Infrastructure & public interest

The UK government spent £13.1 billion on culture, religion and recreation in 2008-9. This includes public funding for organisations like the Football Licensing Authority. It is not right that a sport that pays tens of millions of pounds in transfer fees and tens of thousands of pounds per week to individual players should be subsidised by taxpayers, most of whom will not earn in a lifetime what a footballer earns in a year.

The British cultural establishment is stultifying and ossifying. It absorbs large amounts of public money (paid by poor and rich alike from around the country) to produce often incomprehensible works performed for a minority of better-off people, predominantly around London. There is no justification for taxing the majority to subsidise the pretensions of the wealthy chattering classes of London.

Our current planning system is designed to provoke conflict rather than cooperation. Local politicians and residents have little incentive to support development, however beneficial, to set against people's natural antipathy to change. Developers get little benefit from trying to adapt their plans to maximise the benefit to the community.

The minimum standard of accommodation that should be provided by councils in accordance with their obligations will need careful consideration, but we suggest something like the following:

The standardised charges (by councils for provision of minimum-standard housing to eligible residents) would need detailed consideration, but we suggest that they might be in the region of:

The BI should include a component for housing. This would be a standardised amount across the country, regardless of different housing costs in different areas, to try to counter the inflationary effect of the gravitational pull of metropolitan areas.