Government and Treasury should hang its head in shame that the institute feels it still has to make these basic points — things which have been obvious for decades.
And it does rather clash with Skinner’s claim, though he was working under the wing of the Treasury at the time, that the message that infrastructure was a good thing was not lost on Government.
The fact is that ministers such as George Osborne make extravagant claims in their support of infrastructure, but they don’t do anything which is likely to involve spending money.
Neither does the Treasury, which thinks that benefits delivered immediately have massively more value than benefits which last for generations, so favours piecemeal make do and mend over serious long-term planning and spending.
Indeed it was one senior Treasury official who happily boasted that when the railways were still nationalised, the Treasury would always put up fares faster than inflation to drive away customers.
Its reasoning was that if passenger numbers never rose there would be no demand for more trains, and no need to spend more maintaining either the rolling stock or the track.
The results of this kind of thinking are obvious. Anyone trying to drive from London to Scotland has to endure miles of choked motorways and piecemeal roadworks.
Anyone trying to go by rail is fine provided they avoid the weekend and travel only to or from London, never across country.
Flying means long queues for take-off and being stacked waiting to land — and long waits for late aircraft.
It takes just the briefest of trips to mainland Europe to see how it does not have to be like this — all those countries with their allegedly less dynamic economies have massively better infrastructure — but the difference is that they have also had governments who genuinely believed in infrastructure and saw it as their responsibility to make it happen.
Here Government likes to leave it to the private sector and turns a blind eye as electricity companies daily plumb new depths in appalling customer service — for the first time in a generation power cuts look increasingly likely as coal plants are de-commissioned with nothing built to replace them.
Mobile phone companies bang on in their advertisements about the wonders of 4G but anyone trying to get a decent mobile phone signal outside the metropolitan areas is lucky if he or she can get as much as 1G.
4G: A Reality?
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Wi-fi coverage and superfast broadband are simply not available to much of the country. And a report the other day said that traffic speeds in central London were now as slow as they were before the congestion charge was introduced.
So it is good to know, to quote Skinner, that Government gets the message. All we need now is for Government to do something about it. Perhaps they could pretend to be Victorians.
Still there are some successes. Tonight sees a major bash in Fishmonger’s Hall organised by Thames Water which is being held to mark the fact that the Thames Tideway Tunnel — the super sewer under the Thames — looks as though it has the funding and might actually be built.
Contracts are being signed, and a new delivery vehicle set up. A milestone has been reached.
But boy has it been a struggle. It has taken years for Mike Gerrard and his team to get to this point and has involved the heroic efforts of hundreds — if not thousands — of people.
So who can blame them if they feel they deserve a party? In this country, to get a project of this size under way really is a singular achievement.
