That’s the lesson to take from this:
An increasing number of England’s pothole-plagued roads will be completely resurfaced, ministers have said as councils are handed £8.3 billion for repairs.
Councils will be urged to use the money to fund long-term improvements, including full-scale resurfacing, rather than quick fix repairs as part of a new decade-long funding settlement.
To ensure this, for the first time, the cash will come with a condition that local authorities publish resurfacing plans every quarter, so motorists can hold them to account.
The revenue raised from charging people to use the roads is vastly greater than the costs of building and or repairing roads. So there’s our first clue - actually private roads would cost less and also be better maintained because there wouldn’t be that leakage of some 60% (our guess) of the revenue into other things that usefully buy votes. Government’s an inefficient method of providing roads that is.
Secondly, government is simply a lousy way of maintaining anything. For maintenance never does gain political presence or visibility. Routine patching of holes doesn’t make political careers - perhaps it ought to but it doesn’t. Big plans to splash the cash do make careers - as here. So, doing the plodding boringness that needs to be done isn’t done by politics. A corollary here is that we’ve already got methods for voters to hold local authorities to account. Called elections. And if we’re suggesting that these don’t work in doing so then we’ve got to call our basic manner of democracy into question, don’t we?
The third issue here - that unseen that the economist should look for - is that if we’ve just proven that governments are grossly inefficient providers of roads themselves, let alone maintenance, then what else is currently run by government and politics that badly? What else should we be privatising so that we can have the same at a lesser cost, or more for the same cash?
It really is true that fuel duty (alone, before VAT and other such taxes) is £25 billion a year, spending on roads is about £12 billion. Private roads would be cheaper that is, as even the most vibrant capitalism won’t soak that much in profit off the revenues. So, what else also meets this standard of currently being done grossly inefficiently - so that we can make ourselves richer by not doing it through the medium of government and politics?