Open Letter

Taxes in Britain are rising faster than in any comparable economy while public services deteriorate. The country spends £100 billion a year in debt interest, more than the entire defence budget and equivalent to half of NHS spending. Seven prime ministers in ten years have inherited the same challenge and failed to solve it for the same reasons: the problems are structural and systemic.

Today the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity publishes Prosperity 2030: a costed, sequenced programme of structural reform that models how fiscal, welfare, and infrastructure policies can unlock the gridlock that plagues the country. It shows how structural reform is deliverable without further national debt. It is as ambitious as Beveridge was during WWII, matching the scale of Britain's structural challenges with a programme equal to them.

We agree with the principle underpinning the report: the failures of the last half-century are structural, not moral, and will be solved by rebuilding the institutions, not remaking the people.

Incrementalism will not fix Britain. Frameworks such as Prosperity 2030 merit serious consideration from all parties, so that Britain can prosper again.

Signed:

• Professor Dame Henrietta Moore, Founder and Director of UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity
• Lord O’Neill of Gatley, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and crossbench peer
• Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College London
• Professor John Muellbauer of Nuffield College, Oxford University
• Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation
• Barry Knight, Chief Executive of CENTRIS