Pensions, here’s an idea. Set the State Pension at a clear level against typical wages so everyone knows what the long-term promise actually is. Normally it rises with wages. If inflation runs ahead, protect pensioners against inflation until wages catch back up with that agreed level, then return to normal wage-linked increases. That protects spending power and means nobody gets a cash cut, without permanently building every temporary inflation shock into the pension bill. It isn’t a double lock, wages remain the long-term anchor. Then improve the workplace pensions we already have. You pay in, your employer pays in and the money belongs to you. Gradually increase saving where people can afford it rather than forcing the same higher rate on everyone. And this bit matters: younger workers wouldn’t be paying more into somebody else’s pension pot. Any extra workplace contribution goes into their own pension, in their own name, for their own retirement. The State Pension remains the shared promise between generations, but its long-term cost becomes more predictable. Lower earners need protecting and employers need time to adjust, so if contributions rise, phase them in and give smaller firms temporary, targeted help with the extra cost. For the self-employed, create an automatic saving route through Self Assessment with contributions able to flex when income is weaker. Then make the two sides work together. If reform means the State Pension costs less over the long term than it otherwise would have, don’t just spend that saving somewhere else. Bank a meaningful part of it as lower borrowing and debt. At the same time, stronger private pensions mean working people build more retirement wealth in their own name. So pensioners keep security, younger people build assets they actually own, lower earners are protected from the biggest hit, businesses get time to adapt and Government gets a more manageable long-term pension bill. There could be another benefit too. Less Government borrowing means fewer gilts need to be sold, while larger pension pots create a bigger pool of long-term investment capital. Some will go into businesses and infrastructure, some overseas and some into gilts. Nobody should be forced to invest their pension in Government debt, and this wouldn’t magically fix borrowing costs, but lower borrowing alongside a larger pool of long-term capital could help take some pressure off them. It isn’t free and it wouldn’t happen overnight. More retirement saving today ultimately has to come from somewhere. But we shouldn’t have to choose between protecting today’s pensioners and giving younger generations a decent retirement of their own. Protect today’s pensioners. Build tomorrow’s pensioners. Make the whole system work together.

There’s a lot of noise about political donations at the moment. But is more money in politics necessarily a bad thing? We’re not against more money in politics if it means more people hear the arguments, more people engage and ultimately more people vote. Money gives parties reach. It lets them organise, research, campaign and put their case in front of the public. Yes, money can influence voters. But it still needs the right argument, the right message and the right plan. A fortune behind a bad idea is still a bad idea. And surely more genuine political competition is healthier than a system dominated by the parties with the biggest existing machines. More competition. More ideas challenged. More voters engaged. More pressure on governments to perform. Britain is supposed to be a democracy. So if another party becomes better funded, the answer should be to beat its arguments, not complain that it can now afford to make them.

🇬🇧 ONLY BRITAIN COULD MAKE CHEAP ELECTRICITY THIS EXPENSIVE. We built more power faster than we built the grid to move it. So when cheap wind power can’t get to where it’s needed, we pay wind farms to produce less, then pay more expensive generators elsewhere to produce more. EXTRA cost caused by those grid bottlenecks last year: £1.9bn. The NAO says that extra cost could reach £7.8bn by 2030 if the grid doesn’t catch up. And this is bigger than energy. Too many real world problems are being handed to people who know how to produce the paperwork, instead of enough people who’ve actually run things, fixed things, built things and know what works outside the meeting room. Then reality turns up. Taxpayers get the bill. And voters keep accepting it. Will Britain ever learn?

Yesterday Parliament argued about where Britain finds more money for defence. For perspective: Estimated government fraud and error: £55bn–£81bn a year. Entire MoD budget this year: £68.3bn. No, you won’t recover every penny. But recover just 10% and that’s £5.5bn–£8.1bn. We spend an awful lot of time arguing about which service should lose money. Rather less asking why quite so much of it gets lost in the first place. Priorities, apparently.

🚨 GOVERNMENT WASTAGE UPDATE Public procurement: ~£400bn a year. The CMA reckons bid-rigging could be costing taxpayers £1bn–£3.5bn every year. It now wants better analysis of winning AND losing bids to spot suppliers quietly arranging the result between themselves. £400bn of competitive procurement. Latest innovation: Checking the competition was real.

PMQs today: Defence needs more money. Welfare cuts are out. Chagos got a change of subject. Rosebank got “pragmatism”. Sanctions got “leadership”. More cost-of-living help is coming. Plenty of answers about what Britain should do. Fewer about who’s paying. Details, as ever, appear to have been referred to a later date.

Corporate capitalism. Stop calling it an unintended consequence. SMEs employ 60% of Britain’s private-sector workforce. Yet vacancies at firms with 1–9 staff are DOWN 16.1%, the lowest outside Covid since 2014. Small employers retreat. Small landlords sell. Independents disappear. Capital concentrates. Government piles tax, employment costs and regulation onto the bottom. Scale absorbs it at the top. Then comes the insult: SME support. High-street support. A Regulatory Taskforce. Reviews into why challengers struggle to enter and scale. Create the conditions. Fund the casualties. Commission a review into the result. That isn’t the free market failing. It’s the State redesigning it. Big State. Big Business. Fewer independent owners in between. And with nearly £3tn of debt, Britain needs that productive base getting stronger, not hollowed out. Eventually lenders price the direction too. Apparently monopolies are dangerous. Much safer when Whitehall helps build them.

Funny old system, Westminster. MPs and peers have a group looking at whether we’re getting value from the hundreds of billions the Government spends every year. Very sensible. Helping support that group is Efficio. Efficio makes money advising government and councils on how to spend that money and award contracts. And we're talking real money, earlier this year it won a £7.7m procurement contract from publicly owned NESO. It also helps support the parliamentary group looking at public spending, including its admin, events and overseas research trips. But why stop there? Efficio also pays a company owned by Lord Porter, a member of the House of Lords, to advise it on dealing with councils. Now look at the circle. Efficio makes money from public spending. Efficio helps support the MPs and peers looking at that public spending. Efficio pays a peer to advise it on dealing with the councils spending the money. You don’t need to be a Westminster expert to see why that doesn’t look right. The people making money from the system shouldn’t be helping support the people scrutinising the system. Yet here we are. And you? You just provide the money. Perhaps the first thing the Public Sector Efficiency group should review is who’s helping the Public Sector Efficiency group.

🚨 PUBLIC MONEY. PRIVATE MILLIONS. We went back through the accounts of one company inside Britain’s asylum accommodation system. Stay Belvedere Hotels. 2017: net worth -£36K 2018: -£156K 2019: -£285K 2020: -£275K It was filing micro-company accounts. Then it entered Britain’s taxpayer-funded asylum accommodation supply chain. Watch what happened next. 2021: £104.8M turnover | £8.5M pre-tax profit 6 months to Mar 2022: £308.8M turnover | £27.7M pre-tax profit Next 6 months: £395.8M turnover | £35M pre-tax profit From £285K in the red to nearly £400 MILLION turnover in six months. Follow the money: Taxpayer → Home Office → Clearsprings → Stay Belvedere. Clearsprings is one of Government’s main asylum accommodation contractors. Stay Belvedere was its subcontractor. By 2025, Stay Belvedere was managing 51 asylum hotels + Napier Barracks. At one point, 70% of Clearsprings’ subcontractor spending across southern England was going to this ONE company. Then the Home Office ordered Stay Belvedere OUT, saying significant elements of its behaviour and performance fell below what was expected of a Government supplier. Parliament later concluded the Home Office had not maintained adequate oversight of the subcontracting arrangements. The minister herself described the controls as “quite weak.” So there it is. Public money. Private millions. Weak controls. Inadequate oversight. Eventually removed. The taxpayer had already paid. £35M pre-tax profit in six months. Who says Britain doesn’t reward enterprise?

🚨 £104 BILLION! Government says it has secured a RECORD amount of private investment to rebuild Britain’s water system. Brilliant. Private investors are footing the £104bn bill then? NO. YOU ARE. They provide the finance. YOU repay it through your water bills. YOU pay the financing costs. THEY get the return. Ofwat actually admits: “Ultimately the money that is being invested is from customers.” Read that sentence again. After decades of billions being paid out in dividends, Britain’s water system needs rebuilding and somehow we’re paying for that as well. Yet Government trumpets: £104 BILLION OF PRIVATE INVESTMENT. While its own regulator says the money ultimately comes from us. You really couldn’t make it up. Another Government masterpiece in creative accounting.

Housing. Here’s a thought. We’re putting billions of taxpayers’ money into building homes anyway. So why not make that money work for the taxpayer more than once? Use suitable public land. Create a publicly owned, commercially run housing company. Tender the actual building to private firms, workers get paid, suppliers get paid and builders make a fair profit. Then sell some homes, rent some and keep some for social housing. Sale profits? Build more homes. Rental surplus? Build more homes. Homes retained? The taxpayer owns the asset. No external shareholders. No dividends. No share buybacks. No huge executive rewards while taxpayers subsidise the development. And make it accountable: publish the costs and compare them with private developments. If it doesn't deliver value, change it. Private builders still make money for doing the work. The difference is the long-term return stays in housing and works for the taxpayer. House builders already make this model work for their shareholders. Why can't we make it work for British taxpayers?

Lose £30m. Struggle with cash flow. Then secure £350m of taxpayers’ money. That should get everyone’s attention. Vistry has just been allocated £350m of government funding to deliver 3,028 affordable homes. Its shares jumped as much as 18% on the news. Britain desperately needs homes. But look at the wider picture. Vistry has reported a £30m pre-tax loss for the first half of 2026, is trying to generate cash to reduce debt and has been facing financial pressure. Yet in 2024 and 2025 it spent a combined £243.8m buying back its own shares. Its then CEO received £1.994m in 2025, including a £1.128m bonus. The CFO received just over £1m, including a £425k bonus. And now another £350m of public money is being committed to help deliver its affordable housing programme. There’s something increasingly familiar about the way Britain does business. When things are going well, millions can go to executives and hundreds of millions to shareholders. When things aren’t going well, somehow the taxpayer is still absolutely essential to making the model work. The homes need building. But British taxpayers are entitled to ask: Why are we putting £350m behind a company currently losing money after it recently found nearly £244m to buy back its own shares? Who carries the risk? Who takes the profit? And what happens if the numbers don’t work?

If a contractor repeatedly let you down, would you keep handing them more of your money? We’ve been investigating Capita. British taxpayers might want to look at this. Serious problems with Army recruitment. NHS administration. Civil Service pensions. Another pension transition abandoned after Capita “failed virtually every milestone.” Yet Capita still has 85 contracts/statements of work across the public sector and has secured a role in another government programme potentially worth £873m. But here’s what really caught our attention. For the huge Civil Service pension contract, government told Parliament there were only TWO suppliers capable of bidding. Just think about that. We’ve outsourced so much that government may now be dependent on the very companies it is supposed to hold accountable. So where exactly is the competition? Then there’s the revolving door. Senior public officials have moved into Capita roles. Senior Capita people have moved into senior government roles. Meanwhile Capita’s CEO received £1.61m in 2025, including an £845,600 bonus. Put it all together. The failures. The new contracts. The lack of competition. The revolving door. The money at the top. People can make their own minds up about what that looks like. But one question shouldn’t be difficult: How many times can a contractor seriously let the taxpayer down before government stops handing it more taxpayers’ money? In any normal business, failure has consequences. British taxpayers should expect nothing less when it’s their money.

Interesting development around Labour’s zero-hours reforms. Around 85% of NHS bank workers already have a substantive NHS job, yet NHS Employers estimates the proposed changes could add around £900M a year to NHS costs. All while the NHS is being told to improve productivity by 2% a year and cut temporary staffing costs. Protect workers from exploitation. Absolutely. But if NHS staff genuinely want flexible bank work and hospitals need that flexibility, surely we can protect them without adding another huge layer of cost and bureaucracy? The £900m is an estimate, not a confirmed bill. The consultation closes tomorrow. We’ll be watching.

We've been doing a bit of digging into one of the Government's plans to cut waste and save money. The idea is actually pretty simple. Stop different departments paying for separate HR, payroll and finance systems when they could share them. Basically, stop paying for the same things over and over again. Makes complete sense. But this is where it starts to feel very government. £1.15BN of funding has been committed and £459M has already been spent/incurred. The expected net benefit over the lifetime of the whole thing? Around £1bn. Yet there's no single person at the centre with the authority to run the whole programme. And even the Treasury hasn't made the final decision to move onto its part of the new system. It wants more information on the benefits and service levels first. That's the bit we struggle to understand. If your own Treasury still wants more information before making the final decision, how have we already got £459m into this? Surely you nail down the costs, the realistic savings and who's actually responsible before spending hundreds of millions? Because if the forecasts are wrong, that £1BN expected net benefit starts disappearing pretty quickly. The irony is almost perfect. This is a programme designed to make government more efficient. The idea makes sense. The way they're going about it doesn't.

Britain has a strange habit of making simple things complicated. We need energy that is cheap and reliable. We need an NHS that treats people when they need it. We need welfare that protects people who genuinely need help. We need taxes that raise what the country needs without strangling the people and businesses paying them. We need government that spends our money as carefully as we'd spend our own. Yet somehow every one of these ends up buried under targets, departments, consultations, regulators, strategies and thousands of pages of rules. Maybe Britain doesn't need another grand political vision. Maybe we need to start asking a much simpler question: WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY TRYING TO ACHIEVE? Then work backwards from there. Common sense shouldn't be this difficult.

We spend plenty of time talking about what's going wrong in Britain. SO HERE'S SOMETHING GOING RIGHT. The UK economy grew 0.4% in Q2 2026. UK biotech attracted more than £2bn of venture investment in the quarter, its strongest quarter in five years. Even stripping out the huge Isomorphic Labs deal, investment was still £498m, up from £279m in Q2 last year. Britain remains seriously good at science, technology and innovation. Now comes the important bit. KEEP THE COMPANIES HERE. HELP THEM GROW HERE. TURN THAT INVESTMENT INTO BRITISH JOBS, SKILLS AND PROSPERITY. We call out failure when we see it. We should be equally willing to recognise something going right. More of this please. #UKUnscripted

WHAT CAN BRITAIN ACTUALLY AFFORD? Nearly £3 TRILLION in debt. Around £132 BILLION borrowed last year. Another £56.7 BILLION borrowed in just the first 4 months of this year. Around £109 BILLION A YEAR going on debt interest. And we're STILL promising billions more. Forget the politics for a minute. WHERE'S THE MONEY COMING FROM? More tax? More borrowing? Less spent somewhere else? Because borrowing the money doesn't mean we can afford it. And £109bn spent on interest is £109bn we can't use elsewhere. It's actually pretty simple: YOU CAN MOVE THE BILL TO TOMORROW. YOU CAN'T MAKE IT DISAPPEAR. So maybe before the next billion-pound promise, we should ask the obvious question: CAN BRITAIN ACTUALLY AFFORD IT? #UKUnscripted

BRITISH POLITICS HAS A MASSIVE PROBLEM. Turnout at the last General Election? 60%. Around 4 IN 10 registered voters didn't vote. Amongst younger voters, it's even worse. Yet Westminster carries on like this is normal. Parties spend millions fighting over the people who still turn up. Who can steal 2% from Labour? Who can pinch 3% from Reform? Who can win back Conservative voters? Meanwhile, millions of people are effectively saying: “NONE OF YOU ARE WORTH VOTING FOR.” And THAT should be setting alarm bells off everywhere. Stop obsessing over how to WIN THEIR VOTE. Start asking why they don't think their vote is WORTH CASTING. And don't ask Westminster. ASK THE PEOPLE WHO STOPPED VOTING. Why did you stop? Why have you never started? What would genuinely bring you back? We don't care which box you eventually tick. WE CARE THAT YOU TICK ONE. Because Britain doesn't need political parties getting cleverer at dividing up the same pool of voters. BRITAIN NEEDS ITS VOTERS BACK. And until politics understands why it lost them... IT HASN'T GOT A HOPE OF REBUILDING THEIR TRUST. #UKUnscripted

🚜 CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN BRITISH FARMING TO US? We tell farmers: Produce affordable food. Meet high welfare standards. Protect the countryside. Cut emissions. Fill in the paperwork. Deal with the weather. Absorb rising costs. And somehow… MAKE A LIVING. Meanwhile, England's public sector spends nearly £5 BILLION A YEAR on food and catering. So instead of endlessly asking: “How much should we subsidise farmers?” Why aren't we asking: “HOW DO WE MAKE FARMING A DECENT BUSINESS AGAIN?” 🇬🇧 Buy more British produce through public procurement where it makes sense. 🚜 Don't undercut British farmers with imports produced to standards we wouldn't accept here. ⚡ Secure affordable energy and fertiliser. 🏚️ Make sensible farm diversification easier. 📋 Cut bureaucracy that achieves nothing. 🌾 Give family farms long-term certainty to plan for the next generation. And stop treating a farm's LAND VALUE as though it's money sitting in the farmer's bank account. Farmers don't need another politician telling them how important they are. THEY NEED TO BE ABLE TO MAKE MONEY FARMING. So, farmers… What ONE thing could Government change tomorrow that would actually make your farm work better? We genuinely want to hear from the people actually doing it. @FarmersOfTheUK — interested to hear what your community thinks. 👇 #UKUnscripted #BackBritishFarming