Centre for British Progress

🚨 We’re hiring: Data Analyst 🚨 Join us at Centre for British Progress and help power our policy research with rigorous, story-driven data analysis. We’re looking for a highly capable Data Analyst to join our research team. If you combine quantitative precision with the instincts of a data journalist and you’re excited about UK public policy, we’d love to hear from you. What you’ll do 📊 Source, clean and analyse UK policy data Work with ONS datasets, government live tables and administrative data. Extract, digitise and structure data from complex sources, including PDFs where needed. 📈 Produce publication-quality charts and sharp written analysis Create clear visualisations and concise written outputs that surface the key narrative in the numbers. 🗂️ Build and maintain our internal data library Develop cleaning pipelines and reproducible workflows that keep our datasets accurate, current and accessible. 📐 Conduct statistical analysis Run foundational statistical work, including regression analysis, with clear understanding of limitations and appropriate caveats. 🤖 Work in an AI-native way Integrate AI tools into your daily workflow to accelerate coding, extraction and analysis, while applying independent judgement and rigorous validation. You’ll be great at this if you’re • Quantitatively rigorous and statistically literate • Comfortable programming in Python (preferred), Stata or R • AI-native in your working style • Meticulous about sourcing, citations and methodology • Genuinely interested in UK public policy and economics • Able to communicate complex findings clearly and accessibly Bonus points for • An economics or related academic background • Experience handling large or messy public datasets • Familiarity with Datawrapper • Experience with Git/GitHub and reproducible workflows Our environment We primarily work in Python (pandas, matplotlib), use GitHub for version control, and Datawrapper for visualisation. We actively integrate large language models into our research process. You do not need to be an expert in everything, but you do need to be willing to learn quickly. The offer 💷 £33,000 - £38,000 📍 London (80 Strand) 🕘 Full-time, fixed-term (1 year) 🏢 4 days per week in office, 1 day remote ⏳ 3-month probation 📈 Significant exposure to senior economists and high-profile policy work We’re accepting applications on a rolling basis. 👉 https://lnkd.in/epz7j4-Y

YESTERDAY the Prime Minister committed to implementing ALL the recommendations from the Nuclear Taskforce. TODAY we've launched our Nuclear Taskforce Tracker where you can track departments’ progress on implementing the PM’s priorities. See exactly which recommendations are complete, on track or at risk of getting lost! It’s also a searchable, filterable database of everything the UK needs to do to become a world leader in nuclear power again. 📄 Browse the report & learn more: a searchable, list of recommendations with summaries, tags and clear deadlines from the report 🏅 Department league table: compare which key organisations need to make more progress to fix British nuclear 📅 A timeline: when are the deadlines the report recommends coming up? What announcements have the Government made so far? Hopefully this will help people be able to understand the NRTF recommendations. Implementing these is one of the most important things Britain can do for long term growth. It’s vital that Government departments and regulators keep up the momentum. Use it at https://lnkd.in/eUHYZ2_j

Last week we were delighted to be highly commended for think tank of the year, and to win the "One to Watch" award from Smart Thinking! Thank you to everyone who nominated us, and to those who have supported us over the last year. Our co-founder David Lawrence was at the awards to pick up the prize from Rachel Wolf and Emily Redding.

New report: Cut bills & boost electrification by removing carbon price support On 30 September 2024, the UK closed its last coal plant. But the tax that helped drive coal off the grid — the Carbon Price Support — is still inflating electricity prices. Our report sets out the case for removing it👇 📈 Double carbon pricing Generators already pay ~£57/tCO₂ under the UK Emissions Trading Scheme. CPS adds another ~£18/t — roughly £6.60 per MWh on a 50%-efficient gas plant. ⚡ Because gas usually clears the day-ahead market, CPS pushes up all electricity prices — not just for gas, but for renewables and nuclear too. This makes CPS a bad tax. In 2024, for every £1 the CPS raised for the Treasury it costs consumers & businesses an extra £3.50. With coal gone, CPS has done its job. Ending it would: ⬇️Lower electricity bills ⚡Make heat pumps and EVs more competitive ♻️Support Net Zero through faster electrification 📖 Read the full analysis by Ed Hezlet and Patrick Cook https://lnkd.in/ep3Ssy9h

🚨 We're hiring: Head of Science & Health Policy 🚨 Join us at the Centre for British Progress and lead our science and health policy work. This role is for someone who can commission research, manage fellows, and produce work that actually influences policy. What you'll do  - Write policy briefs for ministers, SpAds, and regulators - Commission and manage research from our network of fellows and experts - Build coalitions across government, industry, and civil society - Track impact and ensure our work makes a difference You'll be great at this if you - Have 5+ years in civil service, regulators, industry, consultancy, or relevant research - Can move between domains and prioritise what's tractable and impactful - Understand UK policy machinery and what makes things happen - Write sharp, clear briefs that senior people actually read - Know how to spot talent and get the best out of collaborators The offer  - £70,000–£90,000 FTE (depending on experience) - 3-5 days/week (flexible) - Hybrid: minimum 3 days/week in our London office (80 Strand) - 5% employer pension - Lead a growing policy area at a new think tank Apply by 10:00 GMT, Monday 3 November 2025 👉 https://lnkd.in/dYmH6n_r

🚨 We’re hiring: Operations Associate 🚨 Join us at Centre for British Progress and help keep the engine running. This is a perfect role for an ambitious junior person looking to join a small and dynamic team and learn a lot. What you’ll do 🔧 Keep our internal processes humming 🎟️ Help run events end-to-end 🗞️ Support basic press & comms coordination 📎 Provide admin support across the team You’ll be great at this if you’re - Highly organised, detail-oriented and reliable - A clear communicator - Comfortable with tools that boost efficiency and quick to learn - Proactive with a can-do attitude – happy to take ownership of practical work - Experience in events, office admin or comms is a bonus, not a must The offer 💷 £30,000–£35,000 (depending on experience) 🕘 Full-time (open to part-time/flexible for the right candidate) 🏙️ Hybrid: minimum 3 days/week in our London office (80 Strand) 🏦 5% employer pension 📈 Scope to grow into finance/legal/HR responsibilities over time Apply by 10:00 BST, Monday 6 October 2025 👉 https://lnkd.in/dtKt6sPD

UK Copyright & AI: Who really wins under a compulsory licensing regime? Policy debates are often framed as zero-sum games. That lens is reductive, but let’s hold judgement. If we apply it to UK copyright and AI, the picture is surprisingly lopsided. Here’s the scorecard 👇 📉 Loser #1 – British LLMs London hosts world-class researchers (Google DeepMind, UCL, etc.), yet no frontier-scale model has ever been trained in the UK. Commercial text-and-data mining (TDM) is illegal here, so the training runs – and the compute spend – happen in Dublin, Virginia, or the UAE. Talent and investment follow. 📉 Loser #2 – Individual creators Licensing pools pay out by catalogue size: big publishers and platforms scoop the pot while independent artists see pennies (a 10k-word essay ≈ £0.20). Even if all of OpenAI's 2025 revenue were funnelled exclusively to UK creators, that's ~ £76 per week per person. Why so little? Platforms already own most user-generated training rights. "Opt-out" stops only domestic scraping—foreign labs keep mining UK content. Only ~6.7% of the creative industries' GVA is even exposed to open-web licensing. 📉 Loser #3 – UK start-ups A flat data-licence fee is a rounding error for Apple or Google; for a seed-stage spin-out, it’s half the raise. 66 % of UK AI engineers say they’d relocate if licensing passes. 📉 Loser #4 – Public research Universities already pay £20m+ per year for data licensing. Licensing forces them to pay again just to text-mine the same papers, and bans dataset sharing, killing reproducibility. 📉 Loser #5 – The wider economy Generative AI could lift labour-productivity growth by ~1 pp (= £28.5bn extra GDP p.a.). A licensing drag of 0.3-0.5 pp wipes out £11.5-19.7bn every year, compounding to £106-175bn by 2035, plus £39-65bn in lost tax receipts. ❓ “But big right-holders cash in…?” Only at the margins, and only briefly. Lump-sum deals for pay-walled or proprietary data (News Corp, FT, Reddit, NYT) are already being struck in the US, where TDM is free. If Britain levies a fee on open-web data, labs simply train abroad and re-enter the UK market. The revenue, and the compute budget, flow with them. 🔍 Bottom line A compulsory licensing regime doesn’t save creators, tilts the field toward incumbents, and exports the UK’s strategic advantage in AI. A modern, growth-oriented copyright framework (TDM exception or opt-out) is the only credible alternative. Read the full analysis from Julia Willemyns and Pedro Serôdio here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/edaUFkyz

🌞🇬🇧 Britain’s getting hotter—but can air‑con actually accelerate net‑zero rather than slow it down? Our new analysis says yes. Here’s how. 👇 1️⃣ Plenty of spare grid capacity • GB’s electricity demand peaks in winter, not summer. • Even if every household bought an AC unit today, we’d still stay comfortably within the existing network headroom. • Electrifying heating only deepens that summer spare‑capacity cushion. 2️⃣ Solar ☀️ + AC = perfect match • Solar output peaks exactly when we need cooling. • Cheap, green electrons mean no hidden carbon cost—and extra AC demand can underwrite even more solar farms. 3️⃣ Weather correlation • London’s hottest days line up closely with record solar yields. • Mid‑summer solar ramp‑up (≈ 06:00), midday peak (≈ 13:00), and tail‑off (≈ 20:00) align with office, retail and public‑transport cooling loads. 4️⃣ Bridging the “home‑time” gap • Domestic cooling peaks later (≈ 17:00‑21:00). • Solutions: pre‑cooling, small batteries, smarter orientation/tilt of rooftop panels—and yes, more nuclear if we choose. 5️⃣ Air‑to‑air heat pumps: the two‑for‑one upgrade • One unit heats in winter, cools in summer. • Much cheaper to install than traditional radiator‑based heat pumps. • Offering cooling may be the nudge households need to ditch gas boilers. 6️⃣ Policy blockers 🚫 Air‑to‑air heat pumps are excluded from the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. 🚫 Building regs & local planning still treat “mechanical cooling” as a luxury. 7️⃣ What we’re calling for ✅ Put air‑to‑air heat pumps on equal footing with other heat‑pump tech for grants. ✅ Modernise building regs so new homes can adopt low‑carbon cooling without red tape. Bottom line: Smart AC can save lives during heatwaves and speed up Britain’s journey to net‑zero—if we tweak two simple policies. 🔗 Read the full report  https://lnkd.in/en8cwqRG

It was a joy to welcome Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology, to speak at our summer party last week! A year ago we had a new government and a new opportunity for growth. Today, there is a community of experts & advocates fighting to end stagnation in Britain. A huge thank you to Google DeepMind for sponsoring and Darktrace for lending their stunning views over London.

Don't miss the first ever Centre for British Progress policy report from Ben Johnson on how we can fix British Defence Innovation.