1. John Trayner, Speech to Guardian conference, 'Key worker housing: building on foundations to crack the crisis', Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, 25 May 2004.

2. See also Peter Ackroyd, London: the biography, Chatto and Windus, 2000.

3. Malcolm Wing, Speech to Guardian conference, 'Key worker housing: building on foundations to crack the crisis', Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, 25 May 2004.

4. RAC Foundation, 'Commuting: The Facts', press release, 22 July 2003, and posted on www.racfoundation.org

5. Leeds EQUAL Telework Project, 'Telework statistics increase again', quoting Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey statistics, and posted on www.equaltelework.org

6. ONS, Social Trends 34, 2004, page 151 and table 10.4

7. ONS, Social Trends 34, 2004, table 10.2, page 150

8. See the ranking of America's top 1000 firms in Fortune, 5 April 2004, page F-34 and F-36

9. Christopher Parkes, 'Schwarzenegger hits gas pedals on Hydrogen Highways plan', Financial Times, 23 April 2004, page 6

The continuance of Victorian Britain

This article was written for the Mind the Gap seminar about the backwardness of construction and transport on 17 June 2004, part of the seminar series Facing the Future: are we too risk-averse?, sponsored by Hill & Knowlton and organised by spiked online. James Woudhuysen takes a look at the decrepit state of British innovation.

The speaker was tall, reasonably powerful in terms of status, confident, yet dying to say sorry. Addressing a 25 May Guardian conference held in London and titled 'Key worker housing: building on foundations to crack the crisis', John Trayner, operations director of the bus division of the transport company Go-Ahead, announced that his firm had raised annual pay for its 4000 London drivers to £20,000. (1)

Those wages, he apologised, were for driving buses, in shifts and with overtime, for 75 hours a week.

The pay rise, Trayner said, was the largest ever granted to workers at his company, even though Transport for London, the £4bn agency charged with getting people from A to B in the capital, uses competitive tendering to play Go-Ahead and its prices off against no fewer than 25 rival suppliers of bus services. Yet Trayner said the rise wasn't enough: Go-Ahead had a moral duty to pay more. Why? Because, each year, 30 per cent of his staff are 'written off books' - leave their jobs without telling Go-Ahead, usually because they are in debt. And why are they in debt? At that point Trayner almost shook his head in disbelief and shame.

Because nobody on £20,000 a year can afford to house a family in London nowadays.

In a recent, enthralling three-part BBC2 series on London, Peter Ackroyd spent quite a lot of time evoking its saturnine horrors during the Victorian era. (2) For London bus drivers, there are few such horrors, but the capital city's prospect must often look gloomy. After all, bus drivers are not among those social groups favoured with the policy of 'key worker housing' at John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM).

Everyone needs a proper house or flat. Yet today the British government will only try to find accommodation for what are called the 'caring' professions - for people who are in health, education or the criminal justice system. Faced with skills shortages in the capital, the South East and the East of England, Whitehall has decided that only certain occupations need help buying or renting accommodation.

Through its 2001 starter home initiative, it arranged for a paltry 10,000 new, affordable homes to be built for first-time buyers who were nurses, teachers and police officers. Now, through its October 2003 push on 'key worker living', it has found £690m, over two years, to build a grand total of 67,000 homes for a wider group, including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists, prison staff and probation officers.

Not for nothing has the phrase 'key worker housing' a somewhat Stalinist ring. Still, at the Guardian conference, Roger Poole, once assistant general secretary of the union UNISON, did make the elementary point that the whole idea of giving special treatment to people designated as 'key' is divisive. (3) Altogether, shortages of decent, inexpensive housing are a problem not just for London bus drivers, but more universally.

Housing shortages, however, also highlight Britain's transport crisis.

On today's average levels of pay, most British people have broadly three options in terms of where and how they live. A few can live cheaply, but well out of the way - though in the countryside it is hard to scrape by. Or they can live more expensively in the suburbs. Finally, they can occupy accommodation that is wholly urban, and thus likely to be very convenient from a transport point of view.

But if they do that, house prices usually won't allow them the space to have children on the premises.

All over the UK, then, accommodation is often only affordable if it is located well away from the more expensive, heavily urban districts in which jobs in the UK's services-based economy tend to be found. With smallish, expensive, relatively distant homes to go to, long transport journeys are the rule. That, together with the managerial incompetence that characterises British transport, makes the British take an average of 45 minutes a day trying to get to work - the highest figure in Europe. (4)

In Britain low wages, high house prices, small homes and half a day a week spent commuting all go together. Having the personal space to swing a cat has become something of a scandal. Having the personal freedom to go where one must on a reasonably reliable and expeditious manner is definitely a national scandal. Things are so bad with British construction and transport, the two rather hum-drum sectors are the stuff of conversations everywhere.

In Britain, both homes and transport links are subject to extraordinary delays, whether they are being refurbished or repaired (rare) or being fashioned anew (rarer still). The relentless continuation of Victorian construction methods on-site is also so great, Britain's roads themselves are often made impassable not just by direct road works, but also by endless building work nearby.

British architects, builders, developers and clients for buildings also have something in common with people involved in transport and distribution. For in New Labour's environmental policy and funding framework, mass retailers, haulage firms, motorists, airlines and airline users are all accused of getting away with cheap fuel. As a result, people in transport meet a barrage of politically correct disgust similar to that encountered by British construction.

In Britain construction and transport are widely hated, not for the leisurely pace of their actions, but rather for being too fast. People in and around these sectors are, we are constantly reminded, too ready to

• build on and so damage the British countryside - with homes, roads, airports
• burn dwindling fossil fuels and so add to global warming
• behave recklessly, so putting at risk the lives of building workers and pedestrians

Altogether, construction and transport are joint symptoms of an economic and cultural immobilisme that is common throughout the Western world, but specially acute in Britain. UK firms in construction and transport do innovate, but at a rate even slower than that UK firms in other sectors. And in both British construction and British transport, information technology plays an outrageously modest role.

Ironically, IT - after construction, transport and utilities, the fourth and most modern leg of modern infrastructure - is all too rarely applied to the worlds of construction and transport.

Just as an illustration, take telework. In 2003, people using IT who spend the majority of their working time in their own home, those that use home as a base, and those who occasionally work from home rose in numbers by 12 per cent, to 2.113m, or more than 7.5 per cent of the workforce. (5) No doubt the pain and anger of modern commuting have something to do that.

Yet while BT promises to bring broadband to every home in Britain by 2006, the country's crisis in the supply of homes can only restrict the spread of telework. It is true that in 2002/03, 34 per cent of newly built homes in England had four or more bedrooms, compared with only seven per cent in 1971. (6) But newly built homes throughout out the UK are at levels so low, they have not been equalled since the mid-1920s: just 130,000 were built in England in 2003. And while semi-detached homes, at a third of Britain's 25m households, are the most common type of dwelling, just 28 per cent of them have been built in the past 40 years: all the others are older. (7)

As a result, only a minority will be able to go teleworking in anything like a modern, dedicated 'home office'. Many more will have to make do with a cramped or antiquated bedroom or kitchen.

There is no need to be alarmist. Even with revived UK rates of divorce, living alone and immigration, homelessness will not really multiply sellers of The Big Issue any time soon. It is still possible, just, to move around the country. Moreover Britain is not alone in the relative weakness of construction and transport as sectors. In America, you have to go through 218 of the nation's top companies before you find a housebuilding firm. (8)

As for American transport, governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will spend $90m building 200 hydrogen fuel stations in California by 2010, in the hopes that 500,000 of the state's 28m vehicles will be equipped with fuel cells by then. (9) But on the East Coast things are rather different. There, inter-city railways run by Amtrak have been plagued by problems for years.

Worldwide, construction and transport exhibit little of the dynamism of the IT sector. But they do highlight the Victorian nature of 21st century British capitalism. They capture, too, much of what is special about the beast.

This article continues over three more pages

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org and all material is Copyright © 2004 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.