New Economics Foundation

We’ve written about communities standing up to fracking giants before. Last week we went to see for ourselves what was happening on the frontline. Over the past six years, Lancashire has become the unlikely epicentre of the fight against fracking. Exploratory drilling caused two earthquakes in the area in 2011, which led to a year-long ban on fracking in the UK. This ban was overturned, however, and fracking giants Cuadrilla, have been hell bent on getting drills...

The housing crisis is a hot topic at the moment. We often talk about who can buy, sell and rent houses – and how much they cost – but we rarely talk about the land beneath them. Lots of land in the UK is owned by the government and local authorities – public land. But a load of it is being sold off, from old hospitals to sites owned by the Ministry of Defence. The government says that we should sell it to developers to build houses on to deal with the housing...

Abdul became an Uber driver after losing his job in the financial crash. He quickly found himself in financial difficulty, as the cost of renting the car to do his job combined with an unexpected fall in the number of driving jobs he was able to take. After accepting a welcome offer of a credit card, Abdul eventually found himself in £25,000 of debt. He sought debt advice, and the interest charges on Abdul’s repayments were frozen – but now he expects to be...

The High Pay Centre’s annual survey of FTSE 100 chief exec pay packages was released today. In amongst its usual exposure of the jaw-dropping salaries of the top earners, it contained a rare piece of good news: senior pay has dropped to below 2014 levels. The last year has seen a number of FTSE 100 companies U-turn on senior pay. And that’s at least in part because of pressure from shareholders voting to curb runaway pay packets. According to figures compiled for...

Should resources essential for human survival be placed in the control of the people who need them? What would this mean in practice – and how could it be achieved? At the New Economics Foundation we are opening up a broad debate about the control of ‘the commons’ – the resources we rely upon to survive and flourish. This began with a roundtable we held on the 18th July, which focused on two kinds of common resource: land and care. The concept of the commons is a...

This article first appeared in TCPA and is reproduced here with permission. The UK is in the grips of a housing affordability crisis. As we enter Brexit negotiations, with private developers uncertain about the future, many more people may find themselves priced out of decent, secure homes: just 3% of councils believe that Brexit will improve their ability to meet their local housing need in the short term, while 34% anticipate that Brexit will have a negative...

For years ‘industrial strategy’ wasn’t talked about at all. But the phrase has recently made a comeback. The government thinks there are some ‘long term challenges’ for the economy in this country, and they need to get involved to do something about them. Host Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined this week by NEF’s Senior Economist Sara Mahmoud and Will Brett, NEF’s Director of News and Media, to discuss exactly what these challenges are and to address the question:...

Remember VHS? It was the future, once (just ask Betamax). Then came the year 1995 and the birth of the DVD, and that was curtains for poor old videotape. Since then, DVDs – and even their upstart siblings, Blurays – have themselves come and started to be gone thanks to downloading and, latterly, streaming. The smartphone and tablet, upon which much media is now consumed, didn’t even exist 11 years ago. So it’s a bit hard to get excited about the Government’s...

Last week the Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, promised the UK would lead the world in animal welfare and environmental standards. We weren’t convinced, warning of the gulf between rhetoric and potential reality as Brexit loomed. It didn’t take long. A mere handful of days later the Trade Secretary has already started hinting that chicken washed in chlorine could be sold in the UK as part of a trade deal with the US. Currently the EU bans the sale of chicken...

Right now, in a field on the outskirts of Preston, Lancashire, people are standing in the way of climate change. It’s been six years since any actual fracking took place in the UK. Aside from one regulatory hiccup following earth tremors near Blackpool, the single reason why companies have failed successfully to drill deep beneath the earth and force out gas trapped in shale is because people have organised to prevent them from being granted permission. As the...