The decision of the Davies Commission to drop the plan of a Thames Estuary airport is the one bit of sanity in the unnecessarily protracted process of working out where our new runways are coming from. As the final report will not be submitted until after the general election, the government has managed to stall for five years a decision that is 20 years overdue. Playing political pass the parcel is not good enough.
We’ll probably never know what this rigmarole costs, but we’ll have to pay for it all the same. And no matter where they put the runway, nobody will be happy. The courts will be choked with judicial reviews and MPs will use any bill to extort favours from the government as it moves through parliament at a glacial pace.
“It takes nine years to get from first shovels in the ground to the first trains running on the first phase of HS2 between London and Birmingham. In a similar time frame, the Chinese laid 1,390 miles between Beijing and Hong Kong.”
This is in contrast to the construction of the Gravelly Hill Interchange, better known as Spaghetti Junction. Plans for it were published in 1965, the road scheme was approved in 1968 and it was completed in 1972.
I wonder how long it would take to put up a Spaghetti Junction today. Our democracy has advanced to the point where minorities can exercise tyrannical power at the expense of the broader national interest.
This means that it takes nine years to get from first shovels in the ground to the first trains running on the 140-mile first phase of HS2 between London and Birmingham. In a similar time frame, the Chinese laid 1,390 miles of high-speed track between Beijing and Hong Kong.
If we are undertaking such projects, to retain our international competitiveness, then taking 10 times longer than our international competitors is not the way to go about it. The result is that we are always playing catch-up, and it begs the question as to whether the vast amounts allocated to such projects will ever represent value for money.
With a new crop of politicians likely to enter parliament on the back of the referendum outcome, and with little capital invested in the infrastructure planning, don’t be surprised if a lot of crucial decisions that need to be made get kicked into the long grass as the post-referendum negotiations get under way.
It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the noted economist, who said: “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.” It will be a shame if some people’s quest for immortality ends up screwing the rest of us.
