Steve Score, Socialist Party national committee
Sewage and pollutants pour into our rivers and coastal waters. Hospitals and schools are literally crumbling because of a lack of investment. Many trains are over their age limit. Bridges and roads are collapsing. Regular weather events seem to constantly surprise authorities – resulting in flooding, fires and rails buckling.
You would think this list was enough to show the dire state of Britain’s infrastructure, but it is far from comprehensive. The dictionary definition of economic infrastructure is “the basic systems and services that are needed in order to support an economy, for example, transport and communication systems (including broadband) and electricity and water supplies.” This leaves a lot out, such as flood defences and ‘social infrastructure’ like housing, hospitals, and schools.
All these things, and more, are in desperate need of massive investment. The failing infrastructure impacts the quality of people’s lives, levels of poverty and regional inequalities, the lack of action to deal with climate change, sustainable growth and, particularly important to British capitalism, the level of productivity and therefore international competitiveness of the economy.
Approximately a third of all government investment in infrastructure is allocated to local government – devastated over a decade of austerity. £15 billion was wiped from council finances between 2010 and 2020. Inflation is hitting funds too; the County Councils Network estimates costs could rise £3.5 billion in the two years to 2024.
One example of what is needed is that local councils say that 3,200 bridges need repair, at an estimated cost of £1.2 billion, but only a fraction of that work is planned over the next five years. Over the year 2021, the RAC reported that 100 council-maintained bridges were declared unfit for the heaviest vehicles, with 17 bridges collapsing entirely and 37 partially. The required repair bill for school buildings alone is estimated to be £11 billion.
This doesn’t mention the housing crisis and the desperate need to build millions of council homes to solve it, the libraries, youth clubs and other community services that have gone. Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates in May’s local elections put forward a strategy to reverse council cuts using reserves and borrowing, and to build a mass campaign to force the money needed from the government. We raised the example of Liverpool City Council in the mid-1980s, led by Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party. It forced Thatcher back and built over 5,000 council houses, six new nurseries, six new leisure centres, and more.
Years of austerity meant stagnation in national infrastructure investment, even before the pandemic hit the economy further. But now, it also faces the problem of further escalating costs due to inflation. The price of construction materials in July 2022 was 46.2% higher than it had been in January 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. The cost of borrowing rises with interest rates too.
It will also cost more to ensure sustainability and reduce the impact of climate change. Budgets for any major investment planned now will inevitably be exceeded by the time they come to fruition.
The Tory government regularly promises money to go into infrastructure schemes and has talked of a “levelling-up” agenda, particularly with reference to more investment outside the southeast to deal with regional inequality. In March the Financial Times reported the Department for Levelling Up was set to spend £2.42 billion less than planned for the year 2022-23.
Last year they promised £650 billion investment in infrastructure over the next decade, at least half of which they hope will come from the private sector. But will the reality match up to the rhetoric?
According to the government’s own infrastructure commission, last year saw just 55,000 heat pumps installed, the target being 600,000 a year by 2028. 300,000 electric vehicle charging points should be available by 2030, but there are currently just 37,000. In September 2021, just 6.3% of homes had full fibre-optic broadband compared to 53% in Romania and 21% in Kazakhstan.
HS2 was trumpeted by the Tories as being a key investment that would link London, the Midlands, and the North with high-speed trains, enhancing business and bringing money to more deprived areas. It was never planned to serve every area and didn’t deal with the lack of investment across the whole rail network, just 38% of which is electrified. It has since suffered from delays, escalating costs and parts of the route ditched. Local buses have seen cuts to route subsidies, and have deteriorated under privatisation and deregulation.
Take another example, hospital buildings. The UK backlog on maintenance just to keep the existing ones from crumbling is at least £10 billion. It has been revealed that many hospital roofs were built with ‘aerated concrete’, which have now passed their 30-year life spans – threatening imminent roof collapse!
Boris Johnson famously promised “40 new hospitals”, but the only actual hospital construction since then has been in projects approved before the announcement. The six hospital trusts that at that time were allocated potential funding were later asked to revisit their plans to reduce the costs. They are still waiting to see if they get approval.
There needs to be a huge increase in hospital bed numbers and overall capacity, beyond the cost of simply maintaining or replacing crumbling buildings. This is of course ‘capital expenditure’ and doesn’t include the need for extra funding on running costs – not least the necessary increase in NHS pay as part of measures to recruit and retain more staff.
The government plans for over half of infrastructure investment to be private. The Tory and Labour reliance on private sector money has failed in the past, and it will again. Private Finance Initiative schemes financed £11.8 billion of hospital buildings across England but are costing the NHS £79 billion in repayments over 30 years.
Privatisation is part of the problem. While water companies have failed to invest in new infrastructure to reduce water leaks in the system, and to deal with sewage overspill, they were making billions in profits and handing them out to their shareholders.
The energy crisis in Britain has been exacerbated by the inadequate investment in storage ability for gas in times of surplus to allow it to be used in a crisis. Of course, even more important has been inadequate investment in renewables, energy conservation and sustainable planning. But Centrica (owners of British Gas) announced the tripling of its profits in 2022 to £3.3 billion and decided to give a £3.7 million bonus for the year, on top of his £790,000 annual pay, to its boss Chris O’Shea.
Some left-wing parties and politicians globally advocate increases in infrastructure investment as part of Keynesian spending plans, including as part of a ‘Green New Deal.’ The Socialist Party supports investment to address climate change and improve infrastructure and working-class people’s live.
But even capitalist governments, like the Tory Westminster government, have been forced to promise increased investment in infrastructure to try to deal with the dilapidated system – not motivated primarily to meet the needs of the population, but to generate economic growth and a more profitable environment for the capitalists.
A feature of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s brief time in Downing Street was pledges to speed up investment in infrastructure in a frenzied bid for ‘growth’. Their programme was thwarted by the capitalist markets, record levels of public debt built up since the 2008-09 economic crisis, the pandemic, and high levels of inflation.
Joe Biden’s much publicised $1.2 trillion (£900 billion) “decade of infrastructure” investment plan is another example. His plans however, as a proportion of US GDP (national income) amounts to just over 0.5% a year over the 10 years and is woefully inadequate.
The Socialist Party called for a vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto which promised to “launch the largest-scale investment programme in modern times”. Corbyn, promising to extend taxes on higher earners and close tax avoidance loopholes, mobilised hundreds of thousands of young people. The opportunity to seize the time and transform the Labour Party from an out-and-out capitalist party into a mass democratic party of the working class – as the Socialist Party campaigned for – was lost.
In defence of the capitalist class, whose profits would be threatened by such a party coming into existence, the Blairite right-wing of the Labour Party assisted in undermining Corbyn’s leadership and is now taking steps to drive all elements of his influence and support into the dust.
The Tories, assisted by the Blairites, whipped up press stories of ‘magic money trees’ and Corbyn’s Labour ‘bankrupting Britain’.
The subsequent Covid crisis resulted in far more expenditure by Boris Johnson’s Tories. However, that was aimed at propping up capitalism itself, and some of the sizeable increase of spending was filtered off by private profiteering by PPE and ‘Test and Trace’ companies, for example.
Ultimately it is the failure of capitalism itself to overcome the short term demands of profits and its own economic crisis that results in a rotting infrastructure. A left party, looking to carry out large-scale investment in the interests of the working class, would need to mobilise mass support and be armed with a socialist programme.
To seriously deal with the investment needed in Britain’s infrastructure, a first step would be the renationalisation of the privatised utilities and services – energy, water, post, telecommunications, rail, and transport. A socialist government could use the profits of those companies to finance dramatic improvements.
But a socialist plan would go further. Despite the cost-of-living crisis facing most of the population, research by Unite the Union showed that profit margins for the top 350 FTSE companies were 89% higher in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period in 2019. The wealth of the UK’s billionaires has risen by over 1,000% in the last 32 years, to £653 billion in 2022.
Nationalising the banks and big construction companies would enable rapid investment into long-term projects. Taking the top 150 companies into public ownership, with compensation only on the basis of proven need, would do more than just allow the necessary finance. It would allow a socialist plan to be developed and would mean that the chaos of the private profit motive and the markets could be replaced by a national discussion on what was needed and what should be prioritised. It would be necessary to have genuine democratic working-class control and management of those industries and sectors to conduct that discussion and develop that plan.
Then such things as a genuine ‘green new deal’ could be developed, investment in an environmentally sustainable way, a massive expansion in improved and subsidised public transport, including free buses, and communication systems, and greater investment in renewable energy, its storage and conservation.
To achieve these things a socialist transformation of society is needed, and a mass movement led by the organised working class is required to make it happen. Clearly Starmer’s Labour Party has no intention of doing that. The creation of a new mass workers party would be the start of a discussion on not just defending our living standards and services currently under attack, but also long-term planning to create a better world – a socialist world.
