The Welsh
Government announced this week that it is working with the 22 local authorities
in Wales on a scheme to use
local authority borrowing powers to boost infrastructure investment in Wales. This looks, in principle, very similar to the
proposal floated by Gerry Holtham some time ago, and effectively circumvents
the restrictions which prevent the Welsh Government from borrowing.
To that extent, it’s
a welcome departure from the usual approach of simply blaming the Tories for
everything. I do have three reservations
though.
The first is the
scale of the plan – or rather the lack of scale. Gerry Holtham suggested that it would be
possible to use this approach to borrow around £2billion for spending over the
five year life of a government. In
comparison to that, £170million looks remarkably unambitious. It’s significantly less even than Plaid’s
rather more modest Build4Wales, which suggested borrowing a mere £500 million
from the private sector.
The second
reservation is that it seems to be restricted to spending on highways
projects. Whilst I’m sure that at least
some of those schemes will be worthwhile, investment in road schemes wouldn’t
be my top priority. And it appears as
though the schemes haven’t even been selected yet – local authorities are being
invited to come forward with proposals.
And that brings me
to my third reservation – the lack of an obvious strategic driver behind the
scheme. Obtaining a large capital sum
for infrastructure investment should be a real opportunity to take a strategic
view and decide on the most important projects to boost GVA. Instead of that, we have a bid-driven
allocation of resources to local authorities – the availability of the money is
driving the spending, rather than the infrastructure needs.
It’s what we’ve
seen far too often from successive Welsh Governments. It’s the same curse which afflicted Objective
One funding and Convergence Funding – an attempt to please as many people as
possible and share the cash around rather than use it to drive a step change.
Sadly, it isn’t
that the Welsh Government doesn’t have strategies – those they have
aplenty. They’re all carefully written,
consulted on, amended, approved, and filed somewhere, with all the right boxes
duly ticked. What they are not, however,
are drivers of government action.
In going down this
route, the Welsh Government was in serious danger of getting something right –
it’s a pity that the implementation is another missed opportunity.
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3 comments:
Surely they should have a grand design on what they want the road (and rail) network to look like in 20 years time, and they should be working towards that plan. Not some ad hoc development dependent on local authority priorities? Or am I missing something?
John
National Savings and Investment originated in 1861 as the worlds first postal savings system with the aim of a facility to provide for themselves should against adversity and ill health allowing ordinary .
as well as providing the Government with accesss to debt funding.
The Westminster Goverment has w handed the operation over to a French company Atos IT Solutions and Services.
The Welsh Goverment look at the possibility of setting up our own N S and I with the option to tranfer existing holdings of Welsh residents into a new Welsh scheme
John
Some of my message was lost in translation
If Local Authorities can borrow from the PWLB at 3.2% which is public money then why cannot we the public also invest directly in the governance of our own Country
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