On Wednesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond MP, gave his first – and last – autumn statement of government spending plans. The next such statement will be in spring 2018, with the budget moved to autumn 2017.

As is often the way when compiling information for this blog, in checking the above information I went down a rabbit hole and discovered that the government is obliged to make an economic forecast twice a year (Paragraph 5(6) of Schedule 5 to the Industry Act 1975), so it will have to be careful to comply with that requirement in the next year.

Anyway, the main infrastructure-related announcements are as follows:

As reported on Wednesday, the government is already fulfilling the three spending-related recommendations of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) relating to the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford (CM-KO) corridor.

Secondly, the government set a ‘fiscal remit’ for the NIC. In other words, a cap on the cost (in public money) of the implementation of its recommendations each year, from 2020 to 2050. Spending on infrastructure is expected to reach 1% of GDP in 2020/21 (it is currently about 0.8%), and the fiscal remit is between 1% and 1.2%. That almost suggests a lower limit as well as an upper limit.

Putting that into pounds, according to the International Monetary Fund our GDP in 2015 was £1789bn in constant prices and £1864bn in current prices, whatever that means. Anyway, 1-1.2% of that is between £17.9bn and £22.4bn, depending on which you use. Not too shabby.

The setting of a fiscal remit seems to have come as a surprise, but it was always intended. It was the subject of a question in January’s consultation on the modus operandi of the NIC, and the consultation result in May indicated that a fiscal remit would indeed be set (see paragraph 2.26).

While a constraint on the NIC, this is just public spending – it can recommend what it likes in other areas as long as the government doesn’t have to pay for it. To see which sectors this affects the most, see Chart 1.A on page 18 of the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan. Transport and science and research are almost all publicly funded, and everything else is hardly at all. More granularly, road and rail are mostly publicly funded, whereas ports and airports aren’t. And does ‘science and research’ count as infrastructure at all? The fiscal remit is basically a cap on road and rail spending alone.

In a headline-grabbing announcements, £7.6m is to be spent on preserving the stately home Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham, although rumours that Jane Austen based the Pemberley home of Pride and Prejudice’s Fitzwilliam Darcy on it have been discredited, according to the Guardian.

Of wider effect is the setting up of a National Productivity Investment Fund. This will spend £23bn over five years on housing, transport, digital communications and research and development. Looking at the small print, though, reveals that £8bn of this is going on housing, roughly equally spread over the five years, and £7bn is going on ‘long term investment’ outside the four headings and all spent in the last year, leaving £8bn for the other three areas. The even smaller print splits the transport into roads and local transport, next generation vehicles, digital railways enhancements, and the CM-KO corridor.

The housing money includes a ‘Housing Infrastructure Fund’ of £2.3bn, to be bid for by local authorities. This could mean things like roads and stations that unlock private housing investment, and according to the press could include water connections too.

The digital communications money is to be spent on ‘fibre and 5G investment’ – I wonder if it will tally with the recommendations of the forthcoming NIC report on 5G.

There are no significant planning law changes announced or even mooted for the future. A White Paper on further reforms to housing has been delayed and will be issued ‘in due course’.  The privatisation of the Land Registry has been officially dropped.

So quite a lot will potentially be spent on infrastructure, but time will tell as to whether it actually is.