The knights who say NIC… used to say NIP


It is with something akin to despair that the UK infrastructure community is told the nation’s infra is once again being assessed to gauge its long-term needs with recommendations laid down for future investment.

A mere two years after the creation of the UK government’s latest infra three letter acronym, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has published its draft assessment identifying priorities and making recommendations to government. Yippee.

For those of you with a memory and a few grey hairs, cast your mind back to November 2010 and the launch of the National Infrastructure Plan (NIP) which heralded a £200 billion ($318 billion) spend over the following five years (up to 2015) - but you weren’t going to know what that would involve until the end of 2011.

The 2010 document announced: “We plan for UK infrastructure investment to be some £200 billion over the next five years. We will help make that happen through smarter use of public funding, improving private sector investment models, encouraging new sources of private capital and addressing the regulatory failures that stand in the way of greater private sector investment in our country’s infrastructure.”

Words of wisdom from then Commercial Secretary to the Treasury Lord Sasson, but it was the following year – no sense in rushing these things – that the market was treated to a pipeline of 500 projects… which came as music to the ears of the insufferably gullible.

Many of these projects turned out to be the ramblings of a deluded mind as some were already built and in operation, while others had been publicly scrapped in earlier announcements. The rest was a hotch-potch of projects that would never make it off the drawing board and many more that had been rattling around for longer than anyone cared to recall.

But hold your horses, HM Treasury had identified a priority 40 as front runners.

And wonderful news for the lenders, it was all going to be financed by the pension funds (Greater Manchester Pension Fund and London Pension Funds Authority singled out as HM Treasury’s champions) and equity was to come from Chinese investors (China Investment Corporation the only one to be named).

In one fell swoop of positive news (fake news had not been invented back then), the UK market was treated to a feast of opportunity and the light that had been glimmering at the end of the tunnel was now welding your eyeballs to the back of your head… or so the government insisted.

Transport took top billing in the famed 40 priority projects with an insistence that real tolls would be levied across the nation. These included:

  • widening the A14 Rugby-Felixstowe highway
  • Silvertown Tunnel – which is slated to close early 2019
  • upgrades to the M6 Toll motorway, M6 and M54 in the West Midlands
  • new junction 10a for the M20 in Kent
  • A5-M1 link road in the east of England

And that was about it.

The NIP malingered along for years achieving very little and frustrating a great deal. But now we are being treated to the glorious NIC and we’re all supposed to be applauding vigorously.

Welcoming the false dawn…

So now, with a justifiable degree of scepticism, the UK infrastructure sector welcomes this latest draft assessment of our infra needs. And what are we being told? Why, there’s lots of work on the way again! Who’d a seen that coming?

Priorities identified in this report include:

  • creating reliable data services across the country – even in rural areas, how nice
  • improving transport within and between cities – obvs
  • supporting delivery of new homes – oh wow, is there a housing shortage?
  • ending emissions from power, heat and waste – good luck with that
  • adapting road transport to the demands of electric and autonomous vehicles – because that won’t look after itself
  • reducing the risks of extreme weather – buy a jumper
  • finding the best ways to finance infrastructure – limited recourse finance, you damned fools

As to telecoms, our leaders tell us that they will have a hand in the delivery of 5G (will it, really?); HS3 is top of the agenda, even though we haven’t really started on HS2; and everyone gets fibre optic (whether you want it or not).

Oh, and Heathrow needs another runway… which brings us right back to 2010 when Sassoon was bumping his gums about that too.