to think that spending £30 billion on the UK's infrastructure is a stupid idea?

[belledechocchipcookie]

10 billion from the government, 20 billion from private companies. Isn't it a better plan to invest in people so that it will filter down?

1000 more nurses and teachers (or whatever) would pump more money into the economy as they will need somewhere to live (bonus to house building) and have money to spend in the shops (bonus to shops and manufacturing).

Improve the roads means people will get from A to B quicker. It's pointless going from A to B if you don't have a job and you can't afford the petrol. It seems very ill thought out and stupid to me. Could someone explain it to me please

getting from a to b is a cost on the bottom line of every business in this country. if i want to get to the other side of town - a five mile drive - it often takes 30 minutes. fuel consumption on that sort of drive is really bad. this is for me an inconvenience. For the delivery van next to me, that's 30 mins and a increased fuel cost that adds no value to their business.

giving someone like me more money, on the other hand, just adds a little bit to the continued market domination of Asda and Tescos, and not much else.

It has the dual benefits (theoretically) of creating (1) jobs in the short term and (2) the framework for a more efficient economy in the medium term.

makes me angry that this broke country can aways find money for schemes like these, yet still whinge that we are broke when it comes to the vulnerable.

..i meant to add, there is a long standing campaign to make the cross-town road a proper dual carriageway that is currently shelved until 2016 - this would involve tunnelling through the hill behind my house to put in a proper bypass and reduce travel time for that 5 miles to perhaps 5 minutes.

if the current government funds that project, they will gain much love from people who live here (tired of endless traffic queues) but also decrease the cost to every business that runs freight or people on that road, making them more competitive.

Yep, you are being unreasonable. Spending it on more nurses only works when you build more hospitals (ie infrastructure). If you are only making the nurses lives easier or reducing the workload of the teachers you are only benefitting that group of people. Infrastructure benefits far more people because of the ripple-down effect.

Whether such spending will = inflation which will = more hardship is a more interesting question. Especially when loads of countries do the same thing.

I think it'll pretty much all go on The south...

Call me cynical...
In and around London and commuting areas I think.

We don't need more hospitals, we need more staff to work in them (I used to work in the NHS). I can't see how knocking 5 minutes off a commute time is going to help the economy.

getting a bus to the next town here would be a start, we have one every hour :S

We need the money being spent on the infrastucture, as much as we need nurses, midwives, etc.

It's not about shaving 5 mins off the commute. It's about ensuring that all the things we need are transported efficiently, as this reduces the cost to us in the long run. Being held up in a jam adds to the cost of the fuel being used by all those lorries, which in turn pushes up the price of the goods you need. If the roads are better the lorries don't use so much fuel, and this also has the knock on effect of cleaner air.

And another thing. In my home town, we have been trying to get a ring-road or bypass for many years. We should have had one by the mid-1980s, according to the reports we had then. In fact my parents remember a campaign from before I was born to get a bypass built, and I'm 40+ now.

Even now, it can take 20 mins or more to just get across town, a distance of about 1.5 miles, especially at rush hour. And yet the bypass never gets on the drawing board, but the council has just announced plans to build 1000 new houses on the north side of town, and the plans make no provision whatever for improving the transport links. It's going to be a sodding nightmare for us, on the south side of town, to get across to see MIL on the north side, even at quiet times.

If some of this £30billion can get us a bypass, it would go a long way to making our town more accessible and perhaps businesses might come here, when I know some have been put off moving into the town because of the transport.

Do you think this is going to affect anywhere north of the Watford Gap though?? Everyone knows the centre of England is London.

Much of the infrastructure is crumbling or inadequate and money spent on it is money well spent.

Infrastructure does have a knock on effect on the rest of the economy so is worth investing in, regardles of economics.

It's basic economics.

The £10 billion is an investment which they hope will kick start the economy and spur private businesses into spending, banks lending to the companies and basically bring some confidence back into the economy. As more jobs are created, more income tax is paid, more people are employed as a result of the spending. Everyone's a winner.

Now you could argue that you could pump £10 billion into hiring more nurses & teachers and that would have the same effect. Well yes...sort of....for year 1. Then what about year 2, 3, 4....20. Where is the money going to come from the keep paying their salaries?

The fact is that this £10 billion is a one off investment during a downturn. We've an eye watering annual deficit so the last thing we need is to add to that. A one time investment is much easier to argue for than adding billions to the UK deficit. Right now that would be an absolute disastrous signal to send to the markets.

What niceguy said.

belle given that the population has been migrating south for a while now, don't you think possibly more infrastructure is needed where there has been most population growth?

the road i was talking about carries more traffic than some sections of the M6, yet goes down to 1 lane about half a mile from my house. the first campaign for a bypass of the 1 lane bottleneck began in 1976. further down the road again there is another section where for want of a 1-mile section of dual carriageway, there are further 30-minute delays on a daily basis. then there is the 8-roundabout joy of a large town that could use a bypass. once you are on the proper dual carriageway after this, you can manage a smooth mile a minute even at peak times.

for the last 13 years the government has had seemingly little interest at all in funding large-scale projects to please the (largely conservative-voting) Southern dweller. this still shafts UK businesses though.

incidentally, i think transport to-from london isn't the problem - it is East-west travel that seems particularly hard, by road and rail.

going from Brighton to Exeter there are 13 possible routes all involving changes, and only 1 direct train a week. you can get from York to London faster.

..i would add that road-building has been particularly hard in the south east as it is a mix of built-up and highly-protected land and every plan meets with some kind of pressure group or other (either residents or conservationists). still, our council every year submit plans for improvement to be refused by the the government (who basically said 'the problem with your plan is it focusses too much on the two roads you have the most problems with')

even though the plan would put a bloody great road through the hill i walk my dog on, i would support it as it would bring the local economy kicking and screaming into the year of the fruitbat.

i was talking about a decrease of 25 minutes! and if all improvements were done, a total of an hour over about 10 miles of road.

that's an hour every freight driver currently adds to their timesheet, an hour of wasted fuel, an hour added to the lead time of every business delivery that delivers no value at all in terms of an improved product.

basically, the crap state of local roads is a cost to every business that runs traffic through it. a cost that makes their product more expensive by the time it gets on a ferry at Dover.

NHS Supply Chain is also one of the bodies subject to these costs.

YABU. Part of the reason Germany has flourishing manufacturing and loads more jobs for normal people is that after the war the Germans invested their Marshall Plan money in manufacturing and industry. The UK spent it on social housing, which was great in the short term but in the longer term has left UK industry to wither and die, resulting in entrenched poverty and hopelessness for a huge chunk of the population. Meanwhile all those lovely council houses got sold off, leaving us with neither industry nor social housing.

I'd rather the state took care of creating an infrastructure that helps us all flourish rather than just paid a few more salaries.

Agree with all those saying that investment in infrastructure is vital. If we want to be globally competitive we have to do it. Out infrastructure is creaking at the seams and worse than most of our competitor nations - partly because we are (or have been) an economic success and attracted population and business growth, and partially because unlike most other countries, we have never had a national infratructure plan. This is blatantly ridiculous and is now being corrected - although the investment announced today will obviously only go a small way to correct this. I think you will find that there is a significant amount of the investment aimed at the north - part of the 'rebalancing the economy' strategy.

Yes, I can see why they need to cut public pensions now.

There they are saying that there isn't the money for the pensions, etc even when the NHS scheme pays in £2billion more a year than it takes out. But suddenly they can find millions for this. Lying bastards.

I think it's a great idea because all of us that are unemployed are capable of working on roads, rails, or other infrastructure projects. NOT.

CurlyBoy, roadbuilding needs procurement people, HR people, clerical people, catering people etc etc