Jobs and Investment: Using untapped capital to boost productivity and growth

You can view the full report here.

The lack of growth over the past twenty years is the number one challenge facing our country. Governments of every stripe have entered office promising to fix it, and governments of every stripe have fallen victim to the same paralysis. But Jobs and Investment argues that there is one largely overlooked piece of the puzzle — and that it is sitting right in front of us.

Britain is not short of capital. The British public holds close to £2.3 trillion in cash savings, quietly losing value to inflation, while the businesses that could be fuelled by that money go without. For the UK's 13.5 million "Mainstream Investor" households — those with between £10,000 and £250,000 in net investable wealth outside their home and pension — the regulatory environment and a culture of excessive caution have combined to keep them on the sidelines of productive investment. They are neither too poor nor too wealthy. They are simply overlooked.

This report, by Andrew Allum and Duncan Simpson, sets out the vital connection between private capital investment, labour productivity, and job creation. Between the 1980s and the late 1990s, productivity growth averaged 2.5% annually. Since the mid-2000s, that figure has slumped to less than 1%. Had Britain simply held its earlier course, the average worker would today be earning £24 more for every hour they worked. That gap is not an abstraction — it is the felt cost of stagnation in millions of household budgets up and down the country.

The capital needed to close the UK's £100 billion annual investment gap does not have to come from foreign direct investment programmes, pension mandates, or public spending. A bespoke survey of 2,000 British adults conducted for this report found that 78% are holding cash for reasons that could be addressed through reform — and that 83% would move more of their savings into productive investment if those barriers were removed. The appetite is there. What has been missing is the roadmap.

Jobs and Investment provides that roadmap. Its four-part programme — covering education, access, higher returns, and lower risks — proposes no mandates, no compulsion, and no new taxpayer subsidy. It calls instead for expanding freedom, improving information, and removing the unnecessary friction that has for too long kept ordinary Brits from becoming active participants in our national economic story.

You can view the full report here.