{"id":93412,"date":"2026-06-29T08:13:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T07:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=93412"},"modified":"2026-06-29T08:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T07:13:07","slug":"we-cannot-trickle-our-way-to-a-fairer-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2026\/06\/29\/we-cannot-trickle-our-way-to-a-fairer-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"We cannot trickle our way to a fairer Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Burnham's speech at the People's History Museum in Manchester this morning has been trailed<\/a> as a pledge to deliver \"good growth in every postcode\", or the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall in recent history, in the words of his allies.<\/p>\n

The ambition is genuine.<\/p>\n

The devolution argument is overdue.<\/p>\n

But there is a prior question that this morning's speech, however well-intentioned, has not yet answered. It is not how growth is distributed. It is whether growth, as conventionally understood, is the right starting point at all.<\/p>\n

The trickle-down assumption<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Good growth in every postcode\" is, at its core, a spatial version of a very old economic argument. The claim is that if the economy grows, the benefits will spread, and if we ensure that growth happens in more places, those benefits will spread more evenly. The failure of the past forty years, on this reading, is not that growth was the wrong objective; it is that growth was too concentrated, too London-centric, too captured by a narrow class of asset-owners and professional elites.<\/p>\n

That is a reasonable diagnosis as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The fundamental problem with this concept of trickle-down economics is not that the trickle fails to reach the right postcodes. It is that the trickle does not work at all.<\/p>\n

Growth, in a financialised economy, does not automatically translate into better housing, better health, better schools, or better lives for the people who most need them. It translates, instead, in the first instance, into higher asset prices, higher returns to capital, and higher rents, all of which actively worsen the position of those who depend on wages, on public services, and on the security that a functioning welfare state is supposed to provide.<\/p>\n

The communities that Burnham is speaking for, whether they be the former industrial towns, the coastal areas left behind, or the cities whose cores have been hollowed by decades of disinvestment, do not suffer primarily because growth has passed them by. They suffer because their needs have gone unmet.<\/p>\n

The distinction matters. If you begin from need, you invest directly in the things that make lives livable:<\/p>\n