Boris Johnson unveils massive programme to construct schools, hospitals and roads

Boris Johnson will today promise a ‘New Deal’ to rebuild Britain.

As a major English city is plunged back into a local lockdown, the Prime Minister will pledge to ‘build, build, build’, bringing forward a massive programme of public works.

He will say Britain can ‘not just bounce back, but bounce forward – stronger and better and more united than ever before’ in the wake of the coronavirus.

How New Deal dragged the US out of Great Depression

The New Deal was a major public relief programme instigated by US president Franklin D Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression.

Some 12million Americans were thrown out of work in the years following the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

The newly-elected Democratic president embarked on his ground-breaking plans in 1933, including reform of banks, support for the elderly and the jobless, and the repeal of Prohibition.

He spoke of the need for the state to help the ‘forgotten man’ at the bottom of the economic pyramid. A centrepiece of the proposals was a massive programme of public works to build up the American economy again.

It is this part of the New Deal to which Mr Johnson was referring when he said that his infrastructure plans were ‘positively Rooseveltian’.

In Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the author called for a ‘new deal’ for exploited workers. Roosevelt had read the book and on accepting the presidential nomination in 1932, he said: ‘I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.’

Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration which employed millions of jobless to construct airports, hospitals, schools, post offices, dams, bridges and thousands of miles of roads. By the end of the 1930s America was on the road to recovery.

But in a grim reminder that the virus is still at large, Mr Johnson was last night locked in crisis talks about reimposing the lockdown in Leicester.

Today’s speech will be accompanied by billions of pounds of investment in building and refurbishing schools, hospitals and roads, as well as new spending on transport and local growth projects.

A new unit, dubbed Project Speed, will be led by Chancellor Rishi Sunak this summer to identify projects that can be fast-tracked.

Reform of the planning system to remove ‘blockages’ is also under consideration. And a new National Infrastructure Strategy will be published in the autumn.

Mr Sunak will put the ‘infrastructure revolution’ at the heart of a mini-Budget expected on July 8.

In his speech in Dudley in the West Midlands today, the PM will also pledge to ‘build back better and stronger’, with a programme designed to reach all parts of the country.

‘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 will say.

‘If we deliver this plan together, then we will together build our way back to health.’

The PM is also expected to offer an ‘opportunity guarantee’ to young people and those who have lost their jobs because of the lockdown, with major investment in apprenticeships and further education.

And his chief aide Dominic Cummings is shaking up the Whitehall machine, which saw the departure of Britain’s top civil servant Sir Mark Sedwill on Sunday night.

Mr Johnson will directly reference the famous New Deal programmes led by Franklin D Roosevelt, which are widely credited with rescuing the United States from the Great Depression in the 1930s. Yesterday he confirmed there would be not attempt to ‘go back to what people called austerity’, saying that would be a mistake.

He will say today: ‘It sounds positively Rooseveltian, it sounds like a New Deal. All I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand.

‘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.