Can you put a price on goodwill? Not here, apparently!

make-it-up irony that the country with comfortably (or uncomfortably) the highest overall generosity score has for several years been Myanmar (formerly Burma).

The headlined results and accompanying explications of Buddhism-inpractice make bizarre reading alongside the contemporaneous reports of the armed forces’ ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s own Rohingya Muslim minority.

My second fascination is the UK’s very respectable position – adrift of the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but invariably one of the most generous European nations.

It was, therefore, with interest laced with a healthy splash of skepticism that I read the latest research report by the think tank Localis – entitled Monetising Goodwill: Empowering places for civic renewal, the sub-title usefully summarising what Localis itself is about. They’re neo-localists, meaning they’re looking for ways to reshape local economies by giving people and their localities more control over the impacts of globalisation. Which here entails testing out the UK’s high international generosity rating by trying to measure the size and nature of what they label the ‘goodwill gap’.

Neat phrase, meaning the gap between what people currently pay towards their various local services and what they might – or say they might – be willing to contribute, if they knew precisely where their money would go.

It’s of course exactly what’s been suggested in the recent debate over NHS funding: that maybe up to two-thirds of us would be prepared to pay more, if – big IF – it took the form of a ring-fenced or hypothecated tax going exclusively to the health service.

There are obviously real problems, however, in trying to fund even part of a vast national service through an annually fluctuating tax yield. Much smaller-scale and more specific local services, though, could be a different matter.

The Localis researchers’ main question was: “Approximately how much tax per month, if any, would you be willing to pay in order to fund the following public services?” And the list of 15 services ran, alphabetically, from adult social care, arts and heritage, bin collection and recycling to road maintenance, secondary education and social housing.

A second question asked about willingness to pay a voluntary one-off levy to resolve a specific local problem – reporting potholes, reducing knife crime, more children’s play facilities, etc. – but I’ll focus here only on the tax one.

There was not one of the 15 services – not even bin collection or arts and heritage – towards which more than a third of respondents said they’d definitely NOT be willing to pay anything extra at all.

And towards the six most popular – public health, police, fire, adult and children’s social care, and primary education – a clear majority (‘Don’t knows’ included) said they’d pay at least something, maybe up to £5 a month, extra.

Responses naturally varied across services, but readiest self-proclaimed volunteers to fund additional adult social care were 18-24 year olds, followed by over-65s, Liberal Democrats, EU Remainers, and Londoners.

Oh yes, goodwill, Localis found, varies considerably by place. So which region, Scotland and Wales included, had the highest proportion of respondents unwilling to pay anything at all to fund adult social care?

You guessed it: the West Midlands. Meanest, poorest, or perhaps most truthful? More research needed.

Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies,

at the University of Birmingham