Yahoo Finance Britain's new infrastructure tsar Sir John Armitt on costs, consequences and staying clear of Twitter
Sir John Armitt is exactly the man you’d hope to call on in a crisis. The infrastructure tsar combines the pragmatism that comes with a life spent in engineering with a character warmer and more intuitive than many of his peers.
It is fitting then that he finds himself at the helm of the National Infrastructure Commission as it steers Britain’s beleaguered infrastructure boom in the wake of a very public political spectacle.
For a start, he does not use Twitter. He reveals this with a barely perceptible glimmer of mischief on a sunny afternoon in his City office, no doubt aware of the comparison this draws with his predecessor.
Armitt replaced Lord Andrew Adonis barely a month ago after the latter quit in a political diatribe against the Government’s £2bn bail-out of the Virgin East Coast rail franchise, and its Brexit strategy. Adonis has barely left Twitter since.
The departure of the first chairman was not at all unexpected for Armitt, who set up the body alongside Adonis in 2015 to help Britain navigate the biggest period of infrastructure investment in a generation.
Victorian-era rail and sewers are being brought into the 21st century to meet a rapidly changing energy system and a digital boom. “We always had this debate: who should chair the NIC? There are benefits to a politician doing it, and there are benefits to the technocrat doing it,” says Armitt.
“[But] the job of the NIC is quite clear. It should not be used as a platform for talking about other issues. But as a national politician, with a national voice, was it reasonable to expect [Adonis] to choose to lower his voice on what he sees as a very big national issue simply to be seen as being more contained within his NIC role? I’m not surprised that as a relatively young, senior politician that he wanted to be able to have that voice in national politics.”
He adds: “My view on Brexit at the end of the day isn’t going to change the world, so therefore I don’t really feel the need to go about shouting about it. On the other hand, if I can have an influence on our infrastructure decision that’s somewhere I have more credibility to have a view on.”
Armitt’s decades-long career in engineering includes stints leading the Union of Railways, Costain and Network Rail. He also led London’s efforts to prepare for the Olympics in 2012. Today he is a member of the board of Transport for London and the Airports Commission, and is senior vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
After winning the backing of Labour who championed the proposed NIC in their unsuccessful 2015 election campaign, it was a Conservative minister, George Osborne, who helped to realise the brainchild of Armitt and Adonis, albeit not entirely as the pair had envisaged.
“The fundamental difference is in how decisions are taken forward. We had proposed that recommendations would be taken to a parliamentary vote by the chancellor to get cross-party buy-in. This was something any government would be nervous about. And that is the element that was undone,” Armitt says.
It was a subtle change to their vision, which may have already cost the public in delayed infrastructure. But when it came to the crunch, Armitt was rather agnostic about it. Is he still agnostic now?
“Well yes, the only thing that really matters is getting things done,” he says.
That, of course, is the problem. Britain’s ambitious plan to expand its airport capacity has dragged on for a decade. The first new nuclear plant in a generation at Hinkley Point C has taken a similarly arduous journey. Meanwhile, the timetables for the HS2 and Crossrail 2 projects are in peril.
The NIC’s first major report on government’s progress condemned ministers for bungling key decisions and warned that a parliamentary vote on Heathrow must be taken this summer. Rail plans must emerge by the end of the year.
Armitt spearheaded the review that backed the third runway expansion at Heathrow over two years ago. He uses the word “disappointing” repeatedly when discussing the lack of progress since then.
“We need to be seen to be a country that is facing strongly outwards. In the time we’ve taken to think about building one, Frankfurt and Schiphol have built several at their airports,” he says. The political dithering might not have taken place if the NIC had been granted the power to take its recommendation to a parliamentary vote, he suggests.
“These projects are not simply about local impacts, they are national in significance and affect the whole country. The best way to take these forward would be for the whole of Parliament to have a say and have a debate so it’s not a parochial issue,” he says.
After more than three years of political debate the £55.7bn HS2 project was given the parliamentary stamp of approval this time last year. But, for many, HS2 stands as a grim example of how well-intentioned infrastructure projects can go bad. As more and more commentators voiced doubts over the benefits of the project, costs virtually doubled. If the decision to move ahead with HS2 were to be taken now, would Armitt press ahead?
“Well, yes,” he answers quickly. A long pause follows. “There are two issues there: one is that the driver for the project is capacity, and the capacity argument hasn’t gone away. The other is that you do get to the point where you can’t keep putting sticking plasters on old Victorian infrastructure.”
“Is the budget the right budget,” he asks, and takes another long pause. “I think one of the challenges we face as an engineering profession in the UK is working to a budget, as opposed to having a flexible budget that keeps increasing as people think more and more about what they want to build.”
At the heart of Britain’s infrastructure challenge is a tangle of both money and power: fiscal constraint dominates public spending, while knotted threads of governance between Westminster and decentralised decision makers frequently trip up progress. Armitt says “collaboration” has rightly rooted into the thinking of those hoping to unravel the mess of opposing tensions, which has left many major projects tied up in indecision and delay.
But there is a wider problem in the infrastructure debate, involving a new kind of conversation about cost and consequence. Armitt says there are some key messages that he has been carrying to people for the last few years: “Firstly, the need for professions who deliver infrastructure to realise that if they want their work to be accepted they have to get out there and explain, in words that are plain English, what it is about and why it is necessary.”
The chief example of this can be seen in the energy debate. “If we really want to have a better life and a cleaner society then we can’t shy away from our carbon objectives – and that has a price,” says Armitt, using Britain’s contentious energy transition away from fossil fuels as a prime example of the cost debate.
Ministers insist that their “green taxes” are leading to lower bills due to better efficiency, while energy suppliers say decarbonising comes at a price.
“It is a sad thing about politics, isn’t it? The short-termism. At the end of the day ministers know they have an election coming two or three years down the line and will be remembered by what costs went up and which went down,” Armitt muses.
Just as well the NIC is in the hands of a Twitter-shy technocrat then.
