Rachel Reeves’s key choice in this Spending Review is to prioritise long-term investment over day-to-day spending.
Within that, some cash will be routed to the Midlands and the North of England rather than London.
And against tight limits on day-to-day spending, the chancellor chose to funnel funding towards health.
These are important strategic reprioritisations. The key judgements are longer term.
You will not be riding on these railways, or getting energy from new nuclear plants in this Parliament. It will take a few years to see the inside of a newly-subsidised social house. There are no quick fixes to many years of under-investment.
For Reeves this was the culmination of a planned strategy from the important technical changes she made to her borrowing rules at last year’s Budget.
The existence of this extra £113bn capital spending arises from that decision, and it is borrowed money.
All of this has added to the pressure on day-to-day spending in the final years of the Parliament.
Some of those spending settlements look very tight indeed set against growing expectations and demands in education and local councils.
A return to a reasonable rate of economic growth is not just the aim of these plans, it is required to make them credibly add up in later years.
The pattern of spending appears to suggest a hope or an expectation that the numbers will be replenished later, assuming that growth will pick up.
Achieving that will require not just effective and efficient government spending on these major long-term projects, but sufficient confidence and vision to get the private sector to pour its money into similar plans.
So this will not instantly transform the country, the state of roads, hospitals and schools, or the provision of services within them. But with a still healthy parliamentary majority, the chancellor has some time.
There is a pathway here to a more balanced, sustainably-growing economy. Indeed, faster growth will be needed to make the Budget numbers add up.
Credit: Source link
