One great capital city, 20 world leaders – and 40,000 holes in the road

Simon Jenkins
31 Mar 2009

Look out of your car window, you mighty ones. Look out this week as you drive to Gordon Brown's self-styled Field of Cloth of Gold, otherwise known as Canning Town. See London, host to the greatest show on earth, 24 hours and £20 million of diplomatic Olympiad, staged by Downing Street in a last chance to save the world. What do you see?

You see road works. You see road works in Whitehall and Parliament Square. You see road works in Knightsbridge and Kensington. You see road works in Oxford Street and Wigmore Street. You see road works through the City and down the Commercial Road to Poplar and Docklands.

With the best will in the world, and the most expensive police outriders, you will be delayed. You will blink and ask yourself what the hell has happened to Britain. Is a nation that once ruled the world disappearing into a giant hole? Is it burrowing to Australia? Are its people being housed underground, like the troglodytes of Calcutta?

Or is Brown playing a verbal joke? He is digging for victory, perhaps. He is building the great trunk road to prosperity via the Isle of Dogs. Or perhaps he is telling the world that he is in a hole and means to keep digging.

I cannot believe London is spending £20 million on a one-day conference - its communiqué already written - yet spending not a penny on tidying itself up for the occasion. It is like inviting one's friends to a wedding and leaving yesterday's dirty dishes on the table.

The G20 was planned to be in London long ago. But the only people who noticed were the Home Office terrorist/security mafia. They have turned it into a securocrat's bonanza.

The sight on Saturday of thousands of peaceful demonstrators streaming through Hyde Park corralled by thousands of police was absurd enough. The next two days will look like a crowd shot for a police state movie. It is hard to decide if this week is really about world peace, or a day out in the capital for the Police Federation on double overtime.

There appears to be no check or accountability on how much is spent on policing these events in London. One expert liaising with the Beijing authorities over last year's Olympics reported back that the communist authorities were libertarian compared with the paranoid autocrats planning the London Games. Security must now be the most lucrative industry undermining the peaceful image of London worldwide.

It is matched by the road-work sappers. They already have in hand an eight-year programme of rebuilding 1,500 miles of London waterworks, due to be finished in 2015. This has co-incided with a freezing winter - more cracked pipes - and the annual March festival of digging, when councils and utilities turn into frenzied moles to burn money before the end of the financial year.

Pavements, potholes, cycle lanes, parking bays, bollards, railings, pipes, cables and sewers are torn up and replaced. In 2008 there were a recorded 15,000 road works in London, creating 40,000 separate holes. Many of them were dug for a second or third time in 12 months. When Ford Madox Brown painted his epic Work, he had to go to Hampstead to find muscular sons of toil shovelling a deep trench. Today he could have set up his easel outside Parliament and stayed a year.

The manic diggers have littered every street through which this week's demonstrators might pass with an armoury of weapons, from traffic cones to planks, scaffolding, bricks and clods of clay. They have also ensured that the charm of London's streetscape, still its best face, is spoiled by digging and sheeting. There will be chaos enough this week from motorcades, reserved lanes and screaming sirens. Add in the road works and the cost to London must far exceed the official £20 million.

The root cause of the trouble is Michael Heseltine's 1991 New Roads and Street Works Act. This was a child of the deregulation culture of the late 1980s, designed to expedite the cabling of Britain. The act did for London streets what Margaret Thatcher's Big Bang did for financial services. It allowed statutory undertakings - mostly privatised utilities - to dig up roads at will. All they should do was give prior warning to the local council, from two hours (in emergencies) to 28 days. Basically they could do what they like.

The council cannot refuse permission or insist on phasing or programming work to co-ordinate with other excavation. They can prosecute a utility that outstays its welcome up to a paltry £5,000, except that the utility fixes the length of that welcome. It currently extends over 560 streets.

The hole outside your front door is thus the utility equivalent of a banker's derivative. Regulation has collapsed, leaving a toxic time bomb under the orderly life of the city. It is a glorious irony that the G20 leaders will be impeded in their debate on one regulatory failure by the consequence of another in the street outside.

The difference is that no other city in Europe would rest happy until its mayor did something. London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, merely said something. Last year he declared that "Londoners are sick and tired of sitting in traffic jams caused by enigmatic craters that litter major roads. It's time for holy war on holey streets." He talked the talk but never walked the walk. There has been no jihad on JCBs.

Johnson promised a permit scheme, much as a minister, John Spellar, promised a rent-and-fine system back in 2001. He even promised that "roads will not be cordoned off if no work is going on". It was like the Financial Services Authority trying to control Barclays bank. The 1991 act still rules. Utility contractors have grown rich on the proceeds and London has grown miserable.

The decision to hold the G20 summit in Docklands was bleak enough. There is no point in these peripatetic events if they do not confer some blessing on the cities they visit. The summits are like the progress of Elizabeth I or the gift of a white elephant, means by which a guest imposes intolerable expense on a host for sheer ostentation. The G20 could be done on the phone.

Perhaps the best way to view the diggers is as the city fighting back. Come here if you like, they say, with your armoured cars, guns, retinues and pompous speeches. But London replies with funky, feisty dirt and delay. Given a bit of luck, one of those limos will end up in a pit in the East India Dock Road, rupturing a gas main and covered in filth.

• 

  Daughter of Anne Robinson: Mum offered to buy me Botox for my wedding. I was like: 'I'm sorry?'

  Emma Wilson reveals exactly what it's like to be Anne Robinson's daughter — and about stepping out from under her shadow

  ---

• 

  Flame and glory: Rammstein set to light up London

  Sound check: German industrial metal band Rammstein literally play with fire in their live performances - and now they are about to unleash their singeing spectacle on London. Watch out for your eyebrows

  ---