Growth and Managed Decline

From a growth promise to a working investment

Britain does not need another growth slogan. It needs a clearer account of what prevents productive activity and who has the power to remove those constraints.

That is the argument of this briefing. It is not a claim that every economic disappointment is caused by government, or that faster approval makes every proposed investment worthwhile. It asks how a national ambition becomes a working project, and how citizens can judge the result.

Energy, housing and infrastructure matter, but repeating a list of desirable outcomes is not a delivery model. We need to distinguish the measures, examine a specific bottleneck and follow what happens after the announcement.

Measure the right thing

Labour productivity and GDP per person are related, but they are not interchangeable. ONS measures output per hour using gross value added divided by hours worked. It also publishes output per worker; changes in working patterns can make those measures move differently. ONS advises looking beyond short quarterly movements when assessing a structural trend. [1]

GDP per person instead divides national output by the population. Its movement can reflect participation, working hours and demographics as well as productivity. A claim about one should not silently become a claim about another.

For a proposed reform, the useful question is which mechanism it is intended to improve. Does it allow a worker to produce more in an hour? Bring more people into productive work? Reduce the resources required to deliver a public service? Those are different claims, requiring different evidence.

A concrete bottleneck: access to power

NESO's August 2026 account of grid reform describes ready projects waiting behind schemes that were not progressing. The reform is intended to prioritise projects that are ready and aligned with system needs. This is a specific example of infrastructure access constraining when investment can proceed. It is also evidence that institutions are attempting to correct the constraint. [2]

It is not proof that every queued project was commercially viable, or that every connection offer will create the investment advertised. The distinction matters. The outcome to follow is the project that becomes operational and produces a useful service, not the size of a queue or announcement.

The economic lesson is about dependencies. A project may have finance and a business case but still depend on network capacity, a permit, skills or access infrastructure. Improving one part while ignoring another may move the delay without removing it.

Why a dashboard needs more than a headline

For a major investment programme, I would want to see a short chain of evidence: the constraint identified, the action taken, the cost incurred, the capability delivered and the outcome observed.

An approval is not construction. Construction is not commissioning. Commissioning is not evidence that forecast demand or benefits have materialised. Each step has a different responsible party and a different test of success.

This does not require publishing commercially sensitive detail. It requires a consistent account of the public commitment: what was promised, what dependencies were known, what changed and what the resulting capability can actually do.

The strongest counterargument

Government cannot manufacture productivity through a programme office. Investment is uncertain. Private firms decide where to commit resources, new technologies may disappoint, and some delays protect legitimate environmental or community interests.

Those objections are sound. A delivery approach that counts speed alone can approve poor projects more quickly. It can also hide costs by moving them onto households, local communities or a future budget.

The response should be better appraisal and accountable decisions, not an assumption that all safeguards are obstacles. Where a project is refused or redesigned, the reasons should be clear. Where an approval is delayed, responsibility for resolving the outstanding issue should also be clear.

My use of “managed decline” describes the risk of accepting persistent underperformance as normal. It does not imply that every institution deliberately seeks decline or that global shocks are irrelevant.

A practical test of a growth commitment

I propose five tests for a major public growth commitment:

• Name the constraint and explain the economic mechanism being targeted.
• Publish the baseline and the measure that will demonstrate improvement.
• Assign authority to resolve dependencies, not just responsibility to report them.
• Show the cost, alternatives and distribution of expected benefits.
• Review the result against the original case, including projects that disappointed.

These tests should support good judgement rather than replace it. Some benefits take years to emerge. A credible review should distinguish an early delivery milestone from a mature economic outcome and should not revise the original target merely to declare success.

Growth as a democratic commitment

The democratic issue is the distance between the promise and the result. Citizens can reasonably disagree about taxes, public investment and regulation. They should still be able to inspect whether the policy chosen delivered what was claimed.

In The Hollow State, the reform argument is not simply that government should do more. It is that delegated power should be connected to visible responsibility and useful outcomes.

Growth cannot be guaranteed. The quality of the decisions, the honesty of the evidence and the discipline of delivery can be improved. That is where a serious growth programme should begin.