Tears are rarely shed for the well-heeled of Barnes.
They enjoy proximity to the Thames, a rather nice duck pond, and house prices many multiples of the national average. No wonder the great and the good live there - you can catch Gary Lineker on the Thames path, Stanley Tucci feeding focaccia to the ducks, Holly Willoughby shopping at Ginger Pig. It is truly a Shangri-La in south-west London.
But the residents of Barnes are trapped; their Teslas gather dust. Because the bridge that connected them to Hammersmith, north of the river, has been shut to traffic for over five years - and it won’t reopen any time soon.
Cracks were discovered in the bridge back in 2019. Ever since, the council, the government and Transport for London have been arguing over who is going to pay to fix them. And meanwhile, the cost and timing of the repairs have spiralled: it’s now estimated the crossing won’t reopen until 2027, with the bill set to exceed £250 million.
There are few more jarring examples of the failure of UK infrastructure policy than Hammersmith Bridge. A busy link between two affluent areas of London - the country’s economic engine - will be closed for close to a decade because no one can decide who’s responsible for it. And while that battle plays out, consultations and tenders proliferate, and the project’s costs grow.
The usual target for ire in these circumstances is the malign influence of Nimbys - but they are blameless here; there is near-universal local enthusiasm for reopening the bridge. So what’s the problem? And why do we so often struggle to fix or build essential infrastructure?
A new essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman aims to provide some answers.
The central argument of Foundations is that Britain has stagnated because it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This difficulty “prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand” and this, in turn, “lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues”. In essence, they say, Britain has “banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs”.
Britain retains many intangible assets: a stable legal regime, a commitment to free trade, a strong financial sector, low levels of corruption, and the world’s lingua franca. But, Foundations argues, we fail to capitalise on these rare advantages because “the economy lacks the most important foundations” - namely, sufficient housing and efficient infrastructure.
You don’t have to live in Barnes or Hammersmith to have experienced the country’s infrastructure failings. The length and breadth of Britain people are standing on shabby, late trains, or carefully navigating their cars down potholed roads. Hosepipe bans are an annual fixture because we have failed to build a new reservoir in over thirty years, while our population has grown by 10 million. Leeds remains the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system.
The authors attribute these failings to the exorbitantly high costs of building. HS2 (even in its neutered form) will be between four and eight times more expensive per mile than French or Italian high speed rail projects; the Elizabeth Line was the second most expensive metro line in the world, at £1.4 billion per mile; our railway electrification costs are more than double those of Germany or Denmark; Britain's tram projects are 2.5 times more expensive than those in France.
But why is it so expensive to build in Britain? Foundations identifies a range of causes, including excessive environmental assessments, the vulnerability of projects to judicial review, and the multiple rounds of consultation and ‘stakeholder engagement’ required by the planning process. All of this means that many infrastructure projects fail to get off the ground - and those that do are painfully slow and expensive.
The most galling example of the problem is the Lower Thames Crossing: the planning documentation for that project runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million - more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
It is fairly easy to explain why Britain’s infrastructure costs are high. The difficult analysis is why this has been allowed to happen. The authors of Foundations conclude that the problem is one of incentives: when infrastructure is delivered solely by central government, costs will inevitably bloat, and local opposition will grow.
Foundations argues that current arrangement has “dramatically narrowed the constituency who want infrastructure projects to go ahead while also wanting to minimise their costs.” Their solution? Decentralise infrastructure delivery, handing over responsibility from central government to the private sector and local authorities: only they have the financial and electoral incentives to keep costs down and deliver projects efficiently.
The authors of Foundations are disciples of the free market. Their message is therefore - predictably - less state intervention, and freer rein for the private sector. So while they make a convincing case for reform, the current government is unlikely to listen: we will be relying on government delivery of infrastructure projects for years to come.
If that’s the case, two key things need to change:
We need to invest. Britain has failed to do so recently: we spend about 4% less on physical capital investment than the rest of the OECD, and 5% less than the rest of the G7. As a result, the National Infrastructure Commission has concluded that overall investment needs to increase by at least £15 billion per year. Of course, the value gained from that money may be higher if we take the approach suggested in Foundations - but the money needs to be invested all the same.
We also need to change our fiscal rules. The Treasury is supposed to ensure that public debt is falling each year as a share of GDP. But this rule treats borrowing for investment spending (which generally results in an increase in national assets) the same as everyday spending on public sector salaries. You can’t cut the latter - so there’s an active incentive to cut the former. This is nonsensical and counterproductive.
There is a growing acceptance across the country that something needs to change in how we deliver infrastructure projects. The physical evidence of our current failings is everywhere, from the fencing around Hammersmith Bridge, to our shabby rolling stock and potholed roads. And if people and goods can’t move freely around the country, growth will suffer. Good infrastructure is infrastructure you don’t notice - because it just works. And we are all happier and more prosperous when it does.
extra content
reading: The Memory Police was published in Japan in 1994, and only translated into English 25 years later. It was then shortlisted for the International Booker and described as a dystopian “masterpiece”. This praise is baffling. It’s hard to know if it’s the fault of the translation, but I found the writing flat and bloodless. Maybe that was an aesthetic decision, to reflect the characters’ lack of joy in the face of an oppressive regime (or something) - but, regardless of the intention, it made for a dull read.
watching: I recently watched the Before trilogy, directed by Richard Linklater. The three films follow a couple through their relationship, starting with a chance meeting on a train across Europe, with each film filmed and set nine years apart. Honestly, I loved them. The dialogue and direction are so measured, and the emotional resonance is profound without being saccharine. And, crucially, they are all under two hours long - a rare thing in 2024.
listening: The Mercury Prize is my annual reminder to pay attention to new music; the shortlisted artists generally make up much of my listening material for the following few months. This year was no exception: I’ve really been enjoying English Teacher’s winning, and genre-defying, album This Could Be Texas. Separately, for those who used to pay attention to new music and now don’t seem to have the time or inclination, I recommend another Substack: New Bands for Old Heads.
I’ve removed ‘eating’ from the extra content section. While I - of course - continue to eat, I don’t have much to say on the topic, so I’m going to save myself the hassle.
Should say bravo, not brave!
This article moves brilliantly from the specific (Hammersmith Bridge) to the general problem we have in actually getting things done in the UK. I like the use of data to support the analysis. Read this Mr Starmer. It makes sense! Brave, David Thomas!