Sir John Armitt is the Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission. He has held positions as Chief Executive of Network Rail (2002-2007), Chairman of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2007-2012), Chairman of the National Express Group (2013-), and a Board member of Transport for London (2012-2016).
This interview was conducted on 8 February 2022.
Q: Can you tell us about your role in regional growth and development?
The first 27 years of my life I spent with a major construction company called John Lang and if I go right back to the beginning, I started with local authority housing back in the mid sixties, when there was an enormous programme of local authority housing. And then in the seventies, I moved across to building power stations, which were at that time in the seventies; it was the last time there was a clear energy policy, was the time of CGB. But building these massive power stations primarily in Kent at that stage.
I then went overseas, which was a consequence of government at that time, lending money to, in this case, Poland. It was a circular way of lending money because the money was lent to Poland, they had to spend it on UK goods and services. So we were building what is the largest European petrochemical plant and PVC plants in the middle of Poland for a few years. I then came back from that to run an anti nationalisation campaign, which the Labour Party, bless them, at that time, Callaghan was suggesting that they were going to nationalise all the large construction companies. I was put in charge of resisting this. It was great fun for six months in the middle of 78. 79, 80, 81, 82, and from the mid seventies, as a company, we got heavily involved in building the first North Sea oil rigs which were up in the Northeast where these dry docks were. And one of the things I remember subsequently and would have been about 82, 83 was going up to Aberdeen when we were doing offshore fabric maintenance. At that time, London was fairly slow and Aberdeen was just literally booming. And I mean, it was the enormous investment which was taking place off the back of North Sea oil.
At the same time, over on the other coast in Sellafield, there was an enormous programme taking place of building out the nuclear treatment, waste treatment plants, which we were heavily involved in as well. So that was a lot of expenditure which was taking place. It came in the case of the nuclear work off the back of government funding. In the case of the offshore oil industry, of course, it was driven by the big oil majors.
If I move on to what was going on in the building division of the company at that time in the eighties, it would have been a lot of commercial property. It was a boom in the large out of town shopping centres being built. A lot of hospitals being built from the government expenditure. The largest levels of activity in our company, we were one of the biggest builders at that time, was London, the Northwest, and the Midlands. And so those were where we saw the primary activity, was London, the northwest, and the Midlands, they were the most successful parts of the business. We come around to London and the M25 was being built. The M14, the A55 in North Wales. And of course there was the start of pressurised water reactor programme with Science World Be, which was meant to be the first of four. But then the whole programme fell over as a consequence of Chernobyl and the loss of confidence in the programme. Cardiff Bay Barrage was being built around that time. Back end of the eighties, you saw the start of private finance initiative. So the first of which was the Dartford crossing, followed by the second Seven crossing, which I was heavily involved in. But of course, then you had the whole schools and hospitals programme. So all of these things fundamentally driven by government or government initiative.
I took over responsibility for high speed one in 93. That was in the period when we were trying to work out the roots of the hybrid bill and the whole process of getting the parliamentary bill through. I think that that was where I first learned that the only things that mattered really on these very large scale projects was the prime minister and the chancellor and without their support, you weren’t going anywhere. And in the case of Maggie, of course, she was stung into action by Metron, who arrived in London and said that he’d spread across the plains of France and ambled through the orchards of Kent. And that caused Maggie to suddenly wake up and say, Right, we were going to build our high speed line from the Channel Tunnel to London and then Michael Heseltine was the person who pushed through the route, which his objective was fundamentally regeneration of the East End. And so a route which up until that point was going to be south of the river, suddenly went north of the river. And that was Michael’s determination to actually regenerate Stratford and have a station at Stratford, and so that determined the route into into St. Pancras.
I joined Network Rail in 2001, which of course — I joined rail track in 2001 in administration, and there was a very heavy programme of investment, obviously financed by the government, driven to a large extent, of course, by commuter activity and less investment in the regions. I suppose what one has always witnessed throughout this time was the importance of university cities, towns, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Sheffield, Science Parks, Milton Keynes we were heavily involved in, which would have been back in the seventies, which was the only significant example post the early first Second World War towns.
The RDA, it’d be interesting to see what people think of the RDA. I have to say, from the outside, we regarded them as a waste of time. We never felt that they had any significant influence. Many people would say the Local Enterprise Partnerships have been worse, actually, than the RDAs. Skills has been a constant struggle all the way through. Skills training has continued to fail in the UK, I think, it’s not improving, particularly at the moment. In fact, it’s gotten worse. It’s got worse in the last two or three years with the introduction of the levy. But of course, the industry, construction industry and infrastructure industry has been saved by European labour, fundamentally, particularly in the Southeast, which has meant that its got away with not having to train in the way that it in the way that it should have done. So that’s a starter for 10. I don’t know what your next question is going to be.
Q: What do you think are the key successes and key frustrations?
Well, I was going to say, I suppose, I know it’s become a dirty word, but I mean, in terms of delivering things, there’s no doubt the PFI was a success. I can argue about the economics of deal spreading, but I think, personally, that was a failure of contract rather than anything else. And it was a failure by the government to recognise that this total turnkey project, one way or the other, the private sector will find a way to make a profit. And so if you screw down the front end capital cost and put all your focus of how you’re going to award the contract on the front, then then you’re going to pay for it in the back end. And of course, it was the back end that actually became the embarrassment and the problem with the famous £60 to change a light bulb type of examples and the operation on maintenance costs, being aware, investors then recovered the funds.
And of course, it’s not surprising in a sense, because if you take the average building and its lifetime cycle, then two thirds of it is actually in its operation, and a third of the investment is actually in the capital costs from then. So I think there was a failure to understand the balance of interest, really, in the PFI approach. But having said that, what it did do, was it clearly leveraged a lot of money into particularly schools and hospitals at a time when there was a need to invest in them.
Q: When you think back on your observations in terms of what drives the prosperity of different places, what would be your hierarchy? What are the most important things? Where would you place infrastructure within that?
I think infrastructure clearly does drive things, but I think it’s in that circle with primarily, I would argue, private sector investment. I mean, I think, to me, if you talk about growth, the ultimate objective has to be jobs. So to me, it’s what can you do, which is actually going to create new employment opportunities? And that, fundamentally, has to be people, if you like, making and selling things, providing, increasingly, services to people. But somebody has to employ them. And therefore, to me, as a contractor, it was always interesting.
You could never resist working for the government because 50% of the expenditure which went into buildings and infrastructure came from government. But you never really wanted to work for them because they were much more difficult clients to work for. When I say difficult, everything just took a long time. You would always finish up with very thin margins and a long period of trying to settle your final account. Whereas if you were working for private sector, it was more brutal. But you knew where you stood and things were resolved much more quickly and so you could get on and do other things.
Whereas — and I can remember spending five years trying to negotiate a final account just for one section of the M25. And in the end, we wore the government down to the point where I got a call from the county engineer saying, John, we need to settle this. Yeah, I’m quite happy to settle at any time you like. At the moment, every year passes by, I get more out of you than I spend. So it pays me just to keep dripping the tap of claims. And so he said, Well, wrap it up, and we wrapped it up in a week. Now we could have wrapped it up in a week three years previously, probably. But of course, very difficult for the public sector to authorise those sorts of arrangements in the way that the private sector can.
And I think that’s one of the frustrations of the public sector, that people are so terrified of actually authorising expenditure without every last dot and t crossed and dotted. But if I come back to why the things happen, the planning process has just got worse and worse.
And the planning process today is probably holding things up more than it ever has done. And that, in part, again, is because there are so many ways in which people can bring an objection, particularly on the environmental front, which didn’t exist at all, really, pre 1990 or barely at all pre 1990’s. So that has just made everything more expensive. It takes a lot longer, whether the end result is that much better, maybe, but relatively small in the overall context of things. But of course, having worked also for Berkley Homes for the last 14 years, what you witness there is how fundamentally, these things are about relationships at the end of the day and your larger house builder is fundamentally working from 7 AM to 10 PM, and the reason they’re working from 7 PM to 10 PM in the evenings, of course, is planning committees. And that is fundamentally about trust and relationships. And if you put in the effort and if you can show that you can be trusted, then you’re going to get your planning consent more often than you’re not. And when it becomes, Can I shake the hand of this client and trust him that he’s going to deliver on what has been agreed? It’s an enormous problem at the moment, because the last couple of years, local authorities have been short of resource. People have been working from home or the other side of the world, literally, at times, supposedly advising on planning.
So everything is taking longer than it should, because you have the ridiculous situation where developers now pay the wages of the people who are going to inspect their own application. So giving the money to the local authority to go cloy somebody who will then actually come in and be able to process an application, it’s a crazy world.
So I think, if we come back to what drives things, clearly with large levels as we saw in the Postwar period and through to probably 1970, you have this very heavy investment by the public sector, by the nationalised industries, which, of course, then fundamentally changed with privatisation of all these large scale entities. And what’s interesting at the moment is we’re coming full circle. And as I observed in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, in the current climate, would we decide to privatise? If we still had nationalist utilities, would we be privatising them in the world of climate change? Absolutely, we wouldn’t. Because you wouldn’t be able to sell them.
And of course, what we’re now seeing is more and more regulation and more and more falling back, in a sense, on the need for government to support the private sector as it deals with decarbonization. So looking forward, it’s an interesting debate. If you say, What’s more likely to be the picture in the next 20 years? Is it going to be more big government, or is it going to be less government? I would say, at the moment, it’s inevitably going to be more government, not less government. And the gas crisis and everything that surrounds it just goes to show how difficult it’s going to be.
Q: Do you think over that period, the influence of London has become greater? Either on the one hand, driving growth across the UK or making life easier or harder for other parts of the UK?
I think undoubtedly, the focus of London makes life harder for the rest of the UK. If you take the other two main cities, Manchester, Birmingham, they’ve not done too badly. Manchester clearly did better. But I think Manchester is a classic example of the, once again, the power of personality and power of individuals. Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese. Richard and Howard, between them, it just shows what can be done with two very powerful people working in harmony for 20 years. Birmingham almost became a basket case with failures of local leadership. But outside of Manchester, it’s quite difficult to point to any — Bristol is the only other fastest growth city of recent years. But I grew up down in Portsmouth for a number of years, and there was always, of course, the desire to create a greater, cohesive element of putting Portsmouth and Southampton together in the so called solar city, which many people saw as being an objective. It’s never really happened. Southampton has probably developed slightly better and faster than Portsmouth. But London, it really strikes me as a fundamental failure of England and potentially France as well, is this total control of a capital city, when you compare it with somewhere like Germany.
Q: Do you have the chance, as part of work on the commission, to look back at the historic pattern of infrastructure spend and its focus on London?
Well, of course then, the argument has always been that of course, the devil is the cost benefit analysis, success breeds success. And therefore, it was always easier to get an investment into London and into infrastructure in London than it was anywhere else because you could just point to the returns. It was very interesting when we looked at the cost benefit analysis, I don’t know if you got involved in it at all when we were looking at high speed one, the only reason high speed one held up was not because of international revenues but because of domestic revenues. And it was the commuting fares and the commuting income, which actually made the business case for high speed one. Without the domestic, 10 trains an hour that we’re going to run on domestic lines, and take 30 minutes — they were taking 30 minutes off of every journey time into London from Ashford was the most stupid decision ever. Ashford should never have had the railway line going through the middle of Ashford. I mean, that added £400 million to the cost. We argued for a parkway station on the ring road of Ashford, which we could have built for 50 million and taken the railway around Ashford. Ashford burgers came and beat up the MPs and ministers in London and persuaded them they had to have the railway line going through the middle of Ashford, which was phenomenally expensive, of course, 10 times as much as it would have done to put in a portal. And, of course, Ashford has never been successful. I don’t think any trains stop at Ashford. On the other hand, Ashford has not developed either as quickly as everyone thought it would do in terms of — I was down there a couple of years ago. And finally a lot of housing was being built around Ashford because of the journey times from Ashford Station on the high speed line into London. I mean, that may not be looking quite as clever at the moment, but equally at that time, people in Canterbury were complaining that they were having to stand on those high speed trains at seven in the morning because they were full to capacity, despite the higher fares, compared with travelling in conventionally.
Q: Looking back over the last 40 years, has the pattern of public infrastructure spending offset regional differences or tended, because of the cost benefit analysis, to reinforce them?
I think it’s reinforced them, and I think it inevitably reinforces. I would say that was in terms of road and rail, then it’s been a reinforcement of the successful roots and reinforcement of the Southeast, primarily. If you look at science developments and science parks, they have been more successful in the traditional Russell Group University locations. I’m involved with Imperial at the moment. Imperial is investing billions, over the 15 year period in Imperial West, out at White City. Oxford and Cambridge, of course, just continue to push out, and the science parks have gone there. Companies like Arm, of course, established themselves. And on the outskirts of Cambridge, if you look at people like the big pharmaceutical companies, they’ve always been in that band, that Southeast corridor. Milton Keynes, Oxford, Cambridge. There was probably more money invested in Sellafield than I suspect was invested in Manchester, if you go back to the eighties. And in the Northeast, once the heat had gone out of the offshore fabrication activities, the last major — when we were building the Isle of Grain Power station between 70 and 74, Redcar steelworks was built, for example. That was probably the last major investment of any scale which took place in that part of the country, outside of what the oil sector was doing in places like the refineries in Hartlepool.
Q: Since 2015, how much was the starting remit about using infrastructure to spread balanced growth as opposed to drive UK growth?
Well, I think the weakness is actually — I made this observation to various business people and leaders in the North when I went up to talk to them, which was, they squabble amongst themselves all the time and there is no unity of purpose. And I said to them one day when we were having a session and we were in Leeds or somewhere and I said, Coming up from the South as I do without really, to be fair, understanding you all, but listening to you all, what you need is a mayor for the North because, you’re so bloody parochial. This is what you really want for Manchester, this is what you really want for Leeds, this is what you want for Liverpool. There’s no coherent objective here across the North.
And as long as you’re like that, then you’re not going to carry much weight in your arguments down, down in London, I’m afraid. And the businessmen laughed and said, Yeah, you’re absolutely right, John. Of course, the local politicians all looked at me in horror. And I have to say, when I did the Thames Estuary study, which I took over from Michael, the Thames growth study, I had a similar problem there in that it was this divide, fundamentally, between the Essex Bank and the Kent Bank. And the idea that there was an Estuary which was sort of pulling everything together was antithetical to them because they looked at it through a Kent lens or an Essex lens.
And again, you were reliant on just one or two individuals who showed any grasp of leadership, but you could see that all they were doing was, each town was actually battling against another town. And of course, the government encourages this. And it’s one of the things we’ve criticised at the NIC whenever we look at this is the constant use of competition to allocate funding and that you’ve got to bid for your money as a city against other cities or as a town against other towns. And they don’t have the resources, really. And of course, they are expending money on consultants, which then isn’t available for anything else. And if you award it according to the highest bid, then you’re not necessarily awarding it to the place which actually needs it the most. You’re just taking a, Well, who’s the best bidder, and let’s give him the job, in a sense. Or let’s give him the opportunity to build something, regardless of when it suits any broader strategy.
Q: And where does that take you in your thinking?
Well, I think you come back to spatial planning, and arguably, the infrastructure commission should be further down the list of activities that you need to start off with a industrial strategy, and the industrial strategy needs to be reflected then, in a spatial strategy, as to, Well, if they’re the industries, everybody cannot be focused on pharma. Everybody cannot be into tech developments. There are about five different towns, all of which claim that they’re in nuclear research, which is stupid. I used to have the same argument with universities when I was the chair of the Energy and Physical Science Research Council that you’ve got one or two bright research professors in, say, Brighton University and Brighton will bid against Imperial for research monies.
And frankly, what you really need to do is to say to Brighton, Look, stop researching that. The focus of the fund is in Imperial. And let them tell your two guys who are very bright, they’re going to have to move up to Imperial and work with people in London or whatever it might be. But as long we have this constant watering down of the resource by trying to spread it around a little bit to everybody, you’re not going to get that agglomeration of skill and effort.
I mean, where we finished up recently is the NIC saying to government that there needs to be at the centre of government, a unit which actually can support and provide guidance to towns in order to help them put together their individual strategic thinking and plans, so that you get some consistency of approach. You are not expected to have to all try and hire these people, but have a resource at the centre. That resource centre is there to support cities and towns in pulling together their own strategic plans and be able to develop a sensible business case to go with it, and then for government. A little bit like Network Rail and highways England has to bid for a five year package of money to the regulator and through the regulator into government. You could do the same approach with local governments and make a bid for five year cycles of funds against plans which are seen as being reasonably sensible and realistic. And, of course, you’ve got to then demonstrate that you can spend that money efficiently and if over a five year period, you can’t do that, you’re not going to get the same support for the next five years.
But I think everything we’ve written now for the last two or three years has inevitably finished up with a devolution recommendation in it, both in terms of powers but also in terms of budget. I’ve also been doing a piece of work at Birmingham University for the last three months, and we’ve got a final meeting tomorrow to look at the outputs of it on how do we address the decarbonization of domestic heat in the UK and we’ve finished up coming to the same point there. In fact, this cannot be done from the centre. It’s a local matter It will vary enormously between different towns and cities and fundamentally, local government are the best people to actually determine with the energy companies what are going to be the best solutions for their particular town and then to actually put in place the programmes which will enable it to happen. It’s probably the most difficult infrastructure challenge we’ve got over the next 20 years, is the decarbonization of heat and the different resources which are going to be required.
Q: Do you think that that holds true looking back several decades, or has that changed over time?
We always used to say that it took 14 years to actually deliver a bypass, and of that 14 years, two years was actually building it. 12 years was actually getting it through the process of local decision making and planning and the objections of everybody who wrote who was going to be near the road, which is crazy, to have to spend 14 years to actually finish up putting down two miles of road to go around the town or a village. At the end of the day, democracy is expensive and takes time, and it’s not got any easier. If anything, it’s become more difficult. If I go all the way back to education and training, that again is an area where, if I think back to my own experience, when I left school, the local authority essentially controlled your educational opportunities. Your local authority was able to provide you with grants, there were no fees to be paid, no tuition fees or anything like that. If your parents weren’t too well off, you actually got a grant to enable you to live in your digs or home, wherever you were going to live. But it was very much local authority controlled and directed,
And again, I think it is something which we’ve lost in the UK in our education and training capacity in recent years. I’ve been chairman of the city and guilds for nine years, which is about technical training, vocational training. And again, there is just a lack of coordination, a lack of joined up thinking at a local level. It needs to be resolved at a local level by companies, employers and colleges and schools working together. In the same way as they do, once again, we’ve the same old examples. In Austria, Germany and places like this, these things are dealt with locally, and there is a culture of making sure that you are providing training and companies via moral obligation within their community to actually be part of it to a totally different degree to that which exists in the UK, where we’ve got a ridiculous situation, where employers just continuously expect government to give them money to train people. It shouldn’t be government’s job to train people at all. It should be employers job to actually train people. Government should focus on education, and then industry and employers should pick up the tab and pick up the responsibility for actually giving people the right training they need to do a job. As long as government continues — you see the thing about business is, if there is a chance of some government money, then you beat yourself up if you’re not taking advantage of it. So you almost feel obligated to go and get the money. Government used to give us money to bid for overseas contracts. It was ridiculous. We kept on telling them it was absolutely critical to our desire to go and win contracts overseas. It was just the software of getting some money back for our tendering costs. If we really wanted to contract, we would pay for it all ourselves, regardless. All the government did by giving us money was actually encouraged us to bid for things that we weren’t really interested in. I mean, it was just daft. But trade associations tend to be quite good at persuading ministers that, Without this money, all hell’s gonna break loose and the industry will collapse, and it’s just not true at all.
Q: How have you found the different parts of Whitehall, as effective operators for delivering regional growth, have you found the variation across departments?
I think the department have always enjoyed working with, because it is intellectually, the most rigorous. It’s treasury. I mean, you can disagree with them, but they actually force you into being more rigorous yourself. I mean, the two departments to generate the most frustration for people, have traditionally been the department of business, whatever you call it, the department of trade, it used to be called, in industry, and now it’s BEIS, and it just constantly changes its name. I mean, that is regarded, probably by most people, as the most useless department, followed closely by the Department of Education. Put those two together and industrial support, thinking about it’s strategic delivery of any of these things, constant churn of ministers, and therefore lack of attraction for good civil servants to work. Not departments, which, apart from a period when you had people like Michael Heseltine and I can’t remember who the other one was, but probably only two secretaries of state in the last 20 years in industry who anybody would have said were doing a decent job. And education –Education are just as bad.
Do you know, in the last 30 years, there have been 60 ministers responsible for vocational education. And that doesn’t attract good civil servants, does it? That constant churn. But it’s interesting, the reputation and how people regarded the Department for the Environment for the brief period that Michael Gove was in charge. It was interesting talking to civil servants, working with Michael, there was more challenge, but equally there was more support. And they felt that they’d got a secretary of state who was actually capable of going back to town to number 10 around the cabinet table and holding his own, getting what he wanted. Civil servants want to deliver things at the end of the day, so they want ministers and secretaries of state who are going to help them to deliver. But I think the thing that strikes me so much about the UK for a long time is that it’s always seemed to us as though the word plan was a dirty work. And, of course, spatial plan was an even dirtier word. So the idea of a spatial plan in the UK has just been almost impossible to talk about for a very long time. And planning itself almost became aligned with the Soviet Union. And so that wasn’t attractive. And so fundamentally, we have just bumbled along. And that’s the tragedy. We’ve got so much intellect in the UK and so much potential horsepower, which somehow just hasn’t been allowed to or hasn’t been sort of pulled together in a way that it could be.
Q: On planning, when you were in the private sector how did you think about the trajectory of the different regions?
I mean, I’ll be blunt, if you’re in the construction industry couldn’t care less, you actually couldn’t care less. You go where the work is. And, frankly, most construction companies don’t care less what they build because that’s not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to take whatever the architect or the client has decided he wants and build it for as much profit as they can possibly make. What it’s like, what use it is to society, couldn’t care less. And why should they? Because they don’t have a role to play in that upfront decision about, What is it that we’re doing? Why are we doing it? What’s going to be the value? What are we trying to create for society? None of that. You get the satisfaction out of laying brick on brick, fundamentally, and try to lay brick on brick as effectively and as quickly as and better than, and quicker than the next guy. So whether you’re building in the North, East, Northeast or the Southeast, it doesn’t really make any odds. You go where the work is. Well, Network Rail, of course you had to — interesting about Network Rail, we used to do strategic reviews of need. So strategically, we would sit down with train operators, with the local authorities, and along a route and say, What is the projected demand? What is going to be the next 10 or 15 years? Can we meet it with the existing infrastructure? What improvements are needed? What frequency? Are there additional rolling stock, additional train paths needed? Is there going to be a revenue stream which supports that? Of course, if we couldn’t demonstrate to the regulator that was going to be the case, the regulator wasn’t going to support what was required. Now it shifted over time to a recognition by the government that it really ought to set the output statement. So the government really ought to be the ones who were going to say, This is the output statement or output requirements of the railway, now, Network Rail regulator, train operators, go away and tell us how you’re going to meet those outturn requirements. And in a sense, the railway, I would argue, has never, after that brief first five or six years, the collapse of Railtrack really saw the end of the purely privatised railway. And then, of course, there was demise of demand from about 2008 and 9 onwards, saw the failure, increasingly, of the rail franchises, back to the point where we’re at today, where the government pretty well, is totally in control of the railway and the investment patterns. I think what is right that’s happening at the moment, of course, is government is putting enormous pressure on Network Rail to improve the efficiency of delivery and saying, Yes, we all know that more electrification is desirable, but we can’t afford to do it at that sort of cost.
I think there’s a bigger question to be asked around transport, generally, which is, is there an over emphasis on rail now, to the exclusion of bus rapid transit systems? The idea that Leeds should get all excited because the government is going to give it 100 million to have a tram as compensation for not having the eastern leg of the East Coast of the high speed two. I mean, frankly, Leeds could do a lot more, a lot more quickly, and a lot more cheaply, just by putting in dedicated bus routes. Because tram systems, rail systems are inherently very, very expensive and they’re not particularly flexible. Whereas bus and coach, I’m obviously interested in this because I chair National Express. We can switch services on and off and vary those services almost on a daily basis to encourage demand, meet demand, vary our ticket prices, whatever else it is, to actually attract people onto city coach and at a fare which is a fraction of what it is on the trains. Trains can’t do that. It takes two years to change the timetable on the railways, and so it’s a very rigid structure without the flexibility which is needed. And of course, at the moment we’re seeing the constant demand for local bus services. And local bus services in a privatised world don’t work. In the same way, the railways in Scotland don’t work. I mean, it would be far cheaper to actually enable people living in the outside of the southern belt of Scotland, it would be far cheaper just to close the railway and actually subsidise people to be able to get a get a taxi, then continue to run railways in remote parts of Scotland, just because of this sort of belief that it’s a wonderful thing to have. We can’t afford it.
Q: What do you think, reflecting on this conversation, is the most important lesson for us to take away? Is there one idea or practise that you think has really worked in the past that you would lift up?
In terms of urban regional growth? I think actually, the solution does not lie in the hands of the public sector, nor does it entirely lie in the hands of the private sector. And therefore, what you have to try and find is the way in which you can get the public sector and the private sector investor to actually have a common purpose and work together, and if you can achieve that — we’re all fed up with listening to people from the city telling us that there’s a wall of money out there, it’s just looking for good projects to invest in. But that is the truth. And therefore you could say, if I was a regional authority, my task, and I think Ben Houchen tries to do this very much up in Teesside, is to say, Well, how can I play a part as a regional mayor in creating opportunities which is going to attract that wall of money? Now that’s going to get me criticised because I’ll be told, people will say, Oh he’s in the hands of the investor or whatever, but without the investor, nothing’s going to happen, because fundamentally, and I was asked by the lady who is the mayor for South Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin in West Yorkshire. I had a conversation with Tracy a few months ago and at the end of it, she said, What would you do if you were in my position, John? I said, Tracy, I would be focused on one thing and one thing alone, and that is jobs. What can you do? What can you do as that mayor to create an environment in which you can create jobs? Because without jobs, there is nothing. There’s a circular economy of activity, which leads to people having money to spend and creating more jobs and bettering themselves.
Q: Do you think that this new generation of elected mayors, over a footprint which is big enough to start making spatial planning transport decisions, is a step forward?
I think it is a good step forward, but it’s again, they cannot be but politically savvy to be in the job that they’re in, and therefore they are going to have to recognise that they are going to have to compromise with central government. Central government needs to recognise it’s going to have to compromise when dealing with them, and the pair of them need to find ways which show that they are willing and able to make things happen to support private industry. I think the surprising thing sometimes about private industry is it doesn’t require a great deal of government support. The leverage opportunity is quite significant, but what it does require is for government to show a consistency of purpose and belief and a consistency of policy. And I mean, the fundamental weakness it seems to me all the time is that nobody thinks more than the next election ahead. It’s the old story, you can have a two year, two and a half to three year window in which you actually do anything, and then you stop doing it because you’re worried about the next election. So it’s how much happens in that first two or three years, and then everything gets turned upside down and off we go again with a different solution, which is the whole idea, as you recall it, of how do we get that more all party approach to some of these critical issues where we have a proper debate in parliament and not each claim that we’re the only ones capable of the country’s salvation.
Well, they haven’t. You’ll always find the odd individual who does, of course. But what you don’t get is that — seen from the outside, you just sense that, my other criticism of government, of course, is that there is not — the Cabinet office is nowhere near strong enough. And that when I joined Network Rail, when I joined Railtrack, rather, in administration, my opening talk to the senior management was that I understood that I had arrived in an organisation which had a series of barracks. And so my only comment to them was, Well, remember what happened to barons in the Middle Ages when they didn’t do what king wanted. And it seems to me that we have that problem in government that at the end of the day, often the barons are stronger than the cabinet office and the prime minister. And so you don’t get a team effort with a series of managing directors reporting to a chief executive in which there has to be that wider goal, which is being sought as opposed to individual preference because you’ve made a great success of your own department. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen in business. Of course it does. But at the same time, within business, I think you do get a more coordinated approach than you see in government. But it seems to me, at the moment, the future is, if we’re going to make any real significant changes, we need more Andy Streets, Andy Burnhams and Ben Houchens.
ENDS