Andrew Van Sickle editor@moneyweek.com
“I’m sure Britain will look lovely once it’s finished,” remarked a German friend as I drove her to the airport after she had spent several months working here. I opened my mouth to protest that it wasn’t as bad as all that, and look at Berlin airport for heaven’s sake, but then the car hit a pothole, and I lost my train of thought. Two minutes later, confronted with a new temporary traffic light, I decided not to say anything.
The country has undeniably become one big pothole with work proceeding at a glacial pace and costs spiralling upwards (Scotland is suffering too; Merryn keeps us updated on her Twitter feed). We build more slowly and expensively than almost anywhere else, and this is the main reason our productivity is subpar, says Sam Richards of Britain Remade, an independent campaign group.
And without higher productivity, we have no prospect of bolstering long-term growth and being able to afford all the services an ageing population will require. “Productivity is not everything,” said economist Paul Krugman, “but in the long run it is nearly everything.”
If a country can’t build infrastructure and housing reasonably quickly and cost-effectively, dynamic cities won’t be connected efficiently; highly skilled and productive workers won’t be able to live in them and enhance growth; and expensive energy will hamper economic expansion. Britain Remade notes that building laboratories costs twice as much here as in Amsterdam. We haven’t built a new nuclear-power station in 29 years, while the planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing totalled 63,000 pages.
Statist stasis
Sam explains the mess in more detail, and what might be done about it, in our interview on page 28. What leaps out, however, is the extent to which the building system is still being held back by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which effectively nationalised the right to develop land. In no other developed country is this the case.
This particular element of the Sovietisation of our economy in the late 1940s was not undone in the 1980s. Instead, it was exacerbated by the Conservative government, as Anthony Breach of the think tank Centre for Cities noted on a blog on ConservativeHome last year. “Attempts to review the green belt in the early 1980s and increase freedoms to build on non-green belt agricultural land in 1987 were me
