Say what you like about Rachel Reeves, but you can’t accuse her of playing to the gallery. In Wednesday’s speech about the need to go “further and faster” in tackling the UK’s economic stagnation, she reeled off a whole list of projects that may raise growth, but will almost certainly make the government even less popular on the way.
She backed the proposed £9bn Lower Thames Crossing between Essex and Kent, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects the UK has ever attempted (far more, per mile, than the vastly more controversial HS2). She promised nearly £8bn in investment for water companies to build nine new reservoirs (because who, at this point in history, could oppose giving more public money to private water companies). Elsewhere, Reeves promised new towns, and road upgrades; new research facilities in Cambridge; and the resurrection of a project, cancelled by Boris Johnson, to restore the Varsity rail line from there to Oxford.
Most controversial of all was the chancellor’s support for a third runway at Heathrow, approved in 2018 but stuck in legal challenge hell ever since. Its current opponents include green campaigners and the mayor of London. Those who may not oppose it yet, but almost certainly will in the future, include users of the busiest stretch of the M25, who will face disruption while the road is diverted through a tunnel.
All these schemes, to be clear, have strong economic cases behind them – to keep Britain moving or connected to the world, to commercialise research from its world class universities, to just plain ensure we do not run out of water. Though you can quibble with the details, if you seriously want to see the economy growing once again, Reeve’s willingness to build is A Good Thing. It’s just that in the process she’s provided opposition campaigners with election leaflet material from here to doomsday, too.
The problem of those who oppose building projects living in specific constituencies today, while the pay off is both electorally diffused and annoyingly far away, is one reason why the last government didn’t really bother with this sort of thing. The other, inevitably, was money. Like a household not thinking enough about the proverbial rainy day, Tory-run Treasuries repeatedly slashed capital budgets (which pay for buildings, maintenance and so on) to protect revenue budgets (which pay to keep the lights on today). For the leaders making those decisions, this was a rational choice, too: why waste political capital on projects for which someone else will one day take the credit? The future could be someone else’s problem.
The problem with this attitude, though, is that eventually the future arrives. On 22 January, the National Audit Office reported that, after increasing steadily over a number of years, the maintenance backlog on public service facilities was now at least £49bn. That works out at around £710 for every individual resident in the UK, roughly 4% of the entire government’s annual budget. The entire defence budget is only £57bn.
Two things are worth emphasising about that number. One is that spending this sum will not give us anything new: it will merely stop what we already have from just falling to bits. The other is that the number only accounts for the parts of the government estate on which this country relies. The bill for fixing everything the government should have maintained or invested in but hasn’t would almost certainly be much higher.
And all this was predictable. Fixing things as they break, rather than planning for necessary spending leads to “higher running costs and… expensive emergency repairs,” NAO boss Gareth Davies said in a speech trailing its report. You can draw a line between the years of government failure to make the necessary investments, and everything from school buildings becoming unsafe because their concrete had exceeded its natural life, to the fact a major west London bridge has been closed to motor traffic for six years and counting with no end in sight. The watchdog’s work, Davies added, highlights “the false economy of allowing maintenance backlogs to build up”.
The projects Reeves trailed in her speech are a mere fraction of the list that’d be necessary to bring Britain’s infrastructure up to scratch. Most still need to drag their way through the labyrinthine nightmare of the British planning system, and it’s unclear how several will be funded, or whether we have the construction capacity to build them, when they do.
Reeves will likely make herself and her government a target with the projects promised in her dash for growth. But it’s a damn sight better than what came before. We can’t afford to wait any longer.`
[See more: John McDonnell on where Rachel Reeves is going wrong]