It’s not about how full a place is, it’s whether you can move around

I’m proud and flattered that so many want to live in Britain and my dream is that one day anyone who wants to experience living here is able to do so. I myself think that Blighty is a rather pleasant place to live, a democratic land with a tolerant and engaging population, not to mention the attractive scenery. I also believe that London enjoys the unique position of being the world’s capital city, with an unmatched diversity of languages and cultures, meaning that it’s generally very easy for virtually anyone in the world to come to Britain and find a familiar community.

My only proviso is that Britain, in terms of the admittedly rather vague concept of affordability, is able to accommodate those who wish to live here. But what level of immigration Britain can afford is a hotly debated topic. In particular, the strain on the social services – particularly the NHS – or the shortages of housing are frequently mentioned as reasons why Britain should curb immigration. However, these problems are not as conceptually intractable as some other problems. Theoretically they can be solved by realistic amounts of money, admittedly by realistically rather large amounts of money, being thrown at the social services to enlarge and improve them for an increasing population. As for housing, there’s only planning rules stopping the Green Belt or agricultural land – and there’s lots of it – being sold for housing.

Regarding the mobility of labour, Britain has an advantage over a larger country like the US, in having a fifth of its population but being one fortieth of the size. The ability to find and quickly fill job vacancies outside of the area where one lives, without moving house, is of great benefit to workers and the economy. But this depends on good transport infrastructure to take advantage of the smaller distances between centres of populations in Britain compared to, for example, France or the aforementioned US. Nominally Britain would seem to have a good transport infrastructure, with an extensive network of roads, a reasonable motorway network and a number of high speed and relatively high speed rail lines that allow a daily commute to London from places as far afield as Bristol or Grantham or maybe even Lille, in northern France.

Unfortunately, anyone familiar with this infrastructure would say that for most of the time it’s at saturation point. The south-east of England is often criticised for having the best transport system at the expense of the rest of the country. Yet with a higher density of population and higher housing costs, to live there requires both partners of a relationship to be generally working and generally travelling. Railways since privatisation have seen in excess of 6% year-on-year (compound) growth, so there are more rail-travelling passengers today, on a smaller network, even than there were in the days when there were more horse-drawn vehicles than cars. Every day the volume of motorway traffic, including the huge amount of commercial vehicles, grinds to a halt through the smallest of perturbations. A car running out of fuel – never mind major accidents – can have profound knock-on effects. Most of the relatively quick fixes have been, or are being, enacted, such as widening motorways, using the hard shoulder at busy times, or variable speed limits. Travelling at night on motorways is rarely an option because the volume and weight of particularly freight traffic during the day means that a lot more maintenance than previously is required, with the resulting overnight lane and motorway closures.

On the smaller roads, the commercial hearts of villages and the smaller towns are dying because every parking space is taken, mainly by residents. In larger towns and cities it’s exceedingly difficult and time-consuming to find parking spaces, and most streets are limited to a single car’s width because of residents’ parked cars. Yet the owning of a car these days is more a necessity than a convenience, so to restrict their use in any way would have profound effects, both socially and economically. Currently the UK is regarded as being in a slowly improving economic phase after a recession, so the mind boggles at how the transport infrastructure would cope with a booming economy. Ironically if transport were at a standstill it’s doubtful the economy would be booming for long.

The problem with transport is that it can’t easily be solved by throwing realistic amounts money at it, even realistically large amounts of money. If new motorways were built then it would just mean that drivers could travel between urban traffic jams more quickly, if indeed they could. Major alterations to the current road system would result in greater inconvenience and an even worse situation before it became better, perhaps years into the future. And likely the interim growth of traffic would simply just saturate the new infrastructure. To significantly improve roads you clearly have to sprint to stand still. New high speed rail projects are pushed so far into the future that even if they avoided the promise of being cut by every new opposition party, they’re not regarded seriously as any sort of solution even for future problems. If it were even possible, 300,000 extra cars on the road per annum would likely have a much more deleterious effect on the country than 300,000 people without cars increasing the burden on the social services.

As a final irony, and which appears as an allegory for the whole problem of pressure on the transport infrastructure, disruption in Calais by those hoping to reach Britain for a better life, results in Operation Stack. Lorries are parked on the M20 (between Dover and the M25) and eventually tail back so far that after just a few days, road transport throughout the whole country is disrupted.

So the burning question of the day is: is the fragile and saturated transport infrastructure the most important factor in considering immigration levels?