21. 'The 2003 Scientific American 50 List of Winners', Scientific American, 10 November 2003, and posted on www.sciam.com

22. 'About CABE: Aims', and posted on www.cabe.org.uk

23. ODPM, Consultation paper on the Draft Business Improvement Districts (England) Regulations 2004, 18 March 2004, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk

24. Olinka Koster, 'Sacked, the parking warden who didn't issue enough tickets', Daily Mail, 5 June 2004.

25. David Leppard, 'Rich greens go to aid of the country', Sunday Times, 16 May 2004, page 6

26. House of Commons Transport Committee, Navigational hazards and the Energy Bill: ninth report of session 2003-4, 3 June 2004

27. Valerie Elliott. 'Britain must prepare for coming of the great floods', The Times, 23 April 2004, page 14

28. Department for Transport, Framework for a local walking strategy, 28 March 2004, page 2 and posted on www.dft.gov.uk

29. Mary O'Mahony and Willem de Boer, Britain's relative productivity performance: Updates to 1999, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, March 2002, and posted on www.niesr.ac.uk

30. A Manseau and G Seaden, Innovation in construction, Spon, 2001, cited in David Pearce, The social and economic value of construction: the construction industry's contribution to sustainable development, Construction Industry Research and Innovation Strategy panel, 2003.

31. David Pearce, The social and economic value of construction: the construction industry's contribution to sustainable development, Construction Industry Research and Innovation Strategy panel, 2003, Chapter 7

32. Office of Science and Technology (OST), 'Net Government expenditure on R&D by departments in real terms, 1987-88 to 2004-05', Forward look 2003, table 5, and posted on www.ost.gov.uk

33. OST, 'Net Government expenditure on R&D by departments in real terms, 1987-88 to 2004-05', Forward look 2003, table 5, and posted on www.ost.gov.uk

The continuance of Victorian Britain - continued

Writing prior to the joint Hill & Knowlton and spiked! seminar Mind the Gap about the backwardness of construction and transport, James Woudhuysen takes a look at the decrepit state of British innovation.

What, then, really interests the government about construction and transport?

As with the City, government concerns itself less with The Laboratory, and more with The Land: brownfield, greenfield, you name it. Beyond that, there seem to be two broad approaches:

First, New Labour wants to go about raising taxes to choke off demand - demand for:

• Houses - New Labour has raised Stamp Duty, a Treasury charge on house movers, four times since it assumed office
• Access to central business districts (CBDs) - Alasdair Darling, Secretary of State for Transport, has let it be known that Ken Livingstone's Congestion Charge scheme is likely to be emulated nationally. Indeed for his innovatory fiscal tightness, and the innovatory physical tightness he imposes on motorists, Red Ken was named one of the world's top 50 leaders in research, business and policy in 2003 - by no lesser an authority than the illustrious US magazine Scientific American (21)
• Fossil fuels - Gordon Brown's tax hikes are the formal source of today's motorway protests against £1-a-litre petrol prices. Livingstone condemns as 'complete idiots' parents who drive their children to schools in SUVs. With flying, it is only a matter of time before the government taxes aviation fuel.

Second, New Labour is keen on policing, in our cities:

• what Prescott calls housing 'sprawl' - through the Commission for the Built Environment (CABE) , whose aim is '... keeping every client of a new building on their toes' in terms of design (22)
• the design of the encounters that people have with the state - the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, leads the Government's 'design champions' of its Better Public Building initiative
• CBDs designated as worthy of 'business improvement'. Here, to raise levies for litterbins and security guards, local businesses must conform with 14 ODPM Regulations (23)
• motoring speeds - through road bumps and other measures of traffic calming. More and more motorists have also been fined for speeding
• parking. Here too fines are on the increase. Nearly 10m tickets were issued in 2003 - a 12.5 per cent rise on 2002 (24)

Government has long been in the tax business. Critics of the government who focus too much on taxes and fines miss what is new about the construction and transport today.

What is new is that, in the two sectors, a safety-first, therapeutically-inclined New Labour is fearful of deaths, injuries and the litigation that attends these. It is also desperate to engage with business and consumer users of construction and transport. Finally, the government's entirely naturalistic perspective on the environment means that it also fears that global warming will shortly overwhelm Britain with floods.

Result: New Labour favours the imposition of statutory requirements in design and in personal behaviour. Limits, bans and prohibitions are the name of the game in construction and transport, just as they are in matters to do with smoking and obesity.

Things have got so bad that motorists and pedestrians alike find the nation's streets are now infested with metal signs telling motorists what they can and cannot do. Over roads and airports, green protesters are financed by toffs; (25) they then conspire with lawyers and the government to prolong planning enquiries.

New Labour is so hostile to fossil fuels, its energy policy looks as if it could directly restrict the movement of trade itself.

The government has run headlong into intermittent wind farms, built to the size of the city of Nottingham and located off the coasts of Scotland and other areas. In the process, it overlooked the likely impact - literally - on container ships. The House of Commons select committee on transport had this to say about how the government arrived at its policy. It was:

'… overseen by a steering group of 15. Six members of the group were from Government Deparments, five were from Government agencies, three were from environmental NGOs plus a representative of the Wind Energy Association. There was no representation from the Department for Transport or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, nor from port or shipping interests.' (26)

It is a sign of the times that Ed Mayo, previously chief executive of the National Consumers' Council, now heads a government committee to press people to adopt Greener lifestyles. (27) We can expect the Department for Transport's 'procedural guidance' for local authorities, in the shape of its Framework for a local walking strategy, will detain Mayo a fair bit. If local authorities can persuade people to walk, the thinking goes, they could reduce traffic, and link up with local health improvement programmes and health action zones. (28)

In the popular perception, there seems little realistic alternative to the current state of permanent grief in both construction and transport. A few Green alternatives are trotted out, such as even more bans on road-building; but these things fail to convince the British public. Any sane person can see how much must be done in construction and transport over the next 20 years.

The British like to engage in self-loathing, and nowhere more than in matters of urban regeneration and general transport. Yet if we take a quick look at some statistics, it's evident that the retarded nature of British construction and transport is, in principle, something that can be overcome.

First, if Britain was able to emulate the capital intensity of construction in Germany and France, or the deployment of information and communications technologies (ICT) in construction in the USA, there would be big improvements:

Productivity in international construction: Britain lags

UK = 100 figures for 1999 (29)

The story in research and development (R&D) in building is even more favourable for Britain - if its construction sector can catch up with practice in Northern Europe:

R&D in international construction: Britain lags - again

R&D per £1000 building output, 1999 (30)

• Britain £1
• US £2
• Japan £3
• Denmark £7
• Netherlands £10
• Finland £25

Of course just to spend a Finnish £25 on building R&D for every £1000 of UK building output by no means guarantees, on its own, that innovation will really happen. Nevertheless, no amount of brilliant British boffinry can compensate for the abysmal level of research that goes on in UK construction.

In the late 1990s, R&D in UK construction was £140m. But higher education and and trade associations spent 88 per cent of this. In other words, the UK's mainstream building firms spend perhaps £17m on R&D. (31) Yet if fragmented private contractors have abdicated much of the responsibility for this state of affairs, so has the government.

The table below looks at government spending on R&D under a number of headings. While the Department of Industry (DTI) has duties with regard to boosting construction industry technologies, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) looks after housing, planning and what it calls 'sustainable communities'. Here are the figures:

Net real UK government R&D spending, £m (32)

The government money spent on the Department of Transport was £44.9m in 1995-6. (33)

A few things are immediately clear:

• State expenditure on R&D in major civilian domains is an order magnitude smaller than that on R&D for the Ministry of Defence
• However much of the DTI budget is specifically devoted to construction, it is likely to be a further order of magnitude smaller than that spent on defence
• The government money spent on R&D in housing is derisory
• However much government transport R&D budgets have changed since the mid 1990s, they too are derisory.

It is true that the powerful therapeutic and naturalistic currents evident in all aspects of British culture today are likely to hold back and distort the outcome of what is required: big increases in spending on innovation in buildings and transport.

But the facts show that Britain's neglect of these two sectors is a policy that is preferred as much as it is endemic.

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