Julia Prescot, Deputy Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, spoke at the annual dinner of the National Infrastructure Planning Association yesterday (Thursday, 21 November 2024), explaining why putting people at the heart of reforms to the planning system for infrastructure is crucial to successfully delivering the new infrastructure projects the UK needs to decarbonise energy and achieve net zero, boost growth and improve our resilience.
In her remarks, Julia reflected that while there was a consensus on the need for planning reform, there was less agreement on the way to go about it. She said there was a need for a more imaginative approach to the way that major infrastructure projects are communicated to the public, one that put people more at the heart of the process and focused on the tangible benefits that new infrastructure would bring to people’s lives communities and the nation as a whole.
Drawing on recommendations the Commission made in our second National Infrastructure Assessment from October 2023, Julia explored what steps were necessary to build a more effective, people-focused approach to infrastructure planning including through providing more tangible community benefits, using more representative ways to engage communities, improving the way environmental data is collected and shared, and ensuring greater continuity in long term infrastructure planning.
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“Good evening everyone.
Many of you will know me as the deputy chair of the National Infrastructure Commission.
But what you may not know is that I originally trained as an archaeologist.
To an outsider, archaeology looks really rather dull.
All that mud and You spend your days scrabbling around in the dirt for inanimate objects…
Objects that are often fairly indistinguishable from rubbish.
But archaeology is really thrilling—believe me.
Because it’s not about the objects. It’s really about the people.
What you’re searching for, down there in the dirt, isn’t really that broken bit of old tile you dig up.
It’s the craftsman who made that tile… The person who bought it…the person whose eyes last looked at it.
It’s all the people who ever walked across the top of that tile over the years…
The people who lived and worked and died in that place
Archaeology is all about imagining people. About recovering traces of people from the physical world….
And bringing them back to life in your mind.
The archaeologist Michael Shanks called that “the archaeological imagination”…
And I think we could do with something like it in the world of infrastructure planning.
Sadly, I didn’t go on to be Indiana Jones…
Instead, I took the better travelled road into banking and investment.
But clearly my interest in digging up ground persisted…with an infrastructure career.
Because in 2005 I co-founded Meridiam, to fund long-term investment in sustainable infrastructure.
And I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved since then.
Our investments have created 85 billion pounds’ worth of largely greenfield infrastructure assets, all over the world.
Like one thousand one hundred and seventy kilometres of rail- and tramtracks…
Two thousand five hundred kilometers of road…
Thirty-five thousand EV charging points.
Now, I could go on listing big numbers like that:
Today, we’ve got 22 billion dollars of assets under management.
But would it really mean anything to you if I did?
Can you get excited about the phrase “seven hundred and fifty-five megawatts total renewable energy production?”
Some people can, but on the whole, I don’t think so. Because what matters about the 125 infrastructure assets we manage is not the assets themselves…
Their size or their spectacle.
It’s the difference they make to people’s lives.
Like the 250 thousand direct and indirect jobs they’ve created…
Or the twelve thousand three hundred hospital beds…
Or the rail, road, tram and air journeys they make possible for three hundred million passengers a year.
That’s what drew me away from archaeology towards infrastructure:
The chance to make the world better for people, in a concrete way…
Sometimes – literally – in concrete.
And I’m sure that’s the case for everyone in this room.
But somewhere along the way, that gets lost from our conversations about infrastructure planning…
Within our profession and in the country at large.
One of the points we always make at the NIC is that we don’t do enough to connect big infrastructure projects to people’s daily lives…
We don’t talk enough about the difference they’ll make.
And that’s a big part of the reason why it’s so difficult to build new infrastructure in this country.
It’s why we’ve ended up in a situation where we have a broad consensus about what we want planning reform to do…
But no agreement about how to do it!
Economic growth. Regional Equality. Net Zero.
All good things, we can all agree. Things we definitely all want to happen.
That’s why I welcome the new government’s Planning Bill…
I know how keen Angela Rayner and her cabinet colleagues are to get it on the statute books as soon as possible.
But where are we going to put the data centres? Or the railways?
(Dare I say it?) Where are we going to put the pylons?
And even more awkwardly: who’s going to pay for them?
This is where we tend to come up against a brick wall.
So, as we embark on this long-overdue process of reforming the planning and consenting regime…
We have to do more to bring people along with us…
Because unless we can do that, nothing else will work.
And I know that’s easier said than done…
But it’s something we managed to do in the past.
It wasn’t always this difficult to get things built.
Someone showed me an advert recently from a 1961 issue of Country Life magazine—no less.
It’s for the Central Electricity Generating Board… a full-page image of a lovely English field.
In the background is a huge pylon, with another one behind it, and with big black power lines all across the sky.
In the foreground is a washing machine. And on top of the washing machine is a woman in an apron, lounging across it like she’s in the Bahamas.
And at the top of the page the advert says this: SHE CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.
It’s a simple but incredibly powerful message.
Let’s just think for a moment what a high-voltage home electricity supply meant for women…
By powering these machines that we all take for granted.
It meant not having to devote an entire day of every week to the back-breaking drudgery of soaking, boiling and mangling clothes…
It meant having hands that weren’t scrubbed red raw from the effort…
It meant feeling a little less like your family’s live-in-maid.
And all of that matters a great deal, actually.
When you think of it that way, having to see a couple of pylons out of your back window is a small sacrifice to make indeed.
So much of the problem we have with planning in this country comes down to the fact that we don’t think of it that way anymore.
Everyone wants a modernised healthcare system that uses data to keep their loved ones healthy for longer…
But no one wants the view of a data centre from their window.
Until a majority of people accept that we “can’t have one without the other”…
Then planning reform will get us nowhere.
Because it’s all very well to believe in “growth” or “net zero” or “regional equality” in the abstract…
But unless you believe they’ll make a concrete difference to the life you live…
You’ll be unwilling to sacrifice anything for them.
The infrastructural imagination
We need to put people back into planning.
That means putting the tangible benefits that new assets will bring front-and-centre in the planning conversation…
The extra money in people’s pockets. The more fulfilling and accessible jobs. The easier lifestyles. The better opportunities.
It’s like the archaeological imagination in reverse:
You put something into the ground, like a piece of rail track or a building’s foundations…
Then instead of imagining who used it in the past…
You conjure up who’s going to use it in the future…
The graduates who won’t have to live cheek-by-jowl in city centres to access work…
The families whose crippling electricity costs will plummet…
The music, the art and the culture that bloom…
In an economy where people can do more than survive.
Call it “the infrastructural imagination”…
(If you can think of anything catchier, I’m open to suggestions!)
What it adds up to a new national story: a story that looks to the future, not the past.
Telling that story is a political exercise. And politicians of all stripes have to get better at talking about long-term progress, not just short-term returns.
But as the old adage goes: show, don’t tell.
It’s not enough just to hear about the long-term benefits of investing in new assets.
To really get on board with new infrastructure projects…
People need to see those benefits.
And there are a number of ways I think we can show them.
What we can do
1: Community benefits arrangements
Most straightforwardly, the government can offer people direct benefits…
In return for hosting major infrastructure projects in their communities.
This was one of NIC’s main recommendations to the last government, last year…
Community benefits arrangements have been highly successful in France.
There’s a different system there:
For example, around 8 to 10% of the cost of new energy transmission and distribution infrastructure goes towards community benefits.
There are as many possible community benefits arrangements as there are infrastructure projects…
From local employment guarantees to direct compensation.
In 2013, EDF Energy even funded a local Odd Job Man to serve the villages surrounding Hinkley Point C…
Who cut people’s grass, painted their fences, and sorted their odds and ends out for free.
You’d be surprised how far small measures like that can go…
How willing people are to make a sacrifice…When they don’t have to wait years or decades for it to pay off.
So, I’m pleased to see the government’s proposals around community benefits for electricity transmission infrastructure.
Personally, I think there is a neat symmetry to ring-fencing funding for environmental projects, such as new park land or solar panels.
But whatever form community benefits take, they’ll make a huge difference…
So, we need to make a decision as soon as possible…
And we need to extend them beyond electricity transmission, to all types of infrastructure.
What we can do 2: Include people in the conversation
But it’s important that community benefits arrangements don’t become a kind of bribe.
The whole point of putting people back into planning is to ensure that major infrastructure projects aren’t imposed on people from above.
It’s not enough for people to grudgingly accept new assets…
What we need is for people to want those assets… to feel excited about them as that woman in Country Life!
For that to happen, people need to feel they have a genuine stake in the nation’s infrastructure…
And for that to happen, they need to play an active role in the planning process.
So when I say we need to “put people back into planning” I’m speaking literally:
We should think about the use of citizen assemblies, as per Ireland, with randomly-selected, demographically representative groups of people.
What they’ve found is that, far from bogging projects down in bureaucracy, as some feared…
Citizens assemblies have actually sped up some processes.
Because when you involve more people earlier on…
You can take possible objections into account, adapt, and head off future roadblocks and challenges.
What we can do 3: Streamline process: more staff; share data
But for citizen-led planning to spark any kind of enthusiasm, people have to be able to see the effects of their decisions pay off…
And there’s a great deal we need to do to streamline and speed up the planning process.
First, I think we need many more people in the planning inspectorate and in the statutory consultees…
It takes far too long to get simple tasks done.
Secondly, cutting down unnecessary duplication of environmental assessments in the same geographic areas can cut years from projects.
Many of you will know our friend, the black-legged kittiwake…
One of the UK’s seven species of native gulls…
And one of our major issues to harnessing wind power (!)
It’s not the fault of the poor old kittiwakes, who nest in the cliffs and fish in the North Sea…
It’s the fault of our wildly inefficient planning system.
You see, every time a new developer wanted to build an offshore wind farm in the North Sea…
They had to go off and visit the kittiwakes…
So, they can complete the thousandth identical impact assessment on these poor nesting gulls.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
There is no reason why we couldn’t have a national library of environmental data…
Where we could collect data centrally and list approved mitigation.
This would dramatically accelerate the offshore wind development process…
It would also help reduce the number of scheme-by-scheme disputes…
And it would mean we could finally let the kittiwakes be.
This kind of streamlining has already been trialled through the Offshore Wind Environmental Improvement Package, to great success…
And I think we could go much further, to reduce consenting times across different sectors….
What we can do 4: Continuity
So it’s encouraging to see the new government commit to introduce legislation to update National Policy Statements every five years.
Because we cannot think strategically, as a country, unless we have continuity of advice and information.
I don’t wish to ruin anybody’s evening by mentioning a certain high-speed rail project.
But suffice it to say that NIC believes that many of the delays and spiralling costs of major infrastructure projects could be avoided…
Long-term thinking
People think in the long term; governments think in the short
And that’s the point I want to end on tonight: an optimistic one.
Building infrastructure will always take patience and long-term thinking.
And politics, as we know, is allergic to the long-term.
But people, on the other hand, are actually quite good at it.
That’s another thing archaeology teaches us.
If you’ve been to the British Museum, you may have come across the Cuerdale Hoard:
The biggest Viking silver treasure trove ever discovered.
The Victorian archaeologists who dug it up thought it must have been an offering to the gods…
Or riches for a king to take into the afterlife.
Now we believe it was a stockpile for the future…
That the Vikings buried all these riches in case they or their great-grandchildren needed them one day…
In case of war or plague or a natural disaster.
And you don’t even have to look that far back to see it:
We take up the piano or guitar one day, even though we know it will be months before we can play a simple tune.
We put aside money for our retirement in our twenties.
We play Mozart to babies when they’re still in the womb in the hopes they’ll grow up and discover the cure for cancer.
My point is that providing we have a clear end-goal in mind…
An end-goal we truly believe is worth waiting for…
One we can imagine…
We humans are pretty comfortable with delayed gratification.
With luck, the government’s promised ten-year infrastructure strategy, next spring, will give us just such an end-goal.
For our part, let’s be crystal-clear, in everything we do, about the ways our projects will improve people’s lives.
Because imagining a better future is what we do…
It’s what we’re good at…
It’s the reason we’re all in this room tonight.
Let’s invite people in, to imagine it with us.
Thank you.”
– Ends –
