Londoners get £3bn a year subsidy because structure of council tax biased against north, says thinktank – UK politics live

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

As reported earlier (see 10.55am), Andy Burnham has suggested he would like to lift the ban on drinking alcohol in the stands at football matches.

Jason Rodrigues has been going through the archives and he has dug out a Guardian story covering the meeting, chaired by Margaret Thatcher in 1985, where imposing the alcohol ban was first discussed. Thatcher wanted to tackle the problem then described as “soccer hooliganism”.

(Much of what Burnham wants to do in politics amounts to dismantling decisions taken by the Thatcher government; this would be a small example.)

At the last general election, Plaid Cymru won four seats. The MRP poll from YouGov out today suggests they would win 15 seats now. (See 8.59am.)

Commenting on the figures, the Plaid MP Ann Davies said:

These figures are encouraging and suggest that the momentum we saw in Wales earlier this year is continuing. To be projected to almost quadruple our representation at Westminster and return 15 Plaid Cymru MPs shows that people across Wales are increasingly placing their trust in us as a new party of government.

They also highlight that Welsh politics no longer simply follows England. While Labour continues to hold on to support in parts of England, this poll suggests they would be almost wiped out in Wales. That underlines the scale of political change taking place here, but it also shows that Reform continues to pose a real challenge in communities across the country.

Full details of the YouGov MRP are now on its website.

The same poll suggests the SNP is also on course to quadruple its Westminster seat total. It won nine seats in 2025, but is now on course to win 40, the poll suggests. (See 11.29am.)

The Survation MRP poll also out today also has the SNP on course to win 40 seats. But its figures suggest Plaid would just win eight.

Lisa O’Carroll is a senior Guardian correspondent covering post-Brexit affairs.

Richard Branson has called Brexit an “unmitigated disaster” and a “hole the UK cannot dig itself out of” on its own.

The Virgin Airlines and music label founder said last week’s positive reception by Canada to the offer of associate membership to the EU showed the “enduring appeal” of “the world’s largest trading bloc”.

“Despite being assaulted, criticised, and vilified from afar and from within, the EU is alive and kicking,” he wrote in a lengthy post on LinkedIn. “The UK should take note”.

Branson, who campaigned to remain in the EU said:

Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster, costing the UK up to 8% of its GDP, with significant losses in trade, productivity, and employment. It’s a hole the UK cannot dig itself out of. Certainly not on its own.

He described the departure from the EU as like the “downgrading from F1 car to a hatchback” and said for those under 30, who can no longer have visa-free work in the EU, “it must feel like a case of transgenerational betrayal”.

He said it is a relief that Andy Burnham is not closing the door on rejoining the EU in the future and said it was time the public acknowledged the world is a different place to 2016 with voters “given a second chance” on being in the EU or not.

John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has reaffirmed his support for decriminalising drugs for personal use. As the Press Association reports, Swinney said this could be “part of the range of measures” to reduce their harm, as he branded a surge in drug fatalities last year as “unacceptable and intolerable”.

PA says:

The first minister was challenged on his government’s record on drugs after statistics for 2025 showed an 11% increase in deaths, with 1,133 people losing their lives as a result.

While the Scottish government has already declared the drugs death rate – which is the highest in Europe – to be a health emergency, Swinney confirmed he too regarded the situation with such seriousness.

Speaking in Holyrood today, Swinney said he did “agree that we face a public health emergency on drugs deaths”.

But he told journalists afterwards the Scottish government was “exhausting every element of the powers and responsibilities that we have to address the situation”.

Asked about decriminalisation – where people would no longer face penalties if they were caught with drugs for personal use – he said that “the government does support that position that there is an argument for decriminalisation of drugs for personal use”.

This, however, would need to be done by Westminster, which has control over drugs laws.

Swinney said it could be “part of the range of measures that we could take to reduce the harm of drugs and to provide us with a situation where there is more control and an ability to provide greater support to individuals who are affected by drug use”.

As the BBC reports, the SNP backed decriminalisation in its 2024 manifesto.

There are comments on BlueSky from Rob Ford, a politics professor and elections expert, on the YouGov MRP poll published earlier.

He starts by highlighting its finding that “37% of constituencies are decided by margins of five points or less in our central estimate, with this rising to 67% of seats projected to be won by Reform UK.”

This finding underlines why we should not take precise MRP numbers v seriously at this stage – huge numbers of seats are projected to be v close – a small shift in national sentiment or a modest and plausible level of tactical switching could dramatically change seat numbers

For example, @yougov.co.uk themselves just published an excellent study of tactical voting motivations yesterday, showing 60% of 2024 LD and Grn voters are now willing to back Labour in order to stop a Reform win yougov.com/en-gb/articl…

Given this evident willingness to tactically co-ordinate, which we also see v strongly in recent Westminster by-elections and in local/devolved elections, I just don’t think a result like this projection in Hemel Hemstead is plausible come election time

Those 12% saying Green and 11% saying Lib Dem are not currently thinking about a possible Reform win (or indeed a possible Tory win) in their seat when answering YouGov’s question. Once decision time approaches, they will, and then those numbers will change. Many such cases!

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater tho – MRPs like this are a very useful exercise for getting finer grained sense of current geography of support. Just don’t get hung up on exact numbers. “Everything to play for” & “many close seats” are the big lessons here

Also, credit where it is due – YouGov do their best to convey the uncertainty of the exercise in all their maps and charts – I particularly like the “lean” and “likely” categories, tho personally I would have a (in this case large) “too close to call” category

Londoners get a property tax discount equivalent to more than £3bn a year because council tax was structured in a way that ensures people living outside the capital have to pay disproportionately more, a thinktank has said.

The Resolution Foundation has come up with the figure in a report that says, outside London, many households are paying hundreds of pounds a year more in council tax than they would be under a fair system.

The report calls for council tax to be replaced with “a proportional tax charged at 0.7% of property value”. It also says stamp duty should be abolished, but with both changes brought in gradually to make the transition manageable for those losing out.

Andy Burnham has in the past expressed interest in a reform along these lines, althought this is not an idea he has publicly advocated since becoming PM.

Explaning the problem with council tax, the Resolution Foundation report says:

When council tax was established, a deliberate decision was taken to adopt a compressed rate schedule. The value of the property in 1991 determines the council tax band a property sits in and every bill, for every local authority, is a fixed fraction (or multiple) of the band D bill in that area. These so-called ‘multipliers’ set the ratio of bills across the different bands and meant that, when council tax was established, a property in the top band was worth at least eight times as much as one in the bottom band, while their bill was at most only three times larger.

This original design flaw has since been compounded by the failure to update the value of properties from their 1991 levels. In the 35 years since, there have been large increases in house prices and – importantly – significant regional divergence …

Now, a property at the bottom of the top band in Richmond-upon-Thames has a price 15 times larger than one at the top of the bottom band in Hull, while their council tax bill is only just over double. Alternatively: the resident of Hull is paying over £1,800 more each year than if they faced the same effective tax rate as the resident of Richmond-upon-Thames.

The report says this has resulted in the equivalent of a £3bn giveaway for Londoners.

Compared to a system where the relationship between tax revenues and the value of housing was the same across the country, London paid £3.1bn too little in residential property tax in 2024-25, with every other region besides the south-east and east of England overpaying. If the rest of England had paid taxes as a proportion of the value of their homes at a rate as low as that in London, regions outside of London would have paid £12.3bn less in tax.

As a result, most households in England are paying hundreds of pounds a year more than they would be under the proportional property tax system proposed by the thinktank, it says.

By 2030-31, and compared to an alternative of property being taxed at a uniform rate everywhere, 61% of households would be overpaying tax by an average of £430 a year, and 36% of households would be underpaying by an average of £680 a year.

Hannah Aldridge, a senior research and policy analyst at thinktank, said:

The UK raises more tax revenue from the homes we live in than most other advanced economies. Unfortunately, our two main housing taxes – council tax and stamp duty – are terribly designed, grossly unfair and economically harmful.

The economic and fairness case for overhauling our housing taxes are clear. But the politics of reform has got hung up on those who lose out – such as those living in gentrified areas of London – even though most households in England would pay less tax.

Housing taxes cannot be fixed overnight. But the chancellor should set out a sensible roadmap to reform in the budget next month.

This chart shows how the combined property tax burden – council tax and stamp duty, as a proportion of what houses are worth – is highest in the north of England and lowest in London.

With the Labour party conference starting at the weekend, the Guardian has published a good long read by Hettie O’Brien about “Manchesterism”, the political philosophy driving Andy Burnham’s politics, and the thinkers in his circle who are promoting it.

Here’s an extract.

It’s possible to discern three distinct camps seeking to influence Burnham. The first, which is closer to [energy secretary Miatta] Fahnbulleh and [foreign secretary Ed] Miliband, draws on the more radical ideas of thinkers such as Lawrence and includes organisations such as Common Wealth and the NEF. Its central argument is that the privatisation of life’s essentials, including energy and social care, has created an affordability crisis that is driving up inflation, and that many of these assets should therefore be publicly owned.

The second camp is closer to Burnham’s powerful ally the first secretary of state, Louise Haigh, her adviser Nick Williams, and Josh Simons, the former Makerfield MP. It includes thinktanks such as the newly founded Centre for British Progress and the Good Growth Foundation. For this more centrist camp, the problem with Thatcherism has less to do with privatisation than the erosion of state capacity that resulted from it. “We rely on an army of consultants, lawyers and third-party providers”, because Britain has “forgotten how to build”, wrote David Lawrence, the co-founder of the Centre for British Progress, in a recent essay. The answer to Britain’s economic problems, according to this school of thought, lies in winnowing down the vast apparatus of regulations, particularly planning policies, that protect large and established companies, prevent startups from emerging, and are holding back a potential abundance of new homes and power plants.

Finally, there is a third, older camp of thinkers who might be called the communitarians; they have more power than either of the other two camps, since they hold key positions in No 10. Among them is James Purnell, Burnham’s chief of staff and one of his most trusted friends, and Purnell’s close friend Graeme Cooke, a former director of the IPPR, who is now director of Burnham’s No 10 policy unit. Newcomers to the Burnham government have been reading a 2010 essay that Purnell and Cooke wrote during a period of soul-searching after Gordon Brown lost the general election. They argued that New Labour had failed to develop a philosophy for what a good society looked like, one that rejected the paternalism of the state and put people in charge of their lives.

And here is the full article.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, says in a post on social media that housebuilding figures out today show “welcome signs of progress”.

These are tough times for housebuilding in England, but new housing statistics released this morning show welcome signs of progress:

✅Housing starts in Q2 of this year were up 6% on the previous quarter (a 20% increase on the same quarter last year).

✅London saw the biggest increase with starts up a phenomenal 298% on last year.

✅Units within outline residential applications are up 41% from a year earlier.

✅Permission in principle decisions on brownfield register sites more than doubled (a 79% increase on the same quarter last year).

Over the past 26 months, we’ve undertaken the most rapid, holistic and radical overhaul of the housing and planning system in decades. Despite the strong headwinds, we are going to stay the course and ensure the country enjoys high and sustainable rates of housebuilding in the years ahead.

More than 700 migrants arrived in the UK on Wednesday – the highest number for a single day so far this year, the Press Assocation reports. PA says:

It comes after a cabinet minister said not every migrant boat can be intercepted in the wake of two boats landing undetected on British shores within two days. [See 9.35am.]

The Home Office recorded 781 arrivals in 10 boats on Wednesday, suggesting an average of 78 people per boat.

This takes the provisional total for Channel crossings for the year so far to 18,565.

This is down 42% on this time last year (32,188), and 26% below the figure at this stage in 2024 (25,165).

Here are the Home Office weekly figures.

As this chart from Migration Watch UK shows, small boat arrivals at this point in the year are at their lowest level since 2021.

Kemi Badenoch has said that she would not want to form some sort of electoral pact with Reform UK in part because of the scandals surrounding Nigel Farage’s party.

In an interview with GB News, she suggested that Reform UK was riddled with “problematic” ex-Tories, and she said one of the things she was doing as a leader was cleaning up the reputation of her own party.

Badenoch has ruled out a pre-election pact with Reform UK before, despite many figures on the right arguing that the two parties should work together to defeat Labour. But the Tories have generally been less willing to accuse Reform UK of “sleaze and scandal” than Labour, who use this attack line against Farage’s team regularly.

Reform UK is being investigated by the police over allegations that the party has accepted donations that are impermissible under electoral law. Farage is also being investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards over claims he broke Commons rules by not declaring a £5m donation from Christopher Harborne. Farage and his party deny wrongdoing.

In an interview with GB News, asked if recent polling (see 8.59am and 10.35am) meant it was time to “unite the right”, Badenoch replied:

What I have said is that it’s about uniting the country, not just uniting the right. Uniting the country behind common sense is what Conservatives want to do.

There was actually another poll about two weeks ago that showed that if you have a coalition, some of the people who are supporting you will go elsewhere. So you can’t just add those two groups together and assume that you’re getting a block vote on the centre right.

Badenoch said the Conservatives and Reform UK were divided on policy. But she insisted that ethics and standards were an obstacle to any form of cooperation too.

What are we uniting about? It’s not just policy; it’s also character.

And when I look at the things that Reform are doing, we saw that exposé. Of course, they deny it. But Nigel Farage is under investigation. That £5m, the money. Robert Jenrick has donations being investigated.

We just don’t want this any more. People saw the Conservative party doing all sorts of things that they didn’t like, and I said, I’m coming in to clean this up. Many of the problematic people have gone to Reform. How can we then join with them?

Badenoch also insisted that, with her in charge, the Tory party was changing.

I want people to see that the Conservative party is getting its act together. We know we got a lot of things wrong. I wasn’t there for the whole 14 years. I was there for half of it. I did what I could, but I’m in charge now.

And the people who were very frustrated by the direction of the party are now running the party. I want your viewers to see that.

Backlogs in magistrates’ courts and crown courts have reached a record high, according to Ministry of Justice figures released today.

At crown courts in England and Wales, where the most serious crimes are prosecuted, there were 80,829 cases waiting to be heard at the end of June. That is a record since the MoJ started compiling these figures, and represents a 3% increase on the previous year.

These cases are also taking longer to process. Average waiting times, from the case being referred to crown court to it being finished, are also at a record high, with the median at 203 days, a 21% increase on the previous year. (The mean is much higher because the relatively few very, very long waits distort the average when it is calculated as a mean, not a median.)

And at magistrates’ courts, there were 380,230 cases waiting to be heard at the end of June, up 9% on the previous year.

Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, said the figures showed “the scale of the challenge facing our courts, with victims waiting far too long for justice – that’s why it’s our priority to reduce the backlog so that cases are heard sooner”.

But Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, claimed Labour policies were making the problem worse.

Labour have spent their time in office attacking our ancient right to a jury trial, rather than taking effective action to tackle the courts crisis.

With both the crown court and magistrates’ court now facing record backlogs, Labour’s proposals to simply shift the problem from one part of the court system to another are dead in the water.

Mark Evans, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, said the figures also showed that 23,706 crown court cases have been in the backlog more than a year. This is 22% more than a year ago.

He went on:

The government must seize the chance to deliver a long-term, whole-system plan for criminal justice reform. This should include usable courts, enough judges and staff and the maximum number of sitting days to hear cases promptly.