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Victoria Lonsdale's avatar

I’d like to think you could tackle the NHS backlog with no additional money but I just don’t see how that’s realistic — without ignoring a big cohort of the population and storing up even more future problems. Productivity has certainly cratered in the health service but at some point you just have to spend more money too, especially to catch up on capital underspend.

You clearly know Oxford well!!! East-west line may not be the best example - I don’t know all the details - but I do know that constant indecision on whether to proceed with projects is a major cause of cost escalation (that and the hopeless planning system!) So my broader point was more that it’s good to have funding certainty out for five years on projects so business can plan around that (reforms to planning reforms also critical).

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Tim Almond's avatar

The business NI changes were political. There's lots of small business owners (1-3 people) and not many large business owners. So you make lots of people temporarily happy at the cost of a few people not so much. But there's no sound economic reason for different rates of NI for different sizes of business, and longer term, this will damage the economy.

Tackling the NHS backlog to get people back to work could be done without spending a penny. You prioritise younger, working people getting appointments and surgery over older, retired people. As of 2016, 2/5ths of the NHS budget went on retired people, so it's probably larger now. And unless working people are targeted, 2/5ths of this extra spending will go on retired people.

East-West rail is a waste of money, like nearly all rail. Rail is useful for either commuting, where density is high, or for long-distance travel. And Oxford and Cambridge and all the places in between do not have the density. Oxford has few major employers in the centre, of the sort that need lots of people travelling in from miles away. There is the university and that's about it. The other major thing in Oxford is that it is a centre of medicine, but most of that is out at Headington, so by the time you get into Oxford and get out again, driving will have been quicker. It isn't even a major city now. East-West rail is a romantic project driven by train lovers who think it was wrong that we closed all those barely-used, loss-making services in the 1960s and want the Varsity Line back.

Planning, getting more labs is good, but more labs into Oxford would require an end to listed building laws, a drive towards knocking down old buildings and an end to the greenbelt. Oxford is really the worst place to try and do this. The centre is lots of listed buildings that you can't knock down, so the roads are terrible, and it has a huge greenbelt that stops development around it. It used to be an industrial city but it's now a university with a museum attached. It can't do what Cambridge does and feed off into science parks near the city. This activity is mostly around Abingdon, like the Harwell Campus, Culham, Milton Park near Didcot. This area the centre of Oxford's applied science now with 10s of thousands of people. It's easy to build there, and it's well connected by train and road already.

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