Keir Starmer, in his commitment to increased defence spending, stated: "In the short term, it can only be funded through hard choices". His first choice was to cut foreign aid.
This week, we have seen approval of an enormously expensive road scheme, the rebuilding of the M3 Junction 9 (just another in a whole slew of similar announcements across the country).
At the inquiry into this scheme, it was already apparent that its economic justification, even in the absurd calculation mechanism used by National Highways, was marginal and only met any kind of value-for-money criterion by the invention, without any justification, of what NH called 'wider economic benefits'.
What we see now is a scheme costing £290m, which, discounted to the 2015 economic base year, computes to £177m, compared with the figure presented to the inquiry of £113m—a rise of 57 per cent.
At the inquiry, NH indignantly rejected the Winchester FoE argument that the normal 33 per cent 'optimism bias' should be applied to the construction estimate, saying that they had already allowed for all contingencies.
Against the increased construction cost, the supposed user benefits of travel cost reduction can only be assumed to have declined since the inquiry.
They are dependent on a growth forecast that has already significantly failed to appear and cannot be plausibly relied upon.
The benefit-to-cost ratio is now 0.86, even before we factor in the failure of the predicted growth curve.
This is a project where the taxpayer spends significantly more than he/she gets back.
In a world where monsters are in power and insanity grows by the day, this piece of economic and environmental madness may not seem much, but Winchester will be plagued by years of traffic disruption, noise and pollution, followed by major traffic growth on its streets (the scheme economics feeds on and generates this growth) and no comparable benefit.
The economy of the nation does not improve (roadbuilding generally correlates with declining GDP downstream), public transport suffers, and net zero objectives are no longer plausible.
Starmer has announced that NHS England will be abolished and absorbed into the DHSC.
Whatever the arguments for that, there is a much stronger case for demolishing National Highways.
It is an unaccountable organisation that makes its own rules for spending taxpayers’ money (the business cases for most road building decisions are not even seen by a minister).
The Department for Transport does not do transport, in the sense of determining the right strategic transport disposition for the nation; it carelessly and lazily presides over two independent silos of road and rail.
Here is a real case for rooting out bad practice – an easy choice, Mr Starmer.
Christopher Gillham
Winchester Friends of the Earth
Upper High Street,
Winchester
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