The heart of Wednesday’s budget will be a pledge to increase infrastructure spending in the five years of this Parliament by just under £100bn to around half a trillion pounds.
The aim, according to government sources, is to boost UK public spending on roads, rail, broadband, flood defences and so on, so we spend more than competitor economies like the US and France.
The plan is to allow public sector net investment to rise to 3 per cent of GDP or national income, up from 2.2 per cent per cent.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK government hasn’t invested this much since 1978 – though in the decades after the second world war this rate of investment spending was the norm.
All these new projects are part of the effort characterised by the prime minister as ‘levelling up’ the poorer parts of the UK, in the midlands, north, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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