© istockphoto.com

An MP has been in our local press campaigning for a major upgrade of Moor Farm roundabout on the A19, not far from where I live. If you’re not familiar with the North East of England, the A19 loops off to the east of the A1, or Great North Road, linking North Yorkshire, Teesside, Wearside, Tyneside and SE Northumberland – all places which have seen serious deindustrialisation in the last half century.

The A19 has seen substantial cash from the Government of in the last 20 years. A new Tyne Tunnel was dug to dual the crossing (£260 million) and the nearest junctions north and south of the tunnel have had their roundabouts supplemented with flyovers (combined cost £200 million). Moor Farm is the next roundabout north of these three projects, so it could be argued that the almost half billion investment in a couple of miles of one A-road simply shifted the bottleneck further down the line.

At least £34 billion has been allocated to capital road schemes nationally by 2030. Outside Swampy-style anti-roads protestors, who have been rather quiet of late, no-one ever asks “what is the return on investment?” It is assumed that roads = jobs, but we have a hell of a lot of dual carriageways all along the A19’s route and precious little re-industrialisation. And yet calls for ‘investment’ in roads never stop.

In stark contrast, the planned £64 billion planned electricity grid upgrade is routinely dubbed a subsidy rather than an investment. OK, it’s twice the road budget, but, if successful, this programme will:

• Address a chronic underinvestment in the grid (investment averaged £3bn per annum between 2010 and 2020, less than half the current annual roads budget);
• Unlock industrial and domestic developments stalled due to weak grids in their proposed locations;
• Allow existing industry to invest in modern electric technologies;
• Slash the roughly £1.9bn per annum ‘constraint costs’ paid to balance production and consumption of electricity ie there will be a direct return on investment which will pay back some of the capital costs directly;
• Protect the country against future energy shocks;
• Massively cut the carbon footprint of the electricity system by allowing more clean energy onto the grid more of the time.

So why are grid upgrades seen as ‘subsidy’ rather than ‘investment’ like road-building? Politics, my dear friend, politics. The easiest way to damage something that may threaten your dominant position is to apply a negative word to it. So we ‘invest’ in private transport facilities (roads, flyovers, traffic signals etc) but we ‘subsidise’ public transport. I suspect if Net Zero hadn’t become part of the culture wars, the very people attacking investment in the grid would be lauding it and/or calling for more. After all, what is more important to the modern economy than electricity?

Words matter. The words you use to describe something shapes the entire argument around it. My favourite personal example is when I jokingly banned the word ‘waste’ from an industrial symbiosis workshop (IS = one industry’s ‘waste’ becoming another’s raw material)  – suddenly people started seeing opportunities instead of problems. It is essential that we don’t get drawn into parroting other people’s prejudicial language, and stick our own words instead.