Let’s Fix All of the Problems in the UK at the Same Time

That title sounds ridiculous.

The UK has an energy problem. A housing problem. A productivity problem. An NHS problem. A welfare problem. A tax problem. A university problem. An infrastructure problem. A prisons problem. A courts problem. And, increasingly, a problem with the machinery of government itself.

Surely the sensible thing is to pick one?

I increasingly think the opposite.

I think we should try to fix all of them at the same time.

Not because I have personally discovered the answer to the NHS, housing, taxation, universities, prisons, energy and everything else.

I haven't.

But because I think we have misunderstood the higher-level problem.

The UK does not simply have a collection of broken systems.

The UK has a broken mechanism for fixing broken systems.

And if we can fix that, we suddenly have a mechanism through which we can tackle everything else.

That is what I am trying to build with Enleashed.

Britain doesn't lack ideas

There are approximately 70 million people in the UK.

Among them are engineers, nurses, doctors, teachers, economists, entrepreneurs, builders, scientists, civil servants, academics, tradespeople, lawyers, software developers, police officers, farmers, accountants and people with decades of lived experience of the systems we are trying to improve.

There is an extraordinary amount of knowledge distributed throughout the country.

Government does not possess all of it.

Universities do not possess all of it.

Think tanks do not possess all of it.

Consultancies do not possess all of it.

And I certainly don't possess all of it.

The knowledge required to run a country is distributed throughout society.

Our problem is that we have a remarkably poor mechanism for assembling that knowledge, testing competing ideas, making decisions and turning the best ideas into working systems.

Instead, we repeatedly do something like this:

Problem → political argument → manifesto commitment → consultation → committee → report → procurement → implementation → unexpected consequences → inquiry → another reform.

Meanwhile, social media, newspapers, television studios and Westminster fill up with people shouting competing solutions at one another.

Everyone talks.

Nobody has designed the machine that turns all of that distributed knowledge into learning, decisions and delivery.

That is the machine I want Enleashed to become.

Start by surfacing the problems

Before proposing solutions, we should be capable of admitting what isn't working.

And there is plenty to work on.

The energy market

We need an electricity system capable of delivering abundant, reliable and increasingly clean electricity while keeping energy affordable for households and internationally competitive for businesses.

That requires thinking about markets, networks, generation, storage, demand, investment, planning and consumer protection as parts of one cyber-physical system rather than an accumulation of policies.

This is where Enleashed started.

But the more I worked on the energy market, the more obvious something became.

Energy isn't uniquely dysfunctional.

The government delivery machine

Government itself is a system.

Departments are components.

Civil servants and politicians are actors.

Legislation creates rules.

Budgets allocate resources.

Data provides feedback.

Public services produce outputs.

Citizens experience the consequences.

Yet we rarely talk about government as something that should be deliberately engineered.

A modern country needs institutional architecture that is measurable, interoperable, digitally enabled and capable of learning.

We should know:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• How do we measure whether it is happening?
• Where are the bottlenecks?
• Who is responsible?
• What information do decision-makers need?
• What feedback loops exist?
• What happens when something fails?
• How does the system learn?

Government should not merely administer the country.

Government should be an extraordinarily capable delivery machine.

The economy and tax system

A tax system isn't merely a way of collecting money.

It is an enormous incentive system.

Change the rules and humans change their behaviour.

Work, investment, entrepreneurship, employment, consumption, saving and risk-taking all respond.

So instead of arguing endlessly about whether taxes should vaguely be "higher" or "lower", we should start with the behaviour we actually want.

We can ask:

What outcomes should the economic system produce?

Then:

What incentives produce those outcomes?

Then design the functions accordingly.

Tax cliffs, arbitrary thresholds, badly designed withdrawal rates and contradictory incentives are fundamentally system-design problems.

So let's engineer them.

The health system

The NHS contains extraordinary people.

But extraordinary people cannot indefinitely compensate for poorly designed systems.

We should map the complete patient journey:

• Prevention
• Primary care
• Diagnosis
• Treatment
• Hospitals
• Social care
• Mental healthcare
• Workforce
• Pharmaceuticals
• Technology
• Data
• Funding

Then ask where the bottlenecks actually occur and why.

What should happen locally?

What genuinely benefits from centralisation?

What information should follow a patient?

Where are clinicians spending time on administration rather than medicine?

Where are incentives misaligned?

Where could technology remove work rather than create another bloody login?

Don't begin with ideology about whether something must be "public" or "private".

Begin with the patient.

Then engineer the system around the outcomes we want.

The welfare system

A compassionate society should protect people when they genuinely need help.

It should also help people regain independence wherever possible.

Those objectives are not contradictory.

The system should therefore be designed around dignity, security, contribution and sensible incentives.

Nobody should face absurd situations where earning another pound leaves them materially worse off.

Nobody capable of progressing should be trapped indefinitely by the structure of the system.

And people who genuinely cannot support themselves should not be subjected to an unnecessarily adversarial bureaucracy.

Again:

Define the desired outcomes.

Understand human behaviour.

Design the incentives.

Measure the results.

Improve the system.

Universities

Universities should be extraordinary engines of knowledge creation, education, scientific discovery and technological progress.

So what are we actually trying to achieve with them?

What does a student receive in return for three or four years of their life and substantial financial cost?

What research creates knowledge?

What incentives does the funding system create?

How should teaching quality be measured?

How do discoveries escape universities and become companies, products, technologies and improvements to society?

How much institutional activity contributes directly to education and research, and how much is bureaucracy reproducing itself?

Again, we should be capable of examining the entire system without treating existing institutional arrangements as sacred.

Housing

Housing cannot sensibly be separated into arguments about planning, landlords, housebuilders, social housing, mortgages and immigration.

It is a system.

Land.

Planning.

Infrastructure.

Construction capacity.

Materials.

Finance.

Interest rates.

Taxation.

Population.

Transport.

Jobs.

Public services.

Environmental constraints.

All interact.

Change one and something happens somewhere else.

So map the system.

Agree what good looks like.

Surface the constraints.

Model the interactions.

Then engineer interventions rather than announcing arbitrary targets.

Infrastructure and planning

Britain wants houses, electricity networks, railways, reservoirs, renewable generation, nuclear plants, data centres, factories, roads and telecommunications infrastructure.

Then it creates processes through which almost everybody involved can prevent almost everything from being built.

That isn't a serious infrastructure strategy.

The question should not be "development versus the environment".

It should be:

How do we build the infrastructure civilisation requires while protecting the places, communities and natural systems worth protecting?

That is an engineering and governance problem.

Treat it like one.

Prisons and courts

What is the justice system actually trying to accomplish?

• Protect the public
• Punish serious wrongdoing
• Deter crime
• Deliver justice quickly
• Rehabilitate people where possible
• Reduce reoffending
• Provide victims with confidence that the state actually functions

These outcomes can be measured.

Instead, cases can take extraordinary amounts of time, prisons operate under severe pressure, and enormous amounts of public money are spent dealing repeatedly with the consequences of failure elsewhere.

Crime, policing, courts, prisons, addiction, mental health, education, housing and employment interact.

Again, we encounter the same lesson.

The departmental boundaries on the government organisational chart are not the boundaries of the actual system.

These aren't separate problems

And this is where "fix everything at the same time" stops sounding quite as stupid.

Energy affects industrial competitiveness.

Industrial competitiveness affects wages and tax receipts.

Tax receipts affect public services.

Housing costs affect welfare spending.

Housing affects health.

Health affects economic participation.

Education affects productivity.

Planning affects housing and energy.

Energy infrastructure affects housing and industry.

Crime affects communities and investment.

Welfare incentives affect employment.

Employment affects health.

Transport affects housing.

Government capability affects all of them.

Pull one lever and forces propagate throughout the system.

The UK is already one enormous interconnected system.

We just don't govern it like one.

So how do we actually fix it?

This is where Enleashed comes in.

I don't want Enleashed to become another think tank producing PDFs that everybody politely downloads and nobody implements.

I don't want another political party.

And I definitely don't want another social network optimised for making everybody furious.

I want to build infrastructure for solving problems.

A mechanism through which an idea can move all the way from ignorance to implementation:

Problem → Learn → Propose → Critique → Improve → Decide → Plan → Fund → Build → Measure → Learn

And then repeat.

1. Learn

Before somebody is expected to have an opinion about an electricity market, tax system, housing system or NHS reform, give them the tools to understand it.

What exists today?

Why?

How does the system actually work?

What terminology matters?

What constraints exist?

What evidence do we have?

Where is there genuine disagreement?

Where are there simply misunderstandings?

This is why Enleashed has a Learn through Knowledge layer.

A functioning democracy requires citizens — and politicians — who can understand the systems they are making decisions about.

2. Surface the problems

Create structured problem spaces.

Not:

THE NHS IS BROKEN!!!

But:

• What specifically is broken?
• What evidence demonstrates it?
• Who experiences the failure?
• What causes it?
• What other systems interact with it?
• What would success look like?

People should be able to submit problems and evidence from the front line.

A nurse knows things about hospital operations that somebody in Whitehall doesn't.

A builder knows things about planning that an economist doesn't.

A prison officer knows things about prisons that a minister doesn't.

A small-business owner knows things about tax administration that HM Treasury doesn't.

Bring that knowledge into the machine.

3. Propose solutions

Anybody should be capable of proposing an idea.

Not just approved institutions.

Not just government contractors.

Not just academics.

Not just think tanks.

Everyone.

But submitting an idea does not mean the idea is good.

It means it has entered the arena.

4. Critique and challenge

This may be the most important part.

Ideas should be attacked.

Politely, constructively and relentlessly.

• What assumptions are being made?
• What evidence supports them?
• What happens in edge cases?
• Who loses?
• What does it cost?
• What incentives does it create?
• What unintended consequences might emerge?
• Has somebody tried it before?
• What happened?
• Can it actually be implemented?

Enleashed therefore needs structured criticism rather than comment-section warfare.

Anyone can challenge an idea.

But criticism itself must also withstand scrutiny.

5. Invigilate

Eventually somebody has to make decisions.

Democracy cannot mean every argument remains open forever.

This is why I like the concept of the Invigilator.

Think of them partly as moderators and partly as custodians of the decision process.

They don't need to possess all the answers.

Their job is to ensure that the process has been followed properly.

• Has the evidence been considered?
• Have serious objections been answered?
• Are assumptions visible?
• Are minority arguments represented fairly?
• What remains uncertain?
• Is the proposal ready to progress?

AI can help organise enormous amounts of information.

Humans remain accountable for judgement.

6. Plan to deliver

This is where most political discourse falls apart.

An idea is not a plan.

"Build more houses" is not a plan.

"Fix the NHS" is not a plan.

"Cut taxes" is not a plan.

"Build more renewables" is not a plan.

Once a solution survives criticism, turn it into delivery.

• What exactly needs to change?
• What legislation is required?
• What software needs building?
• What infrastructure is required?
• Who owns each workstream?
• How much will it cost?
• What dependencies exist?
• What is the sequence?
• What could prevent delivery?
• What does success look like?

Now we have moved from politics to engineering.

7. Deliver

And then do the work.

This is crucial.

Enleashed cannot simply become a clever website containing beautifully structured arguments about why everything is broken.

The endpoint must be reality.

Software.

Legislation.

Infrastructure.

Companies.

Services.

Institutions.

Processes.

Training.

Products.

Whatever the solution requires.

And we should be able to watch delivery happen.

Who owns what?

What has been completed?

What is blocked?

Why?

What decisions are outstanding?

What is the evidence that the intervention is working?

Make delivery observable.

8. Learn again

Nothing will be perfect.

That is fine.

Engineering does not require omniscience.

It requires feedback.

Implement.

Measure.

Observe.

Correct.

Improve.

The country becomes a learning system.

Where do politicians fit into this?

Right at the centre.

I am not trying to replace politicians.

I want to help them.

Politicians currently face an almost impossible information problem.

They are expected to make decisions spanning energy, healthcare, defence, taxation, education, infrastructure, housing, welfare, technology and countless other areas.

Nobody can personally understand all of that.

Nor should we expect them to.

Their proper role is leadership.

Listen.

Set direction.

Represent values.

Make difficult trade-offs.

Choose priorities.

Take responsibility.

And ultimately make legitimate democratic decisions.

But underneath them should sit an extraordinary societal problem-solving machine capable of bringing together expertise, evidence, criticism and implementation.

Imagine a minister being able to open a problem and see:

• The problem
• The evidence
• The system map
• The competing solutions
• The strongest arguments for each
• The strongest criticisms
• The unresolved uncertainties
• The estimated costs
• The implementation plan
• The public feedback
• The expert assessment
• The delivery status

That would make political leadership easier, not harder.

AI changes what is possible

Historically, doing this at national scale would have been extremely difficult.

Millions of people generating ideas, evidence and criticism produces an information-management problem of its own.

AI changes that.

AI can help:

• Structure submissions
• Find duplication
• Map arguments
• Identify contradictions
• Summarise evidence
• Surface unanswered criticisms
• Translate technical language
• Connect related problems
• Search enormous knowledge bases
• Simulate consequences
• Turn proposals into initial implementation plans
• Monitor delivery
• Help ordinary people understand extraordinarily complicated systems

But AI shouldn't decide what Britain becomes.

It should help humans think.

We can combine machine intelligence with distributed human knowledge and democratic legitimacy.

That is a genuinely new capability.

Imagine this operating across the whole country

Energy.

Learn → diagnose → design → critique → simulate → legislate → build → measure.

Housing.

Learn → diagnose → design → critique → simulate → legislate → build → measure.

Healthcare.

Learn → diagnose → design → critique → pilot → deliver → measure.

Tax.

Learn → model incentives → propose → critique → simulate → legislate → measure.

Welfare.

Learn → model outcomes → propose → critique → pilot → deliver → measure.

Universities.

Learn → define purpose → measure → propose → critique → reform → measure.

Infrastructure.

Learn → map need → propose → critique → plan → consent → build → measure.

Justice.

Learn → diagnose → propose → critique → pilot → implement → measure.

Different domains.

Same problem-solving architecture.

And critically, the interactions between them become visible.

This is systems engineering applied to government

Engineers do not normally encounter a complicated machine, change one random component and hope for the best.

We establish requirements.

Understand the system.

Identify constraints.

Model interactions.

Design candidate solutions.

Test them.

Challenge assumptions.

Build.

Instrument.

Observe.

Improve.

Yet when dealing with some of the most consequential systems humans have ever constructed, we frequently abandon this discipline.

We call it politics.

I don't think politics needs less democracy.

I think democracy needs better engineering underneath it.

Everybody is welcome

This only works if participation is broad.

Left.

Right.

Centre.

Rich.

Poor.

Public sector.

Private sector.

Academic.

Tradesperson.

Retired.

Student.

Expert.

Complete beginner who simply wants to understand something.

You don't need permission to identify a problem.

You don't need permission to propose an idea.

And you certainly don't need permission to criticise mine.

The rules are simpler:

Show your workings.

Bring evidence.

Accept criticism.

Change your mind when the evidence changes.

Treat other people like human beings.

And once we've decided what to do:

Help deliver it.

Let's build the machine

The ambition of Enleashed is therefore becoming much bigger than fixing the electricity market.

Energy is the first serious test case.

If we can demonstrate a mechanism capable of taking an extraordinarily complicated problem from:

learning → problem definition → competing solutions → evidence → criticism → decision → delivery

then we have built something far more valuable than a single energy-market proposal.

We have begun building a problem-solving operating system for the country.

One which politicians can use.

One which experts can contribute to.

One which ordinary citizens can interrogate.

One which AI can help organise.

One which exposes disagreement instead of hiding it.

One which remembers why decisions were made.

One which measures whether they worked.

And one which ultimately connects ideas to people capable of making them real.

So yes.

Let's fix the energy market.

And the government delivery machine.

And the tax system.

And the NHS.

And welfare.

And universities.

And housing.

And infrastructure planning.

And prisons and courts.

Let's not pretend these are independent problems.

Let's build the machinery through which Britain can continuously understand, debate, repair and improve its own systems.

Because perhaps the most important thing we can fix is not any individual institution.

It is Britain's ability to fix things.

We are building Enleashed to help.

Politicians: we're not coming for your jobs.

We're building you better tools to do them.