Imagine you have a reasonable income and a not too onerous mortgage, and hear you are due a generous unexpected legacy from a distant relative. Would you tell your disappointed family, "The prudent and sensible way forward would be to pay off debt"? Only if you didn't mind being in the doghouse just when you might most need their support.
That is the situation facing the Chancellor, and those were his words when asked what he would do with the windfall from auctioning the licences for operating the third-generation mobile phones. Bidding now exceeds £22bn, five times original expectations. What should Gordon Brown do? He could pay off debt, but it would be seen as stingy and unimaginative and dangerously unpopular as Labour approaches the next election.
He could give us all, every man, woman and child about £350 each. That would be good fun (particularly if it went literally to everyone), but it would also be inflationary. He could use it to augment existing spending plans in the current Comprehensive Spending Review; but that would raise expectations for future years that would have to be met by increased taxation.
Or, he could be imaginative and take a unique opportunity to look beyond the year-to-year Micawberish problems of balancing expenditure with income and substantially improve the quality of all our lives. A good place to start would be in our increasingly derelict towns and cities, home to 90 per cent of the population.
Look around you.While many of us enjoy work and home environments more luxurious and better designed than our parents would have dreamed of, the substance of the lives we share with others, on public transport, in schools, hospitals, libraries, parks, public housing, civic amenities, even just walking in the streets, has become drabber and dirtier, sometimes downright squalid.
For as long as the government remains in mortal fear of the electoral repercussions of raising taxation, this urban degeneration and decay of public facilities will continue. Britain has become a country of private wealth and public shoddiness. We are like the millionaire residents of a mansion block whose individual apartments are monuments to good taste and design, but who refuse to pay for the upkeep of the communal areas.
Last year, Lord (Richard) Rogers's Urban Task Force issued a comprehensive and visionary report to government on how to improve the quality of urban life in England. Towards an Urban Renaissance made it clear that the revival of cities would not be achieved with a fanfare of public-private partnership giant projects or by transforming the areas around railway stations into shopping malls. The report argued that repairing the neglected fabric of urban life would require genuine subsidiarity in local decision-making - community decision-making where necessary. It went on to say that, while public sector spending in towns and cities (including health, education, policing and social security) was around £200bn, or 60 per cent of all public expenditure, spending on transport, regeneration, housing and general improvements to towns and cities accounted for a tiny proportion of that spending - about £8bn a year. As the report put it, "This small amount is expected to play the crucial role of safeguarding the value of all the other public investment which is locked into our towns and cities". Rogers not only called for far greater public resources to be allocated to urban regeneration, he called for a larger proportion of such funding to be spent by local authorities.
The work of the Urban Task Force was widely lauded, including by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. The only fault anyone appeared able to find at the time was that it would cost money. No one expected this government to fund the entire Rogers programme, but early reports of the urban white paper (now delayed till some time this summer) are doubly disappointing. Ministers appear to be abandoning the report's central principles, while the white paper is said to have been rewritten to focus on the "neglected" suburbs that need improvements to hospitals, schools and transport. Ministers are reported to believe that Rogers concentrated too much on the inner cities. What price the detailed study of a panel of experts if a focus group says Labour needs votes in the suburbs? However, £22bn can pay a lot of debts and buy a lot of favours. Just a fraction of it could radically transform the daily lives of all of us. Brown should not let the opportunity pass.
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