This blog is based on the foreword to our new paper The Future has 5G Foundations.
Britain is searching for growth. We do not need to rehash here the problems which slow growth in both GDP and productivity have presented. How our wage growth trajectory has collapsed since the financial crisis. How a highly leveraged government needs growth to meet the spending needs incurred by a dangerous world and aging population. How growth is the only route out the modern condition of squeezed public finances, a frustrated public, and volatile politics.
We are going to have a new Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister by September, who will have their own account of how growth is delivered. We should not presume to know what that is going to be but we do know that they are supported by an ever increasing architecture of thought. The so called ‘hot essay summer’ kicked off by Tony Blair, and continued with contributions from the Labour Growth Group, Centre for British Progress, Mainstream & CommonWealth together, and others is stimulating thought across the Labour movement.
All of these essays are about growth and, considering the sources, there is a surprising amount of overlap (which is not to say there are not marked differences). What most, if not all of them, agree is that a lack of infrastructure is holding Britain back. There is a broad agreement that a productive state that provide the infrastructure and direction for businesses to grow. Some of them emphasise nationalisation as the route to this, some devolution, some better partnerships with business and better regulation.
At Progress we do not aspire to join hot essay summer for the sake of it. But work we have been doing is relevant to this discussion. As Tony Blair says in his essay: “the centre is the place where policy comes first and politics second. You work out the correct analysis, then the correct answer, and shape your political strategy around it.” So when we come across a policy issue that is worth remedying in itself, but also says something about the politics of growth we want to grab the opportunity to speak to both.
In partnership with mobile infrastructure provider Cellnex we have been looking at mobile infrastructure in the UK, that is the signal your phone or other mobile device receives.
We all know the frustration of not having signal, even when it seems like our device is connected, especially on trains or indoors. Britain has done well on making sure some signal can reach most devices but we wanted to look the question of what we can do with that signal and whether it meets the requirements of all the future technologies like drones, autonomous vehicles, and the internet of thing. This is more vexed, with rankings showing us falling behind our European counterparts and anyone who has spoken to a friend recently back from the US or China will know their adoption of these mobile dependent technologies is pulling ahead of ours.
We’re joining the conversation then, about growth and infrastructure, by suggesting Britain should amend our targets for mobile coverage to include the quality of the connection as well the geographic coverage. Cheeringly OFCOM has recently published a discussion paper looking at the issue. It’s hugely important that both they and government takes this seriously because this is the kind of infrastructure that (in our view) will really drive growth. This is because its one of the key inputs to the new technology on which Britain aspires to lead.
Leadership is important because the leader get the lion’s share of the benefits of new technology. The biggest ‘chunks’ of value, new products, new services, new jobs, are created at the frontier. Their dissemination through an economy is also critical but it is through leading the world that industries are built, comparative advantage entrenched, and prosperity achieved. In the UK, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, we should know this intuitively.
How to lead though, is complicated and it is often hard for government to explain its role. We think the state is involved fundamentally in leading industries. It is involved because it shapes institutions which supply the talent, the taxes and regulation that set direction and define the boundaries of the possible, and the infrastructure which enables the businesses who create the growth.
But what does shaping and enabling mean in practice? Working on mobile connectivity led us to one of the real questions – when it comes to infrastructure, if you agree its a key input, a resource, for growth, how much of it should government be concerned with providing?
One obvious answer is ‘enough’. It would be efficient to provide exactly as much infrastructure as is needed for the country to grow as the government aspires. Unfortunately the relationship is not that linear, especially at the frontier of technology where things move fast. Today’s ‘enough’ is tomorrow’s inadequate.
Furthermore ‘enough’ is just not the politics of growth. Growth is not distributive, it is generative. To do something new, you often need more than enough. Many of the essays discussed above recognise this, drawing on the abundance movement from the USA which called for governments around the world to take an activist role in supply. In our paper we are asking: what if government’s concern in this was not just that we have adequate connectivity for now, but the abundant supply of connectivity we could leverage into a genuine advantage? If it treated mobile connectivity as a resource, one that should be as high quality and widely available as possible. We argue why government should prioritise this – both for the benefits in terms of grabbing Britain’s share of the future and extending growth to every part of Britain. And we suggest how it can have a constructive role is shaping the abundance of this infrastructure – which it does not directly control – in partnership with the regulator and industry.
Though we think this is the right attitude for mobile connectivity, putting us in pole position to develop the technologies that will secure long term prosperity, its an attitude to growth that can be extended across the economy. An abundance of opportunities to gain education and skills is the best protection against A.I impacts on the labour market and stay competitive in the global economy. Buses, so abundant in London and not so elsewhere, if more accessible would enable access to jobs and workers across our economy. Power, data, housing – if we agree our government’s role is to create the preconditions for growth, we must recognise ‘enough’ is not enough.
