Road congestion is hampering the UK’s economic growth, while inadequate infrastructure investment continues to damage business – a rating agency claims.
Standard & Poor (S&P) forecast that the UK would benefit from increased infrastructure investment more than any other developed economy, warning that current funding has become ‘a significant obstacle to doing business in the U.K’.
It added: ‘Road congestion is a fact of life in the U.K., hurting the economy and the environment, and diminishing Britons' quality of life.’
The agency cited findings from road traffic and driver-services company INRIX, which claimed the UK was the third most congested country among major developed economies in Europe and North America.
It is thought the average UK driver spends around 30 hours a year in traffic jams, with this figure riding to 84 hours in the London commuting area.
S&P anticipates that rising infrastructure spending over the next decade ‘could boost the country's economic growth’, yet highlighted worrying trends currently seen in the UK.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report recently ranked the quality of the UK’s overall infrastructure as 27th in the world. S&P added that ‘insufficient investment in infrastructure has been one of the key factors explaining weak productivity performance in the U.K’.
Claiming that the UK had an accumulated infrastructure investment deficit of over £60bn, S&P predicted that an increase in investment of 1% of gross domestic product – co-ordinated across the EU – would create more than 300,000 jobs in the UK over the same year.
