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General matters

May I wish you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the House a happy Christmas and a peaceful new year? As a chartered surveyor and an East Anglian representing a Suffolk constituency, the provision of infrastructure takes up a lot of my time. That has been the case not just over the past seven months, but over the past 27 years. Two things that I find myself saying with great regularity are, ““We don't do infrastructure well in the UK”” and, in an East Anglian context, ““We talk about infrastructure a lot because we don't have any.”” The nearest motorway to my constituency of Waveney is in Holland, and Lowestoft has been waiting 75 years for a third crossing over the water that divides the town. Infrastructure and job creation go hand in hand. A good transport system is a prerequisite for sustained economic growth and, conversely, poor infrastructure and congestion hold back growth and the creation of jobs. Historically over the centuries, Britain has had a great record of inventing and building world-class infrastructure that underpinned economic growth, whether the creation of the canal network, the engineering work of Brunel, or the building of the railways and the London underground. More recently, our track record has been poor. There has been no long-term strategic framework, projects have the gestation period of an elephant, and to many it appears that Britain has ground to a halt, as we sit in traffic jams and wait for trains that never arrive—and, at present, planes that do not fly. In the past, local highway authorities pursued an ongoing programme of continually improving the local road network such as through regularly building bypasses and relief roads around market towns. They stopped pursuing such an approach 20 years ago. The result, in East Anglia at least, is that there is a large backlog of work to be carried out on such schemes as the Beccles southern relief road in my constituency, the Brandon bypass in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), and the Long Stratton bypass in south Norfolk.