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Put money into road resurfacing
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That is true in the sense that they remain usable, but anyone who drives on them will attest that many are hopeless patchworks of repairs, potholes and other defects. They are, and have been for a very long time, well below the standard that might be expected in a fully developed and still relatively wealthy community.
Although Mr Sampson suggests that the road network is more or less fit for purpose, it has been revealed through the Scrutiny process that road resurfacing is currently proceeding four times more slowly than it should be. The Transport department says that this is because it does not have the funds to undertake all the necessary work and that it has been pleading for sufficient money for the past 15 years.
The department’s complaint – if that is what it can be called – comes in the wake of extraordinary revelations from the Fiscal Policy Panel, the independent advisers who report to government on the state of the economy. Last week the panel announced that only a proportion – and a small proportion at that – of money supposedly set aside to stimulate economic activity has been spent.
Despite lip-service being paid on a monotonously regular basis to the notion of joined-up government and the strategic oversight provided by the Council of Ministers, it still appears that important parts of the big picture are being missed. Roads quite clearly qualify as infrastructure, repairing them provides jobs and pumps money into the economy, so what could possibly be wrong with the idea that stimulus money could – and already should – have been used to fund the work that Transport would like to carry out?
Meanwhile, there is a puzzle which is considerably older than the issue of the non-use of stimulus funds. Whatever happened to the plan to fund road repair from at least part of the duty paid on fuel? That eminently sensible scheme first saw the light of day some two decades ago, but, like many other good ideas, seems to have sunk without trace at some ill-defined point in the past.
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