Today, the Chancellor set out his analysis of the UK economy: the impact of recent shocks, the accumulated consequences of previous governments' choices, and what this administration's commitment to growth means in practice. 

With his choices constrained by the latest impacts of increasingly volatile geopolitics and by climate change, the question that matters is how will he create real public value? I use the phrase in both its senses. What does the public actually value? And what economic activity and government policy actually contribute to it? 

This is a critical question for a government that wants to be pro-business - because not all business models are good for the country. The privatisation of public services moved tax payers money into global shareholder returns, while the quality of public services fell. Undervalued national assets, forgone public dividends, rising household bills and an 'enshittified' public realm (quite literally, in the case of our waterways and seas). The country is counting the cost of an economic strategy that chose to grow private wealth at the expense of the public interest. 

At FFCC we work with business leaders for whom doing good business is in their DNA, not just a paragraph for the ESG section in their annual report. They want a pro-business government. They also want a level playing field against competitors who externalise the true costs of their business models. Good businesses invest in the real economy of their communities: decent jobs at fair wages, products that do not harm the public's health or pollute our environment; businesses that pay their taxes in the UK, rather than offshoring their profits through opaque structures. 

There is a useful precedent for thinking about this. Lord Michael Barber's Public Value Framework, adopted by the Treasury in 2017, defines public value as the value created when public money is translated into outputs and outcomes that improve people's lives and economic wellbeing. It asks government departments to answer four sets of questions: what you are trying to achieve, how you manage inputs, how you engage users and citizens, and whether the system can sustain the policy intentions in the longer term. 

Those are good delivery questions. They ask whether the machinery of government is working. They do not ask the harder, more fundamental ones. What is the state for? Who creates value, and who captures it? Who carries the risk, and who reaps the rewards? 

In the public value framework, citizens are present as service users, and engagement is about responsiveness and satisfaction, downstream of the decisions about policy choices. 

So what happens if you put citizens upstream instead, and ask us about what we actually value? About what kind of economic choices build the country we want to live in, for now and for future generations? 

FFCC has spent three years doing just that, through the Food Conversations. Food is a useful case rather than a special one: it is large, measurable, and the costs are increasingly clear. But the same arguments read across all sectors. 

In their research for FFCC, Net Gain or Net Drain? (2025) Dr Dolly van Tulleken and Hannah Haggie make five points that the Chancellor and his treasury team audience should find both illuminating - and perhaps a little uncomfortable. 

1. The growth figures and the cost figures are never set against each other. Government describes food as the beating heart of the economy at £153.2bn of GVA. Yet the health-related costs attributable to the food system run to more than £268bn a year and rising (Jackson, 2024), of which £92bn is direct spending on healthcare, social care and welfare. A sector can be a significant contributor to measured output and a significant net drain on the public purse simultaneously, and nothing in the current analysis obliges anyone to join the dots.
2. GVA cannot distinguish between a firm that creates value and one that drains it. It records activity, not whether that activity leaves the country better off. A growth strategy without this analysis will systematically favour businesses that pocket their own gains and pass off the real costs on the health service, the welfare bill, the environment and workforce productivity.
3. We cannot yet answer the question at the level where decisions are made. Nobody is mapping the agri-food chain and identifying the most dominant firms in each sector. Vertical integration, aggregated reporting and lighter obligations on private companies mean the data do not yet exist in a publicly useful form. That lack of clarity is a governance problem, not just a technical gap.
4. A workable assessment is closer than it looks. The citizen-derived value framework sets out four categories of value, 15 themes and 32 indicators, of which 17 quantitative measures could be assessed from existing data with modest effort. This is a very doable exercise, and it would tell the Treasury which parts of a sector genuinely warrant investment and its support.
5. Who gets to define value is negotiated by access. According to the Food Foundation, Defra met food businesses and trade associations 1,408 times over four years, some forty times more often than civil society. While Defra's new Citizens Advisory Council is a genuine and ground-breaking advance, its latest Farming and Food Partnership has no civil society voices on it at all. Grounding a definition of public value in deliberative citizen evidence is the more defensible and robust option because it is not skewed by the interests of the parties being assessed.

The good news for a Chancellor facing hard questions is that citizens, asked properly, understand the issues and want to help answer them. What they ask for is neither radical nor vague, and it applies across every sector. They want the foundational elements of the real economy to be both affordable and decent, and they reject being told to choose. They want to know how decisions are made, and by whom. They want money and power shared fairly, so that neither primary producers nor households are squeezed while others extract profit. And they want children protected from companies which design, make and market products that manipulate and harm them. 

These asks are more than simply 'consumer preferences' to be weighed against growth. They are a thoughtful and balanced description of the kind of country citizens want to live in and what a fairer and more resilient economy is actually for. They offer a more inspiring and firmer basis for judging value than the measures currently in use.