Latest / Indepen Exchange / Why don’t we look back in anger? If we did, would we find out why infrastructure projects are plagued by unrealistic objectives, missed deadlines and overspent budgets?

Transcript

Why don’t we look back in anger? If we did, would we find out why infrastructure projects are plagued by unrealistic objectives, missed deadlines and overspent budgets? · Indepen Exchange

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Independent Exchange.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Vicky Mustard and I am your host for this podcast.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_03: If you look across UK infrastructure, one pattern keeps repeating itself.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Projects run over budget, miss deadlines, and fall short of what they promised.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: And the uncomfortable truth is we've known why this happens for decades.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: So why aren't we getting any better?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: So today we're asking, if we already know what goes wrong, what's really stopping us from doing something differently?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm joined by Martin Hurst, Heather Sheffield, and Steve Norris, who will introduce themselves in a moment.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: But we're going to dig into what's really driving underperformance.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: Is that from overoptimisation, weak cost control, or the realities of sort of political complexity and a lack of genuine collaboration?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to draw on insights that we've already discussed at the Independent Forum recently, and we're going to explore whether the issues are capability, governance, or culture, and whether our instinct to look back and assign blame is actually getting in the way of our learning.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because if we already know what goes wrong, the real question is what's stopping us from doing something differently.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, first of all, I'd like you to introduce yourselves.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, Martin, if you'd like to go first.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, so I'm Martin Hurst.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have various hats, but perhaps the most relevant one here is that I'm a professor of practice in major infrastructure, sustainability, and business cases at University College London.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: My background is I was a senior civil servant for 20 years, including working for the esteemed foreign minister here.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I was also environment and planning advisor in number 10.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: So over to you, Steve.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, well, I'm Steve Norris, and apparently at one time I employed Martin, which uh uh is a shock for him, and um I you know I don't know how well it reflects on me or Basley.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: However, um one of the things that Martin and I share is a huge interest in the way that in this country we deal with big infrastructure.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um long since after leaving parliament, I uh chair uh an organization called the National Infrastructure Planning Association.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we're a collection of professionals who are involved in every stage of big infrastructure planning.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them, of course, um who look at the 2008 Planning Act, which introduced Dita NCIP's Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects as a sort of specific category to be dealt with by a new mechanism, a new planning mechanism, which was supposed to save time and money and strip out um excessive bureaucracy and so on.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But we've sadly, since 2008, has really been more honored in its um ignorance, if you like, than in its observance.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's I think an issue that we need to deal with today because, you know, in very simple terms, I'm afraid, I don't think we do infrastructure at all well.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: Setting a stall out already, I love it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: Heather, would you like to introduce yourself?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, Ricky.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Heather Sheffield, I'm head of strategic planning at Northern Gas Networks, and I'm also working as an associate director here at Independent.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a civil engineer by background, and I've spent the vast majority of my career working across water and energy sectors, focusing on how we plan and deliver infrastructure that underpins everyday life.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: Ferb.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, let's get straight into it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: So uh I'll start with quite a pointy question, I think.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: So we've known for decades why infrastructure projects fail.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: So why aren't we getting any better at fixing it?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna start with you, Steve.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it's because um uh the UK has a sort of unique um status in this little world of ours.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: There was a time when we covered two-thirds of the planet in pink, and you know, it covered most of the developed world, India, the whole of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as they now are, uh, Australia and New Zealand, and then of course South Africa, other parts of Africa, um, and of course in Europe, not only um the United Kingdom, but we had, of course, in two world wars established ourselves as the guardians of uh democracy and freedom.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, a couple of centuries ago, we allowed the Americans to um to secede, as the king has so magnificently um uh confirmed when he went over to celebrate the anniversary of uh of independence.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um what it's led to is a form of government which is obsessed with bureaucracy.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: We uh we we we're remarkably, for example, free from corruption.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there are the odd corrupt civil servant and official in either local government or even central government, but they are very, very, very few and far between.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I certainly never encountered anybody in my time in government in four or five different government departments who I would put in that category.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're very honest, but very open.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: But frankly, we are too obsessed with detail.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just, for example, uh going from the general to the specific point to the case like the Lower Thames Crossing.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody in this industry will know that this is almost an unbelievable case, and yet it's true.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Lower Thames Crossing project involves a road from the M25 under the current Dartford Bridge to two new tunnels, which will create lots of extra capacity to get goods from the West Midlands to the Kent Ports where our major markets are.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that project has been going for ten years.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's already cost 300 million pounds just in planning and costs alone, and in the process has created an unimaginable£130,000 pages of documentation to be presented to the planning inspectorate.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and just to add insult to injury, although the current Secretary of State for Transport, Heidi Alexander, has indicated that she wants to proceed with the project, we're a million miles for deciding who's going to build it, how they're going to build it, how long is it going to take.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: And all I do know is that I doubt I'll be alive long enough to actually see it delivered.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it's quite vital because what it does is it provides hugely um uh wanted capacity um i f for goods from the Midlands where we make them to get to the ports where we need them to go to sell to our customers.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I rest my case.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: There is no other country in the world that would have treated a project like this in that way.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the Norwegians, of course, I suspect with a very wry smile, point out that for half the money we've just spent on planning, they actually built the world's longest subaqueous tunnel.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: That kind of puts it into perspective, doesn't it?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: Martin, is there anything you'd like to add?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yes, I think I'd take a step back, and I don't accept necessarily that we are universally bad at infrastructure.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um if you look across the world, every country has failed infrastructure projects.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: The two countries I think are best at infrastructure, which probably France, in my view, and China, have their own problems.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: So even the French have managed to build railway stations that can't take their trains because the trains are don't fit.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese are extremely successful in building large numbers of new buildings, but have got a major property crisis at the moment because there's no one to fill them.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you don't have to be a kind of um a Spain building an airport which no one's going to use.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Even the good countries get this role.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um equally, we do have some success stories.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So Thames Tideway Tunnel, for example.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I share Steve's view of some of the bureaucracies that were associated with the start of it because I was involved in it.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact is, it's a highly successful infrastructure project opened roughly on time, doing something that's absolutely essential.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um equally, in one of my other hats, we're just completing a£180 million flood scheme, coastal defence scheme in Portsmouth, which I think is going to be the envy of the world.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's beautiful, it's public realm, it's completed on time, and part of it is actually completed on the budget.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Where I agree with Steve is that there are, well, firstly, there are some schemes which I would describe as largely public sector mega projects that we get badly wrong.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the it would be impossible not to mention high speed two, but we have a comprehensive track record of picking the wrong technologies and then having an extremely expensive build on nuclear.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't think I agree with Steve, I don't think any other country would have faffed around on Heathrow Third Runway to the extent that this country has.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think our problem, and it is a problem, is associated partly with very large public sector projects.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't quite know what the solution is there, and I don't think it's um simply a factor of bureaucracy.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: The other problem that Steve's raised is of planning processes, um, environmental impact assessments, um business cases, etc.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: There I have more sympathy with what we do.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because compared to almost every other industrialized country, we are firstly a democracy, and secondly, we're very densely populated.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the richer countries get, the more their people in general value quality of life and environment.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a densely populated country, then you have fewer places to put things, and the consequences of putting things places are greater.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, while I think we're bad at big mega projects in the state sector, I think some of the bureaucracy is a function of the nature of country we are, viz.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: being a densely populated democracy.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure there's all that much we can do about that.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: We can play around things at the edges.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the things are bonkers, I agree.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: But a number of them are actually a reflection of what the body politic demands in this country.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I would narrow the problem down a bit, I think, to some of the bureaucracy, but the particular issue that we are awful at big mega projects in the public sector.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: So you think it's a public sector versus a private sector?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you actually look at where the if you look at where the projects are working.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, say the projects over a billion that are working, um, it tends to be in the private sector.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So Thames Tideway was definitely private sector.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at offshore wind, for example, which I think is a huge success story for the UK and has been billions, that's been done in the private sector through rightly, I think, a system of auctions, which means we get the most for the cheapest price.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's too early to tell where the big grid upgrade is going to go, but I'm reasonably hopeful that quite a lot of the big grid upgrade will also get through reasonably successfully.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I I do think actually the evidence, where's it gone wrong?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Nucle is effectively a state sector project, even if it is done by third parties.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: High Speed 2 was entirely a state sector project, albeit contracted out.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And Heathrow Third Runway, all the problems are from the state sector.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we can't tell whether it will be a state sector project because it doesn't exist yet.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: True, very true.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's really interesting because I still think a lot of those examples, Martin, that you've um sort of given there, there's still a very strong relationship between public sector planning to set the strategic direction for those projects like Thames Hideway.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I do think that where we are falling down is some of that longer-term thinking.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: So there wasn't, there was an example today, I think, in the telegraph, Rachel Reeves has announced 10,000 houses to be built outside of Cambridge, but they've realized there's not enough water.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: So my question immediately as an engineer is how did we get to the point where they've announced this huge development with massive society impact on customers without actually looking at whether or not the essential services are in place.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, that just shows that there's this lack of um whole system planning or thinking in place that sets that direction to even enable the projects to be delivered in the first place.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think in part that's because the current government is desperate to sort of show activity and in the process has, if you like, not taken sufficient account of things which are blindingly obvious.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the idea that there's a serious water shortage in the Cambridge area is not new.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: For several years I chaired Cambridge's arm's length Crocco when it was run, when the council was run by the Conservatives.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I was retired when it was run by a Liblab coalition.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I know that part of the world very well.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it it's been in it it's not a secret at all that there's a serious water problem in the area.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing you do if you want to start building a lot of homes, which of course are highly desirable, the came you should be a growing city, is to solve problems like that first.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I think you're right, Heather, that the lack of joined up thinking there is just another manifestation of too many cooks, too many cooks spoiling the broth, you know, that an over an overcomplicated solution to a problem that really that nobody's thought through properly.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the bureaucracy point that you made earlier, Steve, I completely agree.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we are obsessed by regulation.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I've worked in the regulated utility sector in the UK now for over 12 years, and we are completely obsessed with regulation.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that is sometimes often, and Vicky's gonna smile when I say this, at the cost of customers and the fact that we're not thinking about customer outcomes, and you can extend that across right across infrastructure delivery to say, are we delivering the right projects in line with what we need to be doing for our community and society to be prosperous?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Martin talked about uh and made an interesting point about us being, you know, a small island, highly populated, and so on, and that that might uh introduce issues which other countries with more space in which to build high-speed railways, for example, you know, Spain, very easy, France pretty easy, UK very difficult indeed.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it doesn't excuse HS2 for reasons we might come on to.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, I'm not entirely sure that I buy Martin's, if you like, proposition.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because why is it in this really dense island that we have totally failed to just deal with planning issues around bats, around jumping spiders, and around, you know, um great-crested newts.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the I mean we with the 2025 uh Planning and Infrastructure Act was supposed to deal with issues like this.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows that they can be an incredible drag on projects.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've known projects held up for years because of bats or in one case um uh it was great crested newts, and in a case I was involved in, it was jumping spiders.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's ludicrous.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: No other country in the world is that obsessed.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're gonna tell me we're the only country in the world that cares about bats and jumping spiders and whatever, I'm sorry I don't buy that for a moment.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is we simply have so much bureaucracy that we manage to avoid the issues that actually matter.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And incidentally, even when we're talking around, uh, for example, the project which uh Martin uh rightly pointed to, which is the 10 times vertunnel, it's a great project, no question about that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is just worthwhile remembering that originally the promoters put 50,000 pages of evidence to the um to the planning inspectorate, and the planning inspectorate came back and said, I'm afraid we need another 20,000 pages.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in total, it's actually 70,000 pages.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who are involved in that project, who I know very well, will tell you that that's the case.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that it's not a great project, because it is.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: But the question is whether you needed 70,000 pages and God knows how many millions of pounds worth of words and time and money and whatever, to simply say, what a good idea, let's get on with it.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because it certainly didn't bother uh, you know, um the original builders of uh the of the sewage system.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Basajet didn't have to deal with 70,000 pages of evidence.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I can promise you that.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: His his uh his proposition was pretty cool and has lasted the last 130 years.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I think I think we ought to be careful.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: We ought to accept that we do some of these things very badly.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's, for example, the appalling example of um uh Hinckley Point C and its attitude to protecting fish.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you probably know that uh one of the things nuclear power stations like to do is to be sighted near open water so that they can discharge the warm water into fresh water, and that's logical.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: It uh occasionally causes problems like Fukushima, where it the proximity to water, of course, um uh had some dangerous consequences, but normally it's what what nuclear power stations, large nuclear power stations, are always planned to do.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: But in our case, uniquely, Hinkley Point C has so far spent in excess of, wait for it, 700 million pounds on trying to make sure that fish don't float the wrong way or don't swim the wrong way into the power station and might get bumped on the head.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: 700 million pounds, massive structures.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: You want to see the pictures of these structures, huge concrete mountains with great, you know, housing, great sort of gates that have to be pulled up and set down and God knows whatever else.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, nobody else in the world does that.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Hindley Point C, which incidentally got its playing concern very quickly because it was one of the first NSIP projects in um around about the turn of the century.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so actually, in that sense, we have we were off to a standing start, still hasn't been built.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when it is completed, it will be the most expensive nuclear power station in the world.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Only in Britain.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Only in Britain would we ever consider.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Incidentally, the later evidence was that the fish weren't swimming that way anyway.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole thing is a complete waste.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And there is nobody else in the world who does what we do.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're either the nicest people in the world and the only ones thinking about the fish, or we're just over massively over bureaucratized dealing with the problem that nobody else thinks is a problem.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think that's uh like a a a mismatch of risk appetite then?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: That actually we are we are quite risk averse, so we want to make sure everything is exactly as it should be before we progress.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who is we?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: You see, I don't think the promoters of the project are we.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think those of us who would like to see that nuclear power come online are we.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're talking about this issue of us being obsessed with dotting every I, crossing every T, and exhausting every potential issue to the nth degree, and in the process, creating a process in which nothing happens for years and years and years.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Hickley Point C was originally thought of before the start of the current century.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're now quarterway through that century, and it's still not built.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, the the I took the first um uh the bill for crossrail through.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The scheme was uh drawn in the 1950s.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I picked it up in the 1990s because it was still obviously a very good project.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: 1995 I took the bill through the commons.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um 27 years later before it was actually opened, and within six months it was the country's busiest railway and an enormous success.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: But 27 years it was as good a project 27 years earlier as it was when it opened.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we would the terrible at it absolutely there are a lot of people.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Can I come back to your question about long-term planning, though?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is in some respect another another reflection of democracy across the world.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: That there are few ministers or ex ministers, present company accepted, who have a long term viewpoint.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's because they have to be elected every five years.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually, in a number of areas, administrations from across the world are coming to the UK because we are one of the better people at long term.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Term planning.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, every time there is a major flooding incident in the States, the congressional committees all come to the UK and the Netherlands.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because we have forward-looking projections on climate change and on um sea level rise, and we have a forward flood programme, and we do it pretty well.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's too bureaucratic, I agree with Steve, but actually it does look forward.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Equally, the reason we're spending£70 billion on operating the grid network is because of forward planning.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's because of where the government and the and the NISO have done the planning.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we are building seven new reservoirs.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: We've docked the issue of long-term planning in water for some time, but actually at the moment we're pretty good at it.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And other countries are coming to me and my colleagues saying we want to talk to you about how you get doing this, because we're finding it hard to get the climate to do this.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the areas where we're bad at long-term planning I think we're very bad at long-term planning on the built environment.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this is partly because it's so connected with the planning system that Steve's mentioned.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So if you looked at the climate change risk assessment the government published, it said amber, amber green for water, amber green for floods, red for the built environment.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we're already finding buildings which were built two years ago, which are too hot to operate, to occupy in a heat wave.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there are things where we're good at long-term planning.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: There are things where every country is not very good at it.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think you need we need to be a bit more segmented in our criticism on long-term planning.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think the built environment, what our cities ought to look like, which is a series of very small decisions, which aggregated, make a huge decision, is something we're uniquely bad at.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really interesting, actually, Martin, because and at the risk of contradicting myself, the examples you've given are so flooding and water resources are where the utilities are incentivized from a regulatory perspective, either through, you know, the business planning process or water resource management plans or drainage, now drainage and wastewater management plans to get those long-term plans in place.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: So they are from a regulatory regulatory framework requires them to do that.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'm not necessarily giving the industry the credit here, because between the industry, the regulator, government, and the consumer bodies, and I was part of this, we ducked the issue of future infrastructure for a decade in water.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: The period when the cost of capital was falling, we should have been using that money to invest in the future.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't, we were using it to keep a tidy relationship, so bills didn't go up and there were decent dividends, and we're now paying the cost.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: But to the credit of this administration and the end of the last administration, we are now doing that forward planning in water.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I can give you a number of countries examples where they're not.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the only one, the only other country I think that are really doing forward planning in water is Australia.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's a topic we we probably, from my background, maybe need to steer clear of based on the fact I've spent the other half of my career in Australia working in water in water.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Let's not make this top about water and wastewater, shall we?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: You see, but in a sense, Martin's made an important contribution to our subject today because he's rightly making the point that we're very, very good at the theory, but very good at the planning.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: My proposition is we're just terrible at execution.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we haven't actually built a reservoir for more than a quarter of a century when the need has been there for a very long time.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're now going to be struggling to catch up.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Water's not just an issue in the Cambridge area.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: There are demands for water in most parts of the country.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: After all, the population is growing.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um when I was born, um, the population in this country was, I think, just around 50 million, something like that, is no near as 70 million.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's a huge increase in population in one gener one big generation.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we haven't kept up with that at all.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with Martin, incidentally, uh, that um the issue of the built environment is where, in a sense, possibly the most the the greatest damage is being done, because you know, we really ought to be cleverer at planning new settlements, um, getting them started, getting them actually built.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all that's happened since the local elections in May of this year is that one or two of the schemes that the previous government, um previous local authority had designated as uh one of the new towns is now no longer to happen, and that's very sad.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: The real truth is, of course, despite build baby build, we're building at a lower rate now than we've been building for the last 30 years.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a big, big problem both in terms of numbers and in terms of quality.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: All part, though, I think, of just too many regulations, uh too much bureaucracy.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you two examples in terms of the built environment, both introduced by the last Conservative administration, Michael Gove being the guilty party in both cases.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: One is the Building Safety Act.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've never built unsafely in this country.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: This was a knee-jerk reaction to Grenfell, and whilst Grenfell was an appalling tragedy, and Narvis wishes to underestimate the the terrible consequences, as it happens, it was not about building safety.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was about wrong instructions being given on how to deal with a fire in an apartment for the rest of the building, you know, which normally meant you isolated the one apartment and the rest of the people were told to stay at home.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: That turned out when the building uniquely was burning from the outside in to be the worst possible advice.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I personally felt enormous sadness for so many people involved who did the best that they thought they could with desperate consequences.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, in London, the application of the whole Building Safety Act regime has led to, at one point, 44 weeks of delay between um setting out your project and having the Building Safety Inspectorate actually approve it.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's another year that I'm paying for the land that I've bought.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm paying for planners to do all this work.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm not doing is building the housing that London needs, which is why, for example, we built so little in London to target 80,000, outcome last year 5,000.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the two, there's the two staircase rule.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's another piece of completely irrelevant legislation.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: It just makes many, many projects, um, higher rise projects, which is what you need to build in a crowded city like London, completely unviable.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and yet these now are part of the endless bureaucracy, which makes um the biggest single builder in the South East, which is Bartley homes, their chief executive Rob Perrins say, I'm not building in London anymore.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Just too expensive, too bureaucratic, too difficult.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'll build similar single-family homes in the home counties.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: What a reflection on the way we operate as a country.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: So what you do find on regulation, particularly regulation that is designed to protect, is that you have a ratchet.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: You found exactly the same with financial services regulation after the 2008 financial crisis.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: That something happens.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Politicians' reaction and those who serve politicians, and I'm not necessarily saying it's all politicians' fault, immediately lean to we need to do something.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Typically, they overcompensate.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying whether building safety is one of these, because as a board member for Housing Association, I have to be entirely neutral on this.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: But um typically, I think they overreact.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But that's also what the body of politics wants.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's what the public demands and it's what the media demand.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this isn't just in this country, by the way.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: The regulation goes up, and then over time it gets eroded, and quite often it gets eroded too much.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if you looked at what's happening potentially in financial regulation in the states, that is certainly a case of not looking back in anger because they're failing to learn all the lessons of the past, one might argue.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I do think you have to look at all of this through a political lens.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: And where does the bureaucracy arise?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: It arises in legislation.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the problem is the bureaucracy then creeps up like this, and the totality is never looked at until you get a Francis Maud or someone who comes in, has a bonfire, the Quangos, it goes down again, then it creeps back up again.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the nature of the political world.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think it's worse in this country for a number of reasons, but one is because we're densely populated, and that just means that the const there's far less space to do things, and the consequences of doing things will impact on more people.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is also probably a reflection of the nature of our judicial review and appeal system.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I do think it is too easy to JR things, and it's also probably a reflection of the nature of the media that we have, which I think only again the Australian media is a type of ours, whereby journalists don't make their money by printing good stories.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's partly why I wanted to emphasize some of the good things we're doing.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because actually the baddies get all the PR.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the failures is where the PR is.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've also got a public accounts committee who get their political um kudos from kicking people rather than praising people, then you're going to get risk aversion, I'm afraid, because that's built into the system.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: The reason for me is do you tackle that by a series of one-off things?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or is actually, there's a big, to you, Tony Blair's phrase, a big conversation here we need to have.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: In previous um forums, we've discussed about um the different the four C's, right?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: So you've got your consumers, but actually you've also got citizens.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: And what we see here is that there is a consumer issue that is responded to by politicians with a view of what does a citizen need and want and who are they going to vote for.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: So actually, you take the consumer view, but you may do a knee-jerk response to a citizen.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: The opposite is also true, though.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: That the consumer view is portrayed as we don't want bills.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the political view is we'll ignore the citizen viewpoint and we won't allow bills to go up to build infrastructure until such a point as it becomes such a burning political issue that you have to do far more than you need to do in the wrong way, which is some of what we're doing in water in wastewater at the moment.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're spending 10 billion pounds on the wrong solution, in my view, because we've got to the point where we simply have to have a political gut reaction to say we're doing something.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: But that's and that but that's been driven by the fact that the problem has become visible.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: That problem with regard to wastewater and the solution required has been the case for a very long time.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not since we've had the data that's exposed the problem and made, and it's it comes back to that customer acceptance, doesn't it?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I think one thing I wanted to pick up, Martin was around the negativity.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: I love the fact that you want to create this like positive, positive view that we are doing things well.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: How much of this conversation is are we influenced by ourselves by the fact that we've got this perception that we're actually really bad at delivering some of this stuff, but there are some good examples around there.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: And does that influence our ability to actually get things done?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like almost like a vicious cycle, if you like?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, I think there's a lot in that.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I also think that there's a legal phrase that um something that you can make it's very easy to make bad law, but bad law shouldn't become a precedent.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: We tend to find, I think, is a lot of cases make bad law.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's it, absolutely.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are one or two poor celebrities about tunnels, nuclear tunnels, etc.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Some of which are actually apocryphal, which get a very large amount of publicity.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: That does inevitably change the political mood.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't disagree with Steve as a problem.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think we do disagree on the scale of the problem or the legitimacy of the problem.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that part of the problem is legitimate, as I said, because we are a densely packed island in a democracy.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you have less space and more people packed into the space you have, it is legitimate for you to have more checks and balances on things that impact on that space.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: And infrastructure is the classic example.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't necessarily agree that we shouldn't have somewhat more bureaucracy than other countries.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: What I do agree with, Steve, is that it's very, very hard to look at the totality and say this has got bonkers, because each individual case has just accreted over time.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I think probably what we need, and maybe national infrastructure uh bodies could do this, because I don't think governments can do this very easily, is have some form of intelligent adult conversation, big conversation, call you what you will, about what do we want as a country.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: And don't look at what do we do on the river wind rush, don't look at what do we do on the communities in East Anglia that happen to have power lines going over their heads.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Their concerns are legitimate, don't get me wrong.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: We look at the totality of the country, saying what we need is a country, what's what's the legitimate checks and balances?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And where is this quite frankly getting silly?
• 36:26
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'd also add, incidentally, that um whilst we're reasonably densely populated compared to the rest of Europe, uh the rest of Europe is broadly democratic.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, there's a democratic system in France and in Spain and in Portugal and Italy and southern Germany.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, it's reasonable to ask ourselves, what do they do that enables them to deliver their grand projet, generally speaking, in a quarter of the timetable that we take?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that they just ignore, if anything?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if they do, why do they feel able to do it?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, is it true, for example, as I believe it is, that their system of compensating landowners whose land needs to be acquired for a project, and that might include homes individual, individual homes never mind just open land, um, that their systems are much more, I would say, commercial and sensible and therefore quick compared to our own incredibly complicated process, which involves, you know, the treasury approving um, you know, compensation deals where we try and tell people what we think the house is worth rather than what they think it's worth, and in the process end up spending far more than we need to to acquire the property which we had to acquire in the first place.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you you know, when, for example, France builds about build its last great uh TGV line down to Bordeaux, um, I heard a number of people say, oh, of course the thing is they just ride roughshod.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Far from it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: They don't ride roughshod for a moment.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: But they they tend to have a much simpler way of acquiring the necessary land, and it's largely about not arguing.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's about coming to a commercial agreement of just doing the deal and moving on.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: We don't do that.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was dealing with some of the later compensation claims for HS1, the original route that went um through to Waterloo, years after the railway had opened.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, we you you've got to explain to me why it takes so much longer to do things in the UK compared with um elsewhere in the world.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you one example.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is also about the way we organize local authority funding in this country, but it's the famous case or infamous case of the Dijon Trans.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Dijon is a lovely town in France, um, and it has in its center a beautiful uh sort of semicircle of cafes and restaurants facing some really lovely municipal buildings.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very popular with tourists, and as a result, the city decided that it wanted to take the tourism traffic away, the car traffic away, and build a tramway, um, which people could use if they wanted to access the center of the city.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they went to ask a couple of tram tram system builders to quote for the job.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And having uh reached agreement, they started the project, and five years later they opened the tram.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's 12 miles long, and I'll I'll explain in a moment why I use miles.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: 12 miles long, and it costs 24 million pounds a mile.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in Birmingham, meanwhile, they're trying to extend the tram by 1.1 miles.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's been going for 10 years.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's cost 176 million pounds, I'm told, and involves a 7,700 page environmental impact assessment to go 1.1 miles further down the line.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm sure that it's more complicated than that, but it can't be that much more complicated.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's in part because uh a modest city like uh Dijon could actually have the power, the right, to go out and decide it wants to, you know, fund a tramway and then just do the deal.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Leeds has wanted to have its own tramway.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Leeds is a very substantial city, and let this be five or six times the size of Dijon, has wanted to have a tramway since I've been a minister, and still hasn't got one because the Treasury says no.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in almost every way, it's that interwining of bureaucracy.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the various government departments have had to be consulted on everything.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: That must be part of the problem here, because we do these things badly, and if we don't accept that, then we're not facing a problem.
• 40:47
  unknown: Yeah.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Steve used the term grand projet, and I think there's a lot we can learn from France.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's universally the case, however.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at, for example, the Venice flood barrier, the solutions to Naples' horrendous waste system, the complete absence of any water infrastructure worth the surplus worth the name in southern Spain, which is the most drought-ridden part of Europe.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: They make Heathway Third Runway seem a model of how to do infrastructure almost.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um we do need, I think, to be a little bit focused on where it's done well.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think France, typically, with some exceptions, for example, a railway station that you couldn't fit the trains into, is actually one of the countries that does it pretty well.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think sorry, Martin?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think there's a societal so there's a school of thought that uh in France in particular, a lot more people rent than own their house.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: So they aren't as tied emotionally to the building.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know if there's anything in that or not, but there are there are different societal pressures in France to what we have around in the UK.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: We have a much higher um home own home ownership, and you're much more emotionally attached to your home.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I don't know if there's anything in that or not.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: I I've not seen any um any kind of I've got no stats on it, but I do I wonder if there's something in there around how we approach our homes.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: I interviewed a sense project there.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: There may be, Vicky.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly don't know the answer.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um although of course I accept that you're probably right that um there is more renting um than owning.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's more about, however, the speed of delivery.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: They decided to build the line from Paris to Bordeaux.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: It had been, of course, um that had been debated for a very long time.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's the sort of last part of the of the big TGB infrastructure.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was said it was partly because Mitterrand didn't want to um build it because of all sorts of disputes with the mayor of Bordeaux and whatever.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but you know, once they decided to do it, they cracked on with it and they built it.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was extremely successful.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we we haven't talked about HS2, and funny enough, I want to put HS2 to one side because there the issues largely arose from the use of the Victorian hybrid bill process, uh, which is utterly inappropriate for use in the 21st century.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: But most and good, I'm glad Martin agrees because it really is.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm sorry to say it's hopeless, it's absolutely hopeless, and it produced all sorts of conclusion, which was simply wrong right from the start.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's a terrible story.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's so bad that we can set it to one side, should never have been allowed to start in the form that it did, and it was inevitable that would go wrong once it was being built in the way that it was being built.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think no, the more general issue I go back to the fundamental question which we posed as the title to this seminar.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and my conclusion is yes, I'm afraid we're really bad at this.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a combination maybe of us being at Dense Island, but that's not a sufficient extra.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: We are massively over-bureaucratized.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have a department for DEFRA.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then why do we need an environment agency?
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we need natural England?
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, why we we when in when I was in government, the um environment uh department, Department of Environment actually ran local government as well as all of the environmental issues.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not to have done it very well.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: But we didn't need all of these agencies, all of these subsidiary bodies.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: They've all grown like topsy since.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every government says it's going to abolish Krangos and simply goes and opens some more.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: This government being no exception to all of its predecessors, it was just as bad.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're just obsessed with bureaucracy.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, India has never forgiven us for introducing the system of government which they still use and which they still rail against because we gave them a sense of what bureaucracy was all about.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you know, in India it's become an art form.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not something I'm very happy that we've sold to the rest of the world, because it really isn't a very useful or effective process.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to think about a really radical, radical, you know, program.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting that uh uh now the um some of the political parties are looking at saying that one of the things we've got to do is we've got to massively reduce the size of the state.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is that in the process we start taking this great burden of bureaucracy off people's backs, off people's chests, if you like, and let them breathe, let them do the job that they're supposed to do, just crack on with it.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we do it, the Liz line being a very good example.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Liz Liz Line, now it has opened, you know, from 1950 to 2022, and a hell of a long time.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, it's an absolutely brilliant rail, but when we do it, you know, and some of the things that Martin was talking about are absolutely brilliant.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Thames Tide Bay Tal, absolutely marvelous.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh Basel Jet 2, and it's been a great success.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: But it's just getting there that's so appallingly difficult, so long-winded, and so expensive.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be really nice to think that if somebody had a great idea about a project we ought to deliver, I might actually think I could see it completed before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: At the moment, I'm not sure that's the case.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's interesting.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's a number of conversations going on um across Independent.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but time and time again, trust comes up.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of what you're talking about there is let's just trust people to deliver.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: And if they don't, then we have a look, rather than let's assume you're not gonna deliver it well, and put some barriers in to make sure that you do.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I do, I think that might become our link based on the conversations we're seeing across forums.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: Trust just comes up time and time again.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: How we build that trust across government, across consumer, across public and private sector is gonna be really interesting, I think.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's Vicki, we have the same brain.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: I have just written trust on my page before you said that and put a big circle around it because we are, and the trust deficit from the public.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think we that's a sort of a phrase that's being used at the moment, is just getting worse and worse and worse with the advent of social media, you know, the doom scrolling, now AI.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: People are very, very cautious and they don't trust everything.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what you've just described, Steve, is very much a result of lack of trust because we don't trust our public bodies or government um to do the right thing for us.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that is, I think that's probably compounding the problem and might be a real challenge for us to be resolving this in the future.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's also one of the sad consequences of social media because Martin would agree with me.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know that in the main, civil servants um are desperately trying to do a decent job.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have no complaint about the attitude or the people who are part of this vast bureaucracy.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're simply doing the jobs that they're employed to do.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, the officials that I worked with in every department I was in, which was the environment, it was trade and industry, and then the home office and then transport, were all, almost without any exception, really dedicated, decent people doing a decent day's work and you know, really trying to solve problems.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the system defeats them.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: The system defeats them.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: The system defeats I think they allow it to in some cases.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: So for as long as I can remember, 15 to 20 years, it's been diagnosed that one of the issues with the civil service is the people who are at the top of the civil service are the people who have done the policy who have serviced the ministers the yes minister types, if you want, not the people who've delivered things.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't get to the top by taking risks.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Steve and I uh all civil servants want to do a good job, but we've all met the civil servants who can find the 17 definitive reasons for never doing anything.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's because the system rewards touching a minister's back, avoiding risks.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: The system does not reward taking risks.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: You take a risk, you get it wrong once, bye.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: You don't take a risk, even though not taking a risk has is it making a big decision, a big bad decision in many cases, you can't you aren't held to account for it.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: So there is still something I think about the way the civil services run that rewards a certain type of person and a certain type of behavior.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Those behaviours and people are not the things that you need to get major projects delivered.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the major projects that have been delivered successfully, they haven't been delivered by policy wonks.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was speaking as a policy wonk who turned himself into the delivery person, intentionally proud to do so, because actually delivery is much more fun.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: But um I do think I do think there's an institutional issue here, which is particularly bad in this country.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think trust is an issue across the world at the moment.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Social media is an issue across the world.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: I do think our particular climate of risk aversion and our culture of um find the reasons not to do something rather than find the reasons to do it, and our cultural challenge uh is something that is a genuine problem.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a cultural issue rather than necessarily a trust issue.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's fair.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: I am going to draw the conversation to a close there.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: I am gonna have one final question.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_03: So I am going to be uh the genie of Independent.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna get my magic lamp out, and you wake up tomorrow and you can make one decision that is gonna change this.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_03: What's your decision, Martin?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: What would my decision be?
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I would aboris the public accounts committee.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because it it more than anything else embodies the system which sets up the inherent risk aversion in politicians and civil servants and in delivery.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is the thing which always looks at the problem and it's a thing that everybody is scared of.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: And handling the public accounts committee is an art which gets you promoted.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Delivering things is not an art that gets you promoted.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: Fantastic.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: Great answer.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much, Steve.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would keep the Public Accounts Committee.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I would do it because uh I think parliamentarians are there to ensure that public money is well spent, and the Public Accounts Committee is there to tell MPs what they have spent and what they've spent it on.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's a vital part of the democratic process actually, so I would keep it.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: But what I would do, and I'm very serious about this, is that I would set out a 10-year program to reduce the civil service to the size it was in if I picked a date, I'd probably say something like 1987-88.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's a long time ago.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: But uh in those days we were able to operate without all without all the benefit of email, of um, you know, uh of technology, no AI, no um social media, no nothing.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and we employed a couple of hundred thousand people less in government.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: It will take ten years to slim everything down, but you have to have a very clear vision, and you will do it.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of it, we might then have the kind of lean focused government, which would enable us to deliver what we need to deliver vitally: homes, infrastructure, water, power, of course, crucially, if we're going to be an EV world in the future and a hydrogen world for trucks and um and plant.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh it's vital.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only way we'll get it done.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, 20 years from now, we'll be regretting that we haven't really done anything of the big things we needed to do to face a zero uh carbon world.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and to me, that would be a terrible thing for my children and their children to have to face the challenge of solving.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: Heather, you get the third wish.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, goodness.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't I got a wish.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_02: This is exciting.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think I'm going to pick up on Martin's point, and it's probably something Vicky, you and I are quite passionate about, is I'd really like all um civil servants, politicians to immediately have the lived experience of customers transported into their brains.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_02: So until you've actually experienced internal sewer flooding or surface water flooding or um frequent outages, or you've had to, or you've gone and handed out hot heaters and blankets when it's minus seven degrees because people are off gas or electricity.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: They that is more important to me.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it comes back to Martin's point around um you get to the top by being risk averse and you don't really go out there and deliver things and understand what's actually impacting customers.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a that's more of a personal passion of mine, but I think I think that's really, really important.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's been fantastic.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_03: I I am very much with you on that one.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: A huge thank you to you all for sharing your thoughts, experiences, and expertise.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_03: What really strikes me from that conversation is this none of these issues are new.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_03: We've had the insights for years, and yet the system still struggles to turn that insight into different outcomes.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe the real challenge isn't knowing what to fix, but creating the conditions to actually do something differently.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: And that means being more honest about the trade-offs, more open to challenge, and more deliberate about the choices we make, particularly when the consequences are ultimately carried by customers, investors, and society as a whole.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's all for this episode of the Independ Exchange.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_03: If this conversation has shifted your perspective or reflects challenges you're seeing in your own world, we genuinely value hearing from you.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_03: You can continue the conversation with me at Vicky.mustard at independ.uk.com.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_03: And if it resonated, do share it with your network.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Vicky Mustard.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for listening, and I'll hope you'll join us again next time.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because in infrastructure, it's not just the decisions that matter, it's whether customers will support them and investors will back them.