TThe slogan of the Conservative Party conference – “Long-term thinking for a brighter future” – may have lacked dynamism, but it oozed seriousness. Unfortunately, it turned out that the phrase actually meant scrapping a mega-rail project on which the foundations were imminent and replacing it with a bunch of schemes which, where they actually exist, are unlikely to get planning permission before mid- the decade
Let’s face it, anyone with the ability to think beyond the current news cycle would have avoided Manchester as a place to announce that HS2 would no longer be coming to the city. Under sustained media pressure, however, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could hardly think of the moment.
Ministers kept the media mob at bay long enough to come up with a list of projects to spend the HS2 money on. However, the speed at which this list was revealed showed that it was written by people with as much foresight as a spouse running to the local garage for a bouquet of flowers on their wedding anniversary.
Ministers tried to sell the HS2 decision on the basis that travel patterns have changed since 2019 due to Covid. This is undeniable. But betting on the house (or in this case, the land bought along the HS2 route) for working from home to stay at current levels is the antithesis of long-term thinking.
Electoral reality means that the thinking of the Labor Party is now the most interesting. Kier Starmer’s own speech promise to “get Britain building again” was enough to quicken the pulse of the chairman of the most Tory construction company. The idea of a national fund to invest in infrastructure is promising.
However, there is a bit of the surface and there are concerns that Labor still needs to be aware of how the development works. Starmer leaned heavily on the perennial promise of planning reform. More cash for planning departments will help, but hope for incremental change in delivery by speeding up councils’ local plans, updating national policy statements and increasing planning contributions is at best tenuous. naive The idea that “land bankers” are “sitting comfortably on brownfield sites while rents in their communities rise” is a somewhat cartoonish representation of some complex economics, good for the campaign, perhaps, but of little use to develop viable policies.
The Prime Minister’s vision of plugging holes and jobs making changes to planning rules reveals a sad truth: neither has a solution for the country being over-borrowed post-Covid. The last time Labor took power, the then new private finance initiative came to the rescue. An equally radical rethink of capital spending will be needed to get Britain building again.
