100 Policies for Mrs May

1. Allow businesses to immediately deduct all new spending on plants and equipments

The decision to reduce Corporation Tax from 28% to 19% has made the United Kingdom a more attractive place to do business. But the decision to part-fund the cut by restricting capital allowance has weakened the incentive to invest. As a result, the Marginal Effective Tax Rate on Capital, the rate that firms actually take into account when deciding to invest an extra pound, only fell by 3pp even though the headline rate fell by 10pp. We should copy the United States and allow firms to immediately deduct new spending on plants and equipment from their taxable income. This would dramatically simplify Corporation Tax and bring the UK in line with international best practice. Evidence suggests that similar reforms in the US boosted investment by 17.5% and created high-paying good jobs.

2. CANZUK Free Movement

The government has, for a number of decades, been making it harder for citizens of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to move to the UK. This is despite deep historical ties and the huge affection British citizens and citizens of those countries have for each other. If we want to rebuild the case for immigration, we’d do worse than start where it’s popular. When Brits are asked where they’d like to move, these countries come top and it’s the same vice versa. There are a number of different ways this could be done: by extending the Common Travel Area of the UK & the RoI to include CANZ; including the UK and Canada in an enlarged Trans-Tasman Agreement; unilaterally allowing citizens of those states to move and work here; providing residency to citizens of those states after just two years of living here. It could be done incrementally, for those under a certain age as an acquired right, or all at once. But however it’s done, it would be an easy win: popular with voters, make something meaningful out of the Global Britain soundbite, and be transformational for millions.

3. Making Childcare Affordable

Corbyn’s childcare subsidy might have made headlines last week at Labour conference, but there was nothing new in what he announced. More money, more state involvement. Higher demand and stricter control on supply. That means either higher real costs or shortage. But there is a better way. By far and away the largest cost for childcare providers is labour. We have some of the strictest requirements on carer to child ratios in the western world, and it’s no surprise we have some of the highest childcare costs as a result. If we relaxed our rules on childcare to Norwegian or French levels we could end up halving childcare costs. And we wouldn’t be compromising on quality either. High staff to child ratios aren't just expensive, they can harm the quality of care too. Studies show that looser mandated child to carer ratios encourage higher qualified staff to enter the industry at higher wages. So let’s scrap child-staff ratio mandates altogether. It would leave more money in the pockets of parents without undermining quality of care.

4. Legalise Recreational Cannabis

The UK’s prohibition of cannabis jeopardises children’s safety, encourages gang violence and leaves millions in the dark about what they’re taking. Our current policy has failed. The UK should instead follow much of the United States and Canada by embracing a harm reduction approach. Legal regulation will reduce underage use, make safer alternatives to high-strength skunk available for adults, raise £1 billion in tax to fund treatment services for problem users, and deprive violent gangs of a lucrative profit opportunity. This activity can then be taken up by reputable and regulated companies, financed by regulated banks and insurers. More Britons support a legal, regulated cannabis market than oppose it and the time has come for the UK to adopt a sensible, pragmatic approach to the drug.

5. Replace Business Rates and Council Tax with a simple Land Value Tax

While there is always a lot of noise whenever business rates change, it is often forgotten that it isn't businesses who bear the cost of business rates, but landowners. Over time, most of any cut in business rates will be offset by a proportionate rise in rents - meaning that it's predominantly landlords who benefit from cuts and lose out from rises, not businesses. It would be better if we were to merge council tax and business rates into a simple tax on land values. It would remove the distortion caused by changing purpose between using land for residential or commercial purposes, and ensure that business investment is not discouraged.

6. Scrap Stamp Duty

Stamp Duty is Britain’s most damaging tax. It has to go. Not just for first time buyers, but for everyone. For every £1 raised for the Treasury, the tax destroys a further 80p of economic activity. Stamp Duty penalises older people for downsizing after their children have left home and stops these homes being sold to new and growing families – making the effective supply of family-sized homes even tighter. The tax means that people too far from work don’t take the job they want or are good at, and they don’t move to where they’ll be most productive. Removing Stamp Duty won’t solve our housing crisis alone, but it will boost housing and labour mobility, as well as economic growth and productivity.

7. Release 3.7% of Green Belt land for residential development

If we really want to solve the housing crisis then we need to transform planning. One of the easiest ways to do this to scrap the Green Belt. It hems in our productive cities, it holds back the careers and lives of millions of Britons and it makes us all poorer. For no benefit either, the Green Belt is misnamed. It is not a rural idyll of rolling hills but includes things like a disused petrol station in Tottenham Hale, as well as pesticide and herbicide use on high-intensity farmland contributing the lion's’ share of air pollution in our largest cities. Releasing just 3.7% of land of London’s greenbelt, all within 800m of existing railway links, could help provide over a million new homes and consign the housing crisis to the past.

8. End Help to Buy

You might have gathered by now, but Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis. We haven’t built enough homes in the right places. Our productive cities have more people that want to move to them, than homes to fit them into. We have a lack of supply and a high level of demand. That means higher prices. Help to Buy was brought in with the good intention to make homes more affordable for the young. Unfortunately it’s a demand side policy. It boosts demand. But demand is too high for the level of supply we have. It’s costing the Conservatives votes, with people forced into renting as they’re priced out of the ownership market, and they’re associating this loss of choice with a crisis of Capitalism. It’s regressive too, giving a hand out to the rich at the expense of the poor. Let’s cut this subsidy and reduce pressure on the prices of homes.

9. Give travellers airline-style choice and competition on long distance inter-city rail routes through Open Access competition

Don’t get us wrong, privatization has been good for Britain’s railways. We’ve got record numbers using the trains and investment at a record high. But there’s more that can be done to introduce private competition and expand consumer choice. As it stands, franchises are over-specified by Westminster and on most lines there is a single monopoly operator. We should expand Open-Access competition to give consumers a real choice. Where open-access already exists, consumers get better value and report higher levels of satisfaction. To restore public support for privatised rail, we need to deliver genuine competition on inter-city routes.

10. Take minimum wage workers out of tax and National Insurance

Unemployment might be at its lowest for four decades, but the current political debate is dominated by discontent at working poverty. So let's stop taxing low-paid workers by taking those on the minimum wage out of income tax and National Insurance altogether. As long as income tax and National Insurance remain separate, the threshold where people begin to pay both should be set at the equivalent of a full year, full-time minimum wage and linked to future minimum wage increases. At a stroke, the government could provide a much-needed boost to those struggling to make ends meet.

https://www.adamsmith.org/100-policies-for-mrs-may-1

More to read on the link

Interesting to read their take on the NHS.

In a nutshell, privatize it.

Patient co-payments, common in almost every other healthcare system (and already current in NHS dentistry and prescriptions), needs to be extended, with care, to reduce marginal and unnecessary demand on NHS services.