It takes Dave Newton up to half an hour to drive into Manchester city centre at the weekend. But on Monday morning, and for the rest of the week, that same nine-mile journey takes up to two hours.
Since Newton moved to Oldham 13 years ago, traffic delays have become “gradually worse”. In the last few months things got “very bad” with roads closed and dug up for water mains, a new tram line, buildings and dozens of small roadworks. Then a sinkhole opened in the notorious A5103 Mancunian Way, the third most congested road outside of London.
“It’s less of a physical impact and more of a mental one for me,” he says. “It puts pressure on you: it pushes you to a slightly bad mood before you get to work and, at the end of the day, you know you have to do it again.”
Chancellor George Osborne has promised to put people such as Dave at the heart of his spending review on Wednesday, when he will unveil plans to spend £100bn in this parliament on new infrastructure: roads, railways, power stations and smart meters, flood defences and broadband.
But there should be widespread suspicion of the pledge. Osborne has published national infrastructure plans every year since 2010. These and the latest plan underpin the chancellor’s central themes: that he is investing to create jobs and wealth, giving his party the right to be trusted by voters with the economy.
Analysis of these plans by the Guardian, however, shows these promises are artificially inflated by rising prices, changes to the rules and a host of expensive but still uncertain schemes. In reality, government spending on infrastructure fell in the last parliament.
These findings are corroborated by official forecasts that congestion is likely to double or triple by 2040 plus falling satisfaction among rail travellers, growing concern about the shallow security of electricity supplies in winter, local authorities filling more than 2.6m potholes a year and, most damningly of all, businesses of all sizes saying that infrastructure in the UK is getting worse, not better.
“Even though we have been promised better, there seems to be an inability of government to actually act,” said John Longworth, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, which represents companies employing five million people.
“There’s a certain level of self-satisfaction on infrastructure. Government has been declaring we have wonderful digital connectivity but the standard is simply not good enough: countries like Malaysia and Estonia are much better connected.
“Believing your own propaganda is never a good place to be. They have to get out there and see what’s happening on the ground: the infrastructure is deteriorating.”
Successive surveys by the Confederation of British Industry, which speaks for the UK’s biggest corporate names, are not much kinder.
Last year, members were almost unanimous that political uncertainty and rhetoric were damaging investment. This year, 43% said infrastructure was improving, but more than half disagreed and a similar number said they had no confidence it would improve during this parliament.
John Cridland, who stepped down as CBI director general this month, gave what, for him, amounted to clear criticism: “our ambition has yet to filter through to tangible results,” he said at the time.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has cautioned that 40,000 people have left the construction industry since the recession, contributing to the worst skills shortage for two decades – at odds with talk of a boom in infrastructure building.
And things are about to get worse, according to Jeremy Blackburn, head of policy at RICS, because not all pipeline projects yet have funding and tender prices are forecast to rise 30% in five years. “British infrastructure is undoubtedly facing a funding crisis,” said Blackburn.
Year after year, the State of the Nation report by the Institution of Civil Engineers continues to give the UK a poor rating. Its president John Armitt, just appointed by the Treasury to a new independent infrastructure commission, said national infrastructure plans were a “clear indication of desire”, but warned policy had been shifting in the past few years and investors needed greater political consistency.
“I don’t think even today government would really claim it has that, but it’s working on that and I don’t think any of us should pretend it’s easy,” Armitt said.
The first National Infrastructure Plan in 2010 declared “the immediate challenge is to rebuild the economy, creating the conditions for enterprise to flourish”. It promised £200bn of investment in the parliament to 2015 and beyond, with Osborne taking personal responsibility for “delivery”. (Given the vague timescale of the new commitment, this was somewhat unfairly compared with Labour’s spending of £113-£198bn in the previous parliament, but they stopped mentioning it as each successive plan revised up their predecessor’s investment.)
Year after year, the Treasury upped the ante: the 2011 plan valued the pipeline of projects at £250bn, peaking at £466bn last year, and dropping off to £410bn this summer. Since then, ministers have announced cuts to rail spending – one of the biggest investment programmes.
Adjusting for inflation, the growth in ambition diminishes to £384bn at the last count. But this is not worthy of a simple comparison. In 2013, the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition moved the goalposts further into the future, from 2015 “and beyond” to 2020 “and beyond”. The same year they “changed the methodology” but have not been clear about how, and a year later they added in £50bn of oil and gas projects (already in place, so not an actual increase in investment).
Meanwhile, big schemes including the £50bn HS2 rail project were included in the plans – despite not having permission or funding. On the advice of statistical authorities, maintenance spending was reclassified as capital spending and works listed included better management of roads and feasibility studies – worthwhile, but not what most people call investment.
Of the top 40 priority projects listed earlier this year, less than half were under construction, while those which were still being scoped out or waiting for funding, planning or other consents – so far from certainly going to be built – accounted for half of the total £237bn value.
Delving deeper into national pipeline data appears to back this up: the early national infrastructure plans claim Labour spent £22.5bn-£40bn a year; this compares with implied calculations that, under the coalition, spending averaged £9bn-13bn, and the most recent forecast for this parliament was £14.6bn a year (all figures converted to 2010-11 prices).
Measures of actual government spending suggest a similar picture. Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis by the Treasury shows public sector gross investment falling by more than one fifth in the last parliament. The Office for National Statistics’ Blue Book accounts measure gross fixed capital formation: public investment in this fell in every year of the coalition parliament and private investment should have just recovered to pre-economic crash levels.
Other policies have also withered: the Green Investment Bank has been neutered by limits to its borrowing and plans to privatise it, stripping away its key advantage of cheaper borrowing; schemes to encourage pensions to invest more have not been anything like as successful as hoped; and businesses say there is no evidence yet of promises to streamline planning.
Despite that, James Stewart, former head of the Treasury’s Infrastructure UK unit and a partner at consultants KPMG, said the UK was “still the destination of choice” for investors and welcomed the introduction of the national infrastructure plans.
“Even a half-good [plan] would provide more analysis, much more ammunition for better decision making,” he said.
