A tanker stuck in a sink hole on Evendons Lane is  very disruptive to local travel and to the local school. I have written to the  company  to urge them to take more rapid action to remove their vehicle so the road can be repaired as quickly as possible. They are well aware of the need to sort the problem out but claim it will take time as they need to get a crane in. The sooner the better.

Yesterday  we heard the Chancellor defend his tax cuts and explain the need for more supply side measures.
He is right to want  to boost the growth rate, and right to fight the recession the Bank is  forecasting. He needs to make numerous changes in a wide range of sectors to boost the growth rate to his target and keep it there.
During  our years in the single market we accepted a major decline in home grown food, home energy production, home produced energy intensive manufactures from steel and glass to building materials and aluminium. reversing these trends has to start with supplying more and more affordable domestic gas, oil and electricity. Grant  regimes for farming, fishing, green energy and much else need reviewing to see what works and what is necessary.

I would be interested in your views on the Chancellors speech and economic  plan.

As government ministers are talking about some spending reductions let me repeat some of my proposals talked about on this blog. A fuller version of this should be the Daily Telegraph today.

1. Stop the small boat people trade which will save the big hotel costs and the need to build more social houses to house them

2. Stop funding Councils to put in aggressive anti vehicle traffic mismanagement measures on our main local roads

3. Stop making grants to farmers to turn farmland into wilderness

4. Tell the railways the government will not pay increasing subsidy levels for those little used train services that are not wanted by the travelling public. railways should concentrate on increasing use of more popular services.

5.Tell the Bank of England it must not for the next year sell bonds at a loss triggering Treasury/taxpayer reimbursement for their realised losses.

6. Refuse more borrowing to Councils wanting to acquire a property portfolio

7. Remove from the overseas aid list all governments with space programmes, nuclear weapon development or ownership, and abusers of human rights

8.Remove tv licence fee cases from the criminal courts to ease pressure on the justice system.

The government is right to discourage economic migrants coming in to keep wages low and fill low skilled jobs. A points based quota system can let us recruit talent and qualified people for higher paid roles. Whilst some firms and farms would like to have the benefit of more cheap labour we need to consider the strains this places on taxpayers. It also serves to keep low end wages down, hitting the incomes of those already settled here or born here in low paid jobs.

The EU once said that it costs a country about 250,000 Euros to provide all the capital it needs to welcome a new migrant. There is the cost of providing them with a home. There is the need for health capacity. If they have children we need extra school places. As numbers increase we need more transport capacity, more road space, more pipes and cables for utility supplies. It all comes to a big bill as we are all supported by huge sunk capital investment in an advanced country.

The best way of considering it is to see that if we invite in an additional 250,000 a year, each year we need to build the equivalent of an important new city to house them and support them. A new city costs many billions. Those are billions the employer of cheap labour does not have to take into account.

Rapid rates of inward migration also makes CO2 reduction much more difficult to achieve.

There are plenty of independent forecasts around for those interested. No government is exempt from scrutiny, criticism or alternative views and rightly  so. The problem is knowing if any of the independent forecasts are going to be right.

I understand why the government wanted the OBR to offer a new forecast when it has seen the spending plans and the growth measures of the new Ministers as well as the tax cuts.  As revenues, GDP and deficits are very sensitive to whether there is growth or not one needs to form a forecast with all three crucial elements of policy.

As I have pointed out in the past the OBR has in recent years been very wrong in its forecasts. It greatly exaggerated the deficits in the last two years when I queried its view when the budget occurred. Last year it overstated the central government deficit by £131bn which lay  behind Mr Sunak’s tax rises. They also wrongly said inflation would stay around 2% until 2025. This year I said I thought their £99bn deficit forecast would be too low, as it clearly will.

I hope any new forecast they make will try to improve on the last two years. I will continue to look at a range of external forecasts and interpret  them based on recent data and trends.