By Steve Conley | Academy of Life Planning
A City broker’s outburst this week branded the UK Treasury “detached, ignorant, and selfish,” accusing policymakers of strangling enterprise and misunderstanding the very nature of economic growth. It’s a strong statement — but one that echoes a deeper truth we at the Academy of Life Planning (AoLP) have observed for over a decade.
Britain’s economic challenge is not merely fiscal; it is philosophical.
We are trying to build a 21st-century economy on a 19th-century idea of wealth.
The Problem: A System Built on Extraction, Not Empowerment
Shore Capital’s analysts accuse the Treasury of being “incapable of creating the conditions for private capital to flourish.” In our experience, this incapacity runs much deeper — to an institutional blindness toward human capital itself.
Policies that over-tax labour, over-burden enterprise, and under-value creativity reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of what truly creates prosperity. When governments see citizens as taxpayers rather than value-creators, the economy becomes a machine for extraction rather than empowerment.
At AoLP, we call this the Exhaustive Cycle — the systemic loop where effort feeds bureaucracy, not wellbeing. It is the same dynamic that has hollowed out trust in finance, regulation, and now government itself.
The Forgotten Engine: Human Capital
Real growth begins not in Treasury forecasts but in the minds, hands, and hearts of people.
Every entrepreneur, teacher, planner, artist, and carer is a node of wealth creation — generating value long before money ever changes hands.
Yet policy treats these individuals as cost centres to be taxed, not as catalysts to be nurtured. The result? Productivity falls, consumer confidence collapses, and trust erodes. It’s not that Britons don’t want to work or spend; it’s that the system no longer rewards their contribution.
What We See on the Ground
Across our community — Holistic Wealth Planners, citizen investigators, small business owners, and individuals seeking purpose beyond pay — the story is the same.
People want to grow, contribute, and thrive.
What they lack isn’t motivation or skill; it’s structural trustworthiness — systems that honour integrity, autonomy, and cooperation over control.
Whether it’s the regulatory burden crushing micro-enterprises or the compliance maze stifling innovation, policy too often confuses oversight with stewardship. It manages the economy like a risk register instead of a living organism.
The Alternative: A Regenerative Economy of Enough
Our response is to model a new way forward — a life-first economy grounded in empowerment, transparency, and community.
Through the GAME Plan, we teach individuals and planners alike to design their lives around Goals, Actions, Means, and Execution — restoring flow where institutions have imposed friction.
Through Planning My Life, we democratise financial planning.
Through Financial Life Coach, we humanise professional practice.
Through M-POWER, we reimagine entrepreneurship as a force for social renewal.
Through Get SAFE, we protect victims of financial exploitation and rebuild trust from the ground up.
This is what it means to replace extraction with empowerment — to shift from taxing potential to unlocking it.
The Takeaway
Shore Capital’s frustration may be directed at the Treasury, but the real issue is cultural: a nation that still measures prosperity in pounds rather than in people.
Until policymakers understand that the greatest source of capital is human, every budget will be a patch on a broken paradigm.
The remedy is not more taxation or more austerity — but a fundamental redesign of how we value human life, labour, and learning.
The good news? That redesign has already begun.
At the Academy of Life Planning, we’re building the blueprint for a fair, regenerative, human-centred economy — one planner, one citizen, one community at a time.
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Contact: steve.conley@aolp.co.uk
Website: www.aolp.info
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