In his budget speech the chancellor, George Osborne, said:
Four-fifths of all journeys in this country are by road, yet we rank behind Puerto Rico and Namibia in the quality of our network.
The claim comes from the annual Global Competitiveness Report compiled by the World Economic Forum (the body that brings you the annual festival of name-dropping that is Davos).
They measure 144 economies worldwide according to the ease of doing business, scoring them on everything from whether their labour force has a “poor work ethic”; to “government instability/coups”.
According to the WEF’s “quality of roads” measure, the UK scores 5.2: that’s actually the same score as Namibia and Puerto Rico are given. So the chancellor is not technically right, but not far off.
That puts the UK 30th in the world for roads, which is considerably lower than its standing on most other categories – apart from the size of the government’s deficit.
