Beat these jams with ingenuity
IT IS hard – and extremely expensive – to build infrastructure in Britain. The availability of land is tight, the environmental lobby for reasons good and bad is powerful, and costs are high. But poor infrastructure damages wellbeing as well as wealth: few people enjoy being stuck in a traffic jam.
Common sense, therefore, says we should use our infrastructure better – and, hey presto, when Gatwick is blocked from building a second runway, it finds it can widen its existing emergency one and use that instead.
There are lots of other examples where we can do better with what we have got. Squeezing in an extra lane on the M6. Cutting the interval between trains on the Victoria line in London to 100 seconds. Cramming 80 million people this year through Heathrow.
Technology helps. The Waze app means we use the road network more efficiently, though at a cost to people living in once-quiet suburban streets. Satnav direction makes deliveries more efficient and more precise. We need more of this because all the evidence is that pressures will go on rising. A new study by Oxford Economics projects that the London region will add 2.3 million people by 2030 and become the third largest market of high-income households in the world after Tokyo and New York.
The other side of doing more with what we already have is not wasting money on grandiose projects. There are a lot of tough questions here. Do we need to spend upwards of £50 billion on a faster railway between London and Birmingham? Is that third runway at Heathrow really needed? We all pay for infrastructure, either in taxes or in user charges. So we should all press politicians to heed the message from Gatwick: use ingenuity to find a cheaper way. HOW did governments know what was happening before the economics profession had thought up the idea of measuring the output of a country in Gross Domestic Product? The answer is that they looked at real data: how much coal was being mined, what was exported through the ports, how many journeys people made on trains and so on.
That was laborious. If they wanted a quick picture, a former head of the Treasury once explained to me, they looked at tax receipts. If people were earning more and spending more, taxes came in and the economy must be growing. If not, it wasn’t.
Apply this to those public finances figures out on Friday. The headlines were that the deficit is coming down much faster than the Office for Budget Responsibility expected in the spring and that the Chancellor will have more room in his Budget for tax cuts and/or spending increases. The other story, less noted, was that if tax revenues so far this year are up 4.6 per cent on last year, then the economy must be growing too. Of course there are concerns, but we have not talked ourselves into a slump yet.