Britain’s inability to build seems our greatest weakness
Like hardy garden perennials, politicians have topics they can safely return to again and again – particularly helpful if you have nothing overly new to say. One such is the thorny subject of skills. We have, for years now, been promised some version of a revolution in the way we develop ‘skills’ in the economy; a most cursory search of the Government’s website reveals not just a skills minister and a ‘skills taskforce for global Britain’ but the Skills for Life campaign, the Skills Bootcamp programme and the National Careers Service’s Skills Assessment. The safest way to receive an applause line from a business-focussed audience, as a politician, is to promise to upskill Britain.
A column by the former political adviser and economist Sam Dumitriu, however, should perhaps have us muting our applause slightly. Dumitriu argues that it isn’t skills holding Britain’s productivity back, even if (obviously) nobody is objecting to a more skilled workforce. Instead, he argues, it is our inability to build stuff. Exhibit A in his case is the impact assessment for the Lower Thames Crossing, a mooted tunnel under the river between Essex and Kent. It ran, extraordinarily, to 93,000 pages. No wonder the thing hasn’t materialised yet.
What makes the thought so interesting is that it puts the onus on politicians, not on employers, to get on with it. For years now parliamentarians have criticised businesses for relying on immigration to fill vacancies, slammed them for not sufficiently investing in training and barracked them for not playing their part in fixing the productivity puzzle.
Yet if Dumitriu is right, it is politicians not businesses which are the problem. Even free market, libertarian newspapers like ours acknowledge governments have a role to play in, for want of a more technical phrase, building stuff. Politicians at local and national level have the power, with the flick of a pen, to sign off on a whole host of stuff to be built. They choose, for electoral reasons, not to. Worth a thought next time we hear about the skills revolution.