Lower Thames Crossing and Old Trafford projects are welcome investments

Good morning. Rachel Reeves will set out a series of measures in her Spring Statement this afternoon. Some thoughts on that in tomorrow’s newsletter.

But for now, some thoughts on what connects the £2bn replacement of Old Trafford and the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing.

Tale of two cities

What connects the Lower Thames Crossing (which Jim Pickard and Gill Plimmer reveal has been given the green light by ministers) and the regeneration of Old Trafford (the subject of a must-read piece by Jen Williams)?

They are both infrastructure projects in parts of the country (the east of England and Greater Manchester) that badly need them. One reason why rail links in and around Greater Manchester are plagued by delays and poor service is the bottleneck around the Castlefield corridor. The Lower Thames crossing will be the first wholly new river crossing in the east of England for 60 years. When I travel the country, some of the worst roads I stumble across, sometimes literally, are in the east of England. And the most frequent delays are caused by the Castlefield corridor.

But they are also both programmes for which the government has a willing partner to do most of the financial lifting. Andy Burnham is asking for just £200mn of public money for the £2bn regeneration of the Old Trafford stadium. And just £2bn of the £10bn cost of the Lower Thames Crossing is to be met by the government. The rest is to be funded by some kind of private scheme — probably toll roads which, due to the nature and intended use of the project, it is well suited to.

These are good reasons to do them in my view. A good question to ask when deciding what to do with limited resources is “where can you pull in additional resources to help?” The UK has surprisingly few toll roads, yet they can be a useful lever for boosting infrastructure spending.

But there’s another important policy takeaway here. Given that Heathrow’s third runway is likely to require considerably more public money than either of these, is considerably more unpopular in its own area, and considerably harder to reconcile with the government’s climate targets, how likely is it really that construction will start under this government? Or will it fall away, replaced by projects such as the Thames Crossing or Old Trafford, where private money can cover most of the cost?

Now try this

We are moving home so, in truth, I have mainly been doing that while failing to see or watch anything. Another terrific Stoke Newington restaurant I will miss having on my doorstep, however, is The Clarence Tavern, whose sister pub, The Anchor & Hope, is far and away the best of the pre-theatre options around the Young and Old Vic.

Top stories today

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• Green versus growth? | Environmentalists will challenge in the High Court today the process by which oil and gas companies were granted North Sea exploration licences, in the latest test of Labour’s attempts to balance net zero goals and business complaints about regulation.