George Freeman was elected MP for Mid Norfolk in 2010 after a fifteen year career in start-up venture capital in the technology sector. He worked closely with George Osborne's office in Opposition on the Richards and Dyson Reports reviewing innovation and business support policies, and has contributed to the Growth Review.
History shows that leaders often turn to national infrastructure projects at times of historic economic crisis. It normally pays off. Roosevelt’s dams, Churchill’s radar and Kennedy’s space programme all laid the foundations for long term economic advantage. (Kennedy’s space program is still paying dividends as the platform for the US’s global leadership in IT.)
The Chancellor’s announcements on infrastructure in today’s Autumn Statement are important and timely. We need to get the real economy moving again. The collapse of the New Labour credit boom has made it all too obvious that we need a new model of growth. The crash has called time on New Labour’s economic model of relying on debt-fuelled booms in the City, housing market and public sector. The Government is right to insist on a more sustainable model of long term recovery. We need a more regionally balanced, sustainable and globally competitive enterprise economy to generate the long term savings and investment we need. New investment in infrastructure is a key part of turning these phrases into reality.
Why? Some commentators talk of ‘shovel ready’ Rooseveltian infrastructure ‘schemes’ as if this is about buying growth by putting the unemployed to work in donkey jackets on road building. They completely miss the point. The significance of this investment isn’t in the speed of the payback (in fact modern road and rail infrastructure has quite long lead in times) but in the importance of poor infrastructure on holding back our real economy, the potential of new models of infrastructure funding to unlock new sources of finance and new engines of growth, and the opportunity to energise parts of the sclerotic public sector.





