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Why can't the UK do government-led projects?

I would say that the government’s lack of success with large scale projects stems from an ideological problem. Successive governments have espoused the benefited of a free market. The free market does work well if there is sufficient competition and a regular opportunity to compete and enough work to support all companies in the market. However with large scale projects, the government is the only customer in this country. This means that the free market does not work. The government stop and start projects with years of delay in-between. Good examples are the new generation of nuclear power stations and power station builds in general that have been stopped for years. Now the government want some more power stations they find that the companies and skills they need are not there. The companies needed long since went bust. The rail network is a similar story. If the government does not OK projects every few years then the supply compares run out of work. People are laid off. If the government wants large scale infrastructre projects to work then there needs to be a continuous stream of them to keep the skills and companies going. Due to the short term of government it would be better if the plan was agreed by a cross party group for the coming years. That way whoever got into government would not stop all the projects. I think this is another advantage the Germans have as their governments tend to be cross party coalitions.

18 Apr 2012

2:26 pm