The Economic Growth Argument: What Forge Actually Does to the Economy
Most parties talk about growth. Forge has a specific, costed mechanism for it. The combination of reforms across this manifesto constitutes the most comprehensive pro-growth economic programme of any UK party, and it does not rely on any single technology, any speculative forecast, or any borrowed money to function.
The growth case rests on five pillars that are independently defensible:
Pillar 1: Tax simplification and lower business costs
The UK tax code runs to 17,000 pages. Forge reduces it below 1,000. The compliance cost of navigating the current system falls on every business in the country. HMRC estimates the annual tax gap at £36 billion, nearly half from errors caused by a system nobody fully understands. For a small business owner, the time spent on tax administration is time not spent running the business.
- Cut the jobs tax: employer National Insurance reform. A business rates cut is substantially captured by commercial landlords through higher rents (only 25 to 50% reaches the business). A National Insurance cut cannot be captured by a landlord. Forge raises the employer NI threshold from £5,000 to £14,000 per employee and expands the Employment Allowance to £15,000, making it meaningfully cheaper to employ people across the whole economy, with the largest benefit to labour-intensive sectors (care, hospitality, retail) and small businesses. A small firm employing four people on modest wages pays no employer National Insurance at all.
- Stamp duty abolished on primary residences. The housing market is currently locked. People stay in homes that are too large because moving costs £15,000 in stamp duty. Businesses cannot get the workforce they need because workers cannot move. Labour market mobility increases the day stamp duty is removed.
- Universal 15% VAT with no classification disputes. The current VAT system has three rates, hundreds of product classification disputes, and a specialist legal industry arguing about whether a product is standard or zero rated. One rate eliminates the compliance cost entirely and creates a level playing field between digital and physical retailers.
- Business rates structurally rebalanced (revenue neutral). Rather than a blanket cut that landlords capture, the burden shifts toward large online distribution warehouses and out-of-town fulfilment centres, with relief for high street and town-centre premises and zero rates for properties under £25,000 rateable value. The VAT registration threshold is held at £90,000 to protect the smallest sole traders, with a two-year tapered transition relief for businesses crossing it.
Pillar 2: Planning reform that actually builds
The single greatest barrier to economic growth in Britain is the planning system. An 8-week statutory decision target is currently met only 20% of the time. Major applications take 318 days on average. 500-unit housing schemes take 5 years. The result is not just a housing shortage. It is a business location shortage: factories, logistics centres, renewable energy installations, data centres, and healthcare facilities all face the same delays. The economic cost of the current planning system is estimated at 1 to 2% of GDP annually in lost investment and misallocated activity. Forge's planning reforms (Section VIII) are a direct economic growth intervention.
Pillar 3: Infrastructure investment in left-behind areas
The property tax redistribution (Section II) is not just a fairness measure. It is a regional economic development programme. Under the current council tax system, a property in Blackburn pays similar council tax to a property of similar banding in Richmond. Under the Forge property tax, a £1.2m house in Richmond pays proportionally more, and the revenue is distributed nationally on a need-weighted basis. The regions with the worst housing stock, the worst infrastructure, and the lowest median incomes receive proportionally more. Combined with the £20bn roads programme, the NHS digital infrastructure, and the BSA investment in the North and Wales, the Forge fiscal programme constitutes the largest involuntary redistribution of economic resource from the South East to the rest of Britain in a generation. This is not charity. It is the precondition for the rest of Britain generating the economic activity the whole country needs.
Pillar 4: Energy cost reduction
British business pays some of the highest industrial electricity prices in Europe. This is a direct competitive disadvantage that makes energy-intensive manufacturing uneconomic in the UK regardless of other factors. The Forge energy market reform (Section XI) decouples electricity pricing from gas prices, cutting industrial and domestic electricity bills structurally. Lower energy costs make British manufacturing more competitive, attract inward investment in energy-intensive sectors, and remove the competitive disadvantage that has accelerated deindustrialisation in the North and Midlands for twenty years.
Pillar 5: Strategic industrial investment
This is what this section covers. Patient capital for British scaleups, procurement leverage, and strategic sector commitment. It does not replace the first four pillars. It builds on them. You cannot attract industrial investment to an area with expensive energy, poor roads, dysfunctional planning, and a tax code nobody understands. Fix those first. Then the strategic investment has somewhere productive to land.
What is honest about this growth case
Tidal energy is a long-term technology programme. The first gigawatt is operational by Year 3 to 4, but the economic benefit to coastal communities in Scotland and Wales is real even at that scale: engineering jobs, maintenance contracts, port infrastructure, skills development. It is not a near-term GDP driver. It is the foundation of something that could be very large within 20 years.
The near-term growth drivers are the tax changes, the employer National Insurance cut, the planning reform, and the roads. These are not speculative. Every serious economic analysis of the UK's structural weaknesses identifies the same blockers: high tax complexity, expensive premises, slow planning, and poor infrastructure. Forge addresses all four simultaneously in the first parliament.
The Existing Problem
The UK invents extraordinary technologies and then loses them. Graphene was discovered at Manchester. Most graphene companies are now Chinese or American. ARM was British; it is now Japanese-owned and listed in New York. Oxford-AstraZeneca developed a world-class vaccine platform; the IP and manufacturing pathway moved abroad. DeepMind was acquired by Google for 400 million pounds in 2014 when it was two years old. The pattern is consistent: brilliant research, weak commercialisation, and foreign ownership of the value created by British science and British universities.
The UK is not a poor country. It is the sixth largest economy in the world. There is no reason it cannot maintain genuine industrial sovereignty in strategic sectors. South Korea, Israel, Singapore, and the Netherlands all do this successfully. The UK has been an outlier in pretending that market forces alone produce national champions. They do not.
A. British Strategic Accelerator: 10 Billion Pounds
The British Business Bank is expanded into a British Strategic Accelerator with 10 billion pounds of investment capital over the parliament. The model is patient capital: the Accelerator co-invests alongside private capital at Series B to D funding rounds, taking equity stakes in British scaleups at the point where they would otherwise be acquired by foreign investors. Returns on investment are reinvested into the fund.
- Commercial terms, not grants: the Accelerator takes equity and expects returns, creating a self-sustaining fund rather than a perpetual subsidy
- Investment committee drawn from industry, academia, and finance, not civil servants
- Modelled on Singapore's Temasek and Israel's Yozma programme, which built Israel's venture capital industry from scratch in the 1990s
B. Five Strategic Sectors
Genomics and Diagnostics
The UK has world-leading capability in long-read DNA sequencing and emerging diagnostic technologies. A National Genomics Procurement Programme commits NHS and public health agencies to long-term contracts with UK genomics companies, providing the revenue certainty that enables manufacturing scale-up domestically. Genomics England, the 100,000 Genomes Project, and the NHS Whole Genome Sequencing service are built on UK capability and leadership. The Accelerator co-invests in UK sequencing, diagnostics, and bioinformatics firms at commercial terms.
Small Modular Reactors
Rolls-Royce SMR has the design: a 470 MW reactor that can be factory-built, transported by road, and commissioned in 4 to 5 years versus 15 years for Hinkley-scale projects. A government commitment to a 10 GW SMR programme over 15 years (around 60 reactors) gives the manufacturing certainty needed to build a global export business. Forge commits to the first 4 reactors by end of parliament, with a long-term contract for the full 60. Manufacturing at Rolls-Royce's Derby and Rotherham facilities, with a potential 40,000 direct and indirect jobs in the programme supply chain.
Marine Energy
Wave and tidal energy has been "5 years from commercial viability" for two decades. The technology is now ready. The UK has two world-leading tidal developers (Orbital Marine Power, Atlantis Resources) and the best tidal resources in Europe. Dedicated Contracts for Difference at a price that reflects the nascent industry's costs, not the mature wind industry's costs. 1 GW operational by Year 5, 5 GW pipeline. Manufacturing in Caithness, Orkney, Shetland, and Anglesey. Real coastal engineering jobs in communities that need them.
AI and Quantum Computing
Britain has DeepMind, Wayve, ARM, Graphcore, and Quantinuum. The Alan Turing Institute, the National Quantum Computing Centre, and the UK's university research base are world class. The Accelerator co-invests in scaleups in this sector with specific focus on: AI for healthcare and drug discovery (where the NHS provides an unparalleled data asset with proper consent and governance), quantum cryptography (where security applications are strategic), and edge AI for defence and critical infrastructure.
Compound Semiconductors
Silicon-based chip fabs are uncompetitive in the UK on cost. But compound semiconductors (gallium nitride, silicon carbide for power electronics, 5G, and electric vehicles) are a different market: high-value, UK has genuine capability, and strategic importance is growing rapidly. South Wales hosts the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and the Newport Wafer Fab. The Accelerator commits 500 million pounds to this cluster. Welsh manufacturing jobs that nobody can offshore easily.
C. Procurement Preference for British Firms
The UK government spends approximately 300 billion pounds annually on procurement. Currently much flows to foreign suppliers because bid protocols favour incumbents. Forge mandates that 2% of strategic procurement is directed to British innovators in the five strategic sectors. Roughly 6 billion pounds annually. This is not anti-trade protectionism. It is treating procurement as an instrument of industrial strategy, exactly as the United States (Buy American Act), France (champions nationaux), and Germany (Mittelstand support) already do.
D. Strategic Acquisition Protection
Companies in the five strategic sectors that receive Accelerator investment, or public procurement contracts above 50 million pounds, sign a Strategic Industry Charter. Any sale to a foreign acquirer above 1 billion pounds triggers a Secretary of State review on national security and economic grounds. Approval is normal but not automatic. Conditions can be attached: UK manufacturing retention, IP protection, technology transfer prohibitions. This is the National Security and Investment Act 2021 applied more vigorously, not a new mechanism.
The principle: the UK does not need to nationalise industries to be economically sovereign. It needs to use the tools other successful economies already use: patient capital at the right stage, procurement leverage, long-term industrial commitments, and a willingness to protect what it has built. Singapore does it through Temasek. Israel through Yozma and defence procurement. South Korea through policy banks. France through Bpifrance. The UK has been the outlier in believing market forces alone are sufficient. Thirty years of evidence says otherwise.
E. Regional Development: Property Tax Redistribution as Economic Policy
The property tax reform is described in Section II primarily as a fairness measure. It is also the largest single act of regional economic rebalancing in the manifesto. The current council tax raises similar amounts from similar-banded properties regardless of their actual value. The Forge progressive property tax raises far more from high-value southern properties through its upper bands and distributes the revenue nationally on a needs-weighted basis. The progressive structure raises approximately £10 billion more than a flat rate would, and that £10 billion is ring-fenced for a national Growth Infrastructure Fund: transport, energy grid, and digital connectivity that rebalances productivity across the country.
The regions that gain most from this redistribution are the ones with the worst infrastructure, the lowest median incomes, and the greatest backlog of deferred public investment. That is not a coincidence. It is the design. The redistribution funds:
- Road resurfacing in priority areas. The National Resurfacing Programme (Section XV) allocates by carriageway length, Road Condition Indicator score, and weather exposure. Northern, coastal, and rural councils, which have the worst roads and the least money, receive proportionally more. Roads are not glamorous regional development. They are the precondition for all other economic activity in areas where public transport is limited.
- Digital infrastructure in underserved areas. The UK X-Road and NHS digital integration programmes (Section XVII) require physical infrastructure investment across the country. Procurement is weighted toward UK suppliers in the regions where the infrastructure is being installed.
- Social care workforce investment. The domestic social care retraining programme (Section III) is concentrated in areas with the highest current overseas worker dependency, which correlate strongly with left-behind coastal and post-industrial communities. Training British workers for care jobs in their own communities at NHS-equivalent pay is regional economic development.
- British Strategic Accelerator geographic weighting. The BSA explicitly targets investments that build manufacturing and R&D capacity outside London. The compound semiconductor cluster in South Wales, the tidal manufacturing base in Caithness and Orkney, the SMR supply chain in Derby and Rotherham, and the Cyber Academy in Scotland are not coincidental geographic choices. They are deliberate investments in places that have been told for thirty years that the economy of the future would pass them by.
F. Business Subsidy Zero-Basing: Stop Paying for What Would Happen Anyway
The UK government spends approximately £9.5bn per year on business subsidies, grants, and support schemes across departments. Some of this spending is genuinely valuable: research grants with genuine spillover effects, aerospace development programmes with long-term strategic value, environmental payments for genuine public goods. Most of it has never been rigorously evaluated against the question of whether it actually changes business behaviour, or whether the activity would have happened anyway without the subsidy.
The academic literature on business subsidies is consistent: deadweight loss (paying for activity that would happen anyway) typically consumes 40 to 60% of the value of business grant programmes. An enterprise finance guarantee that helps a business borrow money it would have borrowed anyway from a commercial bank is not a subsidy to business growth — it is a transfer from taxpayers to banks.
The zero-based review
Every business subsidy programme in central government spending is reviewed against a single standard within Year 1: can the programme demonstrate, from its own evaluation data, that it caused business activity that would not have happened without it? If it cannot demonstrate additionality above deadweight, it is discontinued at the next spending review unless the sponsoring department can provide a credible new evaluation framework within 12 months.
The review covers:
| Programme category | Annual spend | Assessment | Forge position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Innovate UK grants | £1.0bn | Mixed. Some highly transformative (deep tech, life sciences). Much substitution of private R&D. | Retain for frontier research with genuine spillovers. Zero-base commercialisation grants with poor track records. |
| Regional and levelling up grants | £2.0bn | Poor evaluation record. Funds often absorbed by areas already growing. Replaced by structural mechanisms in Forge (property tax redistribution, Priority Planning Zones). | Discontinue as separate programme. Functions absorbed into BSA geographic weighting and property tax redistribution. |
| Enterprise Finance Guarantee and start-up loans | £0.5bn | Additionality typically low. Banks lend to viable businesses anyway. | Retain only where commercial lending demonstrably unavailable. Strict additionality test. |
| Sector-specific subsidies (aerospace, automotive, steel) | £2.0bn | Aerospace has genuine strategic spillovers and high skill density. Automotive less clear since EV transition restructured the sector. | Retain aerospace and advanced manufacturing where strategic case is clear. Review automotive and general manufacturing. |
| Hospitality and tourism grants | £0.5bn | Mostly deadweight in normal economic conditions. Justified only during genuine crisis. | Discontinue in normal times. Reserve as emergency mechanism only. |
| UKRI non-research commercialisation programmes | £0.8bn | Research grants justified by strong evidence. Commercialisation grants have poor evaluation records. | Protect core research funding. Zero-base all commercialisation programmes. |
| Export credit beyond core UKEF function | £0.2bn | Core export finance function justified. Peripheral programmes less clearly so. | Retain core. Review peripheral. |
| Conservative saving (40% of portfolio fails evaluation) | £3.8bn annually | ||
What this is not
This is not an ideological opposition to all government involvement in the economy. The British Strategic Accelerator in this section is an explicit government industrial investment. The difference is that the BSA takes equity stakes and backs genuinely strategic national capability, whereas the programmes above are grants that disappear into business operating costs with no measurable return and no stake retained for the public. The BSA model is: invest in things the market cannot fund, take a share of the upside. The zero-based review model is: stop funding things the market would fund anyway at taxpayer expense.
Estimated annual saving: £3.8bn conservatively, up to £4.8bn centrally. The saving is phased over Years 2 to 3 as programmes are evaluated, decisions made, and contracts wound down. Some programmes will survive the review. Those are the ones that should have survived all along.
G. What We Are Not Promising
Economic honesty requires saying what will not happen as clearly as saying what will.
- Tidal energy is not a short-term economic driver. 1 GW operational by Year 3 to 4 is real and significant for the communities hosting it. It is not a near-term GDP driver for the whole economy. The 5 GW pipeline and the 15-year programme are genuinely important if completed. They are a foundation for something large, not an immediate return.
- The SMR programme is a 15-year commitment. The first four reactors are contracted in this parliament. The economic and energy benefits are realised in the parliament after next. The commitment in this parliament is the precondition for those benefits, not the delivery of them.
- Growth from tax simplification is real but not immediate. Businesses do not invest the day after a tax code is simplified. The effect accumulates over years as compliance costs fall, investment decisions are made with confidence, and capital that was tied up in tax-planning structures is freed for productive use.
- Regional rebalancing is a generational project. The property tax redistribution, the roads programme, and the strategic investment create the conditions for regional economic growth. They do not produce it instantly. Areas that have been economically marginalised for forty years will not be transformed in five. The honest claim is that the trend will have reversed by Year 5 and the trajectory will be clear. That is what a first parliament can credibly deliver.