Why is the UK So Bad at Building Infrastructure?

It has become abundantly clear that the UK just isn't very good at building stuff. The scrapping and delaying of major infrastructure projects as well as tedious bureaucracy add to the ever-burning fire. So, where did it all go wrong?

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00:00 - Introduction
00:59 - How Infrastructure Projects Work
02:57 - Why Infrastructure Projects Cost More
03:55 - Why Infrastructure Projects are Delayed
05:59 - The Cost of Infrastructure
06:59 - What Should We Do?
08:00 - Sponsored Content

[egonotfound]

Fun fact from a Leeds resident, a public transport system was first put in place in the early 1900s but was delayed due to WW1, ever since plans have repeatedly been planned and cancelled.

[birkett]

When the country's economy revolves around finance it's not surprising we struggle to do anything useful.

[dude]

mental we had a decade of low interest rates to build infrastructure and built nothing

[depreseo]

As someone who works in an industry that's usually blamed for construction delays by government official on the campaign tour I can 100% say that one of the major issues is red tap. My lot aren't holding jobs up (we're dependant on this kind of work) and if things have gone right we're usually in several months or up to a year before development starts (barring any unforeseen circumstances). However, I've literally been in a situation where pre-construction assessments and first stage construction have to take place AT THE SAME TIME because someone at the local council didn't make things clear and dragged their heels on a decision. I've literally turned up to a site where my job was literally "monitor", that's it. A simple monitoring job, only to be told when I got there that "oh so-and-so from the city council said that you were going to do this intrusive work which will delay us" which surprised me and my office as the council hadn't told us at all and just threw it at us unannounced. Literally a "right hand doesn't know what the left is doing" job with different council representatives giving different instructions to different offices working on the same job.

Yet, instead of blaming themselves and their own mishandling they:ll blame delays on "newt counters" (ecologists who are usually on sites months before development starts unless circumstances change), "stuffy archaeologists" (same as the ecologists, shouldn't have to be on site at the same time as development if things were planned out), "health and safety gone mad!" (Anyone who works in construction knows that yeh, you get banged over the head with a lot of health and safety paperwork and training, but usually because yeh - people do die and there are a lot of folk who love shifting the blame onto others), "woke green mobs" (a.k.a. the councils didn't do their own job right and fucked up on public conseltation or research) and "egg head experts sticking their noses into proper building work" (a.k.a. the folk at the geological surveys saying "you can't build houses here because this is literally a floodplain"). All the different construction and preconstruction companies tend to get along as we know what each of our jobs is meant to do. Friction almost always happens when there's poor planning and multiple different jobs that shouldn't overlap are demanded to take place at the same time.

[timharris]

Because the outsource everything and get price gouged, not to mention robbed through corruption

[oldshiny]

i'm 50yrs old and Britain has been like this my whole life

[happyslappy]

Tory project: HS2, 225 km, 2017-2030, £66 billion
French Paris-Bordeaux HS Line, last leg 340 km: *January 2012* start of work.
*July 6, 2015* end of civil engineering works, *ahead of schedule.* (500 heavy works including 24 viaducts, 3 million tonnes of ballast, 1.1 million tonnes of concrete sleepers, 13, 000 catenary supports)
*July 2, 2017* commissioning, *ahead of schedule* (planned: December 2017). Cost 7.8 billion euros

[ThomasGray-ge]

how are you supposed to get better at building infrastructure if you keep cancelling

[CRingsing]

In France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Netherlands Germany, Austria and Switzerland, it’s ALL about the DESIGN & QUALITY.

In U.K. and Italy, it’s ALL about the PROFITS you can send off to your mates….

Greed is in the drivers seat in the U.K.

[jhonson]

The Tories have sold the whole country off

[FakeSchrodingersCat]

The problem is the conflict between public funding and private greed. Basically what happens almost every time is the government puts it out for bid and someone intentionally under bids. They then delay the work until there is a public outcry about how long it is taking and claim that actually they can't do it for the price agreed to. The government rather then doing the smart thing when confronted with what is essentially blackmail and suing them out of existence for breach of contract. Succumbs to public pressure and the sunk costs and pays ever increasing amounts as the private company slow walks construction while demanding more and more money.

It is similar to why privatization so rarely works as well and why the UK government is paying more for the supposedly privately owned rail network then they were before it was privatized even counting for inflation.

[aarondunn]

I met a Brit, last month, who said he worked on the HS2 project - was surprised I had heard about it let alone had an interest in it due to many of the YT channels I watch covering it.

Some of the things he mentioned about the project was there was a lot of time wasted for health and safety. Multiple teams, multiple meetings. He mentioned that someone who worked there died (which was not work related) but the HR people wouldn't stop talking about it for weeks, to the point where it actually started to upset people.

Most strikingly was the inefficiency and outright thieft that was allowed to take place. The Private construction firm purchased 5 CAT excavators, 4 sat on the site while only a single 1 was used, and then after 18 months they were deemed to be paid for and so the 4 unused CATs were sold and shipped to Canada.

[benfurfie]

It's absolutely correct that projects like road widening aren't taken at a local level. Far too many highway departments justify their own existence through flawed expansion projects that fail to take into consideration factors like induced demand. Widening a road should be the absolutely last option we take. Instead we should be looking at ways of moving demand for transportation to other modes. And yes, I'm aware that the UK rail system is hugely flawed; but if we took some of the money we seem to be happy to waste on road expansion and instead invested it in non-road transportation infrastructure, we'd be amazed at how much of an impact it would have on traffic levels.

You only have to look across the North Sea to the Netherlands to see that in action.

[robertlee]

The number one issue with infastructure is local bodies wanting changes for non techical reasons but "not in my backyrad" attitude by local communities. Meaning expensive tunneling, sound proving and detours.

[DizY_]

Here in the UK, we're not good at anything at all, aside from complaining...

[Timo-qbgf]

Looking at the general standard of typical British infrastructure, housing etc and comparing it to the younger, especially the Nordic European countries one can tell people in the UK are just used to lower standards and it's much more acceptable to have shitty build quality in housing etc. The amount of bodged solutions I saw in the UK was shocking, yet nobody cares.

[herrglotzenschnitzengruber]

All the skilled building personnel have f'd off back to European countries where they are valued and paid properly with a social safety net that will help them if the arse falls out of it as it has in England, with no friggin safety net.

[smada]

One of the problems with most things in the UK is the proliferation of the “Busy Work” people. Those people that don’t really add any value to a project but will suck the money out.
The NHS is a major sufferer of this. For instance, the people whose job it is to oversee the movement of information that still goes missing.
We have more people in offices pushing pointless paperwork around, than we do people actually building stuff.
This is allowed to continue because the price of inactivity is less than the cost of the risk of doing the wrong thing, especially if you can blame delays and spiralling costs on an unnecessary group of people.

[GRBoi]

As American, it makes me feel so warm and fuzzy to see our ancestral connection to Britain on display 😂😂 If anything, we’re worse

[thomasfromswindon]

Why does it take 18 months (planned) to replace Armco barriers with concrete on the M4/5 at Bristol. I bet it only took about 6 months to build that section in the 1960s.