• People and skills: Foster local digital skills development and collaboration.
• Business environment: Promote digital enablement for local small businesses, expand practical knowledge on related challenges like fraud, and enable startup ecosystems in towns through public-private partnerships.
• Infrastructure: Enhance integrated transportation and connectivity across towns; and promote connectivity enhancement and digital inclusion.
• Sustainability: Promote sustainable businesses and communities through circularity and resource efficiency.
• National coordination: Collaborative town empowerment and alignment of a long-term strategic vision for towns.

The post Towns Vitality Roadmap: A new policy framework for the UK’s towns appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• The UK is experiencing a “fraudemic”. Fraud cost individuals in the UK around £12.8 billion in 2021-22, while polling suggests 9% of the UK’s population fell victim in the same year.
• Fraud has a significant economic impact on its victims. 61% reported that fraud had had a major or moderate negative impact on their economic circumstances, with those on incomes under £20,000 and those aged 65 or over hit particularly hard.
• Fraud also generates broader second-round effects. 35% and 25% of victims respectively reported negative psychological impacts on confidence and mental health, while 9% also reported harm to relationships and physical health.
• The report surveyed the public and fraud victims on a range of fraud policy issues:
  • The public overwhelmingly agreed that there should be some reimbursement in all cases of fraud, but were less supportive of full reimbursement where victims enabled fraud to take place.
  • The general public believe that the liability for reimbursing fraud victims should be spread widely. 57% believe digital services firms should be held liable; 60% want financial institutions holding victims’ money to be held responsible; and 62% want the financial institutions receiving fraudulently obtained assets to contribute.
  • 73% of victims and 70% of the general public agree that it is more important to have stringent checks and verification than speed and convenience when making payments and transfers.
  • Whereas the general public was more inclined to keep their data private and secure, even if this made data sharing to tackle fraud more difficult, fraud victims were more likely to prioritise data sharing over data privacy.

The report contains 13 recommendations addressing the evidence deficit, impacts of fraud, debates around reimbursement and public and private-sector collective action problems relating to fraud.

The post The view from the ground: Building a greater understanding of the impact of fraud and how the public view what policymakers should do about it appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• Despite being a relatively innocuous concept in everyday language, there is significant philosophical and political debate about the desirability of social mobility.
• Some have the concept as being just rhetorical cover for, or a distraction from tackling, economic inequality.
• Taken to its logical conclusions, achieving perfect social mobility could involve an unattainable or even undesirable degree of social engineering.
• Social mobility is inherently a positional zero-sum game – for one to ‘rise’, another must ‘fall’ – and it is questionable whether people truly deserve the power and prestige they secure because of genetic endowments and norms they were raised with.
• A line of criticism that has influenced German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (who in turn is influential over Keir Starmer’s approach) is that the idea of social mobility reinforces hierarchies and can undermine equalities of status and respect.
• Rather than returning to social mobility as a goal, an alternative way forward is to embrace a conception of equality of opportunity as valuable for self-realisation, emphasising the value of every individual having a better chance to realise their potential, whether or not that moves them up the social hierarchy.

The post Social mobility and its critics appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• seeks to address the practical challenges many asylum seekers face in working, not just their theoretical right to do so;
• better protects lawfully working asylum seekers from unfair labour practices and exploitation;
• does not undermine public trust and faith in the fairness and importance of the international refugee regime and the protection of refugees, but also in the controls applied to failed asylum seekers.

Rather than treating all asylum seekers the same with regard to their right to work before their asylum claim is determined, this report argues that the aim should be to maximise the numbers of working asylum seekers who are subsequently determined to be refugees. To do this it proposes:

1. targeting right to work at those asylum seekers most likely to be refugees – from ‘green’ list countries;
2. restricting or strictly controlling right to work for those asylum seekers most likely not to be refugees – from ‘orange’ list countries.

The report also considers that asylum seekers given the right to work in the UK are likely to need significant support, and require better oversight of their employment arrangements, if the right to work that they have been given is to provide them with the reality of fair and productive employment.

Such a policy approach would align with majority public opinion which supports openness to refugees, but takes into account the fact that not all asylum seekers are refugees, and requires appropriate control and consequences in respect of those who are not.

The post The sound of silence: Rethinking asylum seekers’ right to work in the UK appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• Across the period April 2021 to March 2022, we estimate that there were around 10,800 frauds committed per 100,000 adults in the UK population.
• Fraud victims are not just the elderly – in fact, younger people are somewhat more likely to be a victim of fraud than those over 50.
• Fraud doesn’t discriminate by income – both lower and higher earners were marginally more likely to be victims in that period than those in the middle‑income cohorts.
• Email and phone calls were the most common methods through which the most recent fraud suffered by victims were committed.
• More than 8 in 10 victims in the last three years suffered some sort of direct financial loss from the most recent fraud they experienced.
• The economic and social cost of fraud against individuals in England and Wales in 2021-22 could have been as high as £12.8 billion.
• Nearly a third (31%) of the frauds most recently experienced by victims in the UK between 2020 and 2023 had a “major” economic impact on them. Further, victims that were over 65 suffered the largest direct financial losses on average (£6,758) and, along with those on the lowest incomes (annual income of £20,000 or less), were the most likely to say they experienced a “major” economic impact due to the latest fraud they were a victim of.
• Around 7 in 10 victims reported other negative consequences from fraud they experienced, including lower self-confidence, mental health issues and financial disruption.
• People are most likely to report fraud to their bank or building society (56%). A large minority of victims report fraud to the police (31%).

The final report, featuring insights from interviews with victims and a SMF‑convened, policy‑focused expert roundtable on fraud, will be published in the autumn. It will also present recommendations for improvements to the current counter-fraud policy landscape.

The post Fraudemic: Adding to the evidence base on the scale and impact of fraud on the UK appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

The report then goes on to assess what has caused recent labour shortages in the UK, and the extent to which immigration policy has been both the cause of but also the solution to those shortages.   

The tensions and limitations of short-term shortage-based reactive labour immigration policy are clear. In considering labour shortages as likely a longer-term feature of the UK economy, not a temporary blip, the report makes a strong case for the UK economy, in order to meet its:  

• shorter-term needs: recognising the many different categories, and large number, of migrants already in the UK through routes outside the employer sponsorship system who are available to work.     
• longer-term needs: recognising the need to cooperatively lock in longer term labour for the benefit of the UK, identifying future skill needs, and through global skills partnerships investing in training for overseas workers before they arrive in the UK. 

Government and business must work together to build public confidence in a balanced approach to utilising immigrant workers as part of a better trained and better protected workforce overall, which must also benefit domestic workers. Doing this could also unlock opportunities to both simplify the rules, streamline the processes, and reduce the costs of the UK’s labour immigration system.  

The post The Whole of the Moon: UK labour immigration policy in the round appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• Over two-thirds of British equity investment occurs in London and the South East.
• This matters because equity investors identify and develop firms with high growth potential – the sort of firms needed to drive regional economies.
• Regional equity markets face a ‘catch 22’: investors are reluctant to take the risk of setting up in an unproven area, which limits the pipeline of firms in the area recognising the benefits of equity investment and seeking it.
• Recognising these problems, many governments have established successful, large-scale equity investment funds, notably France and Canada.
• In the UK, the British Business Bank has also shown that public investment can be deployed effectively: as of last year it had supported 19 of 33 British ‘unicorns’ and the value of its investments has increased by 51%.
• However, the British Business Bank’s equity investments are as London-dominated as the wider market.

A proposed Regional Investment Bank would build on the skills and good practice developed by the British Business Bank (changing the mandate of the BBB rather than creating a new institution) – clear objectives and delegating investment decisions to operationally independent professionals.

However, it would improve on it in two key ways, by a) orienting it more strongly away from London, and b) coordinating it with regional industrial policy.

The post Equity across the regions: The case for a British Regional Investment Bank appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• The production and sale of alcohol, and associated supply chains account for 4.9% (£8.1bn) of the Scottish economy, around 60% of which comes from whisky exports
• Alcohol’s share of employment (2.4%) is half its share of GDP because whisky production is not very labour-intensive
• The whisky industry represents 15% of international exports, and 99% of scotch production for export. Scots themselves drink considerably more wine, beer and vodka than they do whisky.
• Most of the 60,000 Scottish jobs related to alcohol, however, are in the domestic market: around half are in pubs, bars and restaurants
  • These are some of the lowest paying jobs in the economy: the average hourly wage is £8.46
• The overall effect of lower alcohol consumption on the economy is ambiguous: lost alcohol sales are offset by increased sales in other sectors that gain from diverted demand, and the benefits of a healthier, more productive workforce.
• Moreover, the societal costs of alcohol go far beyond the £1.2 billion estimated economic cost – including the £ value put on lost life, they are comparable to alcohol’s contribution to GDP – amounting to between £5-10 billion

In essence, further measures to reduce Scottish alcohol consumption are likely to have only modest effect on the economy – what matters more is demand for Scottish products in other countries.

The post Getting in the spirit? Alcohol and the Scottish economy appeared first on Social Market Foundation..

• compromising on how these approaches can be achieved, and
• more innovative thinking on what the solutions look like.

A new approach to asylum

Concerns for the safety of refugees must be reconciled with taking immigration control concerns into account. For refugee advocates this means accepting that:

• refugee numbers can be limited by the state; and
• those making asylum claims in the UK will not be prioritised ahead of refugees elsewhere in the world.

But the outcome could be transformative:

• fewer refugees would die making dangerous journeys; and
• more refugees than currently allowed could be admitted and given safety in the UK.

Bringing an end to the Channel chaos requires a deal with France involving an organised movement of people which offers something to both sides: of Channel crossers back to France, and refugees from France to the UK. This is hard, but possible.

A new approach to labour migration

There is widespread acceptance that immigration should play an important part in the UK’s economy and society. But it cannot be the only answer. Acknowledging concerns around the appropriate balance, immigration must be presented as supplementing, not supplanting, local resources.

Much more should be done to highlight the significant costs paid by employers to sponsor overseas workers, but also required in terms of key stakeholders engaging with longer term workforce planning.

And the UK should look to shape migration sustainably on mutually beneficial terms with those countries from which it receives migrants:

• sponsoring ‘brain gain’, not ‘brain drain’,
• through ‘global skills partnerships’, identifying, but also actively developing, before they arrive, the skills of potential migrant workers in a way that can contribute to the UK economy and society but also to the development of their own country.

The post Routes to resolution: Finding the centre ground in Britain’s immigration debates appeared first on Social Market Foundation..