Andy Haldane: we can fix the cost of living crisis. But will we?
Andy Haldane has a simple but stark message for those seeking to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister: Britain has serious economic problems and they won’t be solved by massive tax cuts.
Nor, according to the man who until last year was chief economist at the Bank of England, does the solution to Britain’s cost of living crisis lie with the decisions Threadneedle Street makes about interest rates.
Haldane has moved on to run the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) thinktank, via a stint at the Cabinet Office, helping put together Johnson’s levelling up white paper. Although there will soon be a new face in No 10, Haldane says the next prime minister must not just stick with the levelling up agenda but turbocharge it.
Speaking before Johnson announced that he was stepping down, Haldane said: “The solution to the growth conundrum and the solution to the cost of living crisis both lie squarely on the supply side of the economy.”
He says Britain has “longstanding, deep-seated and structural” economic problems, and warns that regularly chopping and changing the programme for restarting the country’s sputtering growth engine is not helping.
“What we need is scale, duration and coordination of a plan. This has never been more needed – and currently we don’t really have it.”
Regional economic rebirth is at the heart of what makes Haldane tick. Whether it’s called levelling up or given another name isn’t important to the economist, who grew up in the Leeds suburb of Guiseley, a former mill town known as the home of Harry Ramsden’s fish and chips and Silver Cross prams.
“When I was growing up, Bradford and Leeds were not quite level pegging but not far off. But over the past 40 years, Leeds has hit the afterburners while Bradford has sort of
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