🚇 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Fans of Monopoly will know that Old Kent Road is the cheapest square on the board. But under new proposals from the think tank Labour Together and campaign group YIMBY Alliance, its real-world value could change dramatically.
In a joint paper, the two groups argue for a new approach that would allow London to fund more of its own infrastructure rather than constantly going cap in hand to the Treasury. They use the extension of the Bakerloo line from Elephant and Castle down through the Old Kent Road and beyond as a case study, but the principles could apply equally well elsewhere across the capital – and to other big city regions such as Greater Manchester or Birmingham.
As their paper notes:
“When the public sector builds infrastructure or grants planning permission, it can lead to huge windfalls for existing landowners. Allowing a landowner to build housing on agricultural land in the South East can increase the value of the land by 100 times. But it is also businesses and homeowners. Commercial rents and house prices close to Crossrail stations rose faster than the London average after the project was announced. These windfall gains have nothing to do with entrepreneurship or risk-taking. They are the result of decisions and hard work by the public sector, and the public sector should retain much more of the value uplift to pay for infrastructure.”
There are plenty of models for making that happen. Paris has used a small payroll tax and a levy on tourism to fund upgrades to its Metro, which could be replicated here. The Mayor could also be given powers to require outer boroughs to build more homes along new routes, in exchange for a faster commute into central London.
With public finances under strain – and growing pressure on the government to splash cash outside the capital – it’s increasingly difficult for London to make the case for more handouts. But as I wrote last week, strong agglomerative effects represent one of the best ways to escape our economic doomspiral. To amplify agglomeration, we need to explore every option for funding the transport upgrades to keep the city moving. Proposals like those set out in Labour Together and YIMBY Alliance’s paper deserve to be taken seriously.
💳 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
Imagine everyone set aside a small monthly budget for articles, podcasts and videos. But instead of locking it into subscriptions, we put it in a programmable wallet, tell an AI agent what and whose taste we trust, and let it give tiny payments to what we read, watch and listen to. As content arrives, the agent evaluates it against our preferences and context: what we’ve recently consumed, what our network has paid attention to, what is timely or under-reported. When something resonates, the agent sends a micro‑tip to the creator, leaving a receipt that can validate and, if we choose, publicise our attention.
Daisy Alioto, co-founder and CEO of Dirt, an independent media outlet, sketched out this vision in a piece arguing that “the future of media is a bank”: spontaneous payments replacing set-rate subscriptions, autonomous agents trained on taste and empowered to tip, attention recorded not in clicks but in stablecoin transactions.
Speculative as it sounds, it could be a return to something magazines once did well. A recent wave of Condé Nast’s reminiscence reminds us that the miracle was not in the glossy paper, but rather in the system around it: editors serving as gatekeepers and readers as members of a scene. That era industrialised curation as a social technology and made status convertible into money through almost ritualised purchase.
Today, distribution is effectively infinite. Alioto’s proposal tries to rebuild the social architecture that magazines once provided but with the tools we now have and with less gatekeeping. The mechanism would let payment travel with attention and count as proof of support. Micro-tips become a record of taste, which is private by default, but shareable when you want. Agents learn what you like, how you value it, and distribute spending accordingly. Creators get small, frequent income streams instead of fixed subscriptions or volatile advertisement revenues. Since wallets are programmable, agents can also follow agents of others, so discovery flows through people you trust rather than a platform feed. In that world, attention is both a budget and a public signal.
🌎 Jessie May Green, Events and APPG for Entrepreneurship Coordinator
The COP30 Presidency recently announced the daily themes for this year’s global climate conference, which will take place in the Amazonian city of Belém, Brazil in November. To my joy, one of the themes is ‘Small and medium entrepreneurs’.
It makes sense – small and medium-sized enterprises represent a whopping 90% of businesses worldwide, make up half of the global economy, and produce half of global emissions. If we are to get a grip on rising temperatures, we can’t afford to leave SMEs out of the conversation. Not only in the sense that their emissions will have to fall, but also because many will be invaluable in providing innovative solutions to the challenge at hand.
On this front, the UNFCCC – the body responsible for organising the COP climate summits – has issued a call to action to accelerate its ‘Climate-Proofing SMEs’ campaign. Their aims are to: increase green finance from the full spectrum of financial institutions; ensure at least 30,000 SMEs have resources available to support them tackling emissions, from carbon footprinting tools to region-specific training; and – by COP30 – to see at least 150 large businesses actively engaging SMEs in their supply chain via long-term net zero programmes.
It is great to see SMEs coming to the forefront of climate conversations, and to see this supported by institutions in the UK. For example, the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, which is building a network of academic experts on SMEs and climate change. Hopefully, these efforts will combine to catalyse greater business participation at COP30 – participation that is so vital to climate adaptation and resilience.