Rebalancing Britain should be core to Labour’s political project. But that can’t come at the expense of places like London. By giving richer places the tools to pay for their own infrastructure - and occasionally a push to use them - Labour can focus Treasury resources on rebuilding the rest of the country.

This holds for a wide range of projects in the South East, including turning the Ox-Cam corridor into another Silicon Valley, a fleet of new towns to massively expand housing supply and transport projects like Crossrail 2. These projects should be non-negotiables. This paper is about who will pay for them.

Three major bottlenecks prevent this government from changing Britain: centralised power and wealth in Whitehall and the southeast, unsolved structural pressures on Britain’s public finances, and a rules-bound, incapable state that strangles delivery by itself or others.

This paper does not add to that pile. We aim to be honest about Britain’s predicament, the scale of the response required and why politics has so far proven so incapable of providing answers. These three bottlenecks to progress are large and long-standing. Any serious political project must have an answer to fixing them.