Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at MAP and SPE member, held a discussion with Sam Bowman, founding editor of Works in Progress. He writes extensively on the UK economy and most recently he co-wrote with Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes an essay on reasons why Britain stagnated – called Foundations.

In the interview, Sam and Filippo explores the reasons behind the relatively ‘poor’ performance of the UK economy over the past 15 years. In fact, Sam goes beyond the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and provides an overview of UK growth over past two centuries and points to two other inflection points when the UK started to progressively lose ground against its peers: the late 1940s and the 1970s. The core of Sam’s argument is that the UK has a very high potential for growth – rooted in culture, institutions, language, geographical location – but it has stopped doing what is needed to fully leverage its good fundamentals: essentially, it stopped ‘building’ and when it does build, it is too expensive, due to overregulation, poor planning and to a certain extent the tendency to ‘gold-plating’ projects. Three sectors are highlighted in this context: housing, infrastructure and energy. Sam argues that by implementing some planning and regulatory reform and starting building, productivity and innovation can come back.

Sam Bowman is a founding editor of Works in Progress. Previously, he was director of competition policy at the ICLE, principal at Fingleton, and executive director of the Adam Smith Institute.