COMMENT: What on earth are we to make of the wild, and then yet wilder, electoral pledges made by both main parties on spending on infrastructure last week? The Magic Money Tree seems to have veritably burgeoned into Jack’s Beanstalk. Now it stretches up into the stratosphere. Just what is going on? Didn’t we just have 10 years of austerity? Are we hallucinating?
And I know I am not alone in feeling queasy. This is our money, folks. All I want to wail is: “Where, oh where, are all the grown-ups?”
I don’t reckon there’s an EG reader out there who wouldn’t support more spending on infrastructure. And we all take the point about the current headroom for cheap borrowing. Fine. So let’s go for meaningful investment into infrastructure and our economy. But let’s not go into a parallel universe. Whether it’s Labour at more than £1tn (according to the Tories) or the Conservatives at somewhat less (I dunno, what does it matter? Say half of that) these are unprecedented and unbelievable promises. Do they bear any relationship whatsoever with the truth?
And we have to face facts: we’re seriously not great at delivering infrastructure in this country. These testosterone-fuelled pledges sit uneasily with the massive overruns on Crossrail budgets and timetable that were announced on the very same day (squeals of indignation all around).
They sit uneasily with the stark lack of any national airports strategy by any government, of whatever colour, over the last century (putting aside the fact, because he certainly will, that the current prime minister did say he’d “lie down in front of the diggers” for the Third Runway at Heathrow).
They sit very uneasily indeed with the widespread and deep-seated political ambivalence around HS2. (and whilst we’re there: be aware that the current rumour flying around Whitehall is that the Oakervee Review will curtail HS2 to the stretch between Old Oak and Crewe; so not so much of a transformative project now, huh?).
And who is actually going to deliver all this new infrastructure? Our cranky and fragmented construction industry is hardly in the best of shapes to step up to this challenge.
What’s the bet we keep the OJEU methodology (even if it is called something else) after we leave the EU? I might be a great fan of the National Infrastructure Commission – at least I am in principle – but I would be hard-pressed to point at anything it has actually done.
The one big claim to fame of NIC – the Oxford-Cambridge Arc – may well be a stonkingly good idea, which has surely titillated the market, but it remains just that: a good idea. There is no delivery apparatus to support the rhetoric. And there’s no supporting infrastructure even to deliver plans already in train. In an example close to my heart, Central Bedfordshire Council was recently awarded £69.6m of Homes England Housing Infrastructure Fund monies, in large part to fund electricity supply in Biggleswade, where UKR has just achieved planning permission to build 1,500 homes. Another 30 to 500 homes (depending on who you believe) – and that’s before UKR gets started – and there’s just no more juice. And yet we’re supposed to deliver 1m new homes across Ox-Cam. How? Thank goodness, say I, for Homes England. And not for the first time.
And the Whitehall decision-making process is arcane. For years, parts of the country have been crying out for decisions to be made on key bits of road and rail. Actually, I spend much of my working week trying to unlock infrastructure for development, whether it’s for UKR or other mates in the industry – it may not be in my job description, but somebody has to do it. Taking Ox-Cam, the route for East West Rail and its road link is still trapped in the bowels of the Department for Transport. Now delayed further because of purdah of course. And don’t get me going on the future for the A1, currently at the mercy of “RIS2” (the Road Investment Strategy from 2020), you’d be better off dealing with Narnia.
And all this is further complicated, a hundredfold, by the climate change emergency.
So forgive me being a bit basic, but please could we learn to walk before we can run? For starters, let’s get all the statutory agencies into a room working to the same government agenda of clean green inclusive growth, and we might have a chance of getting somewhere. Let’s get some tight, transparent timetables for decision-making. And then, call me old-fashioned if you will, but I do yearn for a bit of fiscal responsibility. By all means, gear up to invest in infrastructure, and we will all cheer you on. But, please, let us do it in a responsible and realistic way. Ditch the funny money stuff and let’s get real. If we are to deliver even a 10th of Sajid Javid’s new and extravagant pledges (let alone those of John McDonnell) then, first, we will need to develop some serious extra capacity in the industry.
Whoever gets elected needs to understand – profoundly – that this is not a game. It won’t be solved by a few soundbites in a speech. Just where, oh where, are all the grown-ups now?
Jackie Sadek is chief operating officer, UK Regeneration
