Forget a Channel bridge and celebrate Crossrail

This column has long been a sucker for a grand projet. ‘Time for a trip to Boris Island,’ I gushed in 2010 when London’s then mayor came up with his much-mocked (though in engineering terms not unfeasible) wheeze to shift Heathrow to a giant man-made landing strip in the Thames estuary. But even I could see no merit in the Foreign Secretary’s equally unscripted suggestion, during the recent Sandhurst summit with President Macron, of a bridge across the Channel — which would play havoc with vital shipping lanes and cost upwards of £120 billion. If the objective is to facilitate continuing trade with Macron’s compatriots after we leave the EU, as one expert observed: ‘It would really be cheaper to move France closer.’

So let us leave that one as a blot on Boris’s jottings pad. Instead let us cleave to the idea that multi-billion infrastructure schemes are not always about political grandstanding. They can be transformative for commuters and commerce, and provide Keynesian stimulus when economies are depressed. Though they are best built with as much private-sector risk capital as it’s possible to mobilise, they are not automatically — as ardent free-marketeers claim — ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money’. Governments have a duty both to renew existing infrastructure as it deteriorates and to plan new works beyond the scope of private investors that will benefit future generations of citizens.

I’ll admit this line of argument has become a little harder to sustain since the demise of Carillion, followed by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling’s glib reassurance that it will not delay the ill-starred HS2 project, on which the debt-laden engineering contractor was awarded a major piece of work last year, even though clearly already under severe financial strain. In search of the positive, I prefer to focus on Crossrail, the great feat of tunnelling beneath London that is scheduled to open its first section on time in December.