Holding Back the Years: How to get the UK's infrastructure up to speed for 2040
An Interview with Julia Pyke and Sir John Armitt
In the UK our infrastructure is challenged across the board. Some would even say barely fit for purpose and the public good, which is what infrastructure has been there for since the Romans. It is worth going back to definitions: Infrastructure is defined as the basic physical systems of a business, region, or nation and often involves the production of public goods[1] or production processes. Examples of infrastructure include transportation systems, communication networks, sewage, water, and school systems.
Investments in infrastructure tend to be costly and capital-intensive, but vital to a region's economic development and prosperity. Projects related to infrastructure improvements may be funded publicly, privately, or through public-private partnerships[1].
We have pressing issues with water, energy, transport, housing, and sewage but energy is one of the most critical. In the UK, due to a combination of ageing power plants being retired from service and the rapidly increasing electricity demands of transport, industry and domestic heating, AtkinsRéalis estimates a total of 187 GW of new capacity must be built to meet the 2035 Net Zero target[2]. 2035 is now only 11 years away. To put this startling figure into context just 4.5 GW was added to the grid in 2022[3]. Even if the UK achieves a 15 per cent increase each year, the peak build rate would need to be 25 GW/Year by 2035 - roughly five times the 2022 rate.
However, if the build rate increases by just 10% the required peak build rate by 2035 would be 40 GW - this is the equivalent of 30 of the UK’s largest offshore wind farms in a single year or 12 Hinkley or Sizewell C nuclear power stations.
So how do we stop the lights going out, our Teslas grinding to a halt and our homes staying cold through another chilly winter?
One of our big problems in the UK is cost. For example, the average cost for a flat road in the UK is £8.45mn per km, compared with a European average of £5.77mn per km and £4.22mn per km in France, according to BCG.[4]
We brought together two acknowledged experts in the field to attempt to find some answers.
Sir John Armitt is one of his generation's most distinguished engineers. Now 78 John is the Chair of the UK's National Infrastructure Commission. He chaired the Olympic Delivery Authority, the body which successfully built the venues, facilities and infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic Games. He was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers from 2015–16. He worked on Sizewell B, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Chaired Railtrack and Network Rail.
Julia Pyke is Joint Managing Director of Sizewell C. Responsible for financing and overseeing the finance, legal, communications, regional external affairs and wider project development functions. Prior to her move to Sizewell C, Julia was Head of Power and Renewables for UK, US & Europe at Herbert Smith Freehills LLP. Julia is a Fellow of the Energy Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the Nuclear Institute.
What are your thoughts about the AtkinsRéalisreport released in February? 25GW per year is needed to hit 2035 targets. How are we going to go about this?
John:
It’s true. The simple fact (amid all the technical detail) is that we need to increase electricity generating capacity by 50% by 2035 and 100% by 2050. Forget gigawatt jargon – you need to express this relative to where we are today.
These are very ambitious targets, and the question is simple: are we up to being able to deliver that ambition? I would say that is the challenge in many areas of UK infrastructure. It’s very easy for the government to officially announce an ambitious target but it’s pretty useless if, in fact, you don’t have the delivery processes and the recognition of the importance of saying, this is where I want to get to, so what do I have to do this year, next year and the following years, in order to arrive there at the destination in due course.
Where we seem to have great difficulty is in that disciplined approach, managing that whole programme to where we can actually deliver that ambition. If you were a cynic, you would say it is easy for government to set a ten-year ambition when they won’t be around in ten years’ time to defend it. The ministers have moved on probably five times in those ten years, and nobody really feels accountable or responsible for that delivery.
Somehow, we’ve got to get that connection between the capability to actually do things and the ambition harnessed and managed in a way which will give us the delivery of what we need.
This is the simple challenge facing us. The lights will either go out or we will spend a fortune buying stuff from other people at the last minute and hold ourselves once again to ransom for not having delivered the security.
We’ve learnt in the last few years with war in Ukraine that energy security is very important and being able to have that capability within our own shores has become stronger. If you don’t deliver that security, then you will be held to ransom and you will be at the mercy of world events over which you have no control. These are simple choices.
Julia:
And you will just increase your reliance on gas because the thing you can buy at the last minute will always be gas. Energy Interconnectors between nations will help a bit. However, weather patterns across Northern Europe tend to be the same, so broadly speaking, when it’s not windy here there’s a higher likelihood it's not windy from wherever you would like to import.
If you look at the impact in, for example, Norway of having low hydro levels – my understanding is that the Norwegian government has passed laws which could prevent the export of hydroelectricity from Norway when Norway itself needs the hydro. As climate change bites, if water levels go down in Norway, things which people have banked on as being the importable low-carbon alternative may also become harder to import.
So, if you were both made joint UK Energy Czars tomorrow, or if you stood for parliament and became minister for energy with the power to get stuff done by old-fashioned edict, as opposed to democratic consensus, which rules would you make and which laws would you pass?
Julia:
I would look properly at how to speed things up. This would involve less modelling, less advising and involving many more people who were excited about the idea of ‘doing’. I’ve spent 25 years advising as a lawyer, but it’s been infinitely more satisfying spending the last seven years actively participating in the delivery of a power station. I think trying to get that mind shift into the population would be a good thing to do. That sense of get up and go. Engineers should be highly prized and highly paid. If there is a choice between being a lawyer and being an engineer, be an engineer. If I could go back in time, I would have gone into doing things.
John:
Goodness. By contrast, I’ve often thought intellectually that being a lawyer is fascinating with the inherent ability to switch yourself into one specific argument for three months. Your brain becomes filled with that task or brief and then your training enables you to jettison all that amassed knowledge and go onto something entirely different. It’s a phenomenal skill of which I’m envious.
Having said that, why did I do engineering? I like seeing things being created and to put it very simply, you go home in the evening and the wall is three feet higher than it was in the morning so you’ve got something tangible and physical that you can actually see. The pleasure is palpable.
When big projects are launched, are successful and become admired – one thinks of the Olympics, The Elizabeth Line etc. – the public gets enormous pleasure seeing something that works. Are people in this country behind doing the right thing when it comes to infrastructure?
John:
The only reason we are doing this is for the benefit of the citizens. They’re the people at the end of the day who are going to use this stuff. They’re going to pay for it, so they have to understand why we do what we do. They need to start by understanding what happens if we don’t build it and what will happen to their quality of life if we don’t do these things with our infrastructure and meet the challenges that we’ve got in so many different ways as we face the future. They need to understand why the engagement is so important right from the very beginning. Particularly what happens if we don’t do it and what happens to your jobs, what happens to your quality of life, opportunities in your part of the country if heads are buried in sand. If difficult decisions are not made.
How many times in my career I’ve seen critics melt away once the product becomes available. The Elizabeth railway line through London is the most recent example. It’s a marvel of engineering, a thing of beauty and it works very well. With HS1, the high-speed line to the Channel Tunnel, if you talk to the people living alongside it today, they barely notice it. Yet when we were developing it, we had them out with placards. You can say the same about the M25 and the funny thing is that it's primarily used by people to move two or three junctions who couldn’t live without it. It’s become a central part of their lives.
For big projects currently on the drawing board, we’re talking about expenditure and effort that will benefit those who come after us – our children and their successors. Do you think the Welsh have done something worthwhile creating a minister for the as-yet-unborn?
Julia:
I think it’s an interesting idea. I certainly think that people who are responsible for the welfare of children should be also thinking about the infrastructure those children will need to use and there is an awful lot of short-termist thinking.
Particularly with objections to infrastructure. For example, why do we not have the water infrastructure we need? Because as a society we’ve chosen to lower bills for adults in the present at the expense of our children and it’s the same thing with power. Why do we now need to renew our power infrastructure? Because as a society we’ve chosen not to renew our power infrastructure when the need was pressing but we patched up and made do. I think people being asked positively to think about the interests of children and future generations is a very good idea.
We take a long time and huge effort in coming to equitable decisions about these projects. But how is it possible that the Thames Crossing planning application is 359 thousand pages long?
John:
That’s the question I’ve been asking for many years. I was staggered when I read that a couple of mornings ago. To me, this is one of the most important pieces of transport infrastructure in the country. It’s right on our critical freight routes between the Midlands and the North and Dover ports and so on. Looking at the overload which is taking place at the existing crossing in Dartford, it is a project which we absolutely desperately need.
I would argue it’s a project which does not have that massive of an impact when you look at the distance between Kent and the M2. Most of it is below the ground. There’s a big road planned on the north side but even so, with all the mitigation that will take place and all the compensational planting and everything else you just think what on earth is going on?
Each time a project is considered there is this constant overloading and requirement to produce more and more information which fundamentally is taking account of the local people. Often projects are of national importance, and I think the critical thing we have to address is understanding that balance between what is critical and necessary for the national interest as opposed to dealing with some local issue which seems so often to take a greater precedent.
It's easy for me to say to politicians, that’s what you need to do but they of course are listening to the voter so arguably our conversation needs to be with the voter. Helping people understand the impacts of these issues on their quality of life so that they become less opposed, and accept and understand the benefits of this in the longer term.
Julia, how many pages is your application for Sizewell C?
Julia:
It’s around fifty-seven thousand pages. The development consent order for Hinkley was around two thousand with fewer than one hundred questions. For Sizewell – which is a close copy of Hinkley Point C – just the DCO itself is four thousand pages and with I think over two thousand questions. The increase in questions is not because we’re building something different, it's because the perceived necessity to ask us questions has expanded.
I think that there’s a tension between devolving power to agencies and their independence and their own fear of being judicially reviewed and of not representing the interests with which they’ve been established and the speedy delivery of infrastructure.
For me, if something is decided to be of national significance, I think there should be a power for the government to direct agencies that it does want the infrastructure. It also naturally wants environmental agencies to protect the environment but within the context of infrastructure actually being delivered. And accepting that there is a cost to all of this and there is a cost to the extreme consultation approach that we take in this country.
Both political parties are very interested in it, but I think both may struggle to achieve the right balance between localism, and what people think they want, and the national interest which people tend to realise what they want later in the day.
How many do you think are very strongly opposed to Sizewell C?
Julia:
The Vox Pops that BBC Radio Suffolk did in early 2024 after the announcement that we had entered the construction phase were revealing. The BBC was expecting to hear a level of opposition and it found none. It's popular with the people who are going to most experience the build and for all the reasons you’d imagine. People are grown up and accept that we need the electricity and they want the prosperity that it will bring to their town. They want skilled jobs for their kids. The people who object tend to be a much smaller but very vocal minority.
One of the reasons for unease about big infrastructure is them going wrong. John how many things have you worked on that have gone wrong – after a screw-up?
John:
I worked on Sizewell B and that was delivered pretty well to time and to budget. HS1 was essentially not far off budget but probably took a bit longer. I often say that what we don’t do is talk about our successes. It’s almost a national characteristic of the British to focus on failure rather than success and I’m sure any statistic would demonstrate that across the different sectors, more projects come in on time and on budget than significantly overrun.
HS2 has undoubtedly gone wrong. One of the challenges with all these projects is that people remember the number that’s first quoted and therefore the worst thing you can do is put a number out before you have a clear view of the scope of work and the challenges you face. The moment a ballpark number gets out it’s the only number that anybody remembers.
One of the challenges we face is that we never want to spend enough money and enough time. Everybody wants to get a spade in the ground, everybody wants to make an announcement and they do it with inadequate information. There are a whole set of other issues too such as getting the framework of your contract correct, the right incentive arrangements and so on but the more you start with less information the weaker your contractual arrangements are going to be.
Now onto political ideology… Was the 80’s privatization wave of public services (trains, power, water et al) a good idea?
Julia:
My personal view is that competition in Britain has tended to be a much-overrated virtue. You absolutely need to keep people honest but whether in reality you do that through competition is very much open to question in various sectors.
In rail, for example, you don’t want people competing with each other, you want an efficient delivery of a service which works coherently.
There is going to be a much greater scrutiny of what’s going to happen in areas like water in the same way that the media has now focused on the Post Office scandal. People have now focused on the adequacy of our water infrastructure particularly in the face of climate change and there is now a rethink about what do we really want out of our water system.
National Grid struggles with the People Hate Pylons movement. How are we going to bring offshore energy onshore?
John:
You come back to the point of what is more important. Is it a visual intrusion into areas where power is brought to shore or is it being able to actually connect that power to a socket? There shouldn’t be any great argument about that.
If you travel down the M25 at the moment you’ll see a lot of the new pylons which are a massive improvement from the old style, much more streamlined and much less intrusive.
The idea that it can all be put underground will have an impact on cost and on consumer's electricity bills. One of the most important challenges we face at the moment is the one National Grid faces which is how do they get their network working to the scale needed. They can do it if they’ve got a relatively streamlined system which will allow them to get their consents in time and not as we’ve seen in the last ten years with going from 10% of these projects going to judicial review to 60%. Someone I was talking to said, one key thing for investors looking at the UK is if 60% are going for judicial review is that really where I want to put my money?
Julia:
There is an older study showing the relative ease of building the French section of HS1 vs the English section of HS1. There are disadvantages and advantages of living in a more dirigiste society. One of the advantages is that infrastructure is a lot cheaper, and they also have a more pragmatic approach than the UK has historically taken. If we are asking an area to host infrastructure, then we need to accept that we will need to create benefit. In the UK, we don’t take the same approach as in France, and it’s harder to offer local benefit other than the economic benefit which is created by the circumstance of location. The planning regime allows mitigation but no more. You can double-glaze people’s windows, but you can’t go beyond that.
I think developers could do a better job. We’ve gone to extreme effort over the years to get buy-in for Sizewell C and on the whole, we have it. It will be disruptive when we build it and yet we do have buy-in. So I do think there is something for developers to learn in all of this along with their approach to planning for national interest.
By 2040 what percentage of our energy in the UK do we need to produce from Nuclear?
John:
I think the question is more what would we like it to be and what is realistically achievable. I would be surprised if that is going to be more than 15% because we're not going to see very much coming from Small Modular Reactors before 2040. So we are reliant on Hinkley and Sizewell C, reliant on the extension of licenses on some existing stations and we probably need to have one more, if not two, in build.
Sizewell C has fundamentally got the go-ahead but what’s the realistic timeframe to get another off the blocks? Ten years or so if we manage to get another one through this process started in the next five years that would be an achievement.
Julia:
We are happy with the government’s ambition of 24 GW but whether or not it’s achievable will be about accepting you’ve already got a design that works and then copying the design and using as many of the same people as you can and keeping a flow-through of skilled people with the knowhow. Of course, we’d love to build another one.
If you want to get to 24 GW, if I were running the world, I’d put another one in Anglesey and one on Moorside bearing in mind Scotland is also going to need baseload power.
Of course, SMRs are feasible. It's a question of how long, realistically, will the process take. It's not an argument between GW and SMRs or AMRs which have really significant advantages (and I’m sure they will play an important role in the future). In the meantime, I think the UK should be developing SMRs (which it is) but it should also be commissioning more GW. The quickest and cheapest way to do that is to copy the design that you have.
The only deliberate difference between Hinkley and Sizewell is that we will take out heat, 400 MG thermal of heat (about 270 degrees and it is clean) and we have a project in consortium with Atkins and Babcock and the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham for direct air capture technology which is heat based, rather than electricity based. So, if you’ve got a cheap source of heat then the DAC, for which we are building the prototype, should be able to halve all the current cost of direct air capture. This could provide a very significant benefit because the benefit of something like Sizewell is that you do things at an enormous scale. So, for a 3% loss of electrical output, you get this huge benefit of the heat and the alternative is that we could use this for heat-assisted hydrogen.
I don’t have controversial views as to the extent to which hydrogen will provide heating but, even if it's only for heavy transport, Suffolk is a great place to make hydrogen because you’ve got the seaports of Ipswich and Lowestoft. You have a lot of logistics and import of stuff which needs to be transported.
If long-distance transport does move over from diesel to hydrogen then it's going to be a good thing to make hydrogen in Suffolk.
In London, transport is not bad. Why are so many major cities not as smart as London?
John:
London Mayors and Transport for London have had the authority to do things for a long time. Manchester, Birmingham and others have started to acquire those powers more recently. All of these things have a commercial edge to them and, of course, the volume of activity in London makes it easier to make any of these decisions because the opportunity is so significant.
From my experience talking to leaders in both Birmingham and Manchester, they are working on these things. The thing about London is that TfL controls everything it buys and the bus companies are not commercially operated (they are under the direction of TfL) so it has the ability to introduce technology change. Whereas, in the other cities you have to persuade private operators to make the investment and make the necessary changes to provide those opportunities.
By right, London is phenomenally fortunate with the transport networks that it has and when we as the NIC go and talk to people in other cities they say, ‘It’s all very well for you in London. If only we had a transport system like you’.
The staggering thing which comes out of all of this is the difference in the GDP of London and other cities. London is the only city in the country with an above-average GDP. All the others are lower. If you go to Germany, you will find six now which are above the average. So, the spread of opportunity and the spread of wealth has been better handled elsewhere and we have almost a city-state in the UK with London. Thus, the whole levelling up agenda. We need a broader spread of opportunities and spread of capacity. This is why the NIC has been saying for several years now that the government needs to give more financial ability by almost treating the cities as utilities where they get 5-yearly settlements to invest in the infrastructure that they know and understand will be best for their city. And of course, to be accountable to their citizens in providing the right infrastructure at the right time. But they can’t do it if they haven’t got any money and if they’re in competition for a small pot of money in the sector.
Julia:
It comes back to the point about the merits of competition. If you’re going to keep competing bus services, your bus operator is not going to invest in a smart card system. They cannot invest that far ahead.
What would you do if you were in charge of transport and getting around in Suffolk?
Julia:
A big expansion of public transport. If you are a kid growing up in Leiston (the town closest to Sizewell C) there is no post-16 education. You get to 16 and your choice is limited – for example to get two buses which will take you an hour and a half each way to Ipswich to continue your education. That’s not a reasonable choice to offer to people growing up in Suffolk. I would probably improve some of the rail lines. It’s expensive but on the other hand, so is building more road network. Particularly around Suffolk, some of the rail lines still exist and have been underused or have little bits of them missing. You could, for example, restore a passenger line to Leiston. I hope it’s one of the legacy benefits we are able to bring. It's not decided but we need to improve the line anyway to deliver construction materials.
Do you think the criticism of Nuclear as being slow and expensive is fair?
Julia:
Slow, yes but the more we do the quicker it will be. It’s hard to criticise people for being slow when none have been built since the 1990s and Hinkley had to retrain the entire UK workforce involved. Sizewell should go more quickly and others more quickly after that.
And, expensive? It depends what you mean. It costs a lot of money to build that much power on that piece of ground, but it brings down bills. The case for Sizewell is about bringing down bills and improving energy security. Even ignoring future gas price increases, Sizewell will save consumers about 1.5 billion pounds a year, even in normal times. It's cheaper than the extent of overbuilding of wind plus storage (long-term storage at scale literally doesn’t exist). In a de-carbonising world it is much cheaper to build the right amount of nuclear. Whether it’s 25% – we don’t need to argue about it because currently, it’s nowhere near that.
We should get on with building them. Other technologies will develop or won’t. Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) could be a game changer but it’s not yet proven to work at scale, so you need to have a nuclear programme. Principally what you need to do is not argue about what you’d like to have. You need to build it.
Do you feel listened to by government at the moment?
John:
I think they do listen and we engage with them during the process of making our recommendations for all the different stakeholders. We don’t want our recommendations to come out of the blue. 80% of the recommendations that we’ve made across a whole plethora of reports in the last 7 years have been, in principle, accepted by government. It’s turning that ‘in principle’ acceptance into policy and we are actually required to mark the government’s card in terms of what progress they have made.
Of course, the further you get down the track from when the acceptance was made, the harder it gets. The 5G network was an exception and has gone very well. You could argue it's gone well because there has been a very collaborative approach to that with departments that regulate and construct working together to say ‘how do we deliver this?’
With the right will, we can do these things and I come back to the point about transport: we have to decide what we want. Do we want to get people out of their cars? Then we have to be prepared to think about the social transport network rather than one which is simply there to make money. Buses are not going to run buses half full and make a return on their investment. So, at times you have to say what is the social need and it would be a darn sight quicker to put on a lot more buses than repair railway lines. So perhaps improving the bus service while we are upgrading the rail system would be a good idea. The beauty of road transport is it's more flexible and you can switch on a timetable and switch it off. You can try something for a week and see the response.
What do you think about the argument that in an era when public confidence and trust in the political process is very low this could be remedied by training politicians, as occurs in other countries e.g. China?
Julia:
I think it would probably be a good idea if there was more training offered but what would really help is having people in posts for longer and that applies equally to the civil service. Having people in post until they’ve achieved the agreed outcome would be a good motivator to achieve the outcome. The constant revolving of personnel is difficult. I started doing the paperwork for Hinkley in 2006 so at this point I know really a lot about how one gets a nuclear power station built. I don’t know how many ministers and officials we’ve seen. It's an endlessly revolving cast and the body of knowledge about how to actually do it sits here because we stay in our jobs.
I think it’s a civil service choice to rotate people through lots of different experiences and one of the consequences of that choice is that it’s difficult for long-term projects to have a consistent group of people as interlocutors.
John:
I think for politicians it's more difficult than civil service. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s, I changed my job every couple of years within the same organisation and I think the engine room of the civil service is probably under 40. So those people are going to be looking for opportunities to learn more and to move around because if their ambition is to rise to the top then you don’t do that by being specialised in one subject.
Gladstone won four elections but his background before he actually went into politics was during the war working in logistics within the government. He came out of conflict and continued to work with ministers to help deliver programmes. By the time he became a minister he understood how Westminster worked and he knew how to get things done.
When you look at the number of things which happened in his primary period he was very effective. He was a clever politician in how he found the balance between all of the competing interests. But his knowledge of how the system works was very valuable and how do you achieve that in the round for everyone? So, then we come back to ‘let’s leave ministers in post for more than a year.’
If you keep rotating ministers at a yearly interval you create a world where policy is more important than delivery – they are expected to create column inches about their bright new idea which is different from the guys who were trying to get something in place a year ago. It’s a recipe for disaster. Somehow we have to have political parties who recognise that delivering things is really important. If we keep changing the people (and particularly the people who are measured by their ability to come up with new ideas) then it really is a recipe for not achieving a great deal very quickly.
Politics is so vitally important to what happens to your country and I can understand the temptation to want to be able to do that. In both mine and Julia’s case in the jobs that we are doing we do get quite a lot of satisfaction from the fact that we are trying to help in our way to make things better.
[1] Investopedia. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-private-partnerships.asp
[2] Atkins Real Estate. Countdown to 2035: Can we meet net-zero energy system targets? [White paper]. Retrieved from https://www.atkinsrealis.com/~/media/Files/A/atkinsrealis/download-centre/en/whitepaper/enz-countdown-to-2035-can-we-meet-net-zero-energy-system-targets-whitepaper.pdf
[3] Energy Storage News. (2022). Europe hit 4.5GW of battery storage in 2022; 95GW by 2050. Retrieved from https://www.energy-storage.news/europe-reached-4-5gw-of-battery-storage-installed-in-2022-could-hit-95gw-by-2050/
[4] Boston Consulting Group. Reshaping British infrastructure: Global lessons to improve project delivery. Retrieved from https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insights/reshaping-british-infrastructure-global-lessons-to-improve-project-delivery