We CAN do infrastructure

•  People say Britain cannot build anything anymore. But that's not true everywhere
•   Coventry is building tram lines on a timescale measured in weeks, not years
•   The track costs around £15 million per kilometre; elsewhere, £100m-plus is common

People say nothing works in Britain. That we cannot build anything any more. We hear about a decade of form filling before a spade is in the ground. Then, when we finally get going, only our grandchildren have a hope of seeing it actually built. But that’s not true everywhere.

On March 14, digging started on a busy Coventry street to build a tram line. An experimental project aiming to do everything differently: modular pre-made sections of tracks; fast-tracked planning; and – crucially – a construction process so gentle that it would not touch the jungle of cables and pipes snaking beneath our streets. This ‘keyhole surgery’ approach to building the tram meant regular traffic was still running along the remaining lanes on the street.

Four hours later, 30 centimetres of asphalt was removed ready for the track to be laid. Most tram projects would dig twice or three times as deep, knocking into every pipe, cable and sewer on the way, all of which would be dug and laid nearby. But when I visited recently, shallow concrete slabs with track in place had already been laid. Trams could have been running. 

On May 19, just eight weeks after work began, trams will flow up and down the street alongside normal traffic. To put that into perspective: Edinburgh took six years and Manchester four years to build their systems. That is not even counting planning time.

The other benefit? It is cheap. The track is expected to cost around £15 million per kilometre, far less than the £100m-plus that many British projects are coming in at. So how have they achieved delivery at a fifth of the cost and on a timescale that would make Edinburgh’s engineers wince? 

The answer is twofold. First, they bypassed the traditional planning red tape that burdens many tram projects by avoiding a Transport and Works Act Order because they already own the streets. This approval process costs millions and delays schemes by years. They also did away with major street redesign. As Hamish, the lead contractor, told me: ‘This is about putting trams into the street, not redesigning the entire street for trams.’

This light touch approach avoided prohibitive drainage regulations. In another project, an eight-metre-deep tank had to be installed simply because the surface area of the tram scheme was large, even though the existing area was already a six-lane road. Engineers will tell you ten more stories like that, each with six-figure consequences.

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The second secret sauce is the track itself. Using a specific type of concrete and patented construction methods, only 30 centimetres of road is dug away to lay track. Not a single utility was moved. And if the water company needs access in five years’ time, that is no problem. You just lift a single module and work overnight. Worst case: you get a replacement bus the next day.

Coventry City Council owns the intellectual property. Hopefully it can export the technology across Britain and to Europe and beyond. It could be a rare British success story. All components are currently made here.

With 1.5m homes to build and cities up and down the country seeking growth, installing sleek, reliable and efficient transport should be top of the shopping list for mayors and council leaders. We should be grabbing the chance to build trams at a fraction of the cost and on a timescale measured in weeks, not years. Let’s send mayors and council officials to Coventry to learn how. 

Supply-side/red tape but from a slightly different perspective:

 

America’s Democrats should embrace “abundance liberalism”

Two new books contain much to commend them

Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

Mar 18th 2025

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Think of America as a vast economic experiment. The country left the covid-19 pandemic full of stimulus, and with a roaring stockmarket. Which places managed to channel this vigour into new companies, houses, power stations and intellectual property? And which let rents and prices surge instead?

Three years on, early results make painful reading for Democrats. Red states have comfortably outgrown blue states. The gap is particularly striking among the largest: Florida and Texas have left California and New York in the dust. In last year’s presidential election, some of the sharpest swings against Kamala Harris could be found in city centres, where the party has had its tightest political control—and free rein to put ideas into practice.

On economics as well as politics, therefore, the left must work out what has gone wrong. Two new books—“Why Nothing Works” by Marc Dunkelman of Brown University and “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, a pair of journalists—suggest an answer: that excessive regulation has hurt America by blocking housebuilding, infrastructure and innovation. The books crystalise ideas that have been swirling around newspaper columns, think-tanks, city-council initiatives and social media.

Online supporters say that they are “abundance-pilled”, adopting a trope from “The Matrix” (in which the protagonist takes a pill to escape his humdrum computer-simulated existence). And the serious label for these ideas, especially in their left-leaning incarnation, is “abundance liberalism”. For his part, Mr Dunkelman argues that progressives must move away from so-called Jeffersonian instincts, which favour localism, diffuse power and plentiful vetoes, and towards Hamiltonian ones, which point to centralising power in order to get things done.

Lingering over both accounts is the spectre of Robert Moses, an all-powerful bureaucrat who from the 1920s to 1960s built the bridges, roads and tunnels that undergird modern New York, and is the subject of Robert Caro’s cutting biography, “The Power Broker”. Today’s regulatory mess began to emerge in the 1970s in large part as an immune response to the domineering methods of Moses and his imitators, who chopped through neighbourhoods with motorways, leaving urban blight behind.

Nowadays “You could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit,” complains Michael Skelly, a businessman quoted by Mr Dunkelman. Mr Skelly spent nearly a decade attempting to connect wind farms in Oklahoma to the Tennessee Valley grid, but was unable to do so despite the support of the Obama administration. That, abundance liberals would argue, reflects a colossal overcorrection from Moses’s time. Rules offering local communities vetoes on housing and infrastructure projects have tied the hands of governments and businesses, hindering efforts to tackle America’s housing shortage, speed up its transition to green energy and build high-speed rail.

Chart: The Economist

This diagnosis suggests that the Democrats should shift onto economic terrain more commonly associated with the political right. The first change would be to switch attention from the demand-side to the supply-side of the economy. Throughout the 2010s many progressives, including Mr Klein, complained that America’s economy was understimulated after the global financial crisis of 2007-09, hurting its recovery. Support for higher spending survived into the pandemic, when the Biden administration juiced the economy, stoking inflation, and then persisted as the deficit drifted above 6% of GDP in 2023. An abundance-pilled approach would instead focus on making supply inputs, such as energy, housing, transport and skilled workers, plentiful and cheap.

The second change—shifting from a focus on redistribution to one on growth—might be more difficult. Democrats have long sought to improve the lot of the downtrodden, whether they are poor, from an ethnic minority or suffering as a consequence of deindustrialisation. Notoriously, the Biden administration saddled its signature semiconductor initiative with fiddly requirements to favour minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses. Now California is struggling to build a high-speed rail line in part because federal funding is tied to measures to tackle air pollution in poor communities. Abundance liberals are happy to forgo these sorts of policies: economic growth must first be secured before it can be redistributed.

Power, broken

Such an agenda would make America’s liberals more liberal in the British sense of the term. But there is one place where abundance types are woollier: on how far the state, rather than the market, should orchestrate economic growth. What animates them most is reviving the government’s ability to act. Messrs Klein and Thompson agonise about how the Biden administration sabotaged its industrial policy with red tape; Mr Dunkelman marvels at how the New Deal-era government built megaprojects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, a dam network still in operation.

Anxiety about Moses-like overreach is not the only reason to be cautious about such an approach. Insulated from competitive pressure, even the best-intentioned public bureaucracies have a habit of atrophying, as, for example, NASA has done in recent decades. And there are risks, too, in relying on a centralised bureaucracy when DOGE-style destruction will only ever be one election away. Ultimately, the right balance between a market- and state-led approach will differ from case to case: high-speed rail probably does require state direction, whereas the private sector can do the heavy lifting when it comes to homebuilding. Abundance liberals are correct to focus on the supply-side of the economy. The danger is that, in doing so, they replace bureaucratic kludge with overactive government. ■

Infrastructure again - supply side ideas & red tape

 

Why Lower Thames Crossing is taking so long … 36 years and counting

The saga of the road linking Essex and Kent, with endless consultations and £300m spent on the planning application, illustrates why Britain struggles to build infrastructure

The proposed Lower Thames Crossing, including a road tunnel under the estuary, is expected to cost about £9 billion

HIGHWAYS ENGLAND/PA

Tom Whipple

Thursday February 06 2025, 8.00pm, The Times

Some 36 years ago — or to put it another way, 22 transport secretaries ago — the words “Lower Thames Crossing” first appear in the parliamentary record.

The Department for Transport’s 1989 white paper, Roads for Prosperity, argued that this road across the Thames estuary might just be the sort of road that would make us prosperous.

Margaret Thatcher in 1989. The Iron Lady was at the height of her powers when the crossing was first suggested

ROWNTREE AND ALLEN/MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES

Ministers went, governments changed. Tony Blair came to power, Blair lost power. There was Gulf War One, and its less critically acclaimed sequel Gulf War Two. John Prescott became transport secretary. Prescott ceased to be transport secretary. He did so having never driven even one of his two Jags over a Lower Thames Crossing.

Then, in 2009 — ten transport secretaries ago — Britain was at last ready. The Department for Transport once again backed a Lower Thames Crossing, this time in earnest.

A mere four transport secretaries later we had an agreed route, and had agreed it was a tunnel. It took just two transport secretaries more for planning to be submitted.

And what now, as we await the decision on the application? Last week the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, confirmed that she very much intends for the crossing to go ahead, describing it as “the infrastructure that our country desperately needs”.

Rachel Reeves is keen to back major infrastructure projects such as the Lower Thames Crossing but the government may struggle to afford it

IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES

• Reeves to back Heathrow third runway in push for prosperity

Paul Channon, the Tory transport secretary who commissioned Roads for Prosperity, will be pleased. Or he would be, if he hadn’t died in 2007.

How has it taken so long?

The case

Today, as every day, 150,000 vehicles, 40 per cent of them lorries, will cross the Thames at Dartford. As with most days, there is a good chance they will be delayed. They have no choice but to wait it out: for traffic crossing the river east of London, this is the only option.

It is, says Jim Dickson, Labour MP for Dartford, “a single point of failure” in critical infrastructure. The gridlock is also, for his constituents, really annoying. “I see every day the missed hospital appointments, the inability of people to get to work or get to school on time.” So, he says, we need another crossing. And not just because it will help Dartford.

The existing Dartford Crossing, consisting of a tunnel and suspension bridge, is often heavily congested

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

In the summer, three former transport secretaries — or nearly one of five of the surviving holder of the post since 1989 — wrote a letter to The Times calling for the construction of the Lower Thames Crossing, “supporting tens of thousands of jobs and adding tens of billions to the UK economy”.

Kate Willard, the government-appointed envoy for the Thames Estuary, called the plan — a 14.3-mile road, including a 2.6-mile tunnel— a “game-changer for the estuary and for the national economy”.

As with every major infrastructure project, there are detractors. Jen Craft, Labour MP for Thurrock, argues it will only be a temporary relief from congestion.

Transport Action Network, a campaigning group, disputes the economic benefit, and says better options, such as improving public transport, had not been considered. “The people tasked with solving the problem are the National Highways agency,” says its director, Chris Todd. “The only thing they know about is highways.”

The Woodland Trust laments the destruction of “six veteran trees”. There are, of course, newts to consider.

But the newts, for once, are not so important in the tale of what comes next. Nor are the campaigners. Because even if it is yet to be built and whether doing so is desirable, there has long been political consensus that the crossing is needed. That dates back to 2009. And as the British state lumbered into gear, it meant only one thing: it was time for a consultation.

The consultation(s)

Michael Dnes, head of transport policy at consultants Stonehaven, likes to refer to a flow chart used in infrastructure planning. It has 300 steps.

To understand why the planning process is so exhaustive, he says, you need to understand what this flow chart really is. It’s not a set of instructions. “It’s more like a map of a minefield, through which you must travel without losing a leg.”

The incentive is to invest in absolute certainty — £100 million-bat-tunnel-certainty, to use an example from HS2 — that you have covered every concern. The reason why is because what can happen if you don’t. There is a final, terrible hurdle that can appear, reanimating like a horror movie baddie, even when you think you have won. This has a name: judicial review.

How the HS2 bat tunnel will look

HS2/PA

“If you get it wrong, opponents can take you to court,” he says. Even if you win, doing so can take months and cause tens of millions of costs in delays. “This creates a risk-averse culture where delivery comes second.”

So the consultation process is very important.

The first consultation was about where the crossing should actually be. There were three options, and from the 5,776 responses, the report concluded that they could exclude the middle one. That meant things were ready to move on: to the second consultation.

The second consultation had 47,034 responses. It meant that, by 2017, we had the final route. Now the project was at last able to progress: to the statutory consultation.

Once that was over, the hope was that things could be wrapped up speedily, with the Supplementary Consultation and the Design Refinement Consultation.

• Root for Reeves — Labour’s green faction would cut growth to net zero

Planning

In 2020, the Lower Thames Crossing at last submitted its planning application. It was considered not detailed enough and withdrawn. Two years and two more consultations later, it was resubmitted. It had cost £300 million — or, as has been pointed out, somewhat more than Norway took to actually build Laerdal, the world’s longest road tunnel.

The final document was big.

How big?

There is, it needs to be made clear, some disagreement. Britain Remade, a group in favour of more infrastructure investment, calculates that if you printed off all the Lower Thames Crossing planning documents and laid them end to end, they would stretch 66 miles. Transport Action Network, their nemesis, disputes that figure — claiming that once duplicates are excluded it comes to less than 12 miles.

• Plan for new Thames crossing runs to 359,000 pages

Whether it is 25 times the length of the planned 2.6 mile tunnel or merely 4.5 times, the problem, says Dnes, is not that what is contained in those pages is absurd. It’s that it’s not.

“Every single thing that the planning system considers is reasonable in its own right. Few people actively wish to harm scarce species, worsen flood risk or release pollutants into the breathable air,” he says. “But taken together they have created a workload that often can’t be shifted in a five-year parliament.” It is now, he says, impossible for politicians to promise they can do something. “Planning and democracy do not always point to the same outcomes.”

Juliano Denicol is director of the MBA Major Infrastructure Delivery at University College London. He and his colleagues conduct research into the delivery of megaprojects, and the reasons they fail. He says regulations are crucial but in a democracy, especially for significant infrastructure projects, so is getting the balance right. Too often, he says, we see projects caught in the same morass. “We are observing an expansion in the requirements, scale, and duration of planning applications, with thousands of pages that are often too open to legal challenges.”

The tale of the tunnel borer is instructive, argues Sam Dumitriu, from Britain Remade. In the original plans for the tunnel, there were two boring machines, working in parallel on each carriageway.

Then someone had an idea. Why not use just one? It could cross one way, then return. It would cost less, reduce disruption and, the project managers calculated, wouldn’t actually add any time.

It was a good idea, says Dumitriu. But as a significant change to the plans it also required they go back with more paperwork to gain amended approval. In a small but telling way it added another delay.

“Whoever figured out that only one tunnel boring machine is needed has saved taxpayers millions of pounds,” he says. “They deserve a medal, but under our planning system they get a meeting with legal instead.”

What happens next?

Just because the tunnel hasn’t started, it doesn’t mean that nothing is getting done. So far, the Lower Thames Crossing has backed dozens of individual projects. They include two community farms, exercise classes in Tilbury, a pop-up immersive dance experience and LGBT social nights in Thurrock.

The tunnel itself though? A summer decision was postponed by the election. Another before Christmas was postponed again.

• Broke Britain’s roads and rail need fixing — so PFIs to the rescue

One of the problems now is how it will be funded. It has seen political epochs come and go. It was first planned in the era of private finance initiatives. Then, when PFI became a dirty word, it was going to be publicly funded. Now Reeves has indicated that she wants private backing after all, probably with the inducement of a toll. A final decision will come in the spring.

The decision on the Lower Thames Crossing will fall to Heidi Alexander, the present transport secretary, in the spring

ALAMY

Then, if in favour, comes the simple bit: building it. It should take six years.

What are the lessons? Stephen Hammond is one of the many transport ministers the Lower Thames Crossing has seen come and go. He worked on it when the planning application was young. He wishes Labour well in reforming planning. “We’ve got to find a way of agreeing certain projects are of national significance and streamlining the process, otherwise we won’t build anything.”

Dickson, the Dartford MP, has a graphic timeline of the project planning. It is titled “Lower Thames Crossing, 15+ years in the making”. Under “May 2025”, he has the entry: “decision due”. That is not, though, the last entry. Immediately after, with a certain weariness, comes “anticipated judicial reviews”.

Jim Dickson backs the project but not all of his Labour colleagues do

“I wouldn’t want to look like I was expecting it,” he says. “But there are always people who want to continue the conversation.”

In a sense, he says, that’s absolutely as it should be. On “a crowded island” consultation and planning are crucial. Conversations are the cost of democracy. He also, though, agrees with Hammond. “There is something wrong with a process in which the construction takes half the time of the decision.”