Conservative commitments - 14, 13 fails

Spending £100bn on infrastructure over the five-year term

As with other commitments, infrastructure is a good idea. We need more and better infrastructure. But as any fool can see, offering to throw £20bn/year away isn’t such a good thing. This pledge means nothing without the detail of what will be bought for the money. I might as well say ‘my government would spend £550bn on government spending’ and expect the votes to come pouring in.

Thankfully, the manifesto gives greater detail, so don’t take the above criticism too seriously. £38bn will go on railways. HS2, for example, will deliver a slower service than we currently have at a cost of £50bn (which will be double that by the time it’s done, or else there will be so many reductions in the size of HS2 that the service will be even worse; it is common knowledge that ‘many of the [government-run] projects incurred a cost and time overrun of over 100%’). When I say slower, I mean that it will be 20 minutes faster than current services (but will be finished in 2026 by which time we might expect to have better normal trains), but that it will take people to a station 20 minutes away from Birmingham centre, where all the transport links are. People will have to spend time changing and then travelling.

HS2 has also experienced numerous changes in justification, a sure sign that it’s a political project in search of a reason to exist. At first it was business time and speed (business time because people can work on HS2). Then everyone pointed out that people can work on normal trains, especially in 1^st class. So HS2 became about speed, and I’ve just scotched that argument. Now it’s about capacity. To increase capacity we don’t need a high-speed line; we need a high-capacity line. Any new track would serve the same purpose at a tiny fraction of the cost. The estimates of increased need for capacity are doubtful at best; they rely on inflated predictions of economic growth, including growth that HS2 is expected to cause.  Let’s remind ourselves of the cost: I expect £100bn over its lifetime. That’s over £1,500 for every man, woman and child in the country, and perhaps £5,000 for every taxpayer. It won’t be free once done, either; it’ll still be more expensive than normal rail. It’s intended to boost the economy in the north; instead we’ll be paying lots of money for London to suck more economic activity from the north.

As for the rest of rail, well, wasn’t privatisation supposed to ensure that we got private investment improving our railways? We shouldn’t be investing any government money in the railways because we sold them off specifically so that other people would do that.

I see £15bn promised for road investment. Investment I take to mean new roads, not maintenance. Given that oil prices will rise in a few years, that we need a greener economy and that evidence shows that road building just creates more traffic rather than reducing congestion, this is likely to be not only a waste, but actively damaging to the environment.

There’s £500m for making vehicles zero-emissions; a commitment better achieved by a more free-market solution such as taxes on emissions, and £200m for cycling safety. £200m is utterly pathetic. Cycling ought to be a major target for urban transport, reducing pollution (both lung-destroying and climate-destroying), congestion and danger, and making people fitter, healthier and happier. Yet it is less than 1/80^th of car spending and 1/190^th of train spending.

Finally, there’s a commitment to faster internet. This long-standing commitment (so not really a new pledge) has recently been subject to an NAO report that found that it had been very poorly implemented. I wonder if rural areas really will get the broadband that they need. Many farmers were angry that they were told to file online with the RPA when they don’t have internet access, and I experienced that myself on some recent farm visits.

The final part of this commitment says ‘We will also release more spectrum from public sector use to allow greater private sector access. And we have set an ambition that ultrafast broadband should be available to nearly all UK premises as soon as practicable.’ So the commitment to superfast internet isn’t about installing nationwide optical fibre or providing computers for everyone (easily doable with the HS2 budget). It’s about releasing public assets for private profit. 

           In summary, then, we will spend £200m on the right general thing, but probably on silly things like subsidising 10m cycle lanes (see box 1), £500m on a nice thing, but with a goal which could be better achieved with a different policy, and the remaining £99bn on waste.