The £30bn question: will Tories embrace infrastructure report or stick with rhetoric?

The cost of upgrading the UK’s infrastructure to make it fit for the future is likely to be £30bn a year of public money, plus about £40bn-50bn a year of private sector investment, the National Infrastructure Commission has said.

That figure of £30bn is strikingly similar to the Labour party’s promised investment of £28bn a year to meet the UK’s net zero targets, shift the economy permanently to a low-carbon footing, and create new green jobs.

And that creates an ideological problem for this government. Labour’s £28bn promise has been the subject of ridicule and attack by the prime minister and his cabinet. Communications from Conservative party headquarters have made it clear this is a key line for its election campaign – they intend to claim that £28bn is unaffordable, unnecessary and it will cripple the UK’s economy.

Sir John Armitt, the chair of the NIC, was an unsurprising choice for the role as he was the engineer in charge of delivering perhaps the country’s last great infrastructural achievement, the London Olympics of 2012. His view is unequivocal: upgrading the UK’s infrastructure is not just a matter of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions, important though that is. Economic competitiveness in a modern economy requires energy, transport, water, communications and other basic infrastructure to be modernised and maintained. Those investments will also ensure a decent quality of life, good health and a thriving natural environment.

“We stand at a pivotal moment in time, with the opportunity to make a major difference to this country’s future,” he said, unveiling the NIC report. “But we need to get on with it.”

The figure of £30bn a year is at the upper limit of what the NIC is legally allowed to call for. Under rules drawn up by the then chancellor, George Osborne, when he set up the body in 2015, the NIC must ensure its recommendations are costed and fall within a spending “envelope” of 1.3% of GDP a year. Currently, that is about £30bn.

Hours before the NIC report was finalised, the energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, stood up in the House of Commons on Tuesday night to ridicule Labour’s £28bn proposal. “Can the right honourable gentleman be proud of his record?” she sneered at Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow net zero secretary. “He said we should sacrifice our growth to cut emissions, that we should borrow £28bn in his blind ambition for 2030.”

Yet for all this negative campaigning, there was little said by ministers at the Tory party conference of what an alternative vision for a thriving Britain might look like. Where were the Conservative investment plans for new jobs and growth? There was plenty on roads, but little else. Shaun Spiers, the executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, has called this “the Trabant strategy” – like the economies of eastern Europe in the declining days of communism: churning out inefficient cars that nobody wants as the rest of the world has moved on.

It is striking how many of the NIC report’s recommendations run contrary to recent government rhetoric. Take rubbish, for instance. Recycling rates need a boost, the report found, before we drown in our own waste. Contrast this against the claim Rishi Sunak and his ministers have been gleefully repeating that they have saved householders from having to use seven bins for rubbish.

Restrictions on the use of cars are also high among the report’s priorities. Investing in public transport is necessary, but not enough by itself – people will also have to be encouraged or forced out of their vehicles if our towns and cities are to avoid becoming so congested they cease to function. This is a matter of economic productivity, the commissioners made clear – they contrasted the UK’s major cities with those of similar size and importance in Europe and found it took far longer to get into and around British cities than those in the EU, owing to woeful public transport outside London.

Yet ministers have been fuming about “15 minute cities”, baselessly accusing councils of rationing trips to the shops, trying to put an end to traffic reduction schemes and vowing to face down a supposed “war on motorists”.

If ministers stick to their martial rhetoric in the face of this calm assessment by experts of the failures that are holding the UK back, the result will be a continuation of the UK’s stagnating productivity, while less ideologically hamstrung nations elsewhere simply get on with their trains and trams.

The government has taken to attacking independent advisers recently, with the Committee on Climate Change in the line of fire. So there is a danger the NIC will also come in for criticism.

The NIC report is a thorough, 222-page, once-in-five-years report from a body set up by a Conservative chancellor. It took teams of experts two years to compile, and is a sober, reflective and solid piece of work that could serve as a blueprint for the UK’s economy for the next crucial decade, when much of the new infrastructure that will be needed between now and 2050 must be built.

If the government cannot accept that, only the Trabant strategy remains.