Of all its manifesto pledges, missions and milestones, Labour has been most keen to tell the public that it is going for growth.

But is it doing more telling than showing?

Does the government have a robust and well-thought-through plan to deliver that

growth? Or is it, like so many before it, struggling to really take the tough decisions

required to drag UK GDP growth up to meet and indeed surpass that of our fellow G7 nations?

I'm Hannah White and this is Inside Briefing the podcast from the Institute for Government.

This government has not been short of plans and strategies.

We've previously discussed the plan for change, the industrial strategy and the AI

Opportunities Action Plan, but what it hasn't produced in its first year and a half in office

is a strategy for growth that helps it make hard choices, nor the right support

in place for the PM to follow through on them. This is a problem as a new paper out this week

from IFG and Imperial College London explores, and its author joins us today. Regional inequalities

are one barrier to growth, and transport is both a symptom and a cause of this. Many regions

like far behind the capital on funding and transport connectivity, preventing people from

getting new jobs, travelling to existing ones or otherwise moving about the country, all harming

productivity. The authors of another new IFG report on this topic, join us to discuss their findings

this week. And these include a case study of

the current mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham's work on the B-Bus Network. So joining me

today are Giles Wilkes, senior fellow and former number 10 economics advisor. Hi, Giles. Hi, Hamer. Great

to be here. Akash Pound, program director for our devolution work. Hi, Akash.

Hi, Anna. And Harriet Shaw, also from the Devo team and author of our new transport paper. Welcome, Harriet.

And I am extremely pleased to be joined by Samir Keane's economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of the economics show podcast. Hi, Samaya.

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