Rethink

The UK government has made growth its key mission. But solving the British productivity puzzle is not a new priority - it’s been on the agenda for successive governments.

Getting productivity up is crucial to sustain higher living standards. The more productive we are, the better off we'll be.

But the UK has experienced significantly slower productivity growth than comparable countries since the global financial crisis in 2008 and by some measures, Britain has been going through its worst period for productivity growth since the Napoleonic Era.

Britain’s productivity lags that of many of our major trading partners, including France, Germany and the USA and that’s despite British workers spending longer in the office. According to the ONS, the French can work four days and achieve roughly as much as the British do in five.

What are the factors behind the UK’s chronically weak productivity growth, what are other countries doing better?

How can we increase Britain’s productivity?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

Margaret Heffernan, Professor of Practice in Management at the University of Bath, writer and former CEO.

Rethink is a BBC co-production with the Open University

Across many countries, civil services, once seen as the backbone of stable governance, are facing growing scrutiny. Long viewed as the impartial and efficient machine of government, the role of civil servants is now being questioned as political polarisation intensifies and trust in traditional institutions declines.

In the UK, the United States and other democracies, critics question its effectiveness, arguing that the civil service has become opaque, unwieldy and inefficient, and process is getting in the way of outcomes.

The modern British civil service emerged in the 19th century, and was designed to carry out the day-to-day tasks of government in an unbiased and professional manner.

However, is a bureaucracy that was created and designed more than a century ago still fit for purpose - or are we witnessing a turning point in its role in modern governance?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

Rethink is a BBC co-production with the Open University

For most of this century, the UK has had a housing shortage, but for one section of society, that shortage has become a crisis.

Prices have risen so much that people who need social housing are completely locked out of the private renting market, and owning a home for many is only a pipe dream. And when politicians speak about "affordable homes", these are also out of reach for many people. "Affordable" means homes available at 80% of the market rate. Typical social housing rents are much lower- around 30% of the full rate.

And this type of home is in very short supply. In 1980, there were around seven million dwellings in the social rent sector, largely owned by councils. Today that's just over four million, the majority of which are owned by housing associations instead.

To the average person, the answer seems simple - just build more homes.

And that’s being done, but not enough are being built - only around 10,000 social homes are constructed each year - far lower than the estimated 90,000 we need every year. So how can we speed up the process to help the million households in England currently sat on council waiting lists?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

Rethink is a BBC co-production with the Open University

Across the West, the long-established liberal order appears to be struggling to adapt to the economic and social challenges of the 21st century. As a result, traditional politics is being rejected by voters at the ballot box, increasingly usurped by narratives once considered too radical for the mainstream.

In Europe, right wing populists and the far-right are in the ascendancy in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump has returned to the White House for a second term.

The roots of political liberalism can be traced back to the 18th century, with much of the modern liberal world order emerging out of the end of World War II. But as similar patterns emerge across numerous democracies, could we be witnessing the end of liberalism?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

You would be forgiven for thinking that inflation, interest rates, GDP and tariffs drive the global economy.

But there are a whole set of interconnected underlying systems that work quietly in the background to keep economies running smoothly. It's not just countries that rely on them, but individuals as well. These systems allow workers to get paid, banks to make transfers, and the free-flow of information on the internet.

These immaterial systems have a presence in the physical world, from fibre optic cables to the servers that host our data. Building and maintaining this infrastructure, and everything else that makes up modern civilisation requires a constant and reliable supply of raw materials.

But in this globalised world, both the underlying systems online and the supply chains in the material world have pinch points - places where if just one thing gets squeezed, then there are immediate and dramatic effects on the economy.

And whoever controls those pinch points wields a vast amount of power.

In this episode of Rethink, Ben Ansell explores those pinch points, how the USA and China are realising their power, and what this means for the UK.

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

Sir Keir Starmer says that the NHS is well placed for an AI revolution in health care.

The Health Secretary Wes Streeting says it could lead to huge advances in health care, from patient passports, which enable doctors to easily access a patient's full medical history, to early intervention - being able to assess a child's risk of disease from birth.

The NHS has a vast pool of information about our health, and unlocking its power is a noble aim: but can everything really be thrown straight into an AI, which will then pump out answers?

Inputting it presents a mammoth task; NHS data is in many places, the bits of information are not always compatible, nor are they easily accessible.

Also, medical records are hugely sensitive and private, so what safeguards need to be put in place before data researchers and medical tech companies can be given access?

What will be the most likely, realistic and achievable benefits of using AI in our healthcare system, and - if the NHS gets this right - what are the potential rewards for patients?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

In 2024, more than two million crimes went unsolved in England and Wales, with police unable to identify a suspect. That figure has increased by 180,000 since 2022, despite there being 86,000 fewer crimes in the same period.

So with detection rates down, and constant financial pressures on the police services across the UK, should crime prevention play a greater role in policing? Targeting preventable crimes and the people most likely to commit them, a process called "focused deterrence" is being trialled at five sites in England. Police services already have better intelligence resources available than in any time in history, and they are also working with care services and other agencies to flag up potential problems.

How could crime prevention be taken further? Would a more academic approach to policing result in knowledge being spread more quickly, and how could police be better prepared for emerging crimes as society and technology change?

Ultimately, could it lead to lower crime rates and financial savings, and is there any evidence to suggest it does either?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

Rethink examines emerging issues in politics, society, economics, technology and the UK's place in the world, and how we might approach them differently. We look at the latest thinking and research and discuss new ideas that might make the world a better place.

In this episode, we consider the changing relationship between the public and big tech companies.

Big technology companies have given us incredible social media and online services, that came with a price - our data. They used it to target advertising and to learn about our likes and dislikes, and the vast majority of us couldn't have cared less about giving up this information.

But Artificial Intelligence products have changed the game, from chatbots that can hold human-like conversations, to Generative AI that can write prose or create a picture from a simple text prompt.

And these unthinking machines require endless amounts of data to train them.

Some companies have been quietly changing their terms and conditions to access our social media and messages for AI training. Privacy regulators in the UK have called a halt to this so far, but US consumers don't have that protection.

Developers have also been scraping the internet, gathering both free and copyrighted material, and leading to legal actions in both the USA, the EU and the UK.

Copyright holders are concerned about a lack of payment or licencing deals, and also that AI imitates their content, putting them out of work. The Government has now launched a consultation to try to balance up the needs of AI and the creative industries.

But with some companies refusing to pay for content, creators have a new tool at their disposal - a program that makes stolen pictures poisonous to AI.

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Contributors:

The UK has many world-leading museums that inspire wonder and fascination in their visitors. Many were originally created to display artefacts from empire or house the collections of their wealthy Victorian founders but recent decades have seen museums finding innovative ways to challenge what a modern museum can be. However, in tough economic times many museums are facing serious challenges. The sector is having to make the case for why museums should receive public money when there’s a lot less to go around. They are also facing criticism about who visits them, who curates them, and what objects they collect and display. What are museums for? Who are they for? And how can they teach us about our past whilst remaining relevant and exciting for today’s visitors?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

At the last General Election Britain’s traditional parties of left and right, Labour and the Conservatives, collectively amassed their lowest vote share ever - well under 60%. Three out of seven Brits voted for Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party or one of Britain’s many regional or nationalist parties. Does this result suggest that British politics is now too complicated to be understood by the labels left and right?

In Europe, some new parties like the German Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance have been labelled both far left and far right. Many similar parties seem to be having success by suggesting that they’re throwing off old political labels and offering something radically new in their place.

Studies say voters struggle to place policies along a left/right spectrum, and many don’t define themselves along left/right lines. So how can we have a shared political sphere if we can’t agree on terms? Are our political labels of left and right outdated? Are they due a rethink?

Presenter: Ben Ansell