AS the Right-wing Tory papers mock Labour’s spending plans with images of Jeremy Corbyn papering Labour central office with £50 notes, it’s worth remembering one thing.
Both sides are pledging to borrow and spend many tens of billions of pounds. And when that happens, whether it’s the reds or the blues in Downing Street, history tells us the end product is waste.
That’s not to say it’s wrong to spend. Far from it. Brexit paralysis in government decision making has seen major projects frozen across the UK. That in turn has caused havoc for our civil engineers. The likes of Kier, Interserve and the rest would be in far less strife now if we had more clarity on the futures of Crossrail, HS2 and all the rest.
But major public spending projects have a nasty habit of producing inefficiency and corruption, with public money disappearing in high wage demands, gold-plated technology and inflation.
One US chief executive in town last week spoke from recent experience; the Longfellow Bridge linking Boston to Cambridge took just seven years to build in the early 1900s. Thanks to an apparent obsession with sticking to the same construction techniques as its top-hatted founders used, the thing recently took five years to repair. All because contractors knew the taxpayer was good for the $300 million bill.
Money abhors a vacuum. And when the spending taps are turned on without strict value-for-money controls, it pours in, never to be seen again.
We should spend more on big infrastructure, but we must make sure we also invest in making sure our commissioning bodies have the skills to keep the projects honest.
