Paul Rogers

Britain has an infrastructure costs problem. But what's causing this and how can we fix it? HS2 will cost up to £102.7bn for 140 miles. Spain built the second longest high speed network in the world, 2,500 miles, for less. It isn't just HS2 though. Underground extensions cost twice the per-mile average of France or Italy, and six times Spain's. Heathrow's third runway, excluding new terminals, is expected to cost 10 to 70 times more than other runways. British trams cost more than double the European average. Why are these projects so expensive? There are eight key reasons: 1. Planning: it took 14 years, £300m, and 360,000 pages for the Lower Thames Crossing to go from being designated a national priority to receiving permission. 2. Environmental and Habitats Regulations: these gave us the £216m bat tunnel and the fish disco, as well as an 18,000 page environmental statement to re-open just 3.3 miles of railway on an existing alignment. 3. Judicial review: of 36 legal challenges to approved major projects, only four forced a re-decision. All four were approved again, but fighting a legal challenge can add £120m+ to a project's cost and mountains of paperwork. 4. Funding: the Treasury pays, but cannot directly control a project's spend, so it instead requires long business cases. Once given funding, promoters don't have the incentive to build more cheaply. 5. Procurement: currently generalist teams rely on consultants and are more focused on social value than past performance and value for money. 6. Regulation: quangos and departments create regulation that they don't bear the costs of. E.g. new tram projects must pay for 92.5% of the cost of moving utilities, which means utility companies demand a completely new set of pipes and wires. 7. Lack of state capacity: Madrid trebled its metro at a tenth of London's cost led by nine in-house engineers. The DfT has the second highest staff turnover of any department and cannot effectively oversee a project from design through construction. 8. Centralisation: Mayors cannot fund and approve their own infrastructure. If they could, they'd have strong electoral incentives to build quickly and cheaply, as seen in France and Spain. The good news is that every one of these is a policy choice, which can be reversed. Some fixes need only a letter from the right minister and none require significantly more spending. My new @CPSThinkTank report lays out these fixes and how to lower infrastructure costs. If we implement them, Britain could once again build the infrastructure it desperately needs. cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…