Anyone looking for something imaginative and exciting when Rachel Reeves addresses the City on Thursday need not bother. The recent UK budget was a patching-up financial statement, raising relatively small amounts of revenue from here, to spend on urgent needs there. In terms of long-term economic vision, there was nothing.
Particularly lacking were large-scale infrastructure developments. France has les grands projets; in Britain there is a plan to spend £100 million on the creation of a tunnel to protect bats on the new, much-reduced HS2 rail line. At Mansion House to mark the installation of a new lord mayor of London, Ms Reeves will change the rules on investing pensions but not say much about the purpose of her shake-up.
The bat controversy is a tad unfair but it says much about the paucity of plans for substantial building schemes that the bats have attracted more comment and coverage since Reeves’ address than any other construction proposal.
Put simply, Britain has stopped doing. While that is bad enough for a country once renowned for ambition, design and innovation, it fails to realise two things: major projects are an excellent, proven way of galvanising the economy, providing jobs across the supply chain as well as long-term improvement; and the UK is in grave danger of slipping behind the facilities provided by its peers, and in an increasingly competitive market for international investment such a backward step is deeply troubling.
Britain led the world with its railways. Not any more. Heathrow was the globe’s leading airport. No longer. The nation’s motorway network is reduced to using computer technology to reduce traffic speed to keep vehicles flowing. There is only one major road from West to East across the North of England, home to a swathe of manufacturing industry. As for the East coast, from London to Scotland, there is no continuous fast motorway. Instead, in places it is a two-lane carriageway, interspersed with roundabouts.
There was no talk either from Reeves of world-beating, large-scale digital, medical and science centres. No power plants either. Little in the way of creating.
Nothing inspiring is in the pipeline. To think, it was not that long ago that Margaret Thatcher was agreeing with Francois Mitterrand to build a tunnel under the English Channel. A Conservative prime minister was prepared to share with a socialist president. That took courage on her part but so determined was she, so convinced of the benefits, that she went ahead.
Boris Johnson also got it. At various times, he envisaged a bridge or tunnel from Scotland to Northern Ireland, an airport on an artificial island in the Thames Estuary, a second fixed link to France. His problem was that while he talked the talk he had no means of execution. Still, he managed to aspire and to lift.
Johnson was the first politician to speak of ‘levelling up’, ending the perennial, socially and economically ruinous North-South divide. The detail and the cost typically did not detain him. Again, though, he made people believe that a problem hitherto thought to be unsolvable could be resolved.
His wasn’t just a signal to Britain, it was a message to the world. Today, Keir Starmer likes to say ‘we’re open for business’ without apparently realising that other nations are also ‘open’ and they’re busy, constantly boosting their offering.
Britain is mired on two counts. First, there is a genuine lack of cash. Decades of neglect mean that the bill to correct existing weaknesses is considerable. Schools are crumbling, hospitals are not equipped to cope, transport is creaking, energy security is flawed, there is a desperate shortage of affordable quality housing stock. Just putting that right demands many billions. Meanwhile, the appetite of the NHS and welfare state is never sated.
That’s before attention turns to additions and improvements, extras if you will, that bear reasonable comparison to those in France and elsewhere. Here, we’ve allowed ourselves to become terrified.
There’s a reluctance in government to explore shared private-public funding, which leads to the total outlay, and the risk, being borne by the taxpayer.
This engenders an ultra-cautious approach that slows and, ironically, only adds to the final spend. HS2 is a case in point. Originally conceived as a super-quick train service connecting London with Birmingham and the North-West, akin to France’s TGV, it’s taken decades and is still nowhere near being built. More and more consultants were hired, planning permissions were blocked or took forever to gain approval, estimates as to the level of public investment required and the time taken to completion kept on climbing. This fuelled rows that only added to the delays.
It’s now a drastically pared back route, going only as far north as Birmingham. Yet the controversy and stalling rumbles on. Safeguarding the bats is one of 8,276 separate ‘consents’ required from public bodies, even for this truncated scheme to go ahead. At one stage, when it was heading to the cities of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, HS2’s estimated cost was extending beyond £130 billion. That’s come down as the project has been cutback, but it’s still put at £66 billion. Most of that will go on legal and planning expenses, poor forecasting and inflation – as the timeframe has lengthened so it’s been hit by a worldwide rise in the cost of materials such as concrete and steel.
An insight into the fear that grips decision-making came this week with new Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s evidence to the Post Office Horizon inquiry (now – incredibly, but perhaps not – in its fourth year). Compensation rightfully due for the sub-postmasters caught up in the scandal was held back, said Badenoch, previously trade secretary, by civil servants refusing to say anything blunt in a document. This was because they were scared in case the memo was ever made public and they were accused of being too direct. They were also, she said, afraid of the thought of having it flashed up on screen at inquiries like the very one she was addressing.
That meant ministers did not see highlighted, simply understood issues – they were hidden and obscured, never to feature, as the officials wished.
Badenoch was defending her corner. Nevertheless, the picture she painted was depressing. Far from well-oiled and humming, the state machine is rusting and stalled.
Put what she said alongside Reeves’s budget and you can see why Britain is no longer attempting to forge ahead. We must raise our game.
