There’s something quaintly
20th century about the UK
joining the aerial posse over Syria
when the evidence is that the Paris attacks were
planned from within Europe. And funded from where? It could be anywhere. Which means that foreign policy alone cannot
guarantee home security. BBC Radio 4 on
Tuesday broadcast a documentary on the threats posed by growing reliance on the
Internet. With hackers becoming ever
more sophisticated, cyber war is joining nuclear war in the thinking of those
whose job it is to predict and avoid catastrophes. Hackers who gain even temporary control of a national
power grid could do real damage by overloading critical equipment that can take
two years or more to repair. And where
there is chaos there are casualties too.
Austerity and resilience
make bad bedfellows. Cost pressures are
driving the transition to ‘digital-by-default’.
But digital-by-default is a fair weather system. Rip out the back-up, rely on microwave
signals, not copper wire, computer programs, not manual valves and paper
manuals. Then cope with a real
crisis. It’s not just about the back-up
technology. It’s about retaining the
skills you need to operate it. From the
floods of 2014 to Fukushima,
it’s still knowing what levers to pull when the screens go dark that makes all
the difference.
Britain has a great deal of ageing infrastructure. There’s a real drive on right now to upgrade
it. But it’s not just about running to stand
still. UK population is still rocketing,
while the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means that previous standards
of protection simply aren’t good enough.
So far, not so good. The UK, the world’s
fifth largest economy, was this year ranked 27th by the World Economic Forum
when it comes to delivering quality infrastructure. So critical is this problem that governments
stripped bare by privatisation are turning to global investors to fund it, even
ones about whom there are entirely reasonable security concerns. That’s a measure of how far governments of
all parties have abandoned their primary responsibility to uphold our way of
life. The investment being sought is
competing for cash with other parts of Europe. Is there scope for better co-ordination? Much of the continent thinks so and while the
UK
is agonising over Brexit, they’re pushing ahead.
Let’s assume that the UK gets the
investment it wants. Now, who gets that investment
next? Where does the Middle Eastern and
East Asian capital all end up? What are
the new national priorities? The
Conservatives have set up the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by
ex-Labour man Andrew Adonis, to answer those questions. We can be sure of two things.
One is that London will receive vastly more than its fair
share. We’ve shown before the extent to
which this happens. The reason it
happens is that the nations and regions outside London fail to elect sufficient nationalist
and regionalist MPs to stop it. It’s
that simple. Any provincial representative
of the London
parties can be easily bullied into voting more cash for the capital. Because we all benefit from London’s prosperity, don’t we? Because the ‘experts’ tell us it’s the best
possible value for money, don’t they?
Because we’re all in it together, aren’t we? As long as it’s public spending, Labour can’t
think of a single reason to fault it.
The other certainty is that
any regional dimension will be skewed in London’s
favour. This is a well-established
principle seen in other centralised European countries. In France,
spending on motorways and high-speed railways has been designed to reinforce
the Parisian view of France,
linking cities deemed to be within the same official region, while ignoring
links across those boundaries. Brittany’s historic capital, Nantes
is tied more tightly to other cities within the artificial ‘Loire Country’ region
than it is to the rest of historic Brittany. Rennes,
capital of the administrative region of Brittany,
has better links to Paris than it does to Nantes. (Those who understand French can read more in
a book called Bretagne et Grand Ouest by Pierre-Yves Le Rhun.)
Within the confines of
still-inadequate devolution, Northern Ireland,
Scotland and Wales
have all developed national plans with a significant infrastructure
component. With devolution bedded-in,
each has now reached at least its third round of plan-making. England has no equivalent, national
or regional, though the UK Government has what it calls a National
Infrastructure Plan, in fact just a list of big projects taken out of
context. Powerful interests insist that
only local clubs of councils, in theory equal partners in city ‘deals’ with the
London regime but in practice wholly under its thumb, can plug the gap. This is plain wrong, for three reasons.
Firstly, because its
approach to place is wrong. The emphasis
on functional economic areas, the cities-first agenda of combined authorities
and metro mayors, flies on the rhetoric of globalisation and the irrelevance of
broad territory. Equally though, it
flies in the face of the fact that cities are not islands but depend for much
of their life-support on those broad territories that the anti-regionalist
consensus would like to ignore. The
places where you’ll find the water-gathering grounds, the power stations and
the landfill sites. Mayors-for-all is a
timid retreat from real devolution, failing to provide joined-up government at
the regional scale, the scale at which meaningful links can be made between the
major infrastructure providers. Highways
England
plan roads. Network Rail plan
railways. So who’s planning
transport? No-one knows how much wealth
is wasted by the silo mentality prevalent among the utilities. These are companies set up to milk public
services for private profit. Poorly
equipped regulators make matters worse because their remit is protecting the
consumer from exploitation by natural monopolies. It isn’t the wider public interest, so
utilities are, for example, prevented from funding investment ahead of demand
(but are allowed to use their own, unco-ordinated projections of what it will
be). Different aspects of a single
scheme – like the new reservoir at Cheddar – get split between different
control periods and held up accordingly.
None of this would be necessary if powerful regional assemblies ran the
public utilities and decided their own priorities.
Secondly, because its
approach to time is wrong. There is much
more to survival than economics, and getting cities fit to compete in a global
economic system heavily dependent on oil.
In building sustainable regions it’s paramount that we build for the
future, for how the world will be and not for how it is. That means a process of infrastructure
planning driven by long-term political campaigning, not short-term economic
speculation. It means building (or
rebuilding) things like north-south rail links in Wales
and Wessex, or improving
those that run east-west across the Pennines. These are schemes that struggle to pass any
conventional cost-benefit test because that conventional analysis is weighted
so as to reinforce the status quo. One
reason why such a huge amount of transport funding goes to London is that savings in travel time count as
economic benefits of a scheme that can then be quantified in terms of the
travellers’ incomes. The more
highly-paid the travellers, the greater the benefit assumed. As taxpayers, we fund things like the London weighting allowance
that drive up those incomes, and this in turn helps attract more public
spending. Low-wage areas are starved of
transport investment because workers’ time is not valuable enough to tip the
cost-benefit scales in their favour.
Decision-making needs to pay less attention to the biased outputs of
computer modelling and get assertively political instead.
Finally, because its
approach to people is wrong. The
devolution ‘deals’ are characterised by next-to-no public involvement. The various closed-door Leaders’ Boards,
Enterprise Partnerships and what-have-you that come and go exist in the legal
shadows, inspiring no confidence either in their own permanence as entities of
local governance or in the stability of the strategies they devise. That’s no way to attract long-term investment
or to act as the credible equal of the UK State. And accountability? The best you’ll get is to vote once every
four years for a mayor you never asked to have.
The result is likely to be very low turnouts that undermine any claim to
political legitimacy for the new single voice of the area. It’s sad but true that the only reason to
vote at all will be to keep out the candidate most likely to ignore the public
and abuse the power to spend your money on his or her personal preferences.
With investment decisions
now being planned that will shape our society for the next 30 to 50 years,
strong regional voices are more important than ever. We should remember that the regional
dimension in England
is closely related to questions of resilience.
In both world wars, regional structures were central to civil defence
(and in between for organising the Government response to the 1926 General
Strike). The regions in use today – the
boring zones still being touted as the only possible basis for elected
assemblies – trace their administrative roots to the areas for which Regional
Commissioners were appointed in 1939. In
the event of invasion, with London
captured or destroyed, these men would have assumed all civil powers within
their regions. In Wessex, those
men were, in the west, General Sir Hugh Elles, briefly replaced by Sir Geoffrey
Peto, and in the east Harold Butler, later replaced by Sir Harry Haig. Familiar names, no doubt, to those who needed
to know. An article in The Political Quarterly in 1941
commented that: “At last we have
established regionalism, after much discussion and excessive delay. But the experiment in regional government
represented by the Regional Commissioners is utterly different from the kind of
institution which was the subject of so much advocacy and controversy during
the past three or four decades.” It
wasn’t the last time that principled regionalists would be disappointed by
chronic imagination-failure in the corridors of power.
So it’s no surprise to see
renewed calls for regions to take the lead in identifying their infrastructure
needs. In our previous post, we referred
to Surveyor magazine’s coverage of
local devolution. Plans are already in
place to develop Transport for the North into a statutory body by 2017. The Midlands Connect Partnership is
developing similar ambitions. Andrew
Pritchard of East Midlands Councils told Surveyor
that the Government’s agenda is “having
an impact on the way we do things. We
recognise if we are to compete for funding we have to take a more collaborative
approach.” This need not be limited
to transport: Martin Tugwell of the Chartered Institution of Highways &
Transport told the magazine that he welcomed the move to regional transport
planning and said it should also extend to other infrastructure such as digital,
energy supply and distribution and water networks. Flood risk and waste management might be thought
useful additions to that list.
With sufficiently determined
regional leadership, this is an agenda that can be wrested out of the hands of
the London
regime. If not, we shall see more
London-oriented investment, packaged as ‘helping’ the regions plug in to what
they need while in fact adding to what has colourfully been called London’s
‘vampiric suction’. It can be done. We just need a new set of MPs: they’re the obsolete
infrastructure we really need to replace.
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