National Infrastructure Commission

The Public-Private Partnership Commission published their first report.

Sir John Armit, who chaired the London 2012 Games and the National Infrastructure Commission, authored that report.

And they identified a shortfall of around £260 billion over the next decade of infrastructure investment.

the difference between what's planned and what's ultimately needed to deliver what society needs.

I mean, we certainly spend less than other countries and we spend that money in a more volatile stock start fashion.

But it feels when people have done research like the National Infrastructure Commission, that the higher costs are largely contained to certain sectors.

I mean, high speed rail, nuclear generation, rail electrification are three areas which they consistently highlight.

But it's also true that across sectors, we've got a long tail of poorly performing projects.

When you look across this, these don't look like we've got some systematic failure in engineering or anything like that.

It looks like systematic problems in how we make decisions.

So the National Infrastructure Commission said that across the programme as a whole, it might be possible to reduce costs by between 10 and 30%.

With those costs concentrated in certain projects, particularly the large mega projects, because there are some things that we get right.

Because if you look at the green line and the red line, this is, uh, estimates from NIST.

The, um... you can see the, the national infrastructure, what used to be the National Infrastructure Commission.

You can see that, um, changing the dr- uh, exploring more, expanding output, that doesn't make a huge difference to output.

So, uh, the, the big debate for us really is about what does the future look like for these places, not, um, should we be drilling more, uh, in those, in those, uh, bits of, bits of the country.