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Cost of drinking crisis
I don’t know about you, but I reckon after this week I may need a drink. Rachel Reeves is preparing to launch another devastating tax raid on us, freezing our tax thresholds, coming after our salary sacrifice schemes, and even taxing our milkshakes. It’s impossible to say exactly what the chancellor is going to put in her budget, and what she’ll leave out. But be in no doubt, the result will be that we’ll all be paying more.

Time maybe then for a trip down the great British boozer. Whether it’s a pint of ale, a glass of wine, a spirit and mixer, or - hell - even one of those garishly coloured cocktails (I won’t judge - promise), we could all do with a trip to surely the most beloved of our national institutions.

Sadly, for many, the joy of that first sip will be accompanied by an equal horror at the price shown on the card machine. Because as recent TPA research has laid out, Britain is in a full blown cost of drinking crisis ([link removed]) .
With the price of a pint now around £5 on average across the country, the pub is starting to feel more like a luxury that needs to be justified rather than a regular pastime. And be in no doubt, it’s not the publicans who are to blame. Like most other things that make Britain an increasingly challenging place to live in, this is on the people at the top, and our MPs in Westminster. More than happy to be snapped in pics pulling pints during election campaigns, when they arrive in the Palace of Westminster they’ve routinely pulled the rug out.

As TPA wonks have found, the average pub now pays £100,000 in annual taxes on alcoholic drinks alone ([link removed]) . Ever wonder why a pint is so pricey? Well over 28 per cent of the cost is just VAT and alcohol duty, with similar percentages for cider, wine and spirits. Demonstrating just how painful alcohol duty is for the British pub, if the price of a pint had just risen in line with inflation since 1989 it would be £2 cheaper, saving the average punter £248 per year. Yet shockingly, it is rumoured that the chancellor is considering hiking booze taxes even further.

To chew over all of this we were delighted to welcome Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, into the podcast studio. She couldn’t have been clearer about the extent of the crisis, telling Duncan “we we have seen a pub close its door every single day this year and without the support we are calling for at this budget we will unfortunately see an acceleration of that.” Listen here ([link removed]) or find on any good podcast platform.
Critically it’s not just alcohol duty which is hammering pubs. Sky high energy bills driven by the mad dash for net zero, business rates, the hike to the jobs tax at last year’s budget, the upcoming employment rights bill and the significant boosts to the minimum wage have all served to squeeze bottom lines.

To visualise this, we popped a pint of beer on top of a jenga tower, to see what happened when we took enough pieces out. The first piece represented taxes on drinks, the next staffing costs, followed by business rates and so on. I won’t spoil what happens when enough pieces are taken out, you can see for yourself ([link removed]) .
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Whatever happens at the budget on Wednesday, we know whose side we’re on. We’re on the side of the worker, the taxpayer, the entrepreneurs, the farmers and family businessmen and of course the pub-goer and publicans. We’re on the side of the people that contribute to our great economy and society, not those who leech off it.

Will you chip in the price of a pint to ensure we are match fit going into next year? ([link removed])
The never-ending debt crisis
With just days to go until the Budget, one uncomfortable truth is slowly being realised: Britain is effectively bankrupt. For the past year, the TaxPayers’ Alliance has been sounding the alarm about the scale of the crisis, with the national debt now sitting at more than £2.7 trillion ([link removed]) – a sum so vast it has lost all meaning in Westminster,

Yet the question politicians are desperate to avoid is also the most important: what would it actually take to bring that debt down? That is exactly what our latest paper ([link removed]) , the scale of national debt reduction, sets out in stark, and frankly depressing, detail.

As the Spectator’s economics editor, Michael Simmons, noted in his coverage ([link removed]) : “The most realistic scenario offered up by the TPA is a 25-year austerity plan. That would require a quarter of a century of annual surpluses of at least 2 per cent of GDP – equivalent to £59 billion this year.” Not for one Parliament. Not for one government. But for 25 consecutive years.
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That should be enough to jolt even the most comfortable minister out of their slumber. And as our researcher Anne explained in her thread on X ([link removed]) , even this eye-watering scenario still assumes political discipline and economic stability that Britain’s recent history simply doesn’t support. Read Anne's thread here ([link removed]) .
So whatever Rachel Reeves announces next week to try and plug her fiscal black hole, it will be little more than a sticking plaster and do nothing to address the real black hole in our economy, which is our ever-growing national debt.
Where Britain really is growing
Growth. It’s the government’s favourite buzzword - and the last one’s too. Yet while neither has managed to get the economy moving in any meaningful way, there is one area where growth has been relentless: the size of Britain’s financial regulatory state.

Findings from another paper from our research team ([link removed]) (yep, three in one week), splashed the front page ([link removed]) of City A.M., reveals that nearly 4,500 more staff are now employed across the City’s five largest regulators than a decade ago. The Financial Conduct Authority alone has expanded its headcount by 65 per cent - the biggest increase of any regulator.
But the blame doesn’t rest solely with the regulators themselves. Successive governments have loaded them with new duties, broader remits and ever more intrusive objectives. The ballooning size of the regulatory state is simply a reflection of this political habit: when ministers can’t legislate for growth, they legislate for control. To borrow from a well-known phrase, as economies die, they accumulate regulators to stamp out any embers of entrepreneurialism.

The shadow businesses secretary Andrew Griffith also took to City A.M., penning a piece about our findings ([link removed]) and committing to do away with regulatory red tape: “The only possible solution is to finally cut back the thicket of red tape that has grown under successive governments. To cut back not with pruning shears, but with a chainsaw”. Hear hear.

Read Andrew’s piece here ([link removed])

The national scandal that is the covid inquiry
Regular readers will know that we have been warning for years about the escalating costs of the covid inquiry. It was May 2024 when we first forecast that it would be the most expensive public inquiry on record ([link removed]) , an estimate that was rudely dismissed by the inquiry itself. Lo and behold, a few weeks ago it was confirmed that it had, indeed, broken the record, and with months still to go. And this week, we’ve seen some of what we’ve been paying for.
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The covid inquiry’s phase two report found that it was all Boris Johnson’s fault, and what we should have done is the lockdown should have been harder, broader and come earlier. In a major test of the nation’s gullibility, the inquiry claimed this could have saved 23,000 lives. Shutting primary schools and fining people for sitting on park benches was too lenient, apparently.

Shockingly, the inquiry effectively dismissed the negative impacts of lockdown - the jobs lost, relationships destroyed, education stunted, missed diagnoses and so on. And it failed to consider the case of Sweden, which performed better than almost anyone in Europe despite having no lockdowns.

Speaking to to GB News ([link removed]) , Elliot told Tom Harwood and Dawn Neesom: “If this inquiry only cost £200 it would be a disgrace. The fact that it has cost £200 million is a national scandal.”
Gritting Roads - the cost of waste
Temperatures have plunged over the last week or so and with that comes a core responsibility for councils - gritting the roads. Yet many local authorities in London have decided that, despite constant council tax rises, residents should be doing it themselves.

Shimeon Lee, debated the issue ([link removed]) on GB News, arguing, “Taxpayers should be expecting more from their local councils, I don’t think we should be relying on the good will of the public to deliver essential services. Certainly not when we are paying record amounts of council tax.”
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Taxpayers are paying more to get less. Every pound wasted on vanity projects and inflated executive salaries is money taken away from the frontline services we rely on. Yet, councils across London are continuing the ‘snow friend’ scheme, handing out high-vis vests and salt so you can do the job for them. Bromley Council hiked taxes by the maximum 4.99 per cent - so why are residents expected to grit their own roads?
Blog of the week
Our blog of the week ([link removed]) comes courtesy of Callum who provides an update of the work that both he and his predecessor, Joanna, have done in investigations from August to October. Hits include the £2 million spent by the NHS on woke staff networks and events and the £100 million scheme to fund contraception in Pakistan.
As Callum put it: “until ministers find the spine to enforce a culture of discipline, efficiency, and respect for the taxpayer, these reports will keep filling up with scandals.” If you want more regular updates on investigations and our war on waste, you can sign up for Callum’s fortnightly bulletin here ([link removed]) .
War on Waste
Britain’s welfare bill has ballooned in recent years, now costing over £300 billion per year. £88 billion of this is taken up by Universal Credit and £10.3 billion of that is UC for foreign nationals.

Callum joined GB News to discuss Labour's new plans to restrict the availability of welfare for foreign nationals ([link removed]) .

Asked if it is time to get rid of UC for foreign nationals, Callum said, “I think the simple answer is yes it is”.

Benjamin Elks
Grassroots Development Manager

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