Boris bestows post-pandemic building bonanza

Amongst the bounty announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson today (June 30) to get the economy moving again after the Covid-19 pandemic was £1.5bn this year for hospital maintenance, building, and the improvement of A&E capacity, £780m on school and college repair and upgrades in addition to the £1bn new 10-year school building programme, £100m on road repairs and£83m for maintenance of prisons and youth offender facilities.

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The Prime Minister’s promise also includes £900m for a range of ‘shovel ready’ local growth projects in England over the course of  the next two years, as well as £96m to accelerate investment in town centres and high streets through the Towns Fund this year.

“Too many parts of this country have felt left behind, neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis,” he said.

“And so I want you to know that this government not only has a vision to change this country for the better, we have a mission to unite and level up – the mission on which we were elected last year.this is a government that is wholly committed not just to defeating coronavirus but to using this crisis finally to tackle this country’s great unresolved challenges of the last three decades.

“To build the homes, to fix the NHS, to tackle the skills crisis, to mend the indefensible gap in opportunity and productivity and connectivity between the regions of the UK. To unite and level up.

“To that end we will build build build. Build back better, build back greener, build back faster and to do that at the pace that this moment requires.”

 

About Fiona Russell-Horne

Group Managing Editor across the BMJ portfolio.

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