With Phase 2 of HS2 cancelled and Hinkley Point C facing delays, the ICE convened a debate about whether the UK can still deliver big projects successfully.
Britain has long been known for its ambition when it comes to major, infrastructure projects.
But where it succeeds in vision it often fails to complete projects on time and within an appropriate budget, as evidenced by High Speed 2 (HS2), Crossrail and Hinckley Point C.
Such projects can put a country on the international infrastructure map in terms of forward thinking and modern engineering, but delays and cost overruns can sometimes overshadow their benefits.
To examine what sits behind this challenge, the ICE brought industry leaders together to debate whether the UK is capable of delivering major projects any more.
The discussion was linked to the launch of the ICE’s Next Steps policy programme for HS2. Its recently published briefing paper The cancellation of HS2’s Northern leg – learning lessons focuses on decision making in upstream planning, procurement and delivery. It also focuses on the people, culture and context within which those decisions were made.
Unity
While there is no doubt the UK has the engineering talent to bring the vision of the projects to life, Costain enterprise programme director John Pelton suggested one explanation for why such schemes struggle.
“I think we have huge engineering capability, excellent companies and some excellent people but I’m not sure we’re that good at bringing it all together,” he explained.
Pelton described how the inability to tie Britain’s capabilities together heavily affects its ability to assess projects in a realistic format and honestly portray how much the work is going to cost.
He said: “What the UK is not good at doing is the process of handling the impact of what we assess and we use systems that hide the cost. That might be driven by the political process, it might be driven by the bureaucracy that we operate within.
“As a result we often don’t declare the real cost and then of course it becomes difficult and then finally the real cost emerges and needs stating.”
In 2013, before construction of HS2 began, a statement of expense submitted to Parliament put the total cost of phase 1 at £19.4bn.
This increased to almost £27bn by 2015 and rose again when former HS2 Ltd chair Doug Oakervee stated the costs could be between £36bn and £40bn in February 2020. This was just before the then prime minister Boris Johnson gave the project the green light.
You really need great leadership, good governance, strong policy and procedural systems and you need proper funding in place
Current estimates put the expected cost of building the high speed line from London to Birmingham at between £45bn and £54bn in 2019 prices.
Reflecting on why the costs have risen so steeply, Pelton said that, although the increases attracted public criticism, the public had played a part.
“The costs back then were done in a genuine and thorough fashion, they weren’t just plucked out of the air,” he said. “This was before we’d had four years of petitioning where the political control was not strong enough to stop the tunnels growing from 20km to 60km and all the other constraints that were imposed.
“Why has it gone up so much? The answer is not because the cost estimating was badly or unprofessionally done, but because the whole system is not geared to be frank and honest about the costing in the first place.”
Tecnica y Proyectos SA (Typsa) structural engineer Svetlana João agreed and said the delivery of major infrastructure projects should align with the leadership responsibilities of government rather than being dictated by public opinion.
“My advice to the government would be to know exactly what you want,” she said. “I think they need to know exactly what they want rather than just moving with public opinion.”
Narrative
Cohesion between all the forces involved in the design, planning and construction of a major project is important, but so is the unity of the nation that is pushing the schemes.
University of Oxford planning and resources pro-vice chancellor David Prout told the debate: “[An important aspect] is the narrative of national unity. High speed rail brings a country closer together physically and the narrative of bringing Scotland and England closer together was never really something that was expressed on HS2. But I think in other countries, it is incredibly important.”
Prout used the example of Italy’s Naples to Bari high speed line as an example. While Prout believes this railway will not see comparable passenger numbers to others around the world, constructing it is “about national unity and about bringing the country together”.
“We never did that,” he says.
Anglia Ruskin University professor of digital innovation and smart places Jennifer Schooling went further. She said that she believes an important reason for the failure of major projects in the UK is weak “storytelling” about each project, with too little focus on what the completed infrastructure will bring.
She said: “HS2 wasn’t procured on outcomes. There wasn’t enough focus put on actually explaining what the ultimate benefits the railway would bring. Once you’ve got a railway, no one ever says, ‘Oh, I wish we’d never built that’.”
Supply chain
The panellists agreed that there were problems, but Mace chief executive Mark Reynolds disagreed with the suggestion that the UK is unable to deliver major infrastructure. He said projects just need the right approach.
“It is relatively formulaic if you do the right things at the right time,” he explained. “You really need great leadership, good governance, strong policy and procedural systems and you need proper funding in place.
“You need a brief that is realistic, achievable and you need to establish a collaborative team.
“We’re actually brilliant at scheduling cost and in the UK. I think we have one of the most stable supply chains, even with the difficulties we have. Tier ones, twos and threes are pretty good at delivering the projects.”
Successful delivery of the 2012 London Olympic Games infrastructure showed that the industry is capable of building major projects on time
A big part of having a successful project pipeline is leveraging the supply chain and collaborating towards innovation, said Schooling.
“The classic example of this is the [2012] Olympics. It could not be a day late, we absolutely had to deliver it on time.
“The whole thing was set up to enable problems to be solved as quickly and efficiently and as effectively as possible. We need to embrace that mindset.”
Schooling believes a similar approach was enacted for the construction of High Speed 1 (HS1) where incentivisation of the supply chain positively affected the outcome and delivery timelines.
“Everyone was incentivised to deliver things early and on time,” she stated. “It worked, funnily enough, because we incentivised the right behaviours.
“We have a fantastically capable civil engineering supply chain and it will do what the client asks if the client asks for the right things.”
Planning
Where planning is concerned, Pinsent Masons strategic planning advisor Jan Bessell believes it is something the UK struggles with.
“Strategic spatial planning is something the UK and particularly England is extremely bad at,” she said. “In fact, successive governments have failed despite many institutions and many professionals urging successive governments to grasp the nettle and do long term strategic spatial planning.”
Bessell added that the UK’s short political cycles are a factor which affect long term planning where infrastructure is concerned, leading those in charge to look for successes for the public to latch onto.
“Effectively if you don’t do it in the first two years, you’re starting to look at the electoral opposition again and therefore you’re looking for headlines, you’re looking for sound bites and you’re looking for cost savings,” Bessell said.
We have a fantastically capable civil engineering supply chain and it will do what the client asks
This lack of strategic planning can only be overcome by integrated planning for the future, according to Bessell. She said: “Why don’t we have infrastructure corridors? Why do we plan in silos?
“We had a plan for motorways, we had a plan for the railway but why wasn’t that integrated geographically and by infrastructure type, creating networks which create other values?
“Also, just think what you could do for the environment if that was coordinated. What we could do for communities and how that could deliver extraordinary benefits, profitability, investment stability and also performance in the economy.”
With this in mind, Prout said that any planning, especially with major infrastructure projects, is particularly hard when a nation is struggling with economic growth.
“It is very, very difficult to plan multi-billion pound projects, when you’ve got no economic growth because you don’t have that headroom constantly opening up that allows you to budget and to spend the money,” he said.
Black and white
Prout added that major project construction failure is not the binary issue many believe it to be.
“I certainly wouldn’t blame civil engineers for the failure of large projects. I probably wouldn’t blame any single group of people for the failure of large projects,”
he concluded.
“I think the success of large projects is not a black and white issue and the failure of large projects is not a black and white issue. “I think too often we reach for the reason why something has failed.”
Instead of reaching for failures and blaming people, Prout says, we should champion success and “celebrating the engineers and builders that pursue the completion of the projects”.
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