When the significance of "Motorway Man" was identified by a Conservative MP before the last General Election, I took this to mean that, Coalition or not, the next government was unlikely to be the "greenest ever". So last week's so-called "Ford Focus Budget", and the accompanying "Plan for Growth", despite use of the "plan" word, came as no real surprise.Nevertheless, this Budget was not all bad. The re-creation of "Enterprise Zones" is to be broadly welcomed as a means of promoting the unrealised economic opportunities of industrial areas with a plentiful supply of brownfield developments sites.
The wider question, however, is whether the UK Coalition Government really understands the international economic and environmental context and the future shocks this may deliver over, say, a twenty year period. My sense is that there are some significant gaps in government intelligence, but I take cold comfort from an unlikely source, the latest report from the McKinsey Global Institute entitled "Urban World: Mapping the economic power of cities", for reasons I shall shortly explain on my other blog @ http://janetmackinnon.wordpress.com/
Picture: my transport during the cold spell which caused so much chaos earlier in the year.
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