Resilience has become a bit of a buzz word around infrastructure over the past few years. Climate change is placing new strains on infrastructure like drainage and sewerage systems as they struggle to cope with the heavier rainfalls that global warming seems to be bringing.
Making existing infrastructure resilient to extreme weather and ensuring that new designs allow for rainfall patterns when that we don’t know for sure yet what they will be is a major challenge for construction. As has been the case for the past 15 years or so however, there seems to be little of a central government plan to deal with the issues or sign of willingness to fund the work that common sense would suggest needs to be done as a priority. It is the same across almost all areas of public spending, as successive reports from independent researchers, government’s own spending overseers in the National Audit Office (NAO), cross-party committees of members of parliament in the Public Accounts Committee and industry bodies.
Public procurement in the UK is a mess. Along with underfunding there are many examples of incompetence in how spending programmes are organised. None of this is exactly under exposed, yet the greatest resilience observable is the government’s devotion to lack of action, to under investing in infrastructure and failing to develop credible plans to deal with the issues.
In what was probably a last gasp attempt to convince MPs of the need for action before this parliament dissolves for a general election, NAO head Gareth Davies took his case to Parliament itself, using the occasion of his annual address to do so. He stressed the need for better practice in delivering major projects, more efficient maintenance and improvement of assets and more professional procurement. All widely accepted as being crucially required, but Davies might have broken some new ground in telling Westminster that Whitehall has a governance problem in relation to managing large scale infrastructure projects.
Presumably appealing to what he thinks makes MPs tick, Davies said that some £20 billion a year of gains could be made from improved efficiency in government spending, from action on tackling fraud, modernising IT systems and improving delivery of major projects like HS2. Davies said work by the NAO and the government’s own Infrastructure and Projects Authority has built a strong body of evidence on good practice in delivering major projects, yet we still see failures of value for money and delivery in others, at enormous cost to the taxpayer. Why is that, he asked. Good question.
Davies said the NAO’s work on HS2 and the New Hospital Programme suggests that “mega projects” like these are arguably too large for the risks to be manageable by the relevant departments and their arms-length bodies. Decisions to proceed with both were not accompanied by sufficiently robust and realistic assessments of affordability. If overspends emerge, it’s likely that they will be too large for the host department to manage. He said a new approach to the governance of the small number of genuine mega projects is needed.
Davies pinned some hopes on the new Procurement Act which he said is a good opportunity to redouble efforts in procurement practices. We can only hope that he has reason to congratulate the government for its reform policies in next year’s address. If not, the question becomes how long can the UK get away with the current approach.
Nick Barrett
Editor