By Chris Fennell

At first glance it looks great – huge amounts of money going to be spent on capital projects . £6.5 Billion to be spent over the next three years. That should see us through the hard times!  However as always “the devil is in the detail”.  

How much is likely to find its  way to the poor struggling architectural and consulting engineering practices whose traditional hunting grounds are Education, Health and Housing?

There are some nice tidy sums set aside for Education - £600 million for 100 new Free Schools and a further £600 million to provide 40,000 new places generally. This should start the stampede. Noticeably there didn’t appear to be any Health funding mentioned.

The Housing sector seemed catered for with the £400 million “Get Britain Building” investment fund. But read the small print – this is to go to stalled projects  which already have planning permission and are ready to start on site. The Designers have probably already done their work on these schemes – so they won’t generate much in way of new fees.

Apart from those the Architects and Consulting Engineers are not going to see a great deal.

Have another look at where the bulk of the £6.5 Billion is being spent and ask yourself are we , as a country, getting the best we can for the amount spent?

As a northerner I look at two schemes in the North West amounting to £455M – more than the Housing fund - and despair.  Do I really think spending £290M to upgrade the rail connection between Manchester and Leeds is a high priority – the current trains take less than an hour already. What about spending £165M on a dual carriageway to connect Stockport to Manchester Airport? Even at peak times it really doesn’t take that long , it’s only a couple of miles for crying out loud.

Read the rest of the Statement and you will find more  examples of huge spends – obviously head line grabbing – throughout the country. How about £250M to upgrade the mobile phone network and superfast broadband network to “create” ten “super connected cities”.

Great Headlines – Little Impact.