The Infrastructure Podcast

Today's special episode is recorded live in Jamie Oliver's new restaurant in Covent Garden London as we return to the tricky, but absolutely crucial issue of skills and the need to lever more of the best talent from schools into the infrastructure, construction and building sector.

Now, anyone who has ever attended an industry conference recently and, I dare I say it, anyone that's ever listened to an industry podcaster lately, will be very aware that the deficit of skills in this sector is presenting a real risk to the ability to deliver our ambition for accelerating investment in the industry and boosting growth and improving the living standards across the UK.

And add to that, the reality that technology is set to transform the way we work, underlines the reality that we have to change to make sure that the brightest minds really do good into the sector.

It's a huge challenge. And so who better to talk to than Alison Watson, president of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, and founder of the Class of Your Own initiative, which, as we heard in Episode Six, way back in March 2023 is a program that is successfully embedding its Design Engineer Construct agenda into the school curriculum and radically increasing the number of students actually making it into the industry.

But not fast enough. Which is why Alison joins me today in Jamie Oliver's lovely new restaurant in Covent Garden, London, as she prepares to launch a new initiative that she hopes could actually start to change the way the sector approaches its support for schools.

Resources
Design a restaurant with Jamie Oliver
Class of Your Own website
Design Engineer Construct website

In this podcast we are talk about road transport and take a quick look into the crystal ball to see what lies around the corner for this vital mode of transport.

Despite the volume and frequency of discussion about the UK’s approach to public transport – and specifically rail travel which continues to absorb huge amounts of public cash – the reality is that, rightly or wrongly, travel by road remains the overwhelmingly most relied upon mode of transport.

I say rightly or wrongly, because there is a view that, for all the convenience of road travel and the improvements made in design and usage, our cars, vans and lorries still remain excessively polluting, congesting, expensive and dangerous as a mode of transport.

Or is that changing? The move towards electric vehicles is certainly creating perhaps the biggest revolution in motoring’s century old history, rethinking the way we approach car travel and prompting a simultaneous revolution in the infrastructure that supports it.

Add to this the huge improvements we are seeing in engine efficiency, vehicle safety and congestion and pollution busting technology and we have a transport mode which is certainly investing in the future.

Yet much of this investment relies on the largely state-owned highway networks to operate effectively – networks which remains under funded and heavily neglected in comparison to many other sectors and parts of the world.

So where are we headed with road transport – a new era of personal travel or the highway to hell?

To find out, and to guide us through the UK’s road transport challenges, my guest today is Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, a long-time observer and driver of UK highways policy and practice, and, in my experience, not someone who normally sits in the hard shoulder of current debate.
Resources:
RAC Foundation website
RAC Foundation data on TVs
DfT's RIS2
National Highways pipeline of possible future schemes
Ashalt Industry Alliance ALARM survey results 2024
EV charging stats

In this podcast we try to understand a bit more about the challenge of fixing transport in the North - and how Sub-National Transport Bodies like Transport for the North can help to drive the vital investment required.
And yes - I renamed this podcast because feedback suggested the original title "Understanding the role of Sub-National Transport Bodies" was just a little too obscure and not "grabbing" enough!
So we start by asking what exactly are Sub-National Transport Bodies (STBs) – what are they, what do they do and why do we need them.

STBs were created by the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act in 2016, and there are now seven Sub National Transport Bodies covering different regions of the UK. The intension is to provide strategic transport policy leadership at a larger scale than is possible by the existing local transport authorities or local authorities individually.

Of the seven currently in existence, only one - Transport for the North - has been given statutory powers – and as such, from 2018 TfN has been a statutory partner to the Department for Transport, National Highways, and Network Rail to ensure that the North's pan-Northern strategic transport priorities are developed and delivered.

The rest, bodies such as Transport for the South East, Transport for the East, England’s Economic Heartland, Western Gateway and Peninsular Transport and Midlands Connect operate in shadow form, advising and cajoling but without formal powers to act.

That said, they do hold influence and, by bringing together local authorities, businesses, communities and asset owners, they should able to make significant cross border difference in terms of where sone vast sums of devolved and centralised public cash is focussed.

But do they in reality? Well to discuss this it is my pleasure to welcome Martin Tugwell to the Infrastructure Podcast. Martin is chief executive of Transport for the North and the former leader of England Economic Heartland so probably knows more about STBs than anyone in the UK!
STB Conference - 5th June
Transport for the North website
TfN strategic transport plan

In this , the 50th episode of the Infrastructure Podcast , we talk about cities – specifically how we should be designing our urban landscapes to be both fit for the future and fit for the people of the future.

It’s a huge and growing issue. The UN reckons that around 57% of the world’s population currently lives in an urban environment – and that this number is perhaps as high as 80% in many developed nations. It’s a number that is growing fast, both as a percentage but also as an absolute number, as the global population increases and our lives become more intertwined and interdependent.
And with this change comes a number of challenges - and a number of opportunities around creating equity, liveability, sustainability and prosperity for inhabitants. And creating safe places to live. The 2017 Grenfell Fire in London certainly highlighted the tragic consequences of failure.
Of course, we must also now add to that list resilience to climate change. Protection from flood; from drought; from heat; from storms and from pollution has never been so important.
All of which puts our built environment designers – those creating the buildings, the infrastructure and the spaces in between – absolutely in the driving seat - and the spotlight.
Fundamentally, better cities create better lives. Which is why barely a week goes by without a new report or paper into why and how we should transform our urban landscapes. The latest of which being the New London Agenda by the team at New London Architecture.
I mention this because amongst many other things, my guest today was involved in producing this Agenda and so I hope will be well placed to guide us through the issues.
So let’s discuss this issue with Stephen O’Malley, founder and chief executive of Civic Engineers, a firm with the mission “to create inspirational structures and places that have a positive impact on the environment and enable people to lead happier and healthier lives”.
Resources
Civic Engineers website
Thinking beyond boundaries article - Stephen O'Malley
New London Agenda - NLA
C40 Thriving Cities Initiative

In today’s podcast we will delve into the knotty and, it seems, unending challenge of controlling and reducing the cost and the time spent delivering our major infrastructure projects.

As we a constantly reminded by politicians, the public and our colleagues, the track record of global major project delivery is not good. I have referenced the findings of Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s book How Big Things Get Done many times on this podcast before – specifically his findings that globally over the last 30 years, just 8.5% of projects met cost and schedule targets while just 0.5% satisfied all benefit goals.
It's a pretty shocking set of findings. And we don’t have to look far in the UK to see evidence – I give you HS2, Hinkley Point C, Crossrail, etc etc. But given that the UK government just published its £800bn pipeline of infrastructure aspiration in the face of an increasing public finance black hole, the pressure is growing to turn this around.
So what is going wrong? Well my guest today is Ali Mafi, an engineer who has spent a career, largely in the shadows, trying to drive change across the sector. In fact he is currently collaborating with Bent Flyvbjerg and Alex Budzier of the Oxford Saïd Business school under their Oxford Global Projects consultancy to try to bring some new thinking to the sector.
And the focus for this work, is the Timist programme, which he founded last year and, as he will explain now I hope, he defines as a next generation project delivery system – a new approach major projects that he reckons could see teams deliver better outcomes in a shorter time and at lower cost than any other systems available.
He believes – as the name of his approach suggests – that most problems really stem from our inability to focus on time. As a result projects lose on average 2.5 days per week which means that the output and productivity is half of what it should be. That’s the diagnosis – so what’s the cure?
Resources
Timist website
The Latham Review - Constructing the Team
The Egan Review - Rethinking Construction
Association for Project Management article on ward rounds