Concrete countryside leads to white elephants

The EU has poured billions of Euros (our taxes!) into new infrastructure in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy... so how come Britain gets their economic migrants, and we feed and house them? Jobs and businesses depend on customers and cash flow, not from new infrastructure! If consumers choose to support cheaper Far Eastern economies with their labour-saving automated processes while paying unemployment benefits here, then Richard’s new factories and glibly promised jobs will remain vacuous white elephants.

My earlier profession was designing work-places and relocating businesses who had maximised their existing premises’ potential. Few chose speculative buildings (generally obsolete within 20 years, doubling their over-egged ‘ecological carbon footprint’), for it is easier and cheaper to take an option on a vacant green- or brown-field site and build only when the economics are right. Capital outlay, rent, interest rates, delaying paying creditors and screwing the tax-payer for the maximum Government relocation grants to a low wage area, determines location! Unless dependant on time-critical distribution or footfall, ‘infrastructure’ (roads, rail, airports, parking) is largely irrelevant and any time saved on the politically driven HS2 will merely enrich station cafe profits!

Far from relieving traffic congestion, new infrastructure generates congestion as people and planners take advantage of over-hyped short-term benefits. Compare the quiet M25 London outer ring road of 1985 to that after completion of the Reigate-M3 section with today’s all consuming, over-developed hinterland and biannual extra lanes! It is now more congested than London’s old fruit ‘n veg markets.

The above protest is of course academic as our ‘democratic’ governments have unilaterally decreed Hastings will be expanded and overdeveloped like Ashford and Maidstone with prime agricultural land sacrificed for more homes and roads, more young mouths to feed, more immigration, welfare and ‘green energy’ taxes! Over to Richard!

Barry M Jones

Bixley Lane, Beckley