Has our infrastructure become too expensive?

By Sarah Whitney

It has been widely reported that Sir Jeremy Heywood is running his slide rule over HS2 reflecting concerns within Government that the budget for the project could be exceeded.  The cost of HS2 has gradually risen over time, from £32.6 billion in January 2012 to £55 billion in November 2015, up from the previous estimate of £50 billion set two years earlier.

This increase is a particular issue, because the vast majority of the cost of building HS2 will fall on the taxpayer, with perhaps a proportion of those costs recouped on completion by the letting of a contract to operate the line. Therefore, it should be no surprise that a project of this magnitude should be subject to periodic review by one of our most senior mandarins.

Why we need to steel ourselves for a new industrial policy

By Mike Emmerich

There is a view that after its post war flirtation with Morrisonian nationalisation and then Thatcherite privatisation, British industrial policy has settled into a new and desirable norm. As I write this blog, Janan Ganesh’s latest piece for the FT is staring at me. “The quiet success of Britain’s anarchic economic model” reads the headline, setting the tone for an argument to be heard often in parts of Britain that we have moved beyond the rigidity of our more doctrinaire past, and in doing so past our old rivals in France, and maybe even in Germany too, in creating a model that has fixed the generations-old British disease.

Budget 2016: What it means for cities

By Simge Kartav

Yesterday the Chancellor George Osborne delivered his third budget in 12 months.  In his 62-minute speech, changes to tax rates and savings took centre stage. However, his announcements on devolution, transport and business rates are those that will inevitably have a big impact on cities in the UK. 

The Chancellor emphasised that the ‘devolution revolution’ will carry on full speed and announced new deals with the West of England, East Anglia, and Greater Lincolnshire. The Chancellor will be building on existing devolution deals with Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, Sheffield City Region, the North East and Tees Valley; soon 57% of the population of the North of England will be represented by elected mayors. Previously agreed mayoral devolution deals will also each receive unringfenced single pots of funding to spend on local priorities, worth £2.86 billion in total.

A Northern Brew

By Mike Emmerich & Irene Guillet

When there’s a beer named after a Government initiative, something unusual is happening. Thus it is with the Northern Powerhouse. What’s more, the beer in question, a first joint concoction of the Bradford and Leeds Breweries, is a deliberate homage to the spirit of intercity cooperation. And yet to a lot of people the Powerhouse is a failure (because the North-South gap remains) or a con (the work of a Chancellor bent on devolving cuts to gullible local politicians). A little over eighteen months after it was launched, this idea is consumer product, a failure and a conspiracy, or so some would have you believe. There is evidence to sustain only the first of these.

Great Western Cities one step closer to realising Britain’s Western Powerhouse

The Great Western Cities today released its report ‘Britain’s Western Powerhouse’, authored by Metro Dynamics. The report examines the benefits of greater ‘sharing, matching and learning’ between the three city regions – including an influential role for universities, businesses and civil society. The report also identifies major potential for the three city regions in strengthening transport links, expanding renewable energy and improving its international profile.