Give the UK growth agenda a chance

Given the UK's poor investment performance over the past 30 years, any govt would need time and luck to turn things around

- MOHAMED A EL-ERIAN

PITY RACHEL REEVES, the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before she had even gotten through her highly anticipated "growth speech" on January 29, criticism flooded social media and the airwaves. Her approach is too scattered, some said, and too reliant on measures whose impact will be felt only over the long term. Some programmes run counter to the government's environmental commitments, others said, and they are not evenly distributed across the UK. It is all too expensive. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary even went so far as to declare publicly that Reeves "hasn't a clue".

Don't get me wrong: the speech was not perfect. But perfection is not possible under the UK's current economic and financial conditions, and to pursue an elusive optimum would be to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Moreover, Reeves' speech did succeed in five areas.

First, it reinforced the message that the government will go "further and faster" to boost growth – its "number one mission". Second, it laid out several specific efforts – including planning (zoning) reforms, reducing over-regulation, and improving the use of pension-fund surpluses to increase domestic investment – to ease constraints on existing growth engines.