It is always nice when I discover an article that seems to segway into one of the questions roaming my mind. I have been looking independently at the issue of the UK’s finances and trying to understand by looking at history what we could do about it to help the country grow again, and then this article was recommended to me via one of the many independent sources I read.
It is a lengthy and interesting look at how investment could be used to help kickstart the economy and improve the life experiences of people. I highly recommend it..
Below is my summation of the article – but I do believe that it is well worth the full read.
Britain’s core economic problem, the article argues, is that too much power is concentrated in Whitehall. By attempting to run the entire country from a single postcode, the central state becomes overstretched, risk-averse, and ultimately ineffective at delivering major projects. The government’s current £1 trillion Major Projects Portfolio highlights this contradiction: while unprecedented in scale, only a tiny fraction of planned spending is actually on track. Layers of process, rigid Treasury oversight, and perverse incentives fuel unrealistic budgets, stalled infrastructure, and wasteful decisions.
https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/municipal-bond-market
The proposed solution is not simply “more efficiency,” but a structural shift: reviving municipal bond markets and empowering local institutions to finance and deliver their own major projects. This model—common across the US, France, Sweden and historically in the UK—places financial responsibility and discipline at the local level. When local authorities raise capital tied to future revenues such as transport fares, land values or local taxes, they gain genuine “skin in the game,” aligning incentives, strengthening accountability, and harnessing local economic knowledge that Whitehall cannot replicate.
To make this work, the UK must embrace deeper fiscal devolution and modernise accounting rules so that locally financed development corporations aren’t treated as central government debt. Although borrowing via municipal bonds may appear costlier than Treasury gilts, the article argues that improved discipline, better decision-making, and fewer failed megaprojects would save billions. Ultimately, unlocking local power and breaking the Whitehall bottleneck would allow Britain to finally build the infrastructure and civic projects it needs—using the same tools that drove the country’s Victorian-era achievements and fuel economic success in other nations today.
I am currently working on a series of post which look at the UK’s finances and how/if we have ever managed to reduce the level of Government Debt, where that Debt came from and who benefits from it. If this sounds of interest to you please subscribe so you can be kept informed when they are published.
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