Transcript

EVAN DAVIS:

A very interesting thing I noticed about technological innovation in the making of this series is that, with large-scale infrastructure, you don’t want it to be too technologically innovative.

You don’t want to be trying things out in a ten billion pound railway project. You want to build, as one guy described to me, the best five-year-old railway system in the world. And that’s because so much capital is tied up in the construction of the railway system. If anything is going to go wrong with the signalling system, you don’t want to be doing that while you’re building or sitting on a huge investment, unused, while that signalling system is being refined.

Then you have to ask yourself, actually, a lot of what we can do is not about technology. It’s about better human organisation. And I was very struck at something called NEC3 - New Engineering Contract, third version, published book. And it’s basically just a way of organising the project management, the contractors, the workers, everybody involved, and trying to iron out some of the mistakes which have dogged us in the past.

INTERVIEWER:

And in terms of what you’ve learned while making the two programmes, what do you consider the most serious barriers to development of infrastructure in this country?

EVAN DAVIS:

I think I would label the barriers to infrastructure as being decision-making barriers. Essentially, we have a habit of taking a very long time to work out how we’re going to finance a project, where we’re going to build it, and whether we’re going to build it. This is not an unfamiliar point. We are quite careful about what we do. And I think being careful about what we do is no problem whatsoever.

We should be careful about what we do. We’re talking about large amounts of money, and we’re talking about a very beautiful country, and we don’t want to go knocking it down and tarring it over for no purpose whatsoever. However, I think pretty well everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that there’s a difference between being careful and being paralysed.

And sometimes it got into the paralysis of analysis. We’ve spent all our time thinking about it, and it hasn’t really improved the decision making. It’s just taken a very long time to get to where you could have been very much more quickly. And I think we need to get away from the paralysis of analysis. Sometimes, we simply just need to make up our minds more quickly. The fact that a decision is difficult doesn’t mean it gets easier because you spend 25 years over it, and then make it, rather than five years and making it. And I think, at times, we just need to knock heads together and decide on a decision.

INTERVIEWER:

Why did you choose to get involved with this series in the first place?

EVAN DAVIS:

The reason I chose to get involved with this series is quite simple – I love the engineering aspect of it. I think infrastructure raises wonderful questions around economics, which is my patch, my beat. But the truth is, I just find it aesthetically pleasing. I think some of the bridges I’ve been to – the Medway Viaduct in Kent with the Eurostars going over it, or the Forth Road Bridge, north of Edinburgh – I just think these are very beautiful constructions. I’m constantly amazed at how you can have a piece of cable going across a river from which you’re hanging a bridge on which lots of cars will go, whether it’s the Humber or the Forth.

I just find these constructions extraordinary. I am in awe of the engineers that design them and build them. And I think it’s a fascinating reflection on Britain today that, actually, the engineering is always the easiest bit. We tend to think of ourselves as a country that lost the knack of engineering. But the engineering bit is the bit we don’t seem to have a problem with. It’s the human bit. It’s not the concrete and cables we get wrong, it’s the human decision-making side we get wrong. Both of them interest me.

But the reason I got involved was so I’d have a good excuse for climbing up tall buildings and going into deep tunnels. And I think people should focus on the decision-making dysfunctions we have in our country. But I worry also about the dysfunctions of not building enough infrastructure. About finding one particular community, blighted by a piece of critical infrastructure, at a particular time, and the need sometimes to take a bigger view of these things and say, look, this is a painful decision. It’s not one that is going to meet everybody’s requirements. But nevertheless, we do need to decide on where a motorway goes or where an airport goes.