When infrastructure is more critical than cost

The UK has a history of developing and delivering some fantastic infrastructure, however far too often, conversations default to cost and programme, before we grasp the aspirational benefits and outcomes of the investment made.

A purely financial cost–benefit analysis of new transport infrastructure can kill the programme before it starts. With a narrow focus on cost, the real but often uncountable benefit to the economy, quality of life, mobility of the public and the environment – gets short shrift. An adherence to the bottom line and the engineering solution at hand is understandable, but economists have known for a long time that it leads officials to make less-than-optimal decisions for society at large.

Indeed, the potential of projects such as High Speed Two (HS2) and Crossrail is prodigious enough to boost local and national economies in the spheres of connectivity, social rebalancing, development, innovation, to name but a few, but the political and budgetary challenges outweigh the benefits for some. Negative sentiment sells more papers and elicits more clicks, of course, and will hold sway with the public when the work to win hearts and minds for infrastructure is an afterthought.

Taking the rough with the smooth

This leaves room for press coverage on new UK infrastructure developments to take a blinkered view – in trade magazines, in Financial Times articles, and in Westminster press releases, a reductionist narrative hampers the understanding that government investment doesn’t disappear once it’s injected; it has a multiplier effect on income, tax, business growth and general spending. A recent report on HS2 from the New Economics Foundation has a strong focus on value for money and concludes that it is more efficient to upgrade existing railway networks instead. The publicity around Crossrail’s delays and cost overruns was amplified by the follow up BBC Two series ‘The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway’, which opened in March with an episode entitled ‘Under Pressure, Over Budget’.

This is not to say that these analyses are unnecessary – projects of this importance require just this sort of scrutiny – but what we don’t want is to fail to account for the raft of positive externalities that they bring or their power to make lives better beyond a return to investors.

The transformative power of infrastructure

While we accept that marshalling negative feelings against big-name infrastructure works ‘is almost as big a part of our national DNA as cricket or fish and chips’, Marc Casci writes earnestly for The Yorkshire Post that ‘to create a better tomorrow’, airport expansions, HS2 and infrastructure projects of their ilk are crucial. The chief executive for HS2, Mark Thurston, told the BBC that a key aim of the railway is ‘to rebalance our economy – be a catalyst for growth and prosperity away from London and the South East.’ Surely this is a vision that we can and should all support. In simple terms, let’s start getting excited about such huge, transformative programmes and the benefits we can reap, rather than apologising for them.

A holistic view

Of course there are numerous initiatives underway that seek to achieve this ambition, for example the Northern Powerhouse, a government initiative focusing on energising investment in Northern England while firmly rooting socio-economic considerations into its four-part strategy:

• connectivity and transport
• science, skills and innovation
• quality of life
• devolution and local growth

This initiative begins to address the question of social and economic disparity, but will only succeed, if we can create a socially driven, infrastructure investment programme. We need to stop talking about cost and instead talk about benefit, for the short, medium and long term. We all need to be able to have honest dialogue about how programmes such as HS2, will impact both negatively and positively, to ensure we provide the most valuable outcomes.

I assert that a more holistic, emotive and human view of infrastructure programmes, is in order. We will always need the excellence of our world-class engineers to help realise the vision, but we must start with questioning something more fundamental than the project cost and start by asking how is it improving our society.