One of the commonest complaints about new housing development seems to be the failure of infrastructure – public transport, health facilities, education etc. – to keep pace with the rate of development. Some of these issues are theoretically the responsibility of the local authority, although as ever, financial constraints loom large.

The National Infrastructure Commission was initially a way for central government to bypass local opinion on big infrastructure schemes, like nuclear power stations etc. However, a report produced in 2021 seems to suggest a more supportive role is emerging.

Infrastructure, Towns and Regeneration argues that we need to pivot away from a reliance on centrally controlled pots of money for which councils must compete. The report calls for

…a new partnership between Whitehall and Town Hall to level up the country, with county and unitary authorities receiving devolved five year infrastructure budgets to support their own economic growth strategies for the towns in their area.

That is of course based on an assumption that local authorities are geared up to deliver these strategies. Sadly, the evidence for Wiltshire suggests otherwise. See, for example, their attempt to produce a Bus Service Improvement Plan.

The Government response took over a year to emerge and is lukewarm. They appear to want to use the report to push instead for an extension of their unproven commitment to elected mayors for ad hoc groupings of local authorities, so creating ambiguity and confusion over who is actually responsible for anything.

Missing from the NIC report recommendations, and hence from the Government response, is any reference to health care. With the recent revelation that 90% of dentists, for example, are not accepting NHS patients, we can see that this is not a trivial omission. This makes the failure to include dentistry in the transfer of services from the former hospital to the new Devizes Health Centre even more of a failure