COMMENT At the risk of sounding like a bit of a toady, I have to confess myself to be a great fan of Grant Shapps. And not just because once – more than 10 years ago now – he said some very nice things about my company in a select committee hearing. Although, for a tart like me, that is reason enough.
No, there is something more substantial underlying my admiration. If you will forgive the pun, I think Mr Shapps is making huge inroads into the future of how we move around the country. And I think he is a hero for thus doing. While we are all distracted by all the sound and fury in Whitehall, the pandemic and the fallout, the pantomime and the personalities, the secretary of state for transport, together with his ministers and department, are quietly getting on with something of a revolution in transport policy in the UK.
Whether it is the Restoring Your Railways programme – reversing the Beeching cuts in pursuance of “levelling up” (must declare an interest here) – the implementation of “Great British Railways” (the Williams-Shapps plan), East West Rail or the – utterly masterly – announcement last week of HS2 going to Leeds (thus ending years of uncertainty), Grant Shapps is demonstrating real leadership in action. This is made all the more potent by the fact that it doesn’t seem to be grabbing much in the way of headlines. He runs a quiet campaign, putting one foot in front of the other.
And all this will be of increasing importance to our fragile recovery. Whether to support the aforementioned levelling up or the “Build Back Better” campaign, or to respond to the WFA (“work from anywhere”) revolution caused by the pandemic, or to meet the challenges of climate change, we badly need to get our transport infrastructure to be fit for the future. And Mr Shapps’s progress is all the more impressive because it is set against a backdrop of the fact that we’re usually rather poor at infrastructure projects. Major ones might take 20 years or more to deliver (Crossrail, anyone?) and our five-year electoral cycle simply doesn’t work here. To put it bluntly: national infrastructure is too important to be left to government. Because government changes.
Independent body
Obviously, I don’t know how long he will be in post, but if I were the secretary of state – with an eye both to my legacy and to keeping up momentum – I would now be setting up an independent body (modelled, perhaps, on the Bank of England) to commission and deliver strategic infrastructure projects: all the national ones and some of the more important local ones.
The National Infrastructure Commission, set up by George Osborne in 2015, made a good start but was limited in remit, responsible for providing the government with “impartial, expert advice on major long-term infrastructure challenges”. So, despite the best efforts of the admirable Sir John Armitt, it is confined to “advice” rather than delivery. The NIC needs to be beefed up completely, pulling in the expertise of some of Mr Shapps’s senior civil servants and the Major Projects Authority of Her Majesty’s Treasury – as well as people with real heft from the private sector – and given more powers and resources, within a very tight remit.
Perhaps it could be called the “National Infrastructure Delivery Authority” or some such? And, in echoes of the Homes England model, it would have a banking facility, as well as a delivery capability. But, most of all, it should be given proper independence, in the same way that the Bank of England is wholly owned but independent of government.
Mr Shapps himself is on record as saying (on Andrew Marr’s programme and elsewhere) that to get better at delivering infrastructure we need to learn from previous projects, the clear inference being that right now we don’t. With apologies for the persistent transport puns, we can no longer afford to keep on reinventing the wheel. We need an expert approach, continually learning from best practice, from both here and abroad, to adopt a far more decisive approach to infrastructure delivery, and to match public money with private investment, starting with pension funds looking for a long-term return on their investment.
One of the greatest signals ever sent, by any government, happened that day in 1997, immediately after his landslide General Election, when Tony Blair granted the Bank of England its independence. If this current government is serious about “building back better” then this is the time to set up an independent heavyweight body to deliver the infrastructure we so very badly need. Mr Shapps is doing a cracking job, but we can’t keep him forever. Will the next secretary of state be quite so focused?
Jackie Sadek is an independent panel member of the Department for Transport’s Restoring Your Railways programme. With Peter Bill, she is author of “Broken Homes – Britain’s Housing Crisis: Faults, Factoids and Fixes”
