A report synopsis
Prosperity 2030
A costed, sequenced programme of structural reform for the United Kingdom.
The diagnosis
The United Kingdom faces an accumulating set of structural problems that no government of the last fifty years has been able to address at the scale required. Household insecurity has deepened, public infrastructure has decayed, local democratic capacity has hollowed, and the welfare system traps the people it was meant to support. Each problem has been the subject of literatures, reviews, and incremental reform; none has reached the depth of structural change the conditions now demand. Prosperity 2030 argues that the failures of the last half-century are structural rather than moral, and will be solved by rebuilding the institutions rather than remaking the people who live in them.
The programme · thirty policies, four conditions
Safety
Universal access to essentials removes conditional welfare traps and makes participation possible: transport, information, digital, energy, water, care, and food.
Strength
Resilient physical and social infrastructure for the shocks of the next half-century: energy security, community housing, and rebuilt local skills capacity.
Democracy
Local democratic capacity sufficient to deliver and sustain the reforms: a professionalised local government and new Local Service Hubs.
Contribution
National Contributions consolidates Income Tax, employee National Insurance, Inheritance Tax, and Capital Gains Tax into one progressive tax applied consistently to all income.
Stewardship: the destination
The horizon that opens once the four conditions are answered: citizens with secure floors, resilient infrastructure, democratic voice, and free contribution gain the headroom to take the longer view that defensive consumerism has suppressed for fifty years.
The mechanism
Well-designed Universal Services do something cash benefits cannot do: reduce the cost of living by more than they cost to provide, generating fiscal space that conventional reform assumes must come from borrowing or taxes. Part of P2030’s structural redesign redirects ~£16bn of non-disability cash benefits into Universal Services once they are running: increasing support by delivering more value per pound.
The provenance
Prosperity 2030 has been developed at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity under the direction of Professor Dame Henrietta Moore. It draws on a decade of research on Universal Basic Services, National Contributions, and the structural redesign of the social settlement. It is presented as apolitical, non-partisan, and fully costed, designed to be considered seriously by any government willing to engage with structural reform.
The numbers · year five steady state
+£101bn
New annual revenues
Raised each year through structural redesign of taxation.
−£65bn
Funds new services
Universal Services and structural reforms delivered annually.
−£14bn
Capital investment
Paid from current revenue, not from debt.
+£16bn
Redirected from cash benefits
Non-disability benefits converted to Universal Services.
=£38bn
New annual fiscal space
Headroom remaining once the programme is fully funded.
Prosperity 2030 · UCL Institute for Global Prosperity
prosperity2030.uk
