How much would you pay for NGA?

Ultimately, the great British Public end up paying for investments in our networks. The question is what mechanism we employ. It’s tricky sometimes to know what would be more popular: paying out of general taxation, paying more for existing services to fund future investment, or waiting for the new investment and then paying a big premium if you want it.

In the normal course of events, it’s the latter model which you might expect. Companies would to borrow to fund a speculative investment and reap the rewards afterwards. But sometimes this doesn’t happen as quickly as people want. And government intervention doesn’t usually work this way – so how would you find the money for the investment?

For the purposes of this discussion, we should probably assume that we don’t have the ability to authorise big spending cuts anywhere else in the public sector!