 Rwy'n rhoi. Cynon ni gyda'n gweithio ymgyrchaf ffordd yn cael ei gael'r ffordd, ac mae'r ffordd yn gweithio y mae'r ffordd yn cael ei gael'r ffordd. O'r ffordd yn cael ei gael y ffordd yn cael ei gael'r ffordd. Felly, rwy'n cael eu ffordd. Mae'n cael ei gael'r ffordd, ac mae'n cael ei gael'r ffordd yn cael ei gael'r ffordd. Fel y gallwn gweld ychydig ar gyfer y rwyfyr ym Mhag banking yng Nghwylol, if we manage to boost growth, that all else equal would be likely to increase inequality if we don't do anything else. That is why, as you heard from Torsen earlier, we have proposed the raft of things on pre-distribution, higher employment, good jobs, increased skills, as well as redistribution, and welfare state that does not leave some groups, some people behind as the economy grows, and a tax system that shares burdens fairly. That is what a we will discuss in the next 45 minutes or so. We have another great panel, and they can all, each individually fill the entire session. But I will not let them. We are going to try and keep the time. They have promised me, and they will do so, which is great. I would really like to hear from some of you too. In terms of our speakers, they probably don't need to introduce, but what I will do is very briefly, very briefly. Mae'r prifsysydd Mark Drakeford yw'r prifsysydd yw Wales. Rwy'n gwybod ar y cyfnod. Rwy'n gwybod ar ddigon. Dwi'n ddim gwell â hyn? Rwy'n gweithio'r fan. Rwy'n gweithio'r fan. Mark weddill yn ddechrau'r prifsysydd 2018. Cymru'r prifsysydd ar gyflym ymlaen. Mae'r prifsysydd hynny'n ddod ar 4 prifsysydd, a'r prifsysydd i'w brifysysydd ar y cyfnod. i maes i fflanzen i ni gwybr i ni gweithio i gyd. Dyna wedi'u meddwl i'r 1998, mae'r ddweud ei fod yn gweld yn ddwylo y Llyfrgell, mae'r ddweud i chi i ni, dwi'n meddwl'u meddwl i chi, a dwi'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi, mae'n meddwl i chi i chi, a ddim i'r ddweud i chi i chi i chi i chi i chi, a gyrddois i chi gynnig o'r Domhaidd, ac mae'r ddweud i chi i chi i chi i chi i chi i chi i chi i chi cofnod yma. ..ynghyddurio i'r Ysgolig dros ymgrifedig o'r Ffadig. Yn gweithio'n gweithio los, ymwneud yn ddysgu'r ysgolig. Y Linsie i'r pari sy'n gweithio'r ddefnyddio... ..ynghwyl o'r ddweud o'r cymhwynt gwybod... ..y'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Fel'r cymhwynt. Yn hefyd, y Linsie i'r ysgolig yn y 2030... ..y'r rhain i'r ddiogel... ..y'n gweithio'n cymhwynt yn y gweithi. iawn. Mae'n gwybodaeth yn gallu bod sgwych yn gallu rhoi yn cael icinol oesodol, byddai rydyn ni'n gilydd i'r rhaglen o'r cyfweldau sphinol yn ddeserogol cyfrifol ym myd i'r talerio cyfrifol, os oesodol iddyn nhw'n cael icinol ym myd i'r rhiwg arall o'u cyfrifol ym myd i'r rhaglen a'i gydag cyfrifol a'r cyfrifol i'r groesol.As gael ei'r left, rydyn ni'n saen i'n ei wneud i gydig i wneud â'i UF. yr hyn yn cael ei oes cyntaf yn casu'r eich unigol? Elened, y dros trefydau ffoc Foolys ar y cytidion o'r ffordd gyda'r cyflwynig. Mae mae'r eich unigol yn cael ei gynrydu ddechrau'n mynd i amgrifesr! Rwy'n meddwl ar unigol yn cyflwynig ym Fy�ddol yn y teimlo'n brif. On ddoch i gydag gwneud yr eich beth o ddechrau yn gyflwynig ym posebwyr yn chacif i ffana hwn o'i colli yn eich ddechrau'n gwneud hynny. Rwy'n cyd-diw i'r gynharu o gynhau oedd oedden nhw i'w cyd-diw i ddweud gwahodd. Yn gyfnod o'r polisi, rydyn ni'n dweud ydym yn ei gweithio noll trefynu cynllun i'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n dweud ydym yn ei gweithio i chi'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio'n gweithio'r pethau. Rydyn ni'n tyn nhw'n cael grannu i chi ddechrau, ac rydyn ni'n dweud ei gweithio'r gweithio arall, that's devolved as well and interesting developments in other plesio am ei gweithio ar gael iawn o'r gwaith yma, a gennym wneud o'r ddwyllwr ddweud, dyweddigaeth y ddysgu'n ddwyllwr i'r ddweud i gyd yn ddod signedog ymlaen i gael ar eu swyddfa. Gwyrdwyd o'n rhai i gynhyrchu, drwy'r ddiligol o'r perombosiad roi'r llawu a'n gyffredinol o'r ddweud o'r rhaid o'r perormol i'r rhaglen, ac yn gyfapod o'r dyfod o'r adnod i'r ddwyllwr o'r edrych eich bod yn cael ei drafiachio. Mae hynny'n cael eu gwirio'r cymhwyng y bwrdd, yw'r cyffredigiau yn ei chyfl fel arlai. Cyfion y gyd-fyddiadau, rwy'n personalio fod eich cyfeirio. Mae'n ffaith eich gallu i'r cyffredigiau ar eich gwirio, yn y ffin yn gyffredig yma, ac yn angen i'r rwyny i'r cyffredigau'r cyfeirio. Mae'n amlwg yma oherwydd bod y gallu ceisio am bod y cyffredigai'r cyffredigiau, ac mae'n ei bellwch ar gael yn cael eu drafn ei wneud yma, mae fyddech chi'n meddwl i'n meddwl 73% o fawr i'r gennyn. Felly, fel gyda'r gweithio gyrswyr, mae'n fyddech chi'n meddwl i'r holl. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r holl, ac mae'n meddwl i'r holl strategiaeth. Ond mae'n meddwl i'r holl strategiaeth gyrswyr yn ei gofyn yn ei holl. Mae'n meddwl i'ch holl yn ymddangos, mae'n meddwl i'ch holl. Gwenddoch chi'n meddwl i'ch holl yn rhan o'r llaw o'r cyffredinol yn y cyblsysgol coi yn cynhyrch bend suction is in the workplace, over time particularly for low earners. Our workplaces increaserael characterised by an excesson of boards but they got quite to it after Arb Falwe yn adegwered y sons ond this charteon to say this. This is showing you a level of anxiety that workers have Jesse say... about unexpected changes to their hours of work. Across the nation 25% of employers say they're worried about changes to their hours of wo- Work unexpected changes, but when we look at the lowest two income quintiles that goes through to third. y third of workers and the poorest workers are worried their wages are going to change. What can we do about that? Well, we think you could have a right to a contract reflecting your actual hours that would help the 1.2 million zero hours contract workers in this country, for example. We think we should require employers to give two weeks notice of shifts and they should be penalized if they change them subsequently. And also, of course, the key way that people see that hours change as many of us experience during the pandemic is if they get sick. felly we need to increase sick pay to 65% of usual earnings and extend it critically to the lowest earners. But we also think that higher national standards are not enough on their own and that there has to be institutional innovation. Here I'm showing you some particular problems sectors in the economy. Let me just talk about the top one, social care. Our research has shown and of course unions have shown this time and time again too that there's huge issues, complex issues in our social care sector and indeed in others. But in social care in particular we've noted for example that unpaid travel time is leading to a really high risk of underpayment of minimum wage. There's huge issues around lack of pay progression, lack of training and no surprise that we have such a profound crisis when it comes to recruitment and retention in the social care sector. What do we need to do about this? Well we think that for problem sectors we need to move to something called good work agreements. We need to get employers and employee representatives together and they need to think hard and work out a programme of action for the sector specifics. But we also think across the totality of the labour market that we've got to do better when it comes to enforcing our labour market rules. We currently have six agencies and local authorities implementing and enforcing labour market rules in the UK reporting into seven different government departments. We need to rationalise this system and move towards a single enforcement body on labour market rights. Now I've talked a lot about the labour market but of course we mustn't forget that there are 11 million working age individuals in the UK who get less than half of their income through earnings. And for them the benefit system is a huge lifeline. The problem there of course is that the value of working age benefits has been on a steady downward slide over time and this chart really brings that home. This is showing you the real value of unemployment benefits as a proportion of average weekly earnings. And in 1970 that stood at 30%. Today it's less than half of that. If we don't do something about the value of our working age benefits those families are on that perpetual decline disconnected from the experience of the majority. So what do we need to do? We're making a bold statement in the Economy 2030 inquiry by saying that we need to increase working age benefits in line with earnings in the future. We need to reconnect the fortunes of those, the poorest citizens in the UK with those who are in work. That's expensive. We're really clear about that. That is not a cheap option but we know that if you upgraded the state pension on the same basis in line with earnings then that could cover half of the cost of that. And we also need to remove some of the sharpest edges in the benefits system. The two-child limit is a perfect case in point. So earnings, benefits, incomes, what about costs? Well the number one cost that we know causes major problems and acts as a headwind against living standards is housing. And there's a number of reasons why we have a housing crisis in the UK today but one of the key ones of course is that we haven't built at scale and this chart points to that. This is showing you housing stock per thousand inhabitants for various OECD countries here, no surprise. The UK is languishing at the bottom of the pack and not just in terms of the ratio of housing stock that we have today but also how we've failed to build over time. What do we need to do? Well no surprises we need to be building at scale and especially in cities which as the previous panel mentioned should be our economic powerhouses in the UK and that's where our pressure points will come when it comes to housing costs. We need to build an adequate share of self-market housing for those who the market doesn't deliver. And we also need effective support with housing costs via the benefit system which is why we were so pleased to see the Chancellor announced two weeks ago, autumn statement, that he was re-pegging local housing allowance with local rents. We would have been even more enthusiastic if he was doing it in perpetuity and not just for one year. Talked about sharing the gains, let me talk finally about sharing the pain. We know that we need to be a higher tax economy. We know that there are structural reasons for that. There's demography. There's the transition to net zero. There's the desperate need for public investment that Emily talked about previously. But if we're going to be a higher tax economy we also need to be a better and fairer tax economy too. Now I'm not going to take you through the minutiae of our tax programme in our final report. I commend you to the actual document but let me talk about three key principles that we highlight. The first is we must work hard towards equal treatment for different sources of income. We currently tax earnings from employment, earnings from self-employment, rents and capital gains in very different ways. We need to start moving and making changes so that that situation changes. The second thing we need to do is tax wealth better. Wealth in the 1980s was the equivalent of three times of national income. Today it stands at over seven times national income but our take of tax take from wealth has barely gone up as a proportion of GDP over that time. There's so much more we could do. This isn't just about snazzy new wealth taxes. We just need to sort out some of the wealth taxes we currently have, council tax and inheritance tax, for example. And finally, we need to make sure that the sacrifices are fairly shared. So we know, for example, that higher income households are rapidly moving towards electric vehicles which are tax-privileged currently. And that means the Exchequer's losing revenue and lower income families are bearing the brunt of motoring taxes. So one of the suggestions we make in the economy 2030 final report is to introduce a simple per mile road duty for electric vehicles. Our tax package overall reduces the very highest tax rates but raises an additional 1.3% of GDP by the end of the next decade. So with a good work agenda, reconnecting benefits to the value of earnings, tackling housing costs, fare taxes, that's our agenda for reducing inequality in the economy 2030 inquiry. And I really look forward to hearing from the panel and from you about it. Thank you so much, Lindsay, admirably concise. Lindsay had another 20 slides. That she could have showed you and obviously didn't for obvious reasons. There's lots of other stuff. It's chapter six and seven of the report for the super king. We could have talked about an apprenticeship guarantee, the major expansion of provision at sub-degree level of training and support for FE and a huge amount, there's a huge amount in there on tax reform. There really is quite an ambitious agenda of tax cuts as well as tax rises. Although net, as Lindsay said, they raise more money. So do look at the report. Right, no more or do, Mark, over to you for your perspective. Thank you. Well Gavin, thank you very much. Good afternoon, plan da. Apologies at the beginning. I am going to be rattling a huge amount of stuff past you very quickly and we'll probably end up speaking in headlines quite a lot of the time, but I want to try and cover as much ground as I can. I thought I'd begin with two of the propositions in the report, one of which I definitely agree with, the other of which I want to just add a small caveat to. So the first proposition is that we must be as hard headed about lower inequality as higher growth. And I hope that the practical things that I will talk about this afternoon demonstrate that these are not remote possibilities, but things that are actually happening today in that hard headed way. The second proposition that the report offers us is that governments have been deeply unserious about what it might take to improve things. And here's an idea. I know where this is going. I enjoyed. We are short term to the core. Well, I just wanted to put a footnote in there because I won't come back to it otherwise. But in Wales we have this thing called the Well-Being of Future Generations Act, which is probably the single most radical piece of legislation passed in the whole of the devolutionary era. It places a legal obligation on ministers and not just ministers but other public sector organisations that when you are making decisions, you have to ask yourself not simply what impact will this have on people today but what impact will it have on those generations that come after us. And in the seven goals of the Well-Being of Future Generations Act, the most radical of the goals is that we must work towards a more equal Wales. Now I'm not saying this because I think the report that the act is an easy drag and drop, you would need something different, I'm sure, in different contexts. But what it does do, and I can tell you this from doing it all the time, it does change the culture of decision making. It does act as a powerful counterweight simply to thinking about the here and now when every time you make a decision, you're confronted with a question about what impact it will have on those who come beyond us. With that out of the way, I'm going to try to respond to the challenge set out in the report, which is to provide confidence that a better future is possible or to quote that famous Welsh socialist Raymond Williams that to attempt the genuinely radical thing is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. And if there is a recipe for what I think government is about, it is about trying to live up to that ambition. And in doing so, I'm going to offer you four things, four strands in how we do make hope possible. And here they are. I think we have to use the power of a reformed state. We need to recognise that while inequality is more than money for the poorest in our society, it's money that matters the most. That when it comes to dealing with in-work poverty, we have to put to work the potency of social partnership. And finally that in thinking about inequality, we must strive for policy innovation as well as trying to re-equip the policies of the past for contemporary conditions. So there we are. Those are my four themes. The first is about using the power of a reformed state. And sometimes when I used to teach these things in universities, I used to get blank looks from students when I would say that in Wales we believe that good government is good for you. As though this was an entirely taken for granted proposition. But of course we know that there are many people who believe that government does best when government does least and that government should just get out of the way and allow the system to operate effectively. We've never taken that view in Wales. We believe that when we take collective action to tackle common problems then and crucially for this session, those solutions reach deepest into the lives of those who need them the most. And I'm just going to offer you two very quick examples of what I mean by that and the absolutely contemporary examples. Some of you may have read that we now have a default 20 mile per hour speed limit in all built up residential areas in Wales. There are many reasons for it, but it is an inequality measure in itself. Accidents don't happen accidentally. If you are a child living in a disadvantaged family or a disadvantaged community, you are much more likely to be involved in an accident that accident is much more likely to leave that child seriously injured. The risks are clustered by individuals and by area and our policy of requiring a 20 mile an hour speed limit in all residential areas is an inequality measure as much as it is anything else. And at the same time, we're consulting at the moment on reforming the school year to bring it into line with the way that people live their lives today. And we do that because we know that learning loss is greatest in those families and for those children who arrive at the school gate with the impact of inequality already imprinted on them. But when schools have done a fantastic job they do in investing in those young people over the school year, you come to July, those children are now the beneficiaries of everything that has been done and they go away. And six weeks later, they have not seen a book. They have not been helped to retain what they've learnt in terms of numeracy. For many of them, they have been hungry during that period, for far too many of them. They face that problem as well. And we will reform the school year in order to help those children the most. Now, I said that this was about a reformed state and using the power of a reformed state. There's a lot in the report itself. You need to set it alongside the Gordon Brown report in order to have a formula to deal with a suffocating weight of entrenched and chronic economic centralisation in the United Kingdom. Renewing Labour's devolution project for the middle of the 21st century is, I think, essential if we are going to have governance arrangements in place in order for us to make those economic and social policies actually operate in the lives of the whole of the United Kingdom. I said my second point was that while all those other things are important, if you're in the 4 million people who live in destitution in contemporary United Kingdom, then money is the answer to your problem. There's an urgent need to recreate a union of solidarity in the United Kingdom by rebuilding our system of social security so that it does what it originally said it would do. It would give you a guarantee of protection against those things that can go wrong in the lives of any one of us. It will be a slow process, of course, but there are things that can be done not just by central government but by regional governments as well. In Wales, we've retained the council tax benefit. We've retained and bolstered the social fund and we've done those things that one of my political heroes, Barbara Castle, used to talk about the social wage, those policies that leave money in the pockets of people who need the money the most. So, to give you just three examples in the field of education alone, we have free breakfasts in our primary schools. We have universal free school meals in primary schools and we've just raised the level of the education maintenance allowance, which we retained in Wales. I mean, been abolished elsewhere. My third point was about in-work poverty and I'm just for a moment going to highlight the recipe that's there in the report itself, a focus on skills, public investment alongside private investment, a willingness to do more to help those nascent industries of the future. But the very best examples in Wales, whether it's aerospace in the north, east, or whether it's Japanese investment in the south, east, they share those qualities that you see in companies in other parts of the world. They regard their workers as an asset in creating a successful future. I mean, Wales, we have the Social Partnership Act, which puts that social partnership model bringing the trade unions, employers, public and private, the Welsh Government around the same table. We've put the force of law underneath that because those difficult conversations and they are challenging conversations are the place where you can craft a landing spot where everybody is prepared to put their collective effort. The work we do through the Social Partnership Council on social care, for example, to take Lindsay's earlier example, is all about not just pay, but the things that go alongside it, terms and conditions, how people are treated in the workplace, how we get that profession to be better recognised. Social partnership, I think, lies at the heart of a recipe for dealing with that in-work poverty challenge. Finally, to policy innovation, because while a lot of the report is absolutely about recreating things that have worked in the past in contemporary conditions, we need to think more widely than that as well. I'll leave you just with this one example. Lindsay talked about the precariat. Is there any more precarious group in our society and those young people who leave the public care system? Is there any group to whom a greater duty is owned by the public, given that the public has taken over the parentage of those young people? We have a two-year experiment of offering a universal basic income to every child who leaves public care in Wales. It's set at the level of the real living wage. It is unconditional. Those young people get an income that they can absolutely rely upon and a worker to help them to navigate that future. Who knows? We will evaluate it in a rigorous way and have to be open to the fact it may not deliver on what we hope, but the early signs are really encouraging that those young people offer that guarantee, make decisions which are not about taking a job here and now because you've got to get through the week, finding somewhere to sleep tonight because you don't know where you will be tomorrow. They use the money to invest in things that create a pathway for them to a future in which they can be contributing citizens of the United Kingdom and different ways of thinking, ways in which add to the repertoire of how we can do what Raymond Williams said and I'll close with a quotation from another Williams. So, this is Archbishop Williams and he was asked in a reth lecture recently about how he would conceptualise the proper purpose of politics and he said that it was the patient progress made in pursuit of the common good. I think I live with that. This is a long journey. The report is clear about that, but if we're prepared to set out on it with patience, but with progress in mind and knowing that the common good is the load star that guides us on that journey, then I think we can have the optimism that the report asks for. Excellent. Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you. Patience and perseverance is what we are all about here. Christina, a trade union perspective. Thank you and thank you for the invitation to speak today and there's so much in this report that certainly my union would support. I want to thank Mark because I think what they're doing on Wales is an inspiration for what we could be doing in other parts of the UK. So, I just wanted to focus on a few quick areas and certainly in terms of, as you won't be surprised to hear from Unison's point of view as the biggest union and the biggest public sector union, that we think investing in public services is absolutely essential if you want to break down inequalities in this country. We've had a government that for the past 13 years hasn't seen any value in investing in public services and we've seen the damage that has caused to both growth, to the economy and indeed to equalities in this country. The consequences of structural inequality are very apparent. We see, and this isn't just the past 13 years, so I'm not just blaming the Conservative government, this is something that's been going on for many years. Is that undervaluing of the skills that many people have, particularly women, that bring to the labour market are just not valued? We pay the people who manage the ticket barriers at stations and the underground. They get paid more than the people who work in care homes. If you look at the people who look after animals in the zoo, they will get paid more than people who look after your children, my children when they went to nursery or a childminder, because we don't place a value on what are seen as women's skills, whether that's caring, cleaning, catering and administration, a myriad of other skills that they bring to the workplace. That needs to fundamentally change and part of that is structural. I'm going to mention something that I know everybody's eyes glaze over, but job evaluation is a big issue in the public sector. This is really important because it's how you boost pay is by getting recognition for the work that people do. We have a broken social care system in this country, and until that's fixed, that impacts on all of us, whether you're a worker in that sector or whether you're someone whose family and relatives and loved ones depend on it. That also impacts on whether people can go out to work until you've got the social care sector sorted, that will not happen. I also want to mention, I've talked about early years workers, but early years, investing in early years, evidence has been around for years and years. I remember when Gordon Brown introduced Sure Start, the evidence was all there that investing in early years pays off in the long run because it has such an impact on disadvantaged children and impacts on their whole life as they go forward. As I say, evidence has been there for years and years on this. That is an investment that actually benefits the whole of society. Taxation, of course, is a massive issue for us because that's how I'm constantly being asked how you're going to fund all these things that you want in the public sector. I won't go into detail, I think, just to say lots of support from Unison in terms of moving towards a more progressive taxation system, particularly things like capital gains tax, where if you make your living through renting out property, you're probably paying less in tax than the tenants that may be working in the care home down the road, and that cannot possibly be right. For us, one of the key issues is making work better and making work pay better and making people more productive through paying them more money. What do we need for that? We need a legal framework that penalises poor working practices, whether that's insecure work, compulsory zero hours, the gig economy and the fake self-employment that we see people being forced into. What we need is a framework that encourages good practice, so better enforcement of employment and, I would say, trade union rights. Reform of sick pay, which you've already covered, and one of the other key things is making it easier to bring cases of discrimination, so the burden of proof in race discrimination of disability discrimination is still very high, very difficult, I've been told I've got one minute, I'm going to have to speed up. Making equal pay much easier, particularly for group claims, and one of the key things will be introducing fair pay agreements in certain sectors, and I very much welcome Labour's commitment to making the care sector the first one that they will actually introduce that. That will have significant impact on low paid workers in those sectors, but it's not just about pay, it also has to be about recognition of the skills they bring, the fact that these are not low skilled jobs, they may be low paid, they're not necessarily low skilled, and that has to be recognised and those skills need to be paid for. I have to apologise as you know, I have to leave because... You've been summoned on to the world of one. Government announcement on something mad that I have to go and speak on. Another one. It's an occupational hazard. Thank you, Christine. Thank you very much, Christina, a bunch of great points, and thank you for your time if you need to slip away. Over to you, Andy, inequality between places. Thank you, Gavin, a massive congrats to you and the resolution team for this fantastic report. I couldn't take issue with any of the diagnosis or indeed much the prescription, including around the tax and benefit stuff that Lindsay set out so clearly. But given where we are, we need real boldness, so let me drop a few bold questions into the pot to get the conversation going. So the most powerful thing that a powerful person can do is to give away power. Gordon Brown demonstrated that on his first day in office. His signature initiative then was to seed power of monetary policy to the Bank of England, audacious and bold move, but it worked, and in some ways it was the signature of his long chancellorship. And I think we need similar degrees of boldness and audacity now from the new chancellor, whoever she or he might be. Now is the time for the new chancellor not to play the role of magician conjuring up new fiscal rabbits from the hat, but rather to play the role of the magician's assistant by cutting themselves in two and the institution over which they preside. What do I mean by that? First, we should consider the separation of the treasury's finance and economy functions, the conflation of which I think has blighted UK growth policy over many decades for the entirely understandable reason that the fiscal first inclinations of the treasury tend to take preeminence. Now an economy ministry would be something standalone with its own minister and Whitehall department, except I wouldn't put them in Whitehall. I would put the new economy ministry instead in Darlington in what is currently the treasury's alternative campus. What better signal of growth intent and of spatially rebalancing our economy than to do that? Now those of you in the audience will think we've heard all this before, Andy. Hasn't this been tried? Do you not read the George Brown story or indeed the Michael Heseltine story or the Vince Cable story? They're all withered on the vine of the treasury. And that is right. There's no chance this could work without buying from numbers 10 and 11. So my suggestion would be that overseeing this national growth strategy is that triumvirate of PM finance minister and new economy minister supported by a common secretary, a new, if you like, councillor, economic advisers, US style, providing analytical and policy support, probably overseen by someone brilliant like Gavin or Torsten. You job for you. Accompanying that and at the local level, we do need a much fuller throated and whole hearted approach to Devo than the debate we have even had so far. And that means Devo not just of spending powers, but crucially of fiscal powers as well. On both fronts, we remain in my mind to timid. That would mean redrawing the Devo contract, not just for the English regions, but for Wales, for Scotland, and in time for Northern Ireland as well. Crucially, crucially in terms set not by central government, but by local leaders. And because no good deed goes unpunished and to bridge what could be, I think, a gap bordring into a chasm between new powers and responsibilities, I would augment that with a standing second chamber of citizens' assemblies to keep local leaders feet to the flames and fully attuned with the public's need. And the third point, Gavin, is we need a new institutional ecology for the financing of local areas. The current one simply does not work. For me, one means of doing that is to create the equivalent of what many of the countries have, which is a national development bank, albeit operating on a deeply decentralized basis. That would comprise a centralized spine of pooled expertise to enable local areas to serve up a portfolio of local projects. Right now, those local projects carry an enormous risk premium relative to London projects. One way of beating that premium back is by drawing upon the central pool of expertise and augmenting that with a consolidated pool of capital to finance those projects, a pool that would come from a consolidation of existing pension pots discussed in the previous panel, but augmenting that with a consolidation of existing quasi-public institutions, namely the British Business Bank and the National Infrastructure Bank. Now, I'm not naive enough to think that merely shifting governance and powers in institutions would be sufficient at the UK from that stagnating state to that superhighway. A lot more is needed, a lot more is suggested in today's report. Nonetheless, I do think that those governance shifts of a type I have outlined are absolutely necessary, if not sufficient conditions for springboarding growth. Local strategies, growth strategies pursued by emboldened and empowered local leaders are the national growth strategy this country needs. We've had separate panels, Gavin, on national growth and growth and balance. In fact, it's the self-same diagnosis and will be the self-same set of solutions, growth built from the bottom up, doing some of the things I've discussed today and some of the stuff here in the report. Thanks very much. Thank you. APPLAUSE Thank you, all of you. Time is racing on. We've had hundreds of questions on Slido. There's people firing them in. I'm not going to do justice to them all. I'm going to bounce off various ones to pose one quick question, which you're going to answer in a minute each, if you can. And they're quite crunchy ones. I'll start with you. We have heard this morning about the need to grow particularly England's second cities and to develop more high-paying jobs in those cities. This panel is about reducing inequality. If you follow the prognosis set out we've heard this morning, will you not get higher levels of inequality inside some regions, even if that means lower levels of inequality between regions? And would that be a good thing or is that a problem? So the UK stands out, distinguishes itself for all the wrong reasons, because it's a wide and widening degree of inter-regional inequality. So investing in our super-star sectors to drive those higher-wage, high-school jobs is crucial for closing those gaps. If you'd like the £100 billion dividend that would come from investing at scale in the UK's second cities, might that have as a side effect some widening of intra regionally called possibly, but with a bigger pie to play with, there's every chance then we can invest in the intra-regional connectivity and intra-regional safety net and intra-regional skills that will then help lift wider boats in the city region, I'm thinking particularly of Satellite and some stranded towns. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you Andy. Mark, now there's a whole agenda here on tax and there's a whole proposal on reforming council tax in England. Lots of people laugh at you when you propose that. I worked in it 20 years ago and I got laughed up by some senior cabinet ministers. It's very hard and that leads to a fatalism, which is nuts. You have had a revaluation in Wales and you're about to have another one I think. What is your lessons for us here about the viability of taking on this horribly iniquitous tax, which causes a fair chunk of some of the problems we're talking about today, not all of them but some of them. First of all it is really hard because you will undoubtedly hear from all the people who will be asked to pay more and you will hear very little from the much larger number of people who will be paying a little bit less. But if you're serious about inequality, then you just have to grasp this nettle. The council tax is the most regressive tax we have. You pay a much higher proportion of your income on council tax. If you live in a band A property, then if you live in a band I property, we will revalue again in Wales, where the only part of the United Kingdom that has 40 years to have a revaluation will do it again and we will make the tax within its limits more progressive than it is currently. The message is you don't get many chances at this. You've got to be bold. If it's the right thing to do, you've got to be prepared to see it through. Our consultation has the unique, I think, current attributions of being praised both by the IFS and the taxpayers' alliance. There you go. Not every day. Not every day you pull that off. When's this going to happen by? The consultation is asking people how quickly they want to see reform and how far they want reform to go. Lindsay, we've had... So, we're in this fine document setting out, and you said it, I just want to say it again, to link social security benefits for working-age people to earnings growth. That is a big deal. I've had lots of... Whenever I've talked about this and seen some of it online, there are versions of, are you mad, are you killing work incentives, as well as, we can't afford it, but there's a genuine question about what does this do to employment and the incentive to work. What's your answer? Well, I suppose the first thing to say is reducing the value of benefits indefinitely is neither moral nor a sustainable way of increasing work incentives. I mean, on the specifics of linking working-age benefits to the value of earnings, it doesn't do anything to work incentives. It basically just freezes them at the current level, but I think also our proposal has to really be seen in the round. So, it has to be seen alongside the other things that I pointed out, the rising minimum wage, value of the minimum wage, better good work agenda, and those are positive things that increase work incentives. One of the things we heard, and again and again, in some of our qualitative research that we've heard for so many people these days, that they withdraw from it as much as they can. You know, people will work as many hours as they need to pay the bills, and that's it. That's not a satisfactory situation. We need to do better on the good work side as well to increase work incentives. Thank you, Lindsay. I'm conscious that I'm stood between 500 people and their lunch. So, I think, and I'm really sad to do this because there's so many of you here, but I think I'm getting a look. At the time now. So, would you help me thank our panellists?