According to the Times (behind a paywall) these are the priorities for UK national investment according to the UK public right now, as recounted to Ipsos Mori:
One to five are all Green New Deal priorities.
I admit water is also a big deal.
And I would put all roads lower down the list.
But the message is getting out there.
Except to Philip Hammond, I am sure.
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Does the UK public really believe that all ten of these are bigger priorities than
– health and social care,
– education and skills,
– policing, crime prevention, prisons and offender rehabilitation and
– security (incl. particularly cyber-security) and defence?
If so, I worry deeply about what we have done to our society.
This is about infrastructure
That’s right – infrastructure it is.
As a social housing developer I can vouch for the flood defences too as effective defences will free up land for development (affordable housing) even within cities where under ground brooks and rivers will be better protected from spates in major tributaries.
The roads in my native Derbyshire are a mess at the moment (as a cyclist the pot holes are lethal) and in the city where I work broken down traffic lights seem to go unrepaired for weeks on end.
I do get the feeling that our country is beginning to fall apart.
Current DEFRA rules say you can only spend flood defence money to protect existing dwellings or businesses. So people who have already built on the floodplain get bailed out by the rest of us when it floods but social providers cannot get money upfront to create safe new land for housing. In fact, the best flood defences are often miles upstream, slowing the flow and stopping runoff. A moral more widely applicable?
Until we dam the Wash flood defences as far inland as Bedford are needed, and will be pretty useless
But no one is taking the need seriously and when it’s too late much of the most fertile land in the UK will be saline polluted
As the prime-minister says “the government has no money of its own” to pay for all these infrastructure goodies, etc. which begs the question is she either to devious or too stupid to ask herself who does “own” the nation’s money creation powers and what constraints are in place to stop them engaging in control fraud and how on earth does the Bank of England exercise its power to control the base rate!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/18/pmqs-verdict-corbyns-easy-win-on-the-economy-should-worry-tories
Agreed
I am curious as to how they separate “New energy generation” and “Nuclear power”?
Is the implication that nuclear power has some other purpose? At any rate I hope that the nuclear fans don’t get their way (for a variety of reasons).
In terms of real priority Water should be first. We take that as read and shouldn’t.
Foul water drainage is intrinsically linked.
I’d be inclined to put a total halt on any new road building that is not already underway and concentrate resources on making good what we’ve already got. Forward planning for transport is an area of immense uncertainty. Self driving vehicles will make for a bigger transformation than the replacement of horse drawn transport by the automobile. We have no way of knowing how many vehicles will be on the roads in a decade. Personal vehicle ownership could conceivably become a purely leisure activity for petrol-heads; and confined to special off road use only. For comparison think inland waterways and railway tracks as cycle-ways.
Why own a vehicle when you can have one arrive at your door as required to take you where you wish to go and then effectively disappear until you want one to take you home again. And where will you be going. Not to work in a factory. Nor indeed a bank if the crypto-nerds get their way.
Self driving public transport could be much more frequent. There would be few staffing requirements.
The jury is still well and truly ‘out’ on Nuclear energy facilities. I’d like to see some sensible and practicable means of dealing with radio-active waste before we create much more of it. At present it is totally un-costable. If it can’t be stored safely in central London (in a redundant underground carpark for example) I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any other community to accept being saddled with it. The entire output of Hinckley B could be online long before it’s completed by continued development of sustainably generated electricity. (Actually it probably will anyway. And will need to be)
Why anybody would bother to ask (an ill-informed) public to advise on this sort of priority is a mystery. Should we have a referendum about it and then slavishly follow its conclusions to perdition?
Housing ? Yes.
Flood protection? Probably not. It would make more sense to remove housing from flood prone areas and then review the situation. It would be useful to have a clearer idea of potential sea level rise before we spend billions on Canutist policies.
Perhaps Lord Lawson could be engaged to head a commission on the subject. His conclusions could be expected to comprehensively debunk the idea that we have a flooding problem at all. That will save massively on unnecessary expenditure.
On public transport and specifically railways. Considerable progress could be made swiftly I suggest by subjecting all personnel above the lowliest management level to an ERT.
This Engine Recognition Test would weed out all the experts who can’t tell a Deltic from a Gresley Pacific. They could then be sent home making way for enthusiasts who would perhaps make the railways fun again.
There are three priorities in this list that would not feature in mine (nos 6, 9 and 10). While I am glad to see railways topping the list I would also like to see improving bus routes feature on this list. However, as evidenced by the shares on twitter, facebook and my own blog I am impressed by this.
As a bus user, I agree
Looked at slightly differently, 4/10 are about transport, be it road, rail or air and people or goods. Unfortunately journalists, politicians and individuals still see these in separate boxes. As we move into a world likely to be transformed by autonomous, electric vehicles, for passenger and goods, current ways of looking at transport are not helpful. More than ever we need to look at transport as a whole and then work out what Infrastucture is needed to support it.
It’s not unlike where the growth of renewables and dispersed sources of energy requires a very different infrastructure for distributing energy. Plus of course, energy and transport will be ever more linked in an EV world
If the (large number of artics) currently on the M1 were being driven by AI there would still be the same number.
PS And as a keen cyclist, I should have put bikes in there somewhere too!