metres tall, a quarter of the height of the Grenfell tower, must have at least two staircases that can be used as exits in the event of a fire. The initial consultation for the guidance suggested a threshold of 30 metres, however, this has been reduced to 18 metres to align with that for high-risk buildings under the BSA.¹³⁹ This both vastly increases building costs and limits living space that can be sold as flats, as well as making it very difficult to meet the standing planning requirement for a building to have windows on at least two facades without seriously sacrificing spatial efficiency.¹⁴⁰

What is more, the BSA does not only affect the development process itself, but it also complicates purchase documentation and acquisition costs. This is because both legal professionals and mortgage providers treat BSA‑affected properties with greater scrutiny, thereby prolonging the purchase process and, in some cases, resulting in higher fees.¹⁴¹ By the government’s own cost-benefit analysis, the total costs of the BSA are 294 times greater than the benefits.¹⁴²

Some progress has been made by the current Labour Government to try to address this. In 2025, the Chair and CEO of the BCA were replaced and building inspectors and engineers were integrated directly into the BCA to speed up the review of applications.¹⁴³ Consequently, in the final quarter of 2025, the BCA processed over three times as many applications as it did in the first quarter of that same year. In December 2025, the BCA also published new guidance for applicants to make it clearer what an application needs to contain in order to be approved.¹⁴⁴

The BSA has inadvertently contributed to housing being less safe. The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee notes that the BCA’s inability to process claims in time “has delayed or disincentivised refurbishments, safety upgrades and the remediation of dangerous cladding in high-rise buildings, leaving residents in unsafe buildings for longer … [and causing] safety issues [as well as] increasing overcrowding and homelessness".¹⁴⁵ In one case, merely adding an extra toilet to an existing bathroom was required to go through the same approvals process with the BCA as constructing a whole new building, delaying the refurbishment by months.¹⁴⁶ This is despite BCA application fees being so high — on average, over £8,000 — that for minor developments they outstrip the cost of the building works themselves.¹⁴⁷

The Government should amend the BSA and relevant regulations to allow for extra flexibility for developers. The enormous mismatch between the BSA’s benefits and costs is disproportionate.

First, similar to what has been suggested by Britain Remade, a second staircase should not be required for any buildings shorter than 60 metres, reflecting the requirements in Germany and still being stricter than the requirements in Italy, Switzerland or South Korea¹⁴⁸ — fire departments should adjust by acquiring taller ladders or rescue platforms as standard. It is worth noting here that Grenfell Tower was 67 metres tall,¹⁴⁹ and so a second staircase there still would have been required under this change.

Second, as the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee recommended, to address delays in the BCA, submitting the full design of non-safety critical features to the BCA should not be required for the construction of a building to proceed.¹⁵⁰

Identify potential council estate redevelopment sites nationwide and fund their redevelopment by cross-subsidising redevelopment where property values are relatively low with the sale of homes from redevelopments where property values are higher.

Another way to raise living standards for low-to-middle income households is the renewal of the UK’s ageing council estates. The sixties and seventies saw the mass proliferation of council housing — 1.2 million social homes were built in the sixties alone,¹⁵¹ with a peak of 425,000 in 1968¹⁵² — however, as highlighted by Britain Remade, these new estates were built at much lower densities than historic neighbourhoods.¹⁵³

These estates have also declined physically. Problems such as poor insulation, damp and high heating costs are widespread, with the Housing Ombudsman reporting that complaints about substandard living conditions in social housing have increased by almost 500% between 2019-20 and 2024-25.¹⁵⁴ Supporting local authorities and housing associations to renew these estates, therefore, presents a dual opportunity: increasing the supply of housing in desirable urban areas through densification while simultaneously improving the physical living standards of the social homes’ current residents.

The scale of potential benefits is significant. In 2021, analysis of 200 major estate regeneration projects in the pipeline — conducted by the planning and development consultancy Lichfields — found that they had the potential to deliver a net uplift of 54,000 homes — a 151% increase in the total number of units.¹⁵⁵ Indeed, 2024 research by Britain Remade suggests that rebuilding estates across London at modest densities and with mixed tenures could add over 530,000 extra homes to London’s housing supply — this is on top of 540,000 rebuilt and upgraded social homes.¹⁵⁶ Given the disparity between build costs and house prices — typical newly built homes in London sell for roughly four times construction costs¹⁵⁷ — renewal projects in high-value, well-connected boroughs such as Camden, Islington and Hackney could generate useful surplus funds to support further housing provision elsewhere.¹⁵⁸

The potential benefits of these sorts of schemes have already been witnessed, as explored in Box 4.4 below.

The popularity of the Teviot Estate regeneration, detailed in Box 4.4 above, reflects the general public enthusiasm for this sort of scheme. Of all balloted estates in London between 2018 and 2024, 36 voted in favour of regeneration with only one voting against,¹⁶⁷ usually with 80% or more of the balloted voters supporting the changes.¹⁶⁸

However, estate regeneration projects do have some drawbacks. Foremost among these is the fact that they are more complicated and normally take much longer than developing from scratch. The Teviot regeneration project, for instance, is projected to span almost 25 years from the beginning of community engagement in 2017 through to the projected completion date in 2041. The consultation process with residents and local stakeholders lasted from 2017 until 2022.¹⁶⁹ Moreover, the masterplan required repeated redesigns, including substantial revisions to comply with new regulations introduced under the aforementioned Building Safety Act 2022, such as the requirement for second staircases in taller residential buildings.¹⁷⁰

Over the past decade, various policy changes have attempted to facilitate estate regeneration projects, both through greater transparency and better funding. Since July 2018, the GLA has required ballots for any regeneration project involving the demolition of social homes where more than 150 units are to be built with GLA funding. This was done in order to strengthen trust and ensure that residents are directly involved in shaping the future of their estates,¹⁷¹ and there is no evidence to suggest that the requirement has hampered otherwise likely developments.

Alongside this, successive Governments have announced funding packages targeted at estate regeneration. Most recently, the Labour Government announced a £50 million London Estate Regeneration Fund, available as grant funding for projects in 2024-25 and 2025-26.¹⁷² This mirrored the 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’s Estate Regeneration Programme, which provided £150 million to three estate regeneration projects over four years between 2014-15 and 2018-19.¹⁷³ This older programme became part of the broader Estate Regeneration National Strategy, published in 2016, which planned to maximise and support regeneration projects over the next ten to 15 years.¹⁷⁴

Indeed, due to the very high upfront costs, estate regeneration can require government funding even in high-demand areas, but it is very cost-effective in the long-term. For the Teviot Estate regeneration project, £95 million in government grant funding led to the creation of 1,393 new homes at an average cost to the government of £68,200 per home, and is ultimately set to net a profit of far more than the initial government grant, as discussed in Box 4.4 earlier.

While London’s low build-cost to house price ratio and number of council estates in areas with high property prices both mean that regeneration projects are most feasible in the capital, there is nevertheless plenty of scope to implement similar approaches in parts of other major cities, such as Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham. One such example is the Collyhurst regeneration project, outlined in Box 4.5 below.

As called for by Bright Blue and PricedOut earlier,¹⁸¹ government should identify potential redevelopment sites nationwide and fund their redevelopment by cross-subsidising redevelopment where property values are relatively low with the sale of homes from redevelopments where property values are higher. This is possible because, on sites where property values are high, the profits from the sale of the extra homes created by the redevelopment will outstrip the costs of the redevelopment in the long term. This extra money can then be used to subsidise redevelopment schemes where property values are lower and so the redevelopment would not be self-financing. The GLA’s ballot requirement on all estate regeneration projects should also be extended nationally to ensure resident support for these redevelopments.

Give strategic authorities the power to introduce upzoning policies, and impose them on local authorities which fail to meet their housing targets.

As briefly explained earlier in this chapter, zoning refers to establishing certain criteria for defined urban areas in terms of land usage and building regulation and thereafter allowing certain developments in the zoned areas by default, known as inclusionary zoning; or, conversely, rejecting certain developments in the zoned areas by default, known as exclusionary zoning. This is as opposed to granting permission for development on a case-by-case basis, as is the case in the UK currently, which gives greater room for uncertainty. Upzoning builds on this platform and refers to establishing zones where a higher density of development is permitted by default.

Upzoning policy has been attempted in the UK before. In particular, the then-Housing Minister Robert Jenrick’s 2020 Planning for the future white paper proposed a zoning system, simplifying land designations into three categories.¹⁸² These included ‘growth’ areas where ‘in-principle’ planning permission would be automatically granted, promoting brownfield and station-based densification — in effect, upzoning. However, these proposals saw massive pushback from Mayors, local authorities and backbench MPs, particularly over threats to local democracy as a consequence of zoning’s automatic approval mechanisms. Many key measures were therefore stripped back, such that the NPPF’s 2023 update instead limited any significant uplifts in the average density of residential development.¹⁸³

Given that the upzoning measures proposed in the 2020 Planning for the future white paper were scrapped, there is minimal UK-based evidence to illustrate how such policies can work. However, several international examples demonstrate how upzoning can help low-to-middle income households by increasing housing supply in urban areas while maintaining or lowering prices. Two recent examples warrant particular attention and are explained in Box 4.6 below.

Despite evidence of success, upzoning policies have their limitations — particularly at a political level. When New Zealand attempted to build on the AUP’s progress with a nationwide upzoning strategy — the National Policy Statement on Urban Development — foot-dragging by local city authorities undermined the cross-party consensus that had built such success in Auckland.¹⁹²

The challenges of implementing upzoning policies are best illustrated by California’s 2021 streamlining laws. This much-touted series of state laws were known colloquially as the ‘YIMBY laws’ — YIMBY standing for ‘Yes In My Back Yard,’ a play on the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) label ascribed to those who oppose their local developments while supporting development elsewhere. These laws removed regulatory barriers to densification, including allowing duplexes and splitting single land parcels into multiple developments in single-family zones. However — unlike in Minneapolis and Auckland — this legislation has so far had “limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply”.¹⁹³ This is for two main reasons. The first is local government resistance — they have obstructed developments, for example by imposing burdensome design standards.¹⁹⁴ The second is excessive restrictions contained in the legislation itself due to interest group carveouts. These include affordable housing quotas and strict labour standards requiring that developers only hire union-affiliated workers.¹⁹⁵

The failure of California’s YIMBY laws illustrates why reducing uncertainty when it comes to planning applications for housing development through upzoning could also be challenging in the UK, with local authorities, homeowners and so-called NIMBYs likely to present similar obstacles in the UK as were encountered in California.

Fortunately, there are promising examples of smaller-scale densification that could levy local democracy in favour of upzoning. One pertinent example is the potential of mansard floor extensions, as explained in Box 4.7.

The current Labour Government has already hinted at its willingness to move in an upzoning-style direction on planning, for example by simplifying development around transport hubs and consulting on brownfield passports, as discussed earlier in this chapter.²⁰² Indeed, the aforementioned working paper on brownfield passports directly cites the potential benefits of upzoning in urban areas.²⁰³ The potential tools to implement zonal forms of planning consent, including upzoning, will also be facilitated by the extension of mayoral development orders, included in clause 32 of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill 2026.²⁰⁴

The Government should continue to move in this direction. Local government should be given the power and incentivised to implement upzoning policies. In particular, following the passage of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill 2026, all strategic authorities — which includes all combined authorities and the Greater London Authority — should be able to implement upzoning policies, permitting by default all housing developments and redevelopments which increase a building plot’s dwelling density and which follow the zone’s design code. Said design code could be drafted by a relevant body within the strategic authority itself.

Local authorities which are failing to meet their national housing targets, on the other hand, could have ‘Manzard zone’ Development Orders imposed on them, similarly to what has been recommended by Henry Hill,²⁰⁵ and strengthening the existing NPPF legislation. Development Orders, introduced in the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act, give the Secretary of State the power to grant permission by default to any development meeting the requirements set out in the Order in any area specified by the Order. Developments that meet the requirements do not need to submit a planning application, effectively bypassing the entire planning consenting process. In areas where local authorities are failing to meet their national housing targets, the Secretary of State ought to issue a Development Order allowing the development of mansards by default, creating inclusionary ‘Mansard zones’ in them.

Revoke the power of Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to block a housing development without the LPA having an active Local Development Order (LDO) and the power of statutory consultees to stop a development taking place when it is already ongoing or if it is past 21 days of their view being asked for.

Currently, planning applications may be determined either by planning officers who work for LPAs or by elected councillors sitting on planning committees. While most planning decisions are delegated to officers within LPAs, larger or more contentious developments are often decided by planning committees.²⁰⁶ Elected members are often influenced by local political considerations when refusing applications, even where all formal requirements are met.²⁰⁷ This contributes significantly to the overall uncertainty within the planning process. A 2024 survey of 416 local planning committee members, conducted by UKREiiF, found that 80% of respondents had voted contrary to their local planning officers’ recommendations in the last 12 months.²⁰⁸

In addition to the unpredictability of local planning committees, the lengthy appeals process for developers increases costs for taxpayers and significantly delays planning applications beyond the original timeframe. The uncertainty created by these delays has an impact on the living standard of low-to-middle income households. The reduced speed of construction slows down the supply of housing and drives up prices of private rent and mortgages.

When it comes to LPAs and planning officers, the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 already includes provisions to clarify their roles; however, it could go further. LPAs should not be permitted to block a planning application for a housing development without the LPA having an active LDO pertaining to housing developments. An LDO is a document, prepared by an LPA for their local area, which gives planning permission by default for certain developments, specified in the LDO, without the need to submit a planning application, effectively introducing a form of inclusionary zoning. LPAs would then not be able to reject planning applications for housing development without first unequivocally specifying what it takes for a housing development to be accepted.

Moreover, despite the current Labour Government’s efforts, statutory consultees still have the power to effectively veto developments. For example, Natural England can declare a development site — even when the development is almost finished — to be a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), for example because of the presence of rare species on said site. Development on such sites is effectively impossible, and so the development is no longer possible, while the developer suffers enormous sunk costs, which are recouped through higher property prices to buyers down the line.²⁰⁹

Ultimately, any power by any statutory consultee — other than those which are a part of the planning authority itself, such as LPAs — to stop a development taking place when it is already ongoing should be revoked, and consultees should be informed that, if they do not provide their view within 21 days of being asked for it, they will be considered to have given full approval.

Commit an extra £163 million annually towards the financing of 7,500 new planners in Local Planning Authorities (LPAs). A proportion of this should be ring-fenced towards bonuses for planners, granted for each planning application approved.

Planning officers are responsible for 96% of all planning decisions in the UK, with local planning committees focusing mainly on the largest and most controversial planning applications.²¹⁰ However, there currently exists a significant skills gap within the planning sector, with over 2,000 of around 24,000 positions unfilled as of early 2025 ²¹¹ and 80% of LPAs operating at below full capacity. The Labour Government’s ambition to increase the number of planning permissions is likely to exacerbate this shortfall, with the HBF estimating the gap could rise to 7,500.²¹²

Consequently, the development planning consenting process often takes an excessively long time. The most recent data on planning decision timeframes shows that just 19% of major applications — those consisting of over ten homes or covering over half a hectare — were resolved within the statutory 13-week period, and only 38% of minor applications were completed within the eight-week target.²¹³

This particularly affects smaller developers who do not operate on multiple sites at any one time, and so cannot divert their resources towards a different site as they wait for planning permission; nor do they have the in-house resources to accelerate the planning process. Consequently, 51% of small housebuilders, as defined by the HBF, found themselves waiting more than a year for planning permission.²¹⁴ Here, the problem is not just focused on urban areas; a 2025 investigation by the Country Land and Business Association found that 40% of rural local authorities were still sitting on applications from before 2020, with some stretching back to 2007.²¹⁵

The pre-planning process is even worse. As of 2023, getting the outline permission for a housing development took, on average, 52 weeks, cost £125,000 and required 30 different assessments to take place. This is all before the actual planning application is submitted.²¹⁶

Still, these statistics do not reveal the full scope of the problem. Rather than submit an application — or petition for an outline permission — in the hope that it will be accepted, developers are much more likely to not submit an application in the first place if they know it will not be accepted; or if it will take too long for it to be assessed for the development to be viable; or if the outcome of the application will be uncertain. And, since 2007, the number of planning applications submitted in England and Wales has consistently declined year-on-year, from over 600,000 a year to 335,800 in the year ending March 2024.²¹⁷

Given the vast scope of environmental and safety regulations that planners are expected to consider, as well as the expectation to create extra planning tools such as LDOs and design codes, it is no wonder that applications take a long time to be assessed. The 2021 National Design Guide, for example, lists 26 “key” publications in its section on planning practice guidance, many of them hundreds of pages long.²¹⁸ What is more, given that, if planners are unable to clearly assess an application in the time allotted, they are much more likely to reject it to avoid permitting a potentially harmful development — rather than accept it on the hope that there are no such harms — the under-resourcing of LPAs directly contributes to a higher planning application rejection rate.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 partly addresses the financial dimension of this problem by enabling local authorities to set their own planning fees. This change is intended to ensure that planning fees fully cover the operational costs of planning services. Indeed, the Act stipulates that these fees must be ring-fenced for planning functions alone rather than diverted to other local authority services.²¹⁹

Nevertheless, there is scope for further action in this area. According to the Royal Town Planning Institute, in 2020-21, net expenditure by LPAs was just £480 million,²²⁰ which is only around 0.4% of the current total expenditure by English local authorities.²²¹ Even increasing that amount by 34%, which should allow the hiring of an extra 7,500 planning officers, would not be a major financial commitment on the part of the central government. Consequently, we recommend that the Government commits an extra £163 million annually towards the financing of LPAs in the UK with the aim to hire and train more, better-paid planners. A proportion of this should be ring-fenced towards bonuses for planners, granted for each planning application approved, so as to create a counter-balancing incentive to approve more developments when under time and resource constraints.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined housing affordability in the UK and the reasons behind its excessive costs. Caused primarily by a regime of development overregulation, the high costs of housing in the UK are a particular harm to low-to-middle income households, for which they represent an outsize expenditure. Despite some progress made by the current Labour Government in this area, more remains to be done, both in terms of improving the abundance of housing and reducing uncertainty surrounding the housing development regulatory process. The next chapter will move on from the housing market to examine in detail the impact of energy costs on the living standards of low-to-middle income households.

Chapter five: Energy

In the last chapter, we explained how to increase abundance and reduce uncertainty in the housing market to drive down housing costs for low-to-middle income households. In this chapter, we turn to examine the problems with and possible solutions to the high costs of energy in the UK.

As with housing, high energy costs represent a major dampener on living standards for low-to-middle income households in the UK. Achieving energy abundance and price certainty by increasing the reliable supply and accessibility of cheap, secure energy is therefore vital.

Since the summer of 2021, the UK has been caught up in what is now a global energy crisis. The end of the COVID-19 lockdowns precipitated rises in fuel prices, magnified in a European context — with UK electricity prices linked to European ones through interconnectors — by the reduced access to Russian fossil fuels following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Energy prices have fallen since reaching a peak in summer 2023, but typical bills remain 44% higher than in 2021.²²²

Though the energy crisis is international in scope, the UK’s situation is especially bad for low-to-middle income households. In 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA)²²³ reported that, out of the 28 developed economies that the IEA monitors, the UK had the second-highest domestic electricity prices after tax — 46% higher than the median and 140% higher than energy prices in the US.²²⁴ The UK’s relative position in this regard has steadily worsened in recent years — in 2019-20, our domestic electricity prices were just 13% above the IEA’s median, and in 2009-10 they were 14% below it.²²⁵

Since income is one of the main three drivers of fuel poverty, namely, the state of living in a property with an energy efficiency rating of band D or below while being below 60% of the median income after paying to heat one’s home — the other two being energy costs and energy efficiency²²⁶ — low-to-middle income households are, unsurprisingly, particularly affected by high energy costs. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, 22% of English low-to-middle income households — over 2.5 million households — were fuel poor, rising to 39% of households within the first income decile.²²⁷

Said fuel-poor households were disproportionately likely to pay for energy through prepayment. Twenty-one percent of all households using prepayment for gas are in fuel poverty, and the same is true for 22% of households using prepayment for electricity; this is as compared to only 11% of all English households in general.²²⁸ However, the average fuel poverty gap — the minimum amount of money annually required for a household to escape fuel poverty — is much lower for those households using prepayment, at £251 for gas and £333 for electricity on average, as compared to an average for all fuel poor households of £407.²²⁹ This would suggest that households struggling to pay the bills find it somewhat easier to manage their electricity and gas bills when on prepayment.

That said, prepayment can end up costing more when a non-smart meter is used, as those cost more to maintain, which is passed on through higher tariffs. As of November 2025, 70% of all meters in Great Britain were smart meters.²³⁰

More worryingly, on prepayment, gas and electricity also turn off when money on the meter runs out. Though energy suppliers generally provide schemes to provide free credit in such circumstances, it was still the case in 2022 that 3.2 million people in Great Britain on prepayment — about 19% of all households with prepayment meters — were at some point cut off from the energy supply because they could not afford to top up their meter. Of them, 18% spent two or more days without gas or electricity.²³¹ Between 2019 and 2023, 63% of households on prepayment also voluntarily chose to disconnect at least once a year.²³²

Much policy attention has already been devoted to improving the abundance and certainty of the energy supply. Indeed, the Labour Government has devoted considerable resources towards increasing our domestic energy production, aiming to quadruple our offshore wind capacity and investing in new nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors (SMRs).²³³ However, we are not currently in a position where simply increasing the supply of electricity would substantially lower energy bills for low-to-middle income households.

Two key factors are holding the UK back from helping low-to-middle income households’ living standards through an improved energy supply and hold back energy abundance. First, the role of marginal gas prices in setting prices on the UK’s wholesale electricity market introduces uncertainty and means that the benefits from an ample supply of cheap, renewable energy are not being transferred to savings for consumers. Second, growing non-commodity costs placed on electricity bills — explained later in Box 5.4 — mean that, even if we were able to massively reduce wholesale energy costs, domestic bills would continue to rise.

This chapter, therefore, focuses on two policy areas: minimising the price-setting role of gas and reducing non-commodity costs on energy bills. Its specific recommendations are as follows:

• Urgently set up a government-backed Electricity Pricing Commission to decouple electricity prices from wholesale gas prices within three years of being set up.
• Produce an updated successor to the Control for Low Carbon Levies (CLCL) framework.
• Ofgem to proceed with introducing a new price cap variant which would require energy suppliers to offer customers a tariff with a higher per-unit rate but no daily fixed charges. Said variant should become the default with the option to opt out.

Urgently set up a government-backed Electricity Pricing Commission to decouple electricity prices from wholesale gas prices within three years of being set up.

The UK’s wholesale electricity market currently operates under a marginal pricing system. This means that, at any given moment, the system price is set by the most expensive source of electricity being used.

In recent decades, the UK has made rapid progress in transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards low-carbon energy sources — indeed, the percentage of annual UK electricity generation coming from renewable sources has gone from just 7% in 2010 to over 50% today.²³⁴ However, despite phasing out other fossil fuel sources such as coal, as Bright Blue has long called for and accurately predicted the timetable for,²³⁵ gas retains a significant role in the UK electricity market, accounting for 30% of total UK generation in 2024.²³⁶

Given that the average price of gas-generated electricity is typically much higher than the average price of renewable energy — this primarily due to fuel and carbon costs²³⁷ — gas has increasingly become the predominant price-setter for UK electricity. In 2015, gas set prices 88% of the time, a figure that had risen to 97% by 2021²³⁸ — this despite only accounting for 40% of total electricity generation in the UK between 2017 and 2021.²³⁹ This is significantly higher than in the EU — which also uses a marginal pricing system for electricity — where all fossil fuels put together set electricity prices only approximately 58% of the time between 2015 and 2021. Natural gas alone set them 39% of the time.²⁴⁰

A large part of this price-setting role stems from the intermittency of the UK’s renewable power sources. Despite the increased prevalence of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, frequent lulls in sunlight and wind strength lasting days or more — referred to as Dunkelflaute or ‘dark wind lulls’ — mean that gas is regularly required to top up the energy supply.²⁴¹ This situation gives disproportionate bargaining power to gas generators in balancing the UK’s electricity grid. Gas generators are able to demand large ‘balancing payments’ to make up supply for short periods, with one particularly egregious example seeing £12 million paid to two gas plants for just three hours of electricity — fifty times the market rate at the time.²⁴²

This reliance on gas hurts low-to-middle income households in two key ways. First, the high price of gas inflates electricity bills and renders moot the potential benefits of cheaper renewables. Second, the volatility of gas prices — which are determined internationally — disproportionately exposes UK consumers to the uncertainty of price shocks. This can be particularly damaging for low-to-middle income households that lack the financial headroom to manage them, even despite the energy price cap and energy subsidies such as the Warm Home Discount, Cold Weather Payments and Winter Fuel Payments, as detailed in Box 5.1 below; as well as because the extra costs incurred to businesses by the uncertainty associated with this volatility are passed on to consumers, with low-to-middle income households spending a disproportionate part of their income on energy consumption. In the financial year ending 2024, low-to-middle income households in the UK spent, on average, twice as much on energy as a proportion of their income as the best earning 10% of households.²⁴³

One way to mitigate high energy prices would be to steadily reduce the amount of time when gas is required to meet electricity needs. This would involve expanding the diversity and supply of alternative sources of electricity. This is the primary approach of the current Labour Government, which aims to hit 95% low-carbon energy generation by 2030.²⁶¹ However, even if this highly ambitious target is met, continuing to depend on gas-fired electricity under the current market arrangements — even to a minimal degree, such as for 5% of all energy generation — will prevent the UK from effectively decoupling electricity prices from the wholesale price of gas.

Even if just 1% of the UK’s electricity supply came from gas, it could still, in theory, continue to set the market price for large amounts of time due to the marginal pricing system outlined above.

Further, following advice from the Climate Change Committee and the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO), the Government is planning on keeping gas-fired electricity as a backup source up to and beyond 2030, to be used when essential.²⁶² Scaling down the UK’s gas-generated electricity such that it became solely a back-up supply — used only to top up alternative energy sources in exceptional circumstances — would minimise its price-setting role to a certain degree. However, doing so without a specific mechanism designed to manage this backup supply — namely, a means of excluding this backup from the marginal pricing system — would leave consumers and businesses vulnerable to dramatic price hikes whenever the backup kicked in.

Managing this transitional period — and turning increased energy supply into tangible living standard improvements for low-to-middle income households — therefore requires reform to the UK’s wholesale electricity market.

Past Governments have recognised this. Indeed, in April 2022, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Government launched a Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) to consider such options.²⁶³ However, the question of minimising the price-setting role of gas — which featured heavily at the programme’s launch²⁶⁴ — has since been minimised, receiving just one mention in REMA’s latest update in July 2025.²⁶⁵ This comes after REMA’s 2024 decision to rule out proposals for more substantial market reform aiming to tackle this problem.²⁶⁶ One such notable proposal, developed in 2022 by University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Resources,²⁶⁷ is the Green Power Pool, explained in Box 5.2 below.

Nevertheless, the Government formally ruled out the GPP scheme in March 2024, primarily over concerns around deliverability and unnecessary complexity.²⁷¹ The REMA suggested that the transformational scale of the changes would take too long, deterring investors in UK electricity generation. The REMA likewise suggested that the GPP’s voluntary nature would simply create two markets between which the price differential could easily be traded away, thus rendering the scheme pointless.²⁷²

Nevertheless, given the rising share of renewables and the declining share of gas in UK energy generation, it is worth considering the viability of an inverse approach. It may prove more workable to leave renewables inside the wholesale electricity market and instead remove gas, placing it into a mechanism whereby it interacts with and balances the wholesale market when necessary but is sufficiently distinct so as not to set prices constantly. One potential method that is used internationally — and has been received positively by energy suppliers including Octopus and E.ON.²⁷³ — is for a strategic gas reserve, as explained in Box 5.3 below.

Clearly, alternatives to the UK’s current marginal pricing system are available. The Government should urgently focus on finding a way of decoupling electricity prices from those of wholesale gas. A government-backed Electricity Pricing Commission should be formed, sitting within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), to investigate alternative approaches and with the mandate to recommend an alternative model for the Government to adopt. The Commission should have the right to launch inquiries and be required to make its definitive recommendation within three years of its formation.

Produce an updated successor to the Control for Low Carbon Levies (CLCL) framework.

Ofgem to proceed with introducing a new price cap variant which would require energy suppliers to offer customers a tariff with a higher per-unit rate but no daily fixed charges. Said variant should become the default with the option to opt out.

Another way to reduce the UK’s inflated energy costs — and thus raise living standards for low-to-middle income households — is to minimise the non-commodity costs levied on domestic energy bills.

Despite their aforementioned importance, wholesale energy costs only make up 39%²⁷⁷ of a typical energy bill, as of 2026²⁷⁸ — 35% for electricity and 44% for gas.²⁷⁹ The remainder — referred to as non-commodity costs — is made up of a wide range of extra charges, broken down in Box 5.4 and Chart 5.1 below.

Chart 5.1. Breakdown of energy bill costs, 2026

_{Source: https://www.energy-uk.org.uk/customers/energy-bills-faq/}

Despite already making up a large proportion of electricity bills — almost two-thirds in total²⁸⁵ — non-commodity charges are set to rise further. Networking costs alone are also set to increase dramatically, as the Government is committed to an £80 billion grid upgrade programme over the next five years to connect new renewables and reinforce the network²⁸⁶ — a process that is set to add an extra £30 to average annual household energy bills from April 2026, rising to £50 by 2028.²⁸⁷

Indeed, Octopus Energy has suggested that, even if wholesale prices halved in the next four to five years, electricity prices for typical households would still be 20% higher than they are now.²⁸⁸ In other words, even if we achieve an abundant energy supply, the charges levied on bills are currently on track to prevent low-to-middle income households from feeling any subsequent benefit to their living standards.

One progressive way to address some of the non-commodity would be to go further in transferring the policy costs from energy bills onto general taxation, as Bright Blue has previously called for.²⁸⁹ This would further distribute the financial burden more evenly across income groups, reducing costs for low-to-middle income households as, under the UK’s progressive taxation system, their tax bill would increase by less than the decrease in their energy bill. However, in the current fiscal context — characterised by high tax levels — going further in this direction would be politically difficult.

aforementioned, policy costs make up 18% of typical household electricity bills as compared to just 8% for gas bills.²⁹⁰ Shifting these costs entirely onto gas would make electricity cheaper while also helping the government’s environmental targets by incentivising electrification. However, this policy would disproportionately benefit the early adopters of electric heating: typically better-off households. Chris O’Shea, CEO of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, therefore suggested that moving levies onto gas would effectively represent “a subsidy from the poor to the rich,” at least in the short term.²⁹¹

Two smaller, more achievable options may exist. First, a more pragmatic approach would be to apply stricter budgetary discipline towards the policy costs placed on energy bills. Oral evidence presented to the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee by senior representatives from the UK’s six largest energy suppliers emphasised the need for greater prudence and transparency in how these costs are managed.²⁹² Certain policy costs are desirable and create long-term savings for consumers. Network-related costs are a key example — NESO suggests that bringing forward key grid upgrades could deliver savings of up to £4 billion in 2030.²⁹³ However, not all policy costs represent the same value for money.

The high levels of spending on carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) exemplify this. DESNZ has already committed approximately £22 billion in funding over the next 25 years to expanding the UK’s CCUS programme, three-quarters of which will come from levies on consumer bills.²⁹⁴ What is more, independent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests that the £50 billion currently earmarked to subsidise this programme accounts for just 8% of the UK’s 2050 target for CCUS, with the total exceeding £400 billion.²⁹⁵ While CCUS may play a role in supporting environmental targets and preserving jobs, concerns have been raised about the technology’s cost-effectiveness. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed a “high degree of uncertainty as to whether these risky investments in unproven technologies present best value for money for taxpayers and consumers, relative to other ways of decarbonising industrial sectors and energy production”.²⁹⁶

The policy measures announced as part of the 2025 Autumn Budget — particularly, the removal of green levies from domestic energy bills, as called for by Bright Blue²⁹⁷ — represent a move in the right direction. However, there remains a need for a more thorough review of the non-commodity charges; we therefore need much stronger oversight on government levies in the interests of value for money for UK billpayers.

This could potentially be achieved through an updated successor to the Control for Low Carbon Levies (CLCL) framework — a control introduced in 2017 to prohibit any additional low-carbon electricity levies adding to consumer bills.²⁹⁸ The framework sets out “that there will be no new low carbon electricity levies on energy bills until the value of such costs is falling”,²⁹⁹ but non-commodity costs are growing as a proportion of energy bills despite this. The 2023 Spring Budget contained an “intention” to refresh the framework, but this had not happened.³⁰⁰

A second option is to move a greater proportion of non-commodity costs onto the variable component of energy bills. In a typical household's energy bill of £1,758 containing £1,068 of non-commodity charges, £328 comes as a standing charge — a fixed cost applied to all customers regardless of household energy consumption.³⁰¹ High standing charges are particularly bad for low-to-middle income households given that energy usage typically increases in line with income.³⁰² Indeed, the Committee on Fuel Poverty recently suggested that “[f]ixed elements of bills, namely standing charges, are not only regressive but are also being driven to increase through policies supporting net zero. Therefore, those least able to pay are being disproportionately charged for net zero”.³⁰³

Reducing standing charges by shifting a greater proportion of non-commodity costs onto the variable component of bills would benefit the majority of low-to-middle income households. Some households, however, would lose out — in particular those with disproportionately high electricity costs due to energy-intensive medical treatments or renters reliant on electric heating and without the means to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Ofgem is currently considering introducing a new ‘zero standing charge price cap variant’ which would require energy suppliers to offer customers a tariff with a higher per-unit rate but not daily fixed charges. This would serve as an effective solution to the problem of varying household usage — allowing high-use households to avoid increases to their bills.³⁰⁴ Ofgem should progress with this policy change; however, as called for by Martin Lewis,³⁰⁵ this zero standing charge variant should be the default and serve as an opt-out rather than opt-in model, as is currently proposed. This would maximise the benefits to low-to-middle income households that may not be aware of the potential savings on offer.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the reasons behind the high energy costs in the UK. UK energy consumers remain unable to benefit from increases in energy supply due to the price-setting role of gas in the UK’s energy market. What is more, even if wholesale prices of energy were to decrease, non-commodity costs would remain high, contributing to high bills. Despite some recent cuts to non-commodity costs, little has been overall done to address either problem. The Government should move quickly to alleviate the root causes of low-to-middle income households' high energy bills.

Conclusion

Living standards in the UK have been stagnant since the global financial crisis at the start of this century. Low-to-middle income households bear the brunt of this stagnation — they most often lack the headroom to cut down on inessential expenditures or savings to fall back on.

Much of this stagnation happened under the reign of the UK centre-right — first, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government and, later, the Conservatives alone. But a change of government has not led to improvement. Forecasts continue to be pessimistic, with most projecting that living standards are set to continue to flatline, and some even projecting a decline.

The suggestions made here will not be enough to fully overcome this stagnation. Living standards are intertwined with a plethora of other issues. Tax, growth, monetary policy, social security, education, international trade, even environment policy, all can affect and change the living standards of everybody in this country.

With that said, the policies outlined here would be a strong step in helping low-to-middle income households with their living standards. They seek to address the two main drivers of high living costs for low-to-middle income households: housing and energy costs. They seek to do so by emphasising supply-side over demand-side, redistributive solutions; by increasing the abundance of housing and energy and reducing uncertainties surrounding their cost and delivery.

Taken together, these recommendations should:

• Improve the abundance of housing available for low-to-middle income households in the UK, hence decreasing their housing costs, by allowing the development of more and better-quality homes in some of the country’s densest, most in-demand and most expensive areas, including in cities and on council estates.
• Reduce the uncertainty linked to the housing development process, hence allowing the market to respond to demand promptly and without additional costs to be levied onto low-to-middle income households. Certainty is improved by setting clear rules for development upfront, preventing arbitrary blockages and speeding up good quality decision-making.
• Allow the abundance of energy available to benefit low-to-middle income households. By reducing the non-commodity costs of energy, an improvement in the energy supply can translate to lower costs for energy consumers, of which low-to-middle income households are a disproportionate part, and allow for the abundant accessibility of energy.
• Reduce the uncertainty related to the fluctuations in gas prices, leading to arbitrarily high bills and downstream costs for energy consumers.

It has now been almost two decades since living standards in the UK have stagnated. Attempts to address this so far have either failed or been insufficient. The best time to fix it was years ago. The second-best time is now.

Acknowledgments

This report is funded by Aberdeen Group Charitable Trust (registered charity number SC040877), under the Trust’s prior charitable name, abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

The project was advised, through a process of interviews, by a selection of decision makers and thought leaders, composed of: Arun Advani, Baroness Morgan of Cotes, Ben Willmott, Charlotte Carter, Fiona Humm, Gail Irvine, Gemma Tetlow, Jeremy Gray, John Penrose, Jordan Cummins, Katherine Chapman, Matthew Percival, Patrick Hall, Sam Bowman, Sam Dumitriu, Steven Dowson, Tim Edwards and Tom Lake. We thank all the interviewees for their time and contributions throughout the project. The views in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the interviewees listed above.

We would also like to thank all the speakers from the 2025 conference which fed into this project, including Richard Fuller MP, Kevin Hollinrake MP, Lord Moylan, Harriet Cross MP, Archie Hall, Alexandra Jezeph, Helen Miller, Andrew Lilico, John Penrose again, Keiran Pedley, Mubin Haq, Jerome Mayhew MP, Alice Grimes, Yael Selfin, Julian Jessop and Diane Banks.

Finally, we would like to thank Sarah Kuszynski and Stephen Ayshford for their help in organising the conference as well as Karen Barker for her work with us throughout this project. As usual, we are especially grateful to Ryan Shorthouse for his thoughts and edits during the progress of this report.

About the authors

Joe Harrison currently works at Sanctuary Counsel and was formerly a Senior Researcher at Bright Blue. He graduated with a first-class bachelor’s degree in history and French from the University of Bristol in 2024, having spent a year on placement at l’Université de Bordeaux Montaigne where he studied geopolitics and constitutional law. While at Bright Blue, Joe had been published in Business Post, City AM, ConservativeHome, LabourList, the Spectator and the Yorkshire Post for his work on various topics including populism, immigration policy and UK-EU relations.

Cyril Davydenko is a Researcher at Bright Blue. He read history and politics of the Americas at University College London and graduated in 2025 with a first-class degree. Alongside his studies, Cyril worked as a Research Assistant at the UCL Centre on US Politics. His work there focused on political theory research, with an emphasis on twenty-first century conservative thought. He has been published in, among others, Conservative Home and the Yorkshire Post.

Bartek Staniszewski is the Head of Policy at Bright Blue. He graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Oxford in 2021 and with an MSt in Philosophical Theology in 2022. There, he sat on the editorial board of the Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society. He has been featured, among others, in the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Critic, City AM, the Spectator and on the BBC and GB News. He is the author of numerous think-tank reports, including on democratic business, planning policy, young people’s political priorities, affordable housing, social security and race inequality. He is also responsible for Bright Blue’s European projects. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Centre Write.