In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. – David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

This paper draws heavily on David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge and applies their ideas to progress, business, and investing. Any errors are my own.

For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about what causes progress. In school, I learned about the American colonies and wondered how that world became the one we live in today, with skyscrapers, computers, and spaceships that can land on the Moon. Yet for most of human history, progress was extremely slow. With America celebrating its 250th anniversary, I started thinking more deeply about that question: why did progress suddenly take off?

The best explanation I have found is the one David Deutsch describes in The Beginning of Infinity : progress occurs when people create new knowledge by guessing solutions to problems, criticizing those solutions, and replacing worse ideas with better ones. Societies differ in how well their cultures allow that process to occur. Those differences help explain why progress has flourished in some places but stagnated in others.

This process also matters for investors because businesses create value by applying knowledge to solve problems for customers. The knowledge that will shape future products, industries, and competition cannot be predicted in detail. If it could, we would already have it. Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide a timely example. Even after a new technology emerges, investors must still judge which businesses will benefit, which will be disrupted, and what expectations are already reflected in market prices. How can investors make sound decisions when a business’s future value cannot be known in advance?

This paper explores how societies create the conditions for knowledge to grow, how businesses apply that knowledge to create and retain value, and how investors can make decisions under uncertainty, especially during periods of technological change.

America and the Conditions for Sustained Progress

It is remarkable that America has existed as an independent country for only about three long human lifetimes. Someone living at the time of the founding could not have imagined the wealth and capabilities available to the average American today. In many areas of material life, that person had more in common with someone living in ancient Rome than with a modern American.

People have been capable of creating knowledge for hundreds of thousands of years, as the early controlled use of fire suggests. The recent acceleration of progress therefore cannot be explained by the sudden emergence of human creativity. Nor can it be explained by access to natural resources alone; materials become resources only when people possess the knowledge needed to put them to use.

The difference lies largely in culture, particularly in whether a society’s shared ideas and traditions protect people’s freedom to challenge existing ideas and propose new ones. Deutsch distinguishes between two broad types of society: static and dynamic. Static societies preserve established ways of life by suppressing criticism and discouraging innovations that challenge tradition. Dynamic societies, by contrast, can preserve useful knowledge and social order while allowing existing ideas and practices to be questioned, improved, or replaced.

Static societies can persist for long periods because their cultures faithfully reproduce entrenched ideas along with the behaviors, traditions, and ways of thinking that support them. Conformity is rewarded, while questioning established practices is discouraged or punished. A community dependent on keeping a central fire burning, for example, might treat the practices for maintaining it as sacred. That might preserve essential knowledge embodied in the tradition, but it could also make useful steps difficult to distinguish from arbitrary or even harmful ones. By insulating the tradition from criticism, the culture can prevent alternatives from being proposed or tested, whether for maintaining the fire or solving other problems.

Although static societies dominated most of human history, some cultures experienced periods of unusual progress. In Peak Human , Johan Norberg examines seven such golden ages, including ancient Athens, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, and Renaissance Italy. He identifies a recurring pattern: openness to people, trade, and ideas from elsewhere allowed existing knowledge to spread, while criticism of prevailing beliefs and experimentation with new approaches enabled new knowledge to be created.

These periods of openness and rapid progress were fragile and eventually receded. Some were weakened from within as authorities imposed orthodoxy or punished dissent: an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death on charges of impiety, Abbasid rulers punished scholars who rejected state-imposed religious doctrine, and the Roman Inquisition placed Galileo under house arrest for defending heliocentrism. War and political upheaval could also erode openness, as the Peloponnesian War did in Athens, or interrupt progress, as the Mongol invasion and subsequent civil strife did in Song China.

One of the Enlightenment’s key achievements was establishing a more durable tradition of criticism through which people could pursue better explanations. In England, common law, limits on royal power, Parliament, and scientific debate helped sustain that tradition. America inherited and extended it through a political system founded on the principles that people possess natural rights and that governments derive their legitimate authority from the consent of the governed rather than hereditary rule. Although applied imperfectly, those principles provided standards against which existing practices could be judged and improved.

In practice, this tradition operates through several mechanisms: open debate, competitive markets, and constitutional democracy. Free speech protects people’s freedom to propose and criticize ideas. Free enterprise and markets allow people to try competing solutions, while customer choice and the resulting profits and losses provide feedback about which solutions create value. Constitutional democracy provides peaceful ways to challenge laws, constrain power, and replace political leaders. As Karl Popper argued, democracy’s central virtue is not that it guarantees good rulers but that it allows bad ones to be removed without violence. Together, these mechanisms allow existing ideas, businesses, laws, and political leaders to be replaced when better alternatives emerge, without overturning the broader system.

A society’s institutions embody accumulated knowledge about how people can coordinate, criticize ideas, and correct errors. Some of that knowledge is made explicit in constitutions and laws; much remains inexplicit, residing in how elections, courts, property rights, and markets operate and in the less visible norms and practices that sustain them. This helps explain why copying the formal features of American institutions elsewhere has not always produced the same results. Cultural qualities such as tolerance for dissent, respect for limits on coercive power, willingness to permit experimentation and failure, and openness to new ideas and competition are more difficult to reproduce. Formal rules can support these qualities, but their effectiveness ultimately depends on how people interpret and uphold them.

The value of America’s tradition of criticism lies not in preventing mistakes, but in making sustained progress possible by allowing people to identify and correct them. Deutsch’s principle of optimism captures the broader point: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” Problems are inevitable, but they are soluble. Protecting the freedom to challenge existing ideas and pursue better ones is therefore not merely a source of prosperity. It is fundamental to creating the knowledge needed to improve the world.

Businesses in a Dynamic Society: Moats and Adaptability

Businesses are among the institutions that enable people in a dynamic society to preserve, apply, and create knowledge. By bringing together people, financial capital, and physical resources, a business can produce goods and services that would be difficult or impossible for individuals to create on their own. It creates value by applying knowledge to resources in ways that solve problems for customers. The knowledge behind those solutions is embodied in its products, processes, culture, relationships, and business model.

Competition and customer choice continually test a business’s solution against alternatives, while profits and losses provide feedback about whether customers value its products and services more than the resources used to provide them. By allowing people to keep trying new and better ways to solve problems, a dynamic society creates the conditions for wealth to grow. The same process leaves every business vulnerable: a competitor may develop a superior solution, or new knowledge may make the existing one obsolete. A durable business must therefore embody knowledge that competitors cannot easily reproduce while remaining capable of developing new solutions as the world changes.

Moats: Hard-to-Replicate Knowledge

Creating value for customers does not guarantee that a company can capture enough of it to earn attractive returns on capital. Airlines transformed travel, but broadly similar services leave little room for differentiation and make price competition intense. High returns attract capital and invite attempts to develop competing solutions. Sustaining attractive returns over time requires a moat: an advantage that makes a company’s solution difficult to copy or replace.

The trucking industry illustrates how seemingly similar services can have very different underlying business models and economics. A full-truckload carrier typically moves one customer’s shipment directly from its origin to its destination. This service does not require a dense terminal network, so barriers to entry are relatively low, competition is intense, and profitability is generally modest. A less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, by contrast, combines shipments from many customers across a network of terminals and routes. Its advantage depends on shipment density, route efficiency, pricing knowledge, service reliability, and the coordination of thousands of daily decisions. The resulting barriers to entry tend to limit the number of viable competitors and support greater profitability for incumbents that have reached scale. A competitor is free to enter the market, but it cannot easily build a dense terminal network or reproduce the operating knowledge needed to run it efficiently.

The LTL network reflects a broader feature of durable businesses: much of the knowledge behind their solutions may be inexplicit. It may reside in accumulated routines, judgment, and practical know-how that competitors cannot easily acquire or reproduce. Recognizing an attractive opportunity does not provide that knowledge. Overcoming such a moat may therefore require creating a materially better solution rather than simply copying what already exists.

A moat earned through customer choice does not prevent competition; it makes the company difficult to displace. Customers can leave and rivals can offer better solutions, so the advantage survives only while the incumbent continues providing enough value to retain them. That differs from an advantage sustained by political privilege or restrictions that prevent alternatives from being offered.

Even a moat earned through superior problem-solving is not permanent. Innovation can alter an industry’s economics and turn the knowledge, assets, and practices that once protected an incumbent into liabilities.

Adaptability: Creating New Knowledge

Newspapers show how technological change can alter an industry’s economics and undermine the advantages that once protected an incumbent. For decades, a city’s leading newspaper often held a dominant local position, supported by economies of scale in printing and distribution and network effects between readers and advertisers. The internet dramatically lowered the cost of distributing content and shifted advertising spending toward digital platforms. Newspapers retained much of their knowledge of journalism and local markets, but that knowledge was no longer enough to sustain the competitive position built around the old model.

Historical results can inform expectations about the future, but they need to be explained rather than simply extrapolated. The important question is whether the advantages that produced them will remain useful as conditions change.

Amazon (AMZN) provides a useful contrast. Jeff Bezos recognized that the internet could give people access to a much larger selection of products and make them easier to find and compare. Amazon’s retail business expanded from books into other categories while remaining focused on enduring customer wants: greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Those goals have no obvious endpoint. They give Amazon a reason to keep investing in fulfillment, software, logistics, and new services while developing new knowledge about how to serve customers better. That culture of continual improvement does not make Amazon immune to disruption, but it has encouraged the company to revise or replace existing methods in pursuit of the same customer wants.

Moats and adaptability address different but related risks: a moat protects existing earning power, while adaptability helps a company improve existing solutions or develop new ones. Warren Buffett has generally preferred businesses with durable moats that do not require continual reinvention. Berkshire (BRK.B)’s experience with newspapers shows, however, that even a genuine moat can erode when innovation changes the economics supporting it. The most enduring businesses therefore combine hard-to-reproduce knowledge with a culture that does not treat existing advantages as permanent.

For investors, a moat can often be assessed through current customer behavior and economics. Adaptability is harder to judge because it concerns problems not yet recognized and solutions not yet created. Investors can still ask whether a company’s existing practices can be questioned, new approaches tested, mistakes acknowledged, and resources redirected. These qualities do not guarantee successful adaptation, but they improve a company’s ability to keep solving customer problems as the world changes.

Investing in a Dynamic Society: Decisions Under Uncertainty

Dynamic societies allow people to continually create new knowledge, but neither the content of that knowledge nor the changes it will bring can be predicted in detail. Investors must therefore allocate capital without knowing precisely how a business or its industry will evolve.

Conjecturing Investment Theses: Good and Bad Explanations

Every investment thesis is a conjecture, but not every conjecture is equally useful. Deutsch argues that a good explanation is hard to vary: its details are constrained by what it explains and cannot be altered arbitrarily without weakening it. A bad explanation can be changed freely while still seeming to account for almost any outcome.

The value of a business ultimately depends on the cash it can distribute to owners over its remaining life. A thesis that does not connect the price paid to those future cash flows is speculation, as I define it. At its simplest, speculation depends primarily on the hope of selling an asset to someone else at a higher price, while investing involves owning a business for the cash it can ultimately produce.

There is nothing inherently wrong with speculating or, for that matter, gambling. The important thing is recognizing which activity you are pursuing. Examples of speculation include buying stocks with money needed soon and therefore depending on a favorable near-term sale price, relying on other investors to become more enthusiastic and pay a higher valuation multiple, and expecting a historical price pattern to repeat. A thesis based solely on a chart pattern can be rejected as a bad explanation because it is easy to vary: changing the pattern, time period, or indicator can support almost any conclusion. Without a reason one pattern should be more meaningful than another, there is no basis for choosing among them.

If the intent is to invest rather than speculate, there is no need to guess where share prices will move in the near term. A useful filter is to ask: “If I bought shares in this company and had to lock them in a vault for ten years, unable to sell them, would I still want to own the business? ” This shifts attention from price movements to what a good investment thesis must explain. I generally place theses that depend on correctly predicting the timing and effects of Federal Reserve policy, recessions, or military conflicts in my “too hard” pile. Those events can affect the intrinsic values of businesses, but I lack a good explanation for forecasting them, let alone determining how they would change the attractiveness of a particular investment relative to other available uses of capital.

The vault thought experiment also helps explain why I favor businesses whose long-term cash generation rests on hard-to-replicate advantages. Commodity-like businesses may not look so cheap, even at low valuation multiples, when the thesis must rely on the cash they can return to owners over time. Rapid growth alone does not solve this problem. Growth eventually slows, and without a moat, high returns on capital attract competition that tends to push those returns toward more ordinary levels. Businesses in fast-changing technology markets present a different problem: their business models and apparent advantages may not have been tested enough to judge whether they will endure.

A good investment thesis therefore uses explanation to form expectations without depending on a detailed prediction of how the business’s future will unfold. It explains how the business creates and retains value: the problem it solves for customers, why customers choose its solution over alternatives, what makes that solution difficult to replicate, and what could strengthen or weaken its position as competition, technology, and customer needs change. It then connects these factors to the economics of the business, including its opportunities to scale and reinvest, the capital required to do so, the cash it can ultimately generate, and how management is likely to allocate it.

Buying a stock because it appears undervalued means judging that the value of its expected future cash flows exceeds the price being asked. This is the inherently contrarian element of active investing: the investor is judging their expectations about the business to be less wrong than those reflected in the market price. Because that judgment remains conjectural, a thesis’s key assumptions must be explicit enough to be criticized as new evidence and competing explanations emerge.

Criticizing Investment Theses: Explanations and Evidence

Criticism begins with the conjecture itself. Is it internally consistent? Does it conflict with relevant facts or other explanations that have survived criticism? Are important assumptions arbitrary or easy to vary? Is there a competing explanation that accounts for the same observations at least as well? These questions can expose weaknesses before any new evidence is gathered.

Evidence provides another source of criticism. Historical growth, margins, market share, and other business results can reveal problems with a thesis, but they are not the thesis itself. They describe what happened, not why it happened or whether the factors that produced those results will persist. The same facts can therefore be consistent with different explanations.

When two competing explanations survive those initial criticisms and appear to account for the same observations equally well, evidence can help distinguish between them. Consider a company that repeatedly lowers prices. One explanation is that competition is forcing it to cut prices because it lacks pricing power. Another is that its scale lowers unit costs, allowing it to pass some of those savings to customers. If that is what is happening, lower prices increase demand and further reinforce the company’s scale and cost advantage.

The price cuts alone are consistent with both explanations. The next step is to identify what each would lead us to expect. If customer adoption and volumes rise, unit costs fall, and the company’s competitive position strengthens, the scale-advantage explanation survives an important test. If volumes fail to grow while unit economics and returns on capital deteriorate, the lack-of-pricing-power explanation may better account for what is happening.

Even then, a period of better- or worse-than-expected performance does not automatically prove or disprove a thesis. That does not make the thesis immune to criticism; whether an outcome undermines it depends on what the thesis claimed and why the results differed from expectations. Businesses operate within complex, dynamic economies, and even the most successful rarely produce results that move smoothly up and to the right. Worse-than-expected performance nevertheless creates a new problem: why did this happen, and what does it reveal about the thesis?

The discrepancy may reflect temporary circumstances, incomplete data, or a mistaken interpretation, but any such explanation must remain open to criticism and account for the evidence better than the alternatives. A claim that a setback is temporary should also explain what caused it, why the thesis’s central claims remain intact, and what should happen when the condition passes. In other cases, the result may expose an important error or make a competing explanation more persuasive. A thesis cannot be altered after every disappointment merely to preserve the original conclusion. The goal is not to defend it, but to improve or replace it when a better explanation emerges.

Changes in stock price should be considered separately from evidence about the underlying business. A rising share price does not validate the investment thesis, just as a falling price does not invalidate it. What changes directly is the prospective return available at the new price. A large price movement may prompt further investigation because it could reflect information I have missed, but the movement itself does not explain what changed.

When company results are weaker than expected and the share price also falls, I ask two questions: How much should the new information change the thesis and my estimate of future owner cash flows? After making that adjustment, how much has the lower price changed the prospective return? A business can become less valuable while its stock becomes more attractive if its price falls by more than the estimated decline in value. The reverse can happen when a business performs well but the stock appreciates enough to leave little room for an attractive return.

Seen this way, investing is a continuing process of problem solving: developing explanations for how businesses create and retain value, exposing them to criticism and testing them against evidence, comparing the resulting estimate of value with the market price, and revising decisions as new problems emerge.

Investing Through Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence

This investing approach is especially useful for filtering opportunities during periods of rapid technological change. Recognizing that a new technology may transform society is not enough to identify a good investment. The businesses that ultimately succeed, the advantages they develop, and the value they capture will depend partly on knowledge that has not yet been created.

Warren Buffett made a related point in a 1999 Fortune article published near the height of the dot-com exuberance. He noted that at least 2,000 companies had entered the automobile business in the United States, yet by the 1990s only three U.S. car companies remained. The paths leading to those eventual survivors were far from straightforward. Henry Ford’s first automobile company failed. General Motors (GM)’ rapid acquisition spree left it financially strained and cost founder Billy Durant control of the company in 1910. Chrysler emerged from the reorganization of the troubled Maxwell Motor Company in 1925. Automobiles transformed society, but recognizing their importance was far easier than identifying in advance which companies would survive or generate attractive returns.

Artificial intelligence presents the same challenge today. Both the technology and the surrounding industry are changing so rapidly that I find it difficult to predict where either is headed. NVIDIA (NVDA) developed GPUs for video game graphics in the late 1990s and later introduced CUDA, which allowed developers to use them for general-purpose computing. AlexNet demonstrated the value of GPUs for training deep neural networks, Google ((GOOG), (GOOGL)) researchers introduced the transformer architecture, and OpenAI (OPENAI) used that architecture to create increasingly capable large language models.

That progression was far less predictable as it unfolded. Few people anticipated that chips originally designed for video game graphics would become central to training large AI models, let alone the range of tasks those models would eventually perform. Nor did many expect ChatGPT, released in November 2022, to bring AI to a mass audience and help drive a surge in demand for computing infrastructure. That history illustrates why AI’s capabilities, industry structure, and competitive dynamics over the next decade or two remain highly uncertain.

Uncertainty about where the technology is headed, combined with the rapid improvement and apparent intelligence of current AI systems, has contributed to dramatic predictions, ranging from widespread job losses and economic disruption to superintelligent systems escaping human control. One unresolved question is whether continued development of these systems will produce machines capable of creating explanatory knowledge, which is the threshold I use here for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Current models do not yet demonstrate that ability in this open-ended sense. A system trained only on the information available before Darwin or Einstein, for example, would have to conjecture explanations that were not contained in prior observations or theories.

Deutsch has argued that AGI must be physically possible but that creating it will require understanding how such creativity works, not merely improving performance on existing tasks. Whatever the path to AGI, AI does not need to cross that threshold to be economically transformative. These systems can assist with or automate parts of coding, analysis, experimentation, communication, and many other tasks. By making existing knowledge easier and cheaper to apply, they can lower the cost of producing many goods and services and expand what people can accomplish.

The harder question for investors is how the resulting economic value will be divided among customers, companies supplying the technology, and businesses applying it. AI may improve or automate one part of an existing service without eliminating the need for the broader product and the distribution network, customer relationships, and accumulated knowledge required to deliver it. Like electricity or the internet, it may also enable businesses to develop products and services that are difficult to imagine today.

Although I remain fascinated by AI, I have found it difficult to form well-grounded expectations about what many businesses built around it will look like in ten or twenty years. It is unclear which business models will endure or whether leading AI models will remain proprietary or become widely available. Investing in a company simply because it involves AI is not an investment thesis. The same questions apply: What problem does the company solve? How does AI improve its solution? What makes that solution difficult to replicate? Who captures the resulting value? What expectations are already reflected in its stock price?

NVIDIA shows that an AI-related investment thesis can rest on knowledge and competitive advantages that already exist. Its hardware, CUDA software ecosystem, and relationships with developers embody knowledge accumulated and tested over decades. Those advantages may help explain why NVIDIA has captured substantial value from the growth of AI, but any thesis would still need to address whether alternative chips and computing architectures could weaken its position. It would also need to judge whether its expected future earning power offers an attractive return at its current market price.

The more a thesis depends on capabilities, products, or industry structures that do not yet exist, the more it rests on assumptions that cannot be tested in the market. Those assumptions should affect whether I invest at all, the price I am willing to pay, and the amount of capital I commit. The practical question is whether the thesis offers an attractive prospective return without requiring a chain of technological and competitive developments to go right.

Active investing does not require identifying every eventual winner as a technology emerges; investors need only find a few opportunities they believe they understand. Early in a technology’s development, companies are still discovering which products and business models will work and what durable advantages will emerge. Many will fail. Venture capital portfolios are structured for this risk, spreading capital across many companies before their products and business models have been extensively tested. Public-market investors can wait until customer adoption, competitive advantages, unit economics, and cash generation become easier to evaluate. For the Saga Portfolio, I am following the industry closely while focusing my research on whether and how AI may affect the businesses we own.

What this Means for Investors

People create wealth by developing explanatory knowledge and applying it to solve problems. Dynamic societies accelerate that process by preserving the freedom to criticize existing ideas, experiment with alternatives, and correct errors peacefully. Businesses apply useful knowledge to solve problems for customers. Moats allow them to retain some of the value they create, while adaptability enables them to preserve what works and improve or replace what does not.

Applying this framework to the Saga Portfolio means looking for businesses that have created valuable, hard-to-replicate knowledge, can continue solving important problems better than their competitors, and can be purchased at prices that are attractive relative to the cash they may ultimately generate for their owners. Within this process, investment theses remain conjectures, subject to ongoing criticism as new problems and evidence emerge.

AI does not overturn this framework. Its economic consequences will depend on the problems it solves, which businesses use it effectively, who retains the value created, and what expectations are already reflected in market prices. The future cannot be predicted in detail because it will be shaped by knowledge that has not yet been created. That uncertainty does not prevent sound investing. It makes good explanations, attractive prices, and a willingness to correct mistakes all the more important.

Original Post

Editor’s Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.

Council at bottom of Northern league table for housing delivery

More than 3,000 new homes could be built in Stockport alongside new warehouses, including on the green belt, if plans are given the go-ahead.

Because it failed to meet government targets, Stockport Council has been told it needs to add a 20% buffer on land given over to housing over the next few years. This could put more pressure on the local authority to allow greenbelt development to go ahead in the future at a time developers have been sending in plans to the town hall.

Residential applications must also now be decided with a presumption in favour of approval, which will make it easier for developers. The change for Stockport does not mean green belt developments would automatically get the go ahead because policies protecting those areas are still in place.

The changes may actually help any brownfield schemes move forward. However the council will now be required to demonstrate the negatives significantly outweigh the negatives if it rejects any plans, including on the countryside.

Figures published by the UK Government showed the borough delivered 1,457 homes against the 3,408 the government said was needed between 2022 and 2025. The latest figures puts Stockport at the bottom of the government’s league table over housing delivery for the North West of England but also the whole north of England too.

Stockport Labour have criticised the situation with Coun Rachel Wise telling the Manchester Evening News: “The numbers are worse now than they were then, and the borough has gone backwards while every other council in the North moved forward.”

However Liberal Democrat leader Coun Mark Roberts said they were delivering a new plan which would deliver ‘sustainable housing on our brownfield sites within our town and district centres’, adding: “Stockport is buzzing, with new homes being delivered for all to see, our town centre regeneration is being hailed as a blueprint for towns across the country by the new [Prime Minister].”

Regardless of political disagreements, the situation now means a number of major developments across the borough could get the go ahead following the latest government order. Here is a list of the major outstanding planning applications currently on Stockport’s planning portal that are waiting for a decision:

Land north of Stanley Road and west of the A34 in Heald Green

Developer Bloor Homes has submitted the plans to Stockport council for approval, with hopes of building 675 homes on land in Heald Green East between the A34 and A555. Bloor Homes said the masterplan would see more than £100m invested into the local area if approved, creating more than 500 construction jobs in total.

The plans involve creating a new local centre to provide ‘essential services’ for future residents, including a health clinic. Space has also been earmarked for a future park and ride facility and train station, which bosses say would need to be brought forward by Network Rail or Transport for Greater Manchester.

A decision on this is due on September 16 2026.

Land south of Stanley Road and Grove Lane in Cheadle Hulme

Stonebond Properties wanted to build 126 homes off Grove Lane on former sports pitches which is now ‘rough grassland’. The site is described as being ‘close to a vibrant mix and choice of retailing, cafés, bars, restaurants and employment opportunities’ in the application.

A design and access statement said: “The proposed development comprises new residential dwellings including new landscaping and areas of public open space,” adding: “The development at Grove Lane, Stockport, will provide an attractive area to live with high quality designed homes.

“The scale and character of the proposals will ensure that the scheme will contribute to and enhance the immediate and surrounding area.”

A decision on this was due on June 9 2026 but has not been made yet.

Land off Moor Lane in Woodford

Miller Homes has put forward plans for up to 130 homes to be built. In a design and access statement, they said: “The proposed development provides a unique opportunity to create a new vibrant place to live, with connections to the existing movement networks and natural features.

“It will increase local housing supply and provide areas of accessible public open space, whilst improving public access across the site and the wider pedestrian network. Furthermore, the proposed development will be a highly desirable place to live for the 21st century and beyond, reflecting the desirable elements of the local vernacular.

“The proposals respect the local character but also move the community towards a more sustainable future, through an increase in housing choice.”

A decision is due on the application by August 25 2026.

Land off Jenny Lane in Woodford

RIchborough have put forward plans for up to 75 homes along with a new green space in Woodford which they said will ‘create a sustainable and attractive development to the village, inspired by the context and local character of Woodford and the aspirations of the Woodford Neighbourhood Plan’.

They are promising that at least 50% of the homes or around 38 of these will be classified as affordable, while the site which is currently private would be opened up to the public and the wider community to enjoy.

A decision is due on the application by November 5 2026.

Land at Upper Swinesye Farm in Woodford

Barratt David Wilson Homes North West and Michael Glen Kingsley are hoping to deliver up to 455 new homes on the farm near Woodford with 50% of these being affordable. A design and access statement linked to the plans said: “This planning application marks a major step forward in the exciting opportunity that the development of the Site at Upper Swineseye Farm, Woodford, represents.

“This DAS has been created to demonstrate how the masterplan proposals for the site embody a high-quality, sustainable, and dynamic new development.”

The site sits next to the Woodford Garden Village where there are plans to build more homes. A decision on this application was due on August 12 2026 but has not yet been made.

Land south of Chester Road in Woodford

Plans have been put forward by Russell LDP and Stantec to build the new homes off Chester Road in Woodford. The development would include up to 423 new homes as well as an extra care facility for those over 55 with up to 72 beds.

Alongside this, there are plans for shops, food and drink venues up to 100 square metres, new health services, a nursery or day centre, as well as a new nature park.

A design and access statement said the plans ‘provide a framework to deliver a high quality, well-designed and sustainable place for the future’. A decision is due on the application by October 6 2026.

Land off Lytham Drive in Bramhall

Wain Estates want to build up to 200 new homes across nearly five and a half hectares of land. A design and access statement for the application said: “The submitted planning application seeks outline planning consent for a high quality sustainable residential development. The vision for the development is to provide a number of beneficial elements for the existing and future communities.

They added: “The site is capable of delivering up to 200 new homes, providing a mix of family homes and affordable housing. The new high-quality residential development will be set with in an attractive network of open space.”

A decision on the application was due to be made on June 26 2026 but has not been made yet.

Mill Bank Farm off Chester Road in Hazel Grove

Plans have been put in by Bellway Homes for 134 new houses at Mill Bank Farm off Chester Road in Hazel Grove, Stockport. If given planning approval by Stockport Council, the new homes would be built on fields just north of the A555 on an area currently designated green belt.

Bellway Homes, which began as a small family business in 1946, is now one of the largest developers of new homes across the UK and claims ‘a proven track record of providing good quality aspirational housing’. The development promises to create ‘create a well-informed attractive neighbourhood, not overly dominated by the car and give a sensitive integration and robust solution to the existing character area’.

The site covers a nearly five hectare area of farmland on the edge of Hazel Grove made up of ‘open fields with trees dispersed throughout’ and has never been developed. A design and access statement linked to a planning application said the development is close to Adidas’ north Europe headquarters as well as number of parks, play areas, and sports pitches.

A decision was due on this application by August 10 2026 but has not been made.

Land next to Jacksons Lane in Hazel Grove

Bellway want to deliver 176 homes off Jacksons Lane with the scheme being a mix of two to four bed dwellings up to two storeys in height.

A design and access statement report said: “The development will create a high quality, sustainable residential neighbourhood which maintains and enhances the key existing features of Hazel Grove with greenspace and surrounding boundaries, integrating the site into the wider area.

“The development will create a well-informed attractive neighbourhood, not overly dominated by the car and give a sensitive integration and robust solution to the existing character area, as well as creating a sense of place which includes house types with reference to the local architectural vernacular.”

A decision was due on this application by June 19 2026 but has not been made.

Land north of Buxton Road in Hazel Grove

Hollins Strategic Land want to build up to 75 new homes as well as new public space near Hazel Grove. Documents linked to the application said: “The application is submitted in outline and seeks planning permission for the construction of up to 75 dwelling houses, access, open space and associated infrastructure.

“The emerging outline proposals promote a landscape-led development, with approximately 33% of the site dedicated to open space, including well designed green public spaces, new play areas, and integrated walking and cycling routes.

“Existing trees and hedgerows will be retained wherever possible, while the overall level of tree cover and planting will be significantly enhanced.

“Given the site’s currently limited vegetation and low-value habitat, this approach will deliver meaningful improvements to both biodiversity and landscape character.”

A decision is due on October 8 2026.

Land south of Mill Lane in Hazel Grove

Hollins Strategic Land want to build up to 31 new homes as well as public open space on another site near Hazel Grove. Documents put forward as part of the application said: “Overall, it has been demonstrated that not only is the site a suitable and sustainable location for new housing development but also that the scale of development proposed can be successfully accommodated on the site in a manner which respects the various technical constraints whilst also adhering to established principles of good urban design.

“This will be a high quality development which respects the local character and delivers much needed homes in an attractive landscape setting. We therefore request that planning permission is granted for this scheme.”

A decision is due on October 8 2026.

Land at the Simpson Business Centre off Buxton Road in Hazel Grove

Nine new homes could be built on land at the Simpsons Business Centre in Hazel Grove with developers arguing the land is grey belt. A decision was due on this application on May 5 2026 but has not been made yet.

Land off Mill Street in Hazel Grove

This application is in its early stages but Northstone Development Ltd is looking to develop up to 174 new homes here. A decision was due on May 12 2026 but this has not been made.

Northstone were hoping to submit a planning application in May but this appears to have been delayed. Earlier this year, Northstone said they hoped to finish construction by 2030 if their plans were approved.

Land at Hyde Bank Meadows in Romiley

Up to 250 homes could be built here under plans put forward by Seddon. These plans are in their early stages but could ‘include a mix of small dwellings and larger family homes’.

A decision was due on the application over whether an environmental impact assessment is needed by April 23 2026 but this has not been made yet.

Land northeast of Bredbury Industrial Estate

These plans look to extend the Bredbury Park Industrial Estate on an ‘unoccupied and overgrown’ site. Developers FI Group hope to ‘provide much needed jobs and industrial units in the area’ through the expansion.

Documents attached to the application said: “Unlike previous proposals for this site, we are proposing a much smaller employment development and are not seeking to develop a large-scale regional distribution hub. Instead we want to provide a mix of units – from starter units to mid-range – that offer flexibility of use for light and general industry and local warehousing and distribution.

“As the indicative site plan shows, buildings would be smaller in scale and height and the scheme will be landscape led. A large part of the overall site will remain as a green undeveloped area of countryside, with the potential to create a publicly accessible community nature park on the remainder of the site.”

A decision was due on June 22 2026 but has not been made yet.

Land southwest of Shakespeare Road in Bredbury

Westchurch Homes want to build 134 affordable homes just outside of Bredbury which they said ‘would deliver a range of high quality, high specification homes for the local community in a sustainable location’.

A decision is due on the plans by October 28 2026.

Economist Lord Jim O’Neill, who has been advising the prime minister, has said he will not be taking a job in Andy Burnham’s government.

As first reported by, external the Financial Times, Lord O’Neill, a crossbench peer who was once a treasury minister under the Conservatives, said he did not want the constraints involved in taking on a formal role.

The former chief economist at Goldman Sachs had been tipped to become Burnham’s chief economic adviser.

He said he was enjoying what he was currently doing too much and did not want to have to give up control of his business interests to comply with official rules.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he had “lots of other things that are going on that I very much enjoy” and, having been a minister before, he knew the job included “all the constraints that understandably go with it, like a blind trust and to abandon everything else you do, never mind the fact that it’s 24/7”.

In placing shares in blind trusts, ministers have no knowledge of how their investment is being handled, to avoid any potential conflict of interest.

He said he concluded he would rather be a voice to talk to and “get on with the rest of the things in my life”.

He earlier told the Financial Times it was “not because of any policy disagreements”, adding “I’m a massive fan of the focus on devolution and I hope Andy and his team will be bold on this and everything else.”

He pointed to Greater Manchester as an example of economic growth and said if you could repeat that around populated areas, “then national economic performance will improve”.

Asked by the BBC whether the new government in the upcoming October budget would need to raise taxes, Lord O’Neill said it was a choice for the prime minister and his team “based on the things they’re saying they want to do more of – defence spending is obviously the one that catches the eye”, among other things.

Pressed on whether the government could turn to something such as wealth taxes, Lord O’Neill said he was “not a fan of further increases in these kind of taxes, particularly as it relates to capital gains for genuine risk taking things like venture capital”.

He noted that the country has boosted government spending “dramatically” in recent years and needed a “more sensible approach to welfare spending under genuine welfare reform”.

From 2015-2016, Lord O’Neill was commercial secretary to the Treasury under the then-Chancellor, George Osborne.

The peer, who grew up in Greater Manchester, was a key figure in pushing the Conservatives’ Northern Powerhouse agenda, which was aimed at boosting the economy of the North of England.

Lord O’Neill is also known as the economist who coined the term Bric in 2001 to describe leading developing or newly industrialised countries with potential for fast growth and, therefore, investment returns.

The original four nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China – later became the Brics when they were joined by South Africa.

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Following the power cut, an update from National Rail at 18:13 BST said the CrossCountry service between Peterborough, Cambridge and Stansted Airport will be running on Sunday evening.

The update also said the operator had been able to resume operating an hourly train service from Birmingham New Street to Leicester and Derby.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said: “Following earlier disruption on CrossCountry services, I am pleased to hear some trains are set to run tonight, and a full timetable expected to resume tomorrow.

“While passengers should continue to check their journeys before they travel, I’d like to thank engineers who are working tirelessly to minimise disruption as much as possible.

“We are setting up Great British Railways and nationalising services, including Cross Country next year, to end decades of fragmentation and vulnerability on our network. We are determined to give passengers the reliability they deserve.”

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) has called for a review of railway operational control centres following the disruption, “to ensure they remain unaffected by power outages.”

RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said passengers and rail workers should not have to face another week of “travel chaos” because of unreliable back-up systems.

East Sussex County Council (ESCC) stopped providing summer holiday supermarket vouchers for families which would have received free school meals support, after the changes to the government scheme. It says this means eligible families no longer automatically receive food vouchers over the summer holidays.

The change has been criticised by Hastings and Rye MP Helena Dollimore, but council leader Andy Woolley said the new fund set up by the council “would provide support to households experiencing immediate financial hardship and to help build longer-term financial resilience, rather than providing universal holiday food vouchers to all families eligible for free school meals”.

Council’s across the country have set up similar schemes.

An ESCC spokesperson said £7.3 million will be spent over the next year supporting residents facing financial hardship including debt advice services, community food support, the expansion of holiday clubs with meals, and help for households with essentials like food and utilities.

A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said the CRF guidance “makes clear councils can use vouchers to support families with children on free school meals during the holidays and we have written to local authorities to confirm this”.

It added: “Authorities have the discretion to design their own schemes, within the CRF guidance, to ensure the poorest children do not go hungry.”

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Edward Close
MD, CEO & Executive Director

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for nib’s FY ’26 Full Year Results. I’m Ed Close, nib Group CEO and Managing Director, and I’m joined here in Newcastle by our Group Chief Financial Officer, Nick Freeman.

Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Awabakal people, the traditional custodians of the land we are joining you from today. I pay my respects to elders past and present. We are pleased to report a solid FY ’26 group result with pleasing strategic progress, positive customer outcomes, a strong capital position and a more balanced contribution across our businesses. Our purpose of your better health and well-being continues to shape our strategy and guide our people to deliver sustainable value for our customers, shareholders and the communities we operate within.

nib is now a simpler, more focused and more efficient business with a clear emphasis on private health insurance and related services, supported by leading digital and AI capability, strong customer advocacy, our high-performing people and a disciplined approach to risk and capital management. This morning, I’ll cover the highlights, segment performance and strategic progress. Nick will then take you through the financial results in more detail before I return to discuss strategy and outlook. So if we head across to Slide 6, our FY ’26 highlights. It was a year of disciplined execution and meaningful strategic progress