Lower Thames Crossing

Just look where the fucking money gets wasted.

Where does all that money go? This HS, they're just starting up the road, the Lower Thames Crossing.

That will be another complete and utter fucking abortion of a fucking job.

It will run billions over budget.

So...

I'm very, very fortunate to work with a program called Lower Thames Crossing.

So this is the largest infrastructure program in the UK.

And it's building a tunnel and two roads.

Um, there's a really interesting recommendation, R10, right? And it talks about, it's nothing to do with railways, it's actually something different.

It says this: ORR with DfT to design and populate a robust regulatory framework for lower Thames crossing RABs, so regulated asset base, financing that supports investor confidence and independent oversight, drawing on lessons from other sectors, and it talks about Ofgem, Ofwat, and, and so on.

That, now that sounds like what we used to have in the sort of the good old days, if I can call it that, of Railtrack and early Network Rail, you know, with their regulated asset base.

You know, what, what does that, what does that look like, do you think, in terms of a, a, you know, the, a RAB for lower Thames crossing? Fascinated by that.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It does name us, uh, as, uh, we will be the regulator for that.

So there's a, a long way to go.

Maybe not.

It's the Lower Thames Crossing, right? So the first draft of my book is roughly 100,000 words long.

And that's pretty long.

It took me months to write.

It actually needs to be edited down quite a bit because it's too long.

So that was 100,000 words.

The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing was just under 100 million words.

That's a thousand times the length of the book that I just wrote.

Now, at the moment, as I say, it's perhaps a bit too early to understand the real implications.

Having said that, we have seen for quite some time quite a lot of opportunities in the UK, principally through the regulated mechanism, so Sizewell Sea obviously being the most recent example of that, But we are seeing other opportunities for regulated type investments in the UK, as it is a model that's being used in other situations like the Lower Thames Crossing project, which is expected to use that same model alongside projects like the water reservoir projects that are earmarked as well.

So there is so there's there's good use of the regulated model in in the UK.

But beyond that, I don't think we're seeing much change at the moment.

Labour's Chris Curtis welcomed the Chancellor's promise to take an axe to the thicket of consultation, and he explained why.

When we tried to build the Lower Thames crossing, the total consultation at the DCO process was 359,000 pages.

That is 250 times the length of war and peace.

Another Labour MP, Graham Stringer, applauded the government's aims to increase devolution and improve technical and science education.