The big interview - Sir John Armitt

Has making the right infrastructure choices ever been more challenging? Even before COVID-19 swept the best-laid plans aside, the pace of change and unpredictability of both politics and public opinion already seemed at odds with the stable, long-term mindset required when deciding on huge investments in new roads, railway lines, airports and power grids.

Now we are in the midst of a global pandemic, things are even less clear. When the crisis ends, as it must, the ways in which we live and work, and the kind of world we will need to shape, will have changed too. Long-held assumptions about how much and how far we will move around in the future, how much can be done digitally, and the balance between the social, economic and climate impacts of major infrastructure projects look set to be upended.

In the eye of this perfect storm sits Sir John Armitt, the veteran civil engineer behind major projects including Sizewell B nuclear power station, the second Severn crossing and the 2012 London Olympics, and now chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC).

“It’s an incredibly difficult debate,” he says of the potential effects the novel coronavirus and the mass economic shutdown that it has brought. “It will be very interesting to see what happens. The longer it goes on, the bigger the potential consequences. What will the impact be in terms of the attitudes of companies and employees to flexible working, for example? Will there be a reduction in the demand for commuting travel – instead of a five-day-a-week peak, will there be a three-day-a-week peak instead? You can certainly see that possibility.”

That could lead to other associated changes. Will the balance between car use and public transport, which in our cities has been shifting in favour of public transport for years, shift back again if people remain unwilling to pack into busy trains and buses? What would that mean for flagship projects like HS2, Crossrail 2 and the proposal to improve east-west rail links between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull?

These are the kinds of question that infrastructure planners are well equipped to answer – at least under normal circumstances, when population-level changes in the behaviour of millions take years to come about. But sudden and unpredictable shifts in demand, such as those the present crisis may provoke, are hard to cope with, Armitt says. In the short term, operators’ revenues are being hit, while in the longer term, important decisions about capital spending will be put in jeopardy.

“The other question, of course, is: what is this going to cost? It’s hard to imagine how any government is going to avoid putting up taxes. What impact does that have in terms of the availability of money to do whatever is necessary?”

And given the billions that have already been promised to support salaries and business lending, he adds, “it’s hard to imagine that we won’t finish up with a slightly bigger government”.

Even big governments need independent advice, however, and that, says Armitt, is at the heart of the NIC’s role. “We’re reasonably well established now, and 95 per cent of the recommendations we have made so far have been accepted in principle. We’re essentially seen as independent – although we are an agency of government at the moment, there has been a lot of talk about turning us into a full statutory body.”

Set up in 2015 by then chancellor George Osborne, the NIC was conceived to help develop a strategic plan for infrastructure that is sufficiently well-founded to survive the vacillations in government policy that have dogged many attempts to upgrade the UK’s critical infrastructure. Too often, plans that were supported by one administration or minister have been sidelined by the next, with the result that vital projects end up seriously delayed, over budget or cancelled – the classic example being the tussle over whether to build a third runway at Heathrow.

In 2018, the NIC duly published the UK’s first ever National Infrastructure Assessment, a comprehensive set of recommendations on everything from road and rail planning to low-carbon power, digital infrastructure, managing urban growth, tackling floods and reducing waste energy and materials. The assessment took an integrated and holistic view of the wider infrastructure landscape – an effort to wean politicians off their penchant for what Armitt has described as “big shiny projects” and to give greater consideration to maintenance and improvement of existing assets.

So far so good, but the expected government response to the NIC’s recommendations, in the form of the much-anticipated National Infrastructure Strategy (NIS) itself, is taking a while to emerge. The document, which will set out for the first time a 30-year plan for UK infrastructure, was due to be published alongside the autumn spending review last year, but the Tory leadership election got in the way. It was then rescheduled to coincide with the budget in March, but put off again.

Now coronavirus is upon us, will the NIS be held up for a third time? “In the current circumstances, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a further delay,” says a diplomatic Armitt, who won’t be drawn on what exactly he expects will be in it, or when it might eventually appear. But his implication is that, with the Comprehensive Spending Review (originally due in July, but now delayed) and the next budget around the corner, plus the ‘double whammy’ of COVID-19 and Brexit occupying Whitehall, we could be in for quite a long wait yet.

But in the meantime there is still plenty of work to do, Armitt points out. Climate change underpinned much of the thinking in the National Infrastructure Assessment, he says, and that issue has become much more urgent since the government announced its aim to achieve net zero by 2050.

“The biggest challenge at the moment is energy policy. That’s a tricky one because, in a way, the government has made it more difficult for itself by deciding to go down the zero-carbon route. Everything you do in terms of energy and electricity becomes even more challenging,” Armitt says.

In light of the recent Court of Appeal decision on Heathrow expansion, climate change considerations are likely to become an integral part of all infrastructure decisions in future, he adds. The saga took its latest twist in February when the airport’s third runway plans were deemed illegal, essentially because the government failed to follow its own carbon emissions impact rules properly.

“Heathrow has been knocked off by the challenge in the courts over whether they had considered the impact of zero carbon. Clearly that’s now going to be an issue for anyone developing any of these projects,” Armitt says.

The rising importance of digital infrastructure also needs to be recognised by an industry that is more often associated with putting large amounts of concrete and steel into the ground, rather than fibre-optic cables. It’s no surprise, then, that the NIC’s new chief executive, James Heath, was previously director of digital infrastructure at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

The still relatively new Conservative government has big plans for infrastructure as a tool for social engineering too – the so called ‘levelling up’ that has been promised to former ‘red wall’ voters in the post-industrial north in return for having lent their votes to Boris Johnson in December. Such plans might include improving the parlous state of the rail links on the axis between Liverpool and Hull, particularly the Transpennine section, in an effort to make the much-talked-about Northern Powerhouse a reality.

Armitt has said that there can be “no levelling up without digging up”, so does he really think that infrastructure can raise living standards and boost social mobility? “By itself, no. It’s one of several factors. If you want to level up, first and foremost you have to provide people with opportunity. So, skills are going to be high on the list, but so are connectivity and the means of distribution. That’s why we had railways in the first place. How do you create connectivity and improve capacity between places as effectively as you can?”

While successful legal challenges on the scale of Heathrow are still pretty unusual, the age-old issue of budget overruns is still very much with us. HS2 is barely under way and the estimated cost has already risen from £34bn to somewhere in the region of £100bn, depending on which report you read.

Armitt, who was involved in building HS1, says that such increases should be laid at the door of the client, rather than contractors. “We did some interesting work with PwC comparing the costs of high-speed rail in Europe and the UK. It’s about 50 per cent more in the UK, and a lot of that comes down to political decisions. I think we do tend to gild the lily a bit in the UK. For example, do you run your new high-speed rail link right into the city, or build a parkway station on the outskirts? Because the costs go up astronomically if you do go into the centre.”

While you might expect an engineer to say that, Armitt’s opinion carries the weight of experience – there are few more seasoned hands than his when it comes to major projects. After 23 years with John Laing, he moved on to developing the plans for the Channel Tunnel rail link in the 1990s. Then, as CEO of Costain, he rescued the struggling construction group and turned it back into a profitable concern with a growing order book. He was CEO of Network Rail at one of its lowest points and successfully steered the organisation through the aftermath of the 2007 Grayrigg accident in which one person died due to faulty points.

Armitt’s father was in retail, so what drew him to civil engineering in the first place? “I was influenced by a leaflet from the Institution of Civil Engineers that described civil engineering as ‘harnessing the resources of nature for the benefit of mankind’ and talked about travel and working out of doors. I thought that sounded pretty interesting,” he says.

He moved into management in his mid-20s in a holiday relief role and never looked back. “I recognised I was never going to be a leading civil engineering genius and that my abilities were more likely to lie on the organisational side, working with people,” he explains.

Perhaps the high point of Armitt’s career – as well as the ultimate organisational and people challenge – was his stint as chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority for the 2012 London Games, where he learned that unmissable deadlines don’t have to be the kiss of death. “When it comes to project management, if you have a fixed end date and you say, ‘Look guys there’s no choice’, then people are encouraged to innovate and achieve a new standard,” he says.

He also learned the value of communication and the power of public opinion, lessons which, he says, the infrastructure sector has yet to take on board fully: “We’ve got to get better at engaging with all the various stakeholders, including the public, about the pros and cons, the costs and the implications of doing nothing – what are you not going to have?”

To that end, the NIC has been undertaking some exercises in what he calls ‘deliberative democracy’, involving presenting various infrastructure challenges to groups of 30 or 40 members of the public at a time. “We’ve done it in Bristol, Nottingham and Liverpool, talking about reducing congestion. ‘As a city mayor, what are my choices?’ Interestingly, the number-one preference is for better use of space – people accept less space for cars and would like to see more space freed up for public transport and cycling. Health and wellbeing was the second highest priority.”

Keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion is a skill that is likely to be even more useful in a post-coronavirus world, when making assumptions about what people want will be even more fraught with the potential for error.

But Armitt also believes that there are some long-term trends that will remain a high priority, despite the confusion caused by the pandemic. “I’d be surprised if it takes the pressure off the climate change and zero-carbon agenda. The open question remains – 25 or 30 years out, to what extent will we be seeing different behaviours and living in a different society because of this? Because, as a sector, we have to remember that we aren’t doing this just for our own job satisfaction, we’re doing it for the consumer and for the public.”