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.
How did a tram network not get built in the late 1800s, when so many US and European cities were building out their networks? Tacoma, Washington had it’s first streetcar line built in 1888, when the city had a population of only around 34k
@@PhilliesNostalgiait had a tram until 1952. An idea in the 1930’s was to dig tunnels through central Leeds and run tram’s underground in the city centre. It was planned to start construction around 1940 but cancelled during ww2 around 1944. There was also a tram proposal in the 80’s which was cancelled and the money was relocated to the Sheffield tramway. And when the Leeds Supertram was cancelled, it was replaced with a £250,000,000 trolley bus network which was never built. This was the second time a trolley bus network was proposed as in the 70’s the Public transport executive granted funding for 3 trolley bus lines to Leeds, Bradford, and Kirkstall. It was cancelled when the Executive was privatised.
I’m sure even towns like Bournemouth had trams once upon a time, I read in a history book that the trams were. Ought out by bus companies who ran them into the ground so they didn’t compete with buses.
@@PhilliesNostalgia loads of Uk cities use to have trams. In fact there was probably more trams in the UK than anywhere else in the world. But they made a big mistake and got rid of most of the tram systems to make way for the cars only to realise now that it was a mistake
Better that government expands and we have "British construction", where we set the prices for 5 minutes till they form a union and extort the government since they are the only people who can do government construction.
@@SaintGerbilUKand yet they just gave examples where in France infra projects are far far cheaper while at the same time France has bigger government and far higher levels of unionisation and striking. Go figure 🤔
Dead right the civils contractors are a mafia and price gouge everything they touch. I worked with a civils contractor some years ago on a networking project that had a large element of civils. I could not believe how adept they were at getting extras out of the customer on the basis that if they werent done the project would fail and it wasnt in the tender...
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.
If only the tories had not implemented austerity and reduced how much central government financing was given the local councils which would have prevented them reduce their resources, have installed technology for efficiencies in governance control, etc.
@@theincrediblemahoganygoddess Or do like some other countries do and build the houses on stilts. Put a garage at the ground floor and everything else safely 10' up. (And forbid people from converting the garage). That way, the land can still get flood every few years and it's not going to cost billions in insurance to fix.
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
as a french person I am curious... HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE ? How can we be better at organizing than anyone ? we litterally leave early, drink on lunch break, strike a 10th of the working time,... How ?
@@baclm555France has been building one or two new TGV lines every decade since the first one opened in 1981. They didn't just build the lines, they built the institutional knowledge and expertise and maintained it. In contrast the UK hardly built any rail at all for the entire twentieth century so when projects like HS1 and crossrail got approval in the late nineties they didn't have anyone with the skills. Institutional knowledge like that is hard to create and very easy to lose.
@@baclm555 British ONS (Office for National Statistics ) 20 January 2022. International comparisons of UK productivity - Main points: - The G7 countries’ average (excluding the UK) output per worker was 13% above the UK in 2019. - The UK’s output per hour worked is less than France and the US. - France is between 9% and 28% more productive than the UK, with a central estimate of 18% more productive.
@@baclm555 "Britain is among the least work-oriented countries in the world, according to the research by the Policy Institute at King’s College London." (7 Sep 2023) Dominic Raab: "British workers are 'among the worst idlers in the world'. "Liz Truss was heard criticising the British work ethic, suggesting people lacked the 'skill and application' of foreign workers.."😂😂
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.
Hot Take: This is the natural state of an out-of-control capitalist system. Capitalism inherently rewards and encourages greed. Greed is a virtue of capitalism. And if there aren't counter balancing forces capitalism will naturally lead to corruption and inefficiency.
I mean, even Italy has built widespread rail and infrastructure projects. Italy is concurrently building large sectors of HSR, along with massive transalpine tunnels through mountains (Mont d'Ambin and Brenner Base Tunnels)
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.
I've worked on many projects in the UK which were managed by the big UK builders (Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Laing ORourke etc) and that's a fair take. So much red tape slow the production to a near halt but the government basically write a blank cheque since the collapse of carillion so the principle contractors don't care so much about how long it takes.
The excavator thing sounds like something out of Eastern Europe... LOL! And yes, the more bureaucrats involved the longer it takes and more expensive it is. They do this on purpose to justify their existence. The UK has become the bastion of ineffiiciency trying to cover all scenarios for every situation which is insane.
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.
Agree with this completely. Travelling outside of London (e.g. London to Yarmouth) is a pain. Trains are too slow, and they cost way too much. It's cheaper to drive :/
Yup. Increasing roads is useless for traffic. Widening them with Dutch style cycle lanes (the only type that should be legal, full stop) reduces traffic and increase cycling and saves the NHS a tonne of money. But other than that, cycling infrastructure sucks as an investment unless you care about budget, money, time, positive health impacts, quality of life. There's lots of factors that are worse about adding proper cycle lanes though. Unlike trams which are anti-cycling and wildly expensive compared to electric buses and insanely unsafe and unsightly and just a half measure when we should be building undergrounds in every major city and between some of them and just have done with the whole idea of trams.
@@jonevansauthor One reason trams are so wildly expensive is that, at least until Very Light Rail becomes a thing, modern-day trams are so heavy that unless you're building on top of disused rail lines and can re-use ballast, you've got to dig up the road, move all the utilities out of the way, then install a concrete slab on which the rails can be placed. Buses are only half a solution unless you can build dedicated bus lanes, as otherwise, they'll be caught in all the existing traffic - plus, as they often stop every few hundred metres to pick up or set down passengers, even in the absence of congestion can effectively move at ~15mph so may be slower than cars (even if parking charges in town make them cheaper to use). Buses also have an unfortunate tendency to attract the dregs in society, so additional delays can be caused if the bus driver has to persuade someone kicking up a fuss or lighting up a vape / cigarette / joint to leave, while even on frequent routes, reliability can be decidedly dodgy. It doesn't help that most public transport is run by private companies, so with declining government subsidies, will only run routes and services that are profitable to them - so if the majority of passengers are elderly people or students using passes, the service / route could be withdrawn as they're not making any profit from them. Bicycle infrastructure, while welcome, is controversial with locals, as with shared / side-by-side footways and cycleways, pedestrians can legally use both (and not all local authorities take care to remove all street furniture from the bicycle half) and will inevitably moan if any cyclists build up a decent cadence or pass onto the footway to avoid obstructions, while on the road it's usually implemented as a painted line, with no physical separation from traffic (and, of course, motorists will often use them as unofficial parking bays, safe in the knowledge there's little to no enforcement). Meanwhile, motorists see very few cyclists using them and regard them as a waste of money.
@@jonevansauthor Cycle lanes are less appropriate in the UK because it's far more hilly, particularly in the north, and population centres are further apart. And underground systems are too expensive.
@@existnt sorry, but that’s absolute nonsense. 75 years ago, when bikes were much more heavily used, hills weren’t an issue. They were just something you dealt with. With the availability of ebikes today, hills are non-issue. If you’ve never ridden on an ebike, I definitely recommend finding a local shop and giving one a go.
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.
@@icu17siberia It is hard to objectively determine the best bid beforehand and demonstrate it. Especially in a bureaucracy. But there should be harsh penalties for any company that cannot complete the contract on time for the price they bid.
I work for the civil service, I can give an example of this, we needed new printers and so it went to auction for the contract, lowest bidder got it, the printers came they were installed and they stopped working after 3 months, we needed a guy to come out, he comes out, says we need to buy a part, turns out instead of them maintaining the printers under contract turns out we have to pay for everything and that's why they were so cheap, servicing these printers costs like a grand each time and they are routinely broken so I have to walk around an entire building asking people if their printer works. And if we paid a little more at the start we could have had the printers being repaired by them at no extra cost to us and our cost is what some of tax payers money are being spent on, I could have bought a HP printer and had a better time then what we have
@@solaireastora5394 your office still has printers? I'm also part of the civil service and our buildings have all gone fully paperless. There's only like one old printer from like the early 2000s for my entire floor. Funny thing I recently was clearing some documents off a nearby locker as we were putting some food out for the team and turns out the date on the paper suggests its just been left there since 2014!
As someone who has worked on putting bids together for construction projects you are totally wrong. The HS2 contracts haven't been let from competitive bids, being a construction management type of contract. And the projects that are bid competitively don't end up like you think they do.
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.
@jonhack2585 However the laws in France means, its unlikely for local community group to force the builder to tunnel or go around the planned path for Nationally Significant Infastruture. In a nutsehll in France the developers used tunnels becuase the HSR cant go over or around the mountain and it will be cheaper, in UK the developers had to tunnel 800km in sections becuase it ruined the views or made too much noise for horses, which cost 20 times more than building the rail over land
It's annoying how most of our major cities have no underground networks but in the countryside, where there's plenty of space to put the HSR above ground, they insist on tunneling.
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.
@@michaelcoward1902 Naw. When I moved to the UK for five years in late 2007, the rail line near me was in awful shape, the train tossing passengers from side to side as it jostled along. Then a ten billion pound project to fix it and some other lines. Silky smooth. Then, within a few years, bad shape again, tossing passengers side to side as the train went along.
I'd take an older 100 year house over a pop up home with cardboard walls any day. The hilarious thing is the 100 year old house will be bigger and a third of the cost to buy.
It's a mix of cant & wont. Won't because lobbyists & the need to stay in power requires pleasing certain voters. Can't because well you've lagged behind in the education needed to build intricate infrastructure & need to outsource which is expensive
I'm not sure it's about lagging behind in education. It's that the EU made certain industrial infrastructure redundant. You can have all the educated people, if they don't have that in place, they can't work. One of the reasons Brexit was insanely stupid.
Outsourcing is even more expensive if the contracts go to between-taker mates without expertise, who make millions without producing the desired construction, PPE, etc.
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.
It's all bureaucracy and red tape, it takes 6 months worth of meetings of people with expensive salaries just to agree that it's a good idea and should move forward.
3 months you source the parts, 3 months to replace them, 12 months to have the "lead director" and "chairman of the planning committee" and all the other fat cats to twiddle their thumbs and get paid £187,000-400,000 a year for it.
Funding. It always comes down to funding. MPs and councillors love to talk about how things need to be done asap...and when you ask them how it's being paid for they say nothing.
The US is worse by far. Our problem is we have one political party that considers all infrastructure spending to be "evil socialism" and the other is willing to just throw money at infrastructure projects without oversight to ensure 90% of the money isn't blown on fluff and waste.
@spaghettiisyummy.3623 The way I see it is, if I have a million dollars and can pay 50,000 for a builder to build a house in a year. It's better than having a 100,000 dollars and paying 25,000 to do it in 5.
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.
Well in the UK there will likely be indeterminate sequences of committee meetings to decide who will sit on the committee meetings to decide who will sit on the committee meeting to decide who will sit on the committee meetings for many years before the substance of the original purpose of the committees even gets a mention in the minutes. That is if anyone can remember what the original purpose was and if still required. By then the budget will have quadrupled in the interim, what with the fat fees all around for the privilege of attending all of this for the chosen luminaries and their attendant consultants of course. The London Garden Bridge project is a wonderful example of the British ability to put so much public money in to selected pockets whilst achieving absolutely nothing in a plan with no purpose and little use to anyone but a favoured group of luvvies and celebrities. The Marble Arch Mound fiasco is also another amusing tale of UK wasting money with daft ideas badly organised.
I served 50 years as an industrial plumber after having served a six year apprenticeship. I was lucky enough to work with and learn from the old guard, the sort that had patience providing you gave 100 percent interest. Over the years apprenticeships vanished and the lads who started just didn't seem to be interested. I don't know if it's the same for other trades but there seems to be very little interest in providing vital services these days.
In Belgium here. Two weeks ago, a plumber came over with an apprentice. The old plumber was professional, cared about making as little mess as possible, tried to teach the apprentice... The apprentice was complaining about missing his break, about working too hard, declared he wouldn't work past 17:00 and ran off at 16:30. Also said at some point that he's quitting next week as soon as he got his salary. The worst thing is, he appeared to be a recent immigrant. I sighed and told the old plumber that young people these days come to Europe believing all that crap about rights etc., when in fact every job is hard, and when you're young you should prioritise learning as much as possible so you can later set your own terms. Old plumber agreed. It's not the second time I hired this plumber, even if I'm not familiar with the profession I could tell he has outstanding ethics.
In Scotland the Queensferry Crossing (large bridge project notorious for going awry) was built on time and within budget. Professionals are coming from all over the world to find out how this was done. However, as this was achieved by an SNP Scottish Government, it is either not reported or reported in the poorest light possible.
Meanwhile the MSM and "unionists" will freak out about the ferries... do mistakes happen?... yes, the problems is the UKG makes more mistakes that are much more expensive but the yoons are ok with those mistakes for some strange submissive reason.
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.
@@SASMADBRUV7 no, it's not true. We can easily get the workers but they won't turn up for projects that don't happen. It might be true we pay more for their time than other countries but most qualified people I see talk about this put the cost increase squarely in planning and bureaucracy. HS2 basically went over budget because of things like planning problems, and NIMBYS decided the air vents need to look like their local stone barns to blend in with their countryside areas instead of say, tin barns that are also common and would mostly be concealed by trees and hedges anyway. Hundreds of things like that happened to the route and the budget went completely insane (it's not just that, but it's a huge factor in our big projects).
@@SASMADBRUV7 I don't about skilled personnel moving to Europe, but it is likely, considering that the UK doesn't have a sustained pipeline of work. That's another reason that wasn't mentioned in the video that our building is so expensive: we don't do enough of it, often enough. They say practice makes perfect, and that is certainly true for building. The UK is out of practice, and as a consequence has to constantly rebuild the skilled workforce through training every time we decide to embark on an infrastructure project. Whereas if we had stuff like, I dunno, *rolling programmes* of infrastructure building, which we have been constantly campaigning for, the UK would finally get the practice it needs, we wouldn't need to continually rebuild the workforce, and construction costs would get cheaper with every completed project.
false they're just taking advantage of the rampant red tape that infects every inch of productivity in Britain. Skilled workers are still here, but when they can be slower to stay on payroll, why would they go faster and why would they challenge the red tape? The systems in place enable that behaviour. Other countries can build roads in mere months, but here it takes years. Other countries can build entire shopping malls in a year or two.... meanwhile there's a building near my work that they plan to put a shop in... they've been renovating it for over 3 years now.
Not becoming, already is and has been. It is quite pathetic. So much red tape and nonsense and so many special interests get involved and stop everything. It is really quite sad actually.
Almost everything in UK is behind compared to other European countries, housing, airports, healthcare, roads, Law Enforcement, right down to the water pressure in the house. Germany's law enforcement took down a coup, Belgium's healthcare ranks 3rd in the world, France has arguably the best water supply in the world, Italy has on average some of the longest living people in the world with a blue zone in their country. Norway's prison system is great too, meanwhile England still hires surgeons and GP's from Europe even though they left the EU. Their own government doesn't play by its own rules, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock during the pandemic are prime examples. Their healthcare service is collapsing, their teachers and ambulance workers are striking too. How far has the "5th richest country on Earth" fallen.@@xXMuseFan1996Xx
Sometimes i wonder if most of the London MPs have travelled anywhere outside London. Seems there's a major disconnect with what's going on outside London and assume it's essentially the same
I moved to the UK in 2019. And although I love this country and the people (mostly), what shocked me - especially coming from Germany - is the quality (or lack thereof) of houses. Shocking.
I remember reading an article somewhere that stated the UK had the worst quality newbuild housing in Europe. And the older houses are never maintained and are left to crumble and rot.
My hot take: Decades of denigrating trades and hard skills. In favour of an academic elitism, which prioritises jobs based on talking rather than doing. And an economy which is built primarily on manipulating abstract financial instruments.
Not really a hot take as it's been happening in other Anglosphere nations like Australia, Canada and NZ, and I'll include America too. Infrastructure here (Australia) also is incredibly expensive and frequently experiences both delays and budget overruns. An example would be the Snowy River Scheme 2.0 which is slated to be 6x over the initial budget of $2bil AU.
@@MrCordycep Yeah, but I'm being hyperbolic in claiming it's the single biggest cause of infrastructure decline. I do think it's certainly a factor though.
@@andybrice2711you’re not wrong though. For the past 30+ years regardless of government the policy around education has been the same, push and push kids into universities even though they maybe shouldn’t go to universities. We should introduce a German style approach to education where some leave early to blue collars and some continue into higher education
@@mohammedhussain6749 And also, the investment banking industry has been head-hunting all the skilled mathematicians who might previously have gone into science or engineering.
@@andybrice2711 you’re completely wrong. We need people to build infrastructure not plan it, we’ve already got enough of it. We need builders, plumbers, electricians and carpenters not engineers. Blue collar not white collar
@@narannavan because I want smaller government? Remind me who's increased government spending by a lot over the past 13 years? It's funny that it's the Labour cultists who always think people who disagree with them must be on the blue team. It's tribal thinking like that which has gotten us into this mess.
a few things. 1> there is no cost of living crisis. Its just a rebranded wages collapse against inflation. 2> no one cares about long term investing. esp if someone else can claim credit for an opening of something 3> lobby groups 4> "think tanks" 5> revolving doors for gov officials. put another way, british contractors were involved in making singapores metro. 130+ stations, built in 30-40 years. meanwhile in the uk, *just* electrifying the track in the uk, balfour beatty struggled years & in the end gave up. roads are not built to last. materials exist, but the way projects are run, its more profitable to repair / resurface. projects are also low balled with numbers to get approval because if real figures were announced - would be canned instantly. in short its the way projects are specified, managed and costed. there is little appetite for forward thinking. anything risky is done by such a large committee that should failure occur - no one is blamed. thats why such things are so expensive.
I can't believe a news channel named after a phrase originally popularised by 4chan has become one of the most respectable journalism outlets in modern britain. I'm always impressed by this channel's ability to tell me about things without telling me what I should think about them.
As a Civil Engineer, i can list multiple reasons off the top of my head: -Aging infrastructure (much of it over 100 years old) with little investment during the various financial crises during the 20th and 21st century, meaning that over time newer projects need to be larger to meet current demands. - UK land ownership rights are very favourable to the land owner, so it is very expensive to buy land, so developers need a high investment. - UK design and Health and Safety standards are much higher than other countries, so many projects are over designed and take a lot of work to convince the authorities that they are safe - Lack of skilled engineers. The 2010s saw the highest infrastructure investments ever, but there were't enough people to design or build it all. This means that we couldn't capitalise on a decade of a strong economy.
I'm civil engineering student and I'm looking for a country where I have fewer work hours, work life balance and where I get paid well, maybe even being able to work from home most of the time. I was thinking about the UK but seems like you guys have way to many problems right now. I'm mainly between Germany, Australia, Norway and Canada. You know, I love what I'm studying but I don't see myself in the long term working to live, but instead living to work, I'm staying away from America and those profit over people mindset
@@hakohito the problem with countries where worker Unions have too much power e.g France, is that project costs tend to skyrocket and you end up with cities like Paris where infrastructure is aging and doesn't get fixed. I think in the UK and US there is a good balance where worker safety is looked after but they are also incentivised to work quickly
what a surprise that the tories couldn't be bothered doing their jobs and updating the planning policy statement things so the country could keep functioning. They pretend they want small government, but what they actually want is lazy government. Where they get paid the same but don't do any of the work
"They pretend they want small government, but what they actually want is lazy government. Where they get paid the same but don't do any of the work" THIS IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF CONSERVATISM!!
I went on a tour of a small local hydroelectric power station that had been built about a hundred years ago. The tour guide told us that the header tank (a big square water tank) at the top of the hill needed renovated, and that so far they had spent more time trying to get planning permission for the renovation of the header tank than it had taken to build the entire power station a hundred years ago.
As with many things, this goes back to the 15 years of austerity, lack of investment, and honestly a lack of vision or ambition from the government. Building HS2 would have been the bare minimum compared to similar European projects and David Cameron was right to champion it as he couldn't know how his successors would fumble the ball. The kind of gusto, energy and support that should have gone into HS2 has instead gone into arbitrary goals like "Stop The Boats", "Get Brexit Done" etc. I don't really understand the cancellation when in reality the hardest part has been bending over backwards to get approval from Greenbelt MPs to allow it, which is a one of many factors in the ever-increasing costs of the Project, going further North isn't anywhere near as difficult, because as we know the tories don't give a crap about the North, even the sitting MPs there. The leg from Old Oak Common to Euston, just makes the service functionally useful, without it, it will be quite hard I feel to make the route popular with it's intended audience, which was effectively to link B'ham to the centre of London, so allow the city to continue to increase productivity and at the same time allow the wealth of London to be shared with the "north"(if you consider Birmingham to be Northern) The official reason was cost saving to spend the money elsewhere, but, what money? Its all being paid for with government debt, there isn't a pot somewhere they can redistribute, if they want to do something else, it's the same debt and as we saw, this was just a smoke screen as many of the suggested recipients of this phantom money were for projects that had been completed in at least one case 10 years prior.
Well 100% political leadership has caused issues but this manifests itself in so many ways. HS2 for example was weakness in just pushing the project forward but also a really unhealthy relationship with risk, treating all risk as if they were issues and costing accordingly. HS2 also didn't take into consideration the strain of supply chain, concrete supply alone became heavily constrained due to HS2 consumption, causing the costs of concrete to increase for HS2 as well as others.
s simple story, a prefab building was ordered and delivered to save £ before the foundations laid, so extra storage was required for the building, costing more £, due to being stored unassembled suffered rain damage. when finally built a year later the building is warped, leaks and has a mould issue and now needs to be replaced the building is late and over budget probably the person who okayed the purchase or the prefab got a bonus for saving the company £
Should be noted that this isn't a uniquely UK issue but also parts of the US and most of Europe. We should also be cautious about "removing red tape" because most politicians will understand "Remove red tape so we can build infrastructure? Yes I agree I also oppose the res tape they call workers rights. Unions are annoying when building. The stupid environmentalists also dont want us to build grey appartment complexes about historic landmarks and lakes. We also oppose the red tape around high taxes. Lets remove taxes that will mostly help the rich, they will help the middle class as well, but they wont be able to own stuff in 5 years anyways." Thats the problem when I hear people opposing buerocracy and red tapes. Are some bad? Yes, but I often only hear one side of the story and the tapes removed are often the ones that are very much needed.
Agreed. I'm all for improving the planning process, but no government ever seems to do it though they all talk about it (including Labour). But we need protections against stupid developments for a reason. There's a project near me being taken over by a new developer, and they've changed the road layout so that instead of the school, shops and community centre being next to each other, there's a Y junction and each is on a different bit of that junction, meaning people have to cross the road for literally no reason. They don't get any traffic or housing benefits from that change, but the council does not have the power to say, 'Your plan is worse, we want this change made'. It's insane. There's no guiding voices handing out sensible decisions about this stuff, so developers just get to reap massive financial rewards while supplying sub standard areas that can't be fixed later because no-one wants to knock down houses. Sadly, I don't believe the government or the next one will make a single improvement to our planning law and systems and we'll continue to limp along.
An extensive study was done recently by NYU about transit costs which contradicts your claim. Most European countries are on the lower than average part and some are in the middle section above the average. The UK is at 3rd from the top (most expensive) in the crazy section, surpassed only by Qatar and New Zealand (which is No 1) and above Hong Kong and Singapore. Below this group is the US, still high but $130M less per km than the Singapore and almost $200m less than the UK. Most expensive European country is Hungary, which has a similar cost to the US, the Netherlands ($80M less than Hungary/US) and Check Republic ($100M+ less than the Netherlands.Germany is at the edge of the high cost side with less than half per KM from the UK. 10 European countries are at or below the world average (which is almost a quarter of the cost in the UK). That said, while red tape contributes to the cost it's in no way the main and certainly not the only, reason for the high costs. It's deeper than that and most likely has more to do with the way your economy is based on which is rentier capitalism and your over individualism, which is why many of your former colonies have similar problems.
Scott Hall Road? I’ve always wondered why there’s a walled channel in the central reservation for buses, it looks like we can’t have a tram but we can have buses on a track.
French can make stuff Brits can’t: - High Speed Trains. HS1 line & rolling stock were built with French TGV technology. French built in 1981 the 1st true HST line in Europe, world speed record on rails 380 kph (1981), 515 kph (1990), 574 kph (2007). HS2 trains will be built by Japanese-French JV (Hitachi/Alstom). HS2 line building strongly relies on French expertise: "Dominique" the enormous "launching girder" being used to construct the HS2 Colne Valley viaduct is French engineering. - Nuclear power plants. EDF owns 56 nuclear power plants (largest number in Europe). EDF is 2nd world power producer, 167,000 employees worldwide. French electricity is almost completely carbon-free by eliminating (almost) all gas, coal and fuel oil in electricity production: 17 gCO2/kWh (Netherlands 98 g, UK 183 g, Germany 196 g) - 600 dams and 4,253 hydraulic power stations in France. - In 2023 France was top power exporter in Europe: 50.1 TWh, far ahead of Sweden (28.6 TWh) and Norway (7.3 TWh). - Big ships. French shipbuilder St Nazaire holds some world records (2005: QM2, biggest Atlantic liner. 2016: 'Harmony of the Seas'. 2018: 'Symphony of the Seas'. 2021: ‘Wonder of the Seas')
France is very good at infrastructure, mostly because they didn't neglect it and lose engineering talent by not touching it for decades even when they've had conservative governments. UK Tories are like US Republicans, they consider all infrastructure spending to be "evil socialism"
@@mrvwbug4423 Calling HS2 "evil socialism" is somewhat accurate since the UK Treasury is paying for everything with no end in sight in order to achieve societal goals like "leveling up the North". The same can be said about California HSR. The Lignes a Grande Vitesse were built on time and on budget because the owner (SNCF for the first lines, the builders for the recent Aquitaine and Brittany) financed them with privately borrowed money and needed the TGVs to run in order to pay back the loans.
The British can but the Government can’t!!!!! The British invented the Rail system and even things like the great tilting system but the government sold it off just like they sold off the great jet powered VTOL aircraft…. Making things fast doesn’t compare to this Our aircraft carriers today use the STOVL system that works way better in bad weather and doesn’t use the ridiculous Nuclear Power reactors onboard that need more crew to operate and will cause true devastation in warfare but the aircraft can’t fly as far . Most carrier technology is British such as Steam launch system , armoured deck, Optical Landing System, Radar, angled deck so make out that the French made any
One of the major issues in the UK is the ownership of the land these projects need to use or go through. Unlike on much of the continent, the U.K. Government or councils cannot just decide to build on or through land not owned by them. The land owner holds most of the cards and this takes time and money to sort. On the continent, the government can decide to build on land and the owners have less right to so no.
"compulsory purchase Law" Uk can force to buy your land by using that law You the land owner have no right when the government/council use that. so acquired land for project is not a problem in the uk.
@@jetli740 Legally yes, but any of them that have money will throw lawyers at it to get a better deal, causing delays. eg. 'My duck pond is worth £1million and wasn't considered as part of my compensation!'
In my own country infrastructure is seen more as a vessel of direct economic stimulus rather then an expense needed to keep the country running. It’s the difference between replacing a damaged shingle on your roof vs demolishing the entire house and rebuilding it from scratch.
We closed or sold off all our world leading companies. A good example we built the worlds first nuclear power station 70 years ago and now we don't even know how to build one. The Tories (1979) thought you could deindustrialise the country and still have the same economy based on finance and services, well sadly we are finding out the hard way that you can't.
To be fair, the other EPRs, Olkiluoto 3 & Flamanville 3 went way behind schedule(18 years instead of 5 for O3, 10 years behind schedule for F3) with Flamanville 4x the original cost so far. Olkiluoto was a fixed price contract.
How Big Things Get Done should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in large infrastructure projects, as it examines the data behind why some projects go over budget and experience delays.
A stretch of the A1 has been closed for months, causing massive traffic jams and delays as a 70mph 3 lane dual carriageway gets funnelled into 1 single lane on the other side of the dual carriageway with a 40mph speed limit. Apparently they’re testing the concrete.
The statement about the crossrail line costing 1.392 billion per mile is mind blowing. A lot of people must have been given a nice envolope under the table
As someone in the construction industry, there are a lot of problems. Indecision and late changes is a major productivity killer. A lack of large schemes means that there is no scalability from lessons learned. Major mistakes get repeated as people aren't retained for the design duration. Under paid engineers wont have loyalty, over paid HR are busy bodies.
Our standards of building have fallen because we need quick, cheap, throw-it-up architecture that isnt built to last because thats how our building sectors operate. If we could sort our othwr problems out, we could incentivise more meaningful building from our cinstruction companies. But our government doesnt want community centred housing for its people, it would rather turn everywhere into a London Mega Metropolis. All the best architecture in London is the old stuff.
I've used the A428 since I was 17 (25 now) and it's been a such a slow process. If I can notice that in 8 years (and longer if you consider me seeing the process through public transport prior) god knows how slow it's looked to my parents and other citizens of Beds & Cambs
and has per normal London gets a new rail line for the city and other places get nothing yet is cost more to build the new rail line than it would of to build the new metro system in Leeds
I was shocked when I saw a pernment board next to one of London's overground Station saying that there is a refurbishment going on of the bridge and "expect delays for next 3 years. They didn't bild new bridge just to be clear just fixing existing one. They bloked one line of traffic of a very busy road for the entire duration.
The bar for nationally significant, be in England. If its a project in Scootland it is not nationally significant. Queensferry crossing for example, one of largest projects in UK, not nationally significant.
You go into a lot of detail without really addressing the underlying cause. Which imo is that the UK hasn't done large scale infrastructure projects for a long time. Other than building "just one more lane". For rail for instance since the 60s the UK has basically not done anything major. On the contrary it has mostly been closing down lines. Even for roads though I do think it was a good decision they haven't really done any large scale projects for at least 3 decades. Just (useless) expansion of existing roads. The last major infrastructure project before HSR was the M3 and planning for that started in 1956. Why is that an issue? Well because the longer you do not do anything the more the various involved organizations skill erodes. People retire. They don't properly teach their replacement. Maybe there isn't even one since you are downsizing the organization. New people don't have any experience with large scale stuff. And suddenly you find that nobody is really sure how to do this. A major reason France for instance can build rail so incredibly cheaply is that they have been doing it basically non stop since WW2. They have well established systems. They have a large consortium for which this stuff is routine. France has done particularly well in this regard but even for the rest of Europe the UK does stand out as just not having done anything for decades. So yeah the only way to fix this is to stop cancelling and delaying everytime there are cost overruns. Because there will *always* be cost overruns when people and organizations are basically having to start from the ground up.
They are a lot better at putting money in their back pockets than they are at putting it to work. That's the only reason. Plus builders charge government double, miss deadlines and demand more money. HS2 point in case.
01:54 Yep…there’s a road near me that has been planned as a dual carriage way since the initial one lane road was built…34 years ago. Last month they finally started clearing trees next to the road so that the dual carriage way can be completed. Trouble is that with the amount of traffic these days it’s probably not gonna make much difference. 🤷
The consequences of Chinese bureaucracy are exactly the opposite of those in the UK. Chinese bureaucracy will build more and even redundant infrastructure.
Government won’t build a tram for the largest city in Western Europe without any metro as it’ll cost an estimated TOTAL £1.6bn but will shell out £1.4bn PER MILE on yet another line in London 🙄 they never really cared about levelling up
*It isn't bureaucracy.* 'Bureaucracy' is only ever a hindrances if you already have opposition to your cause. The Tories have 13 years and they fail to build, maintain or upgrade practically every, NOT because of bureaucracy since they are in control. They fail because they never intend to build anything of value. Bureaucracy is merely the scapegoat because most people generally don't bother to understand how it works and what it is for.
@@SaintGerbilUK As oppose to property owners bribing tories against public housing? Granted, tories don't need bribery to be against a lot of things. Aside from that being mostly BS. For every project, you can find opposition to 'something', the major difference between an effective government is that they tend to find out whether a grievance is reasonable and see if they is a compromise. The Tories don't bother with that because building anything wasn't their goal.
@@biocapsule7311 absolutely but I'd prefer the stagnation of the Tories, than the planned decline of the Labour party. Neither of the two front parties have any values they stand for.
@@SaintGerbilUK Labour is "planned decline"?? As a foreign observer, if you haven't realized that Tories IS the decline and Labour or even Green your only hope. You kind of deserve what you get. There is no equal in both. And the Tories HAVE ALWAYS stand for their values, you just haven't realized their values is screwing over people like you. And if this 13 years have not convince you of that, nothing will.
In 1954 the UK economy was 66% larger than Frances the Uk government said we need to curb spending, France did the opposite and by the 1970s Frances economy was larger than the UK. We've only got worse, the only reason it's not so noticable is because Neoliberalism infected those countries meaning they started to invest less as well.
We are good at building what we suck at is getting the right people managing it. These large projects are filled with corruption of mates hiring mates it’s an open secret on site.
The West Midlands Metro (seen at the start of the video) has and is taking years and years. The whole thing was closed down for months and months TWICE not long ago because they found massive cracks in the Trams. 🙄 they were built by a Spanish company called CAF. Then there is the M6 Junction 10 upgrade which has taken over 5 years to complete, should have been done in 2 years.
I was having a discussion about this the other day on Reddit. Did you know in the 1850s a British railway company packed up their kit and went to Crimea and built 7 miles of railway in 7 weeks, at cost, during the severe Crimean winter in war time? And here we are, almost 200 years later unable to build rabbit hutch houses or a single railway line.
From my point of view, the biggest problem of British politics in general is that everything gets micromanaged from London instead of having local governments decide on the matter.
As a Portuguese living in UK I can't talk much ahahah In Portugal we still don't have TGV (high speed train) to Madrid or the nearest big city Porto, from Lisbon. It takes 10hrs from Lisbon to Madrid by direct train which by the way only leaves once a day at 9pm... The rest of the day is indirect train and it takes 17hrs at least. Currently I live in Lancashire and right in front of my house I can see traces of a bridge that used to be a train line from 1900's. Then the town next to mine has a train station that is used as a cafe and the trains that come are only used for tourism. Meanwhile I need that train line to go Greater Manchester for work ahahaha (I am laughing but crying at the same time).
@@chrisj9700 You are completely correct. Of course I wouldn't. As you in your obvious wisdom already know, that's because I have a finite lifespan. The country has not. So a country can afford to take a long view and can borrow now, when money is cheaper and repay that debt over a period of 60, 80, 100 years, all the while paying just a few procent over inflation. And as the sum used to construct said project goes straight back into the economy and comes back as taxes, the price is even cheaper. So while I'm at the end of my life the infrastructure project keeps earning the country money. I'm really glad an intelligent person like yourself took the time to point that out to all of us.
As someone who works in this industry I can list many reasons here are some: - inadequate budgets - IR35 stifling mobility in what is a transient industry - Wages the job isn’t for everyone especially with UK weather and bureaucracy, wages need to reflect this. - Corruption at a political level
Private companies, thats where it went wrong. It is true, we cant build anything, even the most simplest thing. Here's some examples ive seen. Footpaths that don't direct water to to a drain, so flood. Footpaths that have a dip ion the middle, causing water to pool. Train stations that haven't been painted for decades. A pot hole filled with A) poor quality tarmac, and B) with no tar edging (water gets in, it all breaks apart after one winter). A pedestrian safety barrier gets knocked down by a truck. a temporary plastic fence appears, and it near leaves, the barrier never fixed, (interesting a local bus stop advert board was blown down a few weeks ago, and that get replace ASAP!). As a nation we are pathetic.
Call the russians to build the nuclear power station at budget cost. And call the chines to build the railway at budget cost. These two are no nonsense countries.
Pretending this is a UK only problem is a bit disingenuous. It's a common problem for most english speaking countries (USA, Canada, Australia, and increasingly Hong Kong and Singapore). This is more than just a problem of British politics and policy, but of a wider culture of HOW we build infrastructure, including excessive use of consultants and over-engineered solutions. The Pedestrian Observations blog has a few articles on this if anyone is interested.
Are public sector projects in the UK (specifically England), open to private sector bidding? That's how it works in the states. Contracts are awarded to the best overall bid (cost, compliance, timeline etc).
4 key reasons, 1. Lack of competition. Oligopoly among a few contractors. 2. Labour union. 3. Too many parties involved in decision making and flawed bureaucracy. 4. Lack of accountability.
We didn't get worse at building, we got worse at costing -with the tender and charging process open to large scale corruption that no one talks about. A public works project will be absolutely milked for its readily available, unending money (even before the pandemic/ cost of living crisis) as greedflation on an epic scale, for decades. There's also something to be said about the spiralling costs placating nimbys and endless consultations with the public, middlemen and lawyers -foil to a litigious culture all of which adds up to the fact things are built at 6x the cost of richer Western nations with higher salaries, such as France and Germany. It took 12 years to refurbish an escalator at Tottenham Court Rd in the 90s-noughties, whilst it took only 7 years to build the entire Victoria Line in the 1970s. The fact the refurb of the Jubilee Line went from one year to a decade, and involved one charming example of laying the track & cable for a year, then whoops! realising it was the wrong type and having to rip it all out again and start again (plus their attempt to overcharge £2 billion extra that an investigation revealed). Likewise the project to upgrade the signalling system, with a contractor who came back months later saying it was sorry, too complicated for them, without a single thing done and pocketing the £100+ million -yet still managed to get the HS2 contract after. The fact these teams were found to be doing absolutely nothing each night, from secret cams. Also the high level political corruption -note how HS2 passes certain voter strongholds, and thus will have to tunnel through these 'beauty spots' and not others, and that it doles out new community centres and projects like Santa Claus, to every rich village and commuter suburb it impinges their view on. The US has similar issues if not worse -some subway extensions come in at $2 billion a mile, have been on the cards for over a century and infamously, one auditor found hundreds of labourers on the project, with no identifiable job in the construction being paid $1000-$2000 a week. She nor the managers, or company could identify their role onsite.
Well, we're very good at the actual getting things built that are cool. The Elizabeth Line/Crossrail is truly spectacular and an engineering marvel. But we did start planning it 70 years ago and recognise that we needed it, including the routes we need to use and so on... I think planning is our biggest cost overrun in the UK vs other European projects. We couldn't completely one high speed rail project, Italy has seven bigger ones going concurrently.
When you do big boom projects your not going to get a team that can improve in building and planning. If you adding a station a week you get good at making stations.
Yup, our green and pleasant land, not productive and manufactured. Conservatives should be about conserving the land though, so it's on Labour to make the land more productive, I don't understand why Boris wasn't catering to his NIMBY base. Hopefully Keir Starmer can change that, but he isn't exactly brave when it comes to differentiating the Labour party.
I just wanted to say that the Infrastructure Planning Commision was not created in 2012 it was actually abolished in 2012. In that year the IPC was subsumed into the Planning Inspectorate, where it now operates as the Infrastructure Planning Unit.
It's almost as if increasing the bureaucracy, has not increased the effectiveness and efficiency of decisions! 😱 The problem is when the politicians ask the bureaucrats what to do. The inevitable answer will be more bureaucrats. 😱😱😱 This has being going on for years: UK Productivity = 😱😱😱😱😱👷😱😱😱😱😱
As a Spaniard, it amazes me how many comments are pointing "bureaucracy" as the mayor issue. I don't think you realise how much paper work is link to any infrastructure project in any european country. I mean, I doubt UK has more bureaucracy than Germany or the Netherlands. People talk about red tape as if deregulation allows better and cheaper infrastructure (I think you should read something about infrastructures project prices in a deregulation Uthopia called USA) and in reality is not linked. Regulation doesn't mean more expensive works. I'm not saying bureaucracy isn't part of the problem, of course it is. But it's just one (and a little one). I would say NIMBY movements affect more than red - tape and legislation. Small group of People opposing any major investment could delay, stop or even cancel projects if they start protests and lawsuits. And I would say NIMBY movements are more common in UK than in the rest of Europe (don't know exactly why)
What? You mean the public sector which blocks absolutely everything. The private sector are the ones doing stuff, despite the regulation. Do you see the massive government wind farm to give us a sovereign wealth fund? No. It's all private. And Crossrail is a public project but entirely built by privates means and it took 70 years to get it done because governments are completely incompetent.
@@thomasfromswindon7609 No I mean private. Private sector involvement in any context or capacity in strategic civic development, is fundamentally wrong, as it ultimately is merely only a forum for rentseeking, with no basis in any kind of reality, other than the ideological predilections of the rentseekers.
I will explain a bit more here, working in the feild of architecture. Delays in construction projects can increase the cost for construction for many reasons. 1. delays can result in additional labor costs, as workers may have to work overtime or extend their contracts. 2. delays can cause material and equipment rental costs to rise. Materials may deteriorate or expire, you will then need extra cost for storage of materials. 3. Delays can increase the interest payments, taxes, insurance premiums, and fees associated with financing the project. Delays can also affect the cash flow and profitability of the project. as a general rule, cost of a project can double for every 3 months of delay... so now imagine 18 months of delay as mentioned in the video... good luck
People need to stop blaming 'Bureaucracy' when the problem is political priorities. Bureaucracy is merely the process of organizational function. Whether it aids or hinder something, is dependent on the priorities of the ruling government. Singapore has the "biggest" bureaucracy of it's size as a nation and it is building 24/7 since it's founding, it's notorious as the most over-planned city-state in the world. Bureaucracy becomes a problem to accomplishing something when the accomplishment was never the goal of the particular government in power. If the Tories fail to build something and there isn't some external factor (such as lack of vital material etc.) stopping them, then it was never their goal to build in the first place.
@Shamur-og1es yeah no that sounds right but I'm 24 and they started it when I was like 8 or younger, was supposed to be 300 million and somewhere close to billion, not to mention from the old Edinburgh tram system it's only a fraction of what it once was, proportionally it's more expensive as it was over 3 times the cost and probably double the expected time
Don't forget the layers of "consultants" employed on lucrative short-term contracts, who always fail upwards as a delay to the project means contract extension (on preferred terms cause, of course, we can't loose someone familiar with the project) or move to consult on other projects, for a higher fee, having had years of experience "working" on a previous project (that still didn't get delivered).
As a civil engineer, I can also say the management contracts which clients employ for a competent body to manage contractors, also doesn’t help as the organization who manages the contracts are paid to ask questions and make what is in most cases a challenging project even more challenging and time consuming as questions need to be closed out and clarified before works continue. Ultimately resulting in delays and additional work which isn’t focused on delivering the project. I see the benefits of the managing contract and it ensures the project is delivered safely and the best quality for the client, but ultimately the contractor has the responsability of also working safely and delivering the contract to the highest quality as the contractor is liable to usually at least a 10 year defect period
My observation as a foreigner is that public always oppose infrastructure projects. Palanning system alows this. HS2 is regularly fighting legal challenges by local councils which cost money and time. Heathrow runway got cancelled because of the same reason.
When talking about public transport, we focus so much on the cost to build a tram or high speed rail. We ought to consider the cost of not having infrastructure. The increased housing and road repair costs. Not to mention the costs of car ownership
![Gunna - HIM ALL ALONG [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/w7Wf0h1Q8a4/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
that is pretty funny indeed !!!
How did a tram network not get built in the late 1800s, when so many US and European cities were building out their networks? Tacoma, Washington had it’s first streetcar line built in 1888, when the city had a population of only around 34k
@@PhilliesNostalgiait had a tram until 1952. An idea in the 1930’s was to dig tunnels through central Leeds and run tram’s underground in the city centre. It was planned to start construction around 1940 but cancelled during ww2 around 1944.
There was also a tram proposal in the 80’s which was cancelled and the money was relocated to the Sheffield tramway.
And when the Leeds Supertram was cancelled, it was replaced with a £250,000,000 trolley bus network which was never built.
This was the second time a trolley bus network was proposed as in the 70’s the Public transport executive granted funding for 3 trolley bus lines to Leeds, Bradford, and Kirkstall. It was cancelled when the Executive was privatised.
I’m sure even towns like Bournemouth had trams once upon a time, I read in a history book that the trams were. Ought out by bus companies who ran them into the ground so they didn’t compete with buses.
@@PhilliesNostalgia loads of Uk cities use to have trams. In fact there was probably more trams in the UK than anywhere else in the world. But they made a big mistake and got rid of most of the tram systems to make way for the cars only to realise now that it was a mistake
When the country's economy revolves around finance it's not surprising we struggle to do anything useful.
You mean money laundering
@@IsochestSame same.
@@birkett83 Agreed
@@Isochestwhy did you bother to repeater letter for letter exactly what the OP wrote?
Its the only thing we have left. The Socialists destroyed everything else.
mental we had a decade of low interest rates to build infrastructure and built nothing
What profit is there in useful infrastructure?
@@aspie2901 Only long term profits so they didn't give a shit
Politicians don't see the future past 5 years
@@aspie2901 increasing rail capacity? Improving road infrastructure?
@@00dude3 how does that translate into profit for banks and corporations?
Because the outsource everything and get price gouged, not to mention robbed through corruption
Better that government expands and we have "British construction", where we set the prices for 5 minutes till they form a union and extort the government since they are the only people who can do government construction.
@@SaintGerbilUKand yet they just gave examples where in France infra projects are far far cheaper while at the same time France has bigger government and far higher levels of unionisation and striking. Go figure 🤔
@@David-bi6lf yes they need the infrastructure to be built since the near perpetual riots keep burning the old infrastructure down.
Dead right the civils contractors are a mafia and price gouge everything they touch. I worked with a civils contractor some years ago on a networking project that had a large element of civils. I could not believe how adept they were at getting extras out of the customer on the basis that if they werent done the project would fail and it wasnt in the tender...
I suspect that for every pound actually spent on a project another pound goes to a tory donor to consult on part of the project.
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.
If only the tories had not implemented austerity and reduced how much central government financing was given the local councils which would have prevented them reduce their resources, have installed technology for efficiencies in governance control, etc.
But it's true stop building on flood plains!
@@theincrediblemahoganygoddess Or do like some other countries do and build the houses on stilts. Put a garage at the ground floor and everything else safely 10' up. (And forbid people from converting the garage). That way, the land can still get flood every few years and it's not going to cost billions in insurance to fix.
Exactly! Too many fingers in the pie, too much red tape and bureaucracy- we were in the EU too long…..
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
as a french person I am curious... HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE ? How can we be better at organizing than anyone ? we litterally leave early, drink on lunch break, strike a 10th of the working time,...
How ?
@@baclm555France has been building one or two new TGV lines every decade since the first one opened in 1981. They didn't just build the lines, they built the institutional knowledge and expertise and maintained it. In contrast the UK hardly built any rail at all for the entire twentieth century so when projects like HS1 and crossrail got approval in the late nineties they didn't have anyone with the skills.
Institutional knowledge like that is hard to create and very easy to lose.
@@baclm555 British ONS (Office for National Statistics ) 20 January 2022. International comparisons of UK productivity - Main points:
- The G7 countries’ average (excluding the UK) output per worker was 13% above the UK in 2019.
- The UK’s output per hour worked is less than France and the US.
- France is between 9% and 28% more productive than the UK, with a central estimate of 18% more productive.
@@baclm555 "Britain is among the least work-oriented countries in the world, according to the research by the Policy Institute at King’s College London." (7 Sep 2023)
Dominic Raab: "British workers are 'among the worst idlers in the world'.
"Liz Truss was heard criticising the British work ethic, suggesting people lacked the 'skill and application' of foreign workers.."😂😂
£66 billion just phase 1. Not entire project. Entire project will cost double that is way they scrapped phase 2 Birmingham- Manchester.
how are you supposed to get better at building infrastructure if you keep cancelling projects!!!!!!!???????
How do you build stuffs for practice(to get better at it) when you have to maintain a low budget?
@@akhripasta2670 you don't
i'm 50yrs old and Britain has been like this my whole life
Yeah. Backwards and crap 💩.
Victoria's knew the game 🎮
I'm 42, same. The way people harp on about stuff as if it's a new thing now is hilarious!😊
Britain was broken then as much as it's broken now. Too many people lining their pockets with the cash before any real good can come of it!!
Channel tunnel got finished at least!
@@andyp123456would be strange if UK wouldn’t build their 1/2 part 😂
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.
Hot Take: This is the natural state of an out-of-control capitalist system. Capitalism inherently rewards and encourages greed. Greed is a virtue of capitalism. And if there aren't counter balancing forces capitalism will naturally lead to corruption and inefficiency.
Sweden isn't do that well - PewDiePie
Ditto the US, as noted in the comment about the NYC subway being the only system MORE expensive per mile than the Underground.
Germany isn't any better
I mean, even Italy has built widespread rail and infrastructure projects. Italy is concurrently building large sectors of HSR, along with massive transalpine tunnels through mountains (Mont d'Ambin and Brenner Base Tunnels)
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.
I've worked on many projects in the UK which were managed by the big UK builders (Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Laing ORourke etc) and that's a fair take. So much red tape slow the production to a near halt but the government basically write a blank cheque since the collapse of carillion so the principle contractors don't care so much about how long it takes.
The excavator thing sounds like something out of Eastern Europe... LOL!
And yes, the more bureaucrats involved the longer it takes and more expensive it is. They do this on purpose to justify their existence.
The UK has become the bastion of ineffiiciency trying to cover all scenarios for every situation which is insane.
What did they die of? Old age?
Sounds like a classic case of embezzlement.
@@xanderjames8682 Ligma
Why can't the government just have their own workers instead of hiring greedy contractors? Oh... right yeah crony capitalism
The Tories have sold the whole country off
The UK was made for absolute monarchy we have failed as a republic
It's what they do.
@@theimmortalemperor3605America will send capitalism if you go back to monarchy 🤗
@@sachin2842well if you don’t want us going back to the absolute monarchy then send your people over who have infrastructure skills to prevent it
@@werty21100
They'll send the doctors and engineers crossing from Mexico 😂😂😂
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.
Agree with this completely. Travelling outside of London (e.g. London to Yarmouth) is a pain. Trains are too slow, and they cost way too much. It's cheaper to drive :/
Yup. Increasing roads is useless for traffic. Widening them with Dutch style cycle lanes (the only type that should be legal, full stop) reduces traffic and increase cycling and saves the NHS a tonne of money. But other than that, cycling infrastructure sucks as an investment unless you care about budget, money, time, positive health impacts, quality of life. There's lots of factors that are worse about adding proper cycle lanes though. Unlike trams which are anti-cycling and wildly expensive compared to electric buses and insanely unsafe and unsightly and just a half measure when we should be building undergrounds in every major city and between some of them and just have done with the whole idea of trams.
@@jonevansauthor One reason trams are so wildly expensive is that, at least until Very Light Rail becomes a thing, modern-day trams are so heavy that unless you're building on top of disused rail lines and can re-use ballast, you've got to dig up the road, move all the utilities out of the way, then install a concrete slab on which the rails can be placed.
Buses are only half a solution unless you can build dedicated bus lanes, as otherwise, they'll be caught in all the existing traffic - plus, as they often stop every few hundred metres to pick up or set down passengers, even in the absence of congestion can effectively move at ~15mph so may be slower than cars (even if parking charges in town make them cheaper to use). Buses also have an unfortunate tendency to attract the dregs in society, so additional delays can be caused if the bus driver has to persuade someone kicking up a fuss or lighting up a vape / cigarette / joint to leave, while even on frequent routes, reliability can be decidedly dodgy.
It doesn't help that most public transport is run by private companies, so with declining government subsidies, will only run routes and services that are profitable to them - so if the majority of passengers are elderly people or students using passes, the service / route could be withdrawn as they're not making any profit from them.
Bicycle infrastructure, while welcome, is controversial with locals, as with shared / side-by-side footways and cycleways, pedestrians can legally use both (and not all local authorities take care to remove all street furniture from the bicycle half) and will inevitably moan if any cyclists build up a decent cadence or pass onto the footway to avoid obstructions, while on the road it's usually implemented as a painted line, with no physical separation from traffic (and, of course, motorists will often use them as unofficial parking bays, safe in the knowledge there's little to no enforcement). Meanwhile, motorists see very few cyclists using them and regard them as a waste of money.
@@jonevansauthor Cycle lanes are less appropriate in the UK because it's far more hilly, particularly in the north, and population centres are further apart. And underground systems are too expensive.
@@existnt sorry, but that’s absolute nonsense. 75 years ago, when bikes were much more heavily used, hills weren’t an issue. They were just something you dealt with. With the availability of ebikes today, hills are non-issue. If you’ve never ridden on an ebike, I definitely recommend finding a local shop and giving one a go.
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.
@@icu17siberiayou’re giving them more credit than they deserve.
@@icu17siberia It is hard to objectively determine the best bid beforehand and demonstrate it. Especially in a bureaucracy. But there should be harsh penalties for any company that cannot complete the contract on time for the price they bid.
I work for the civil service, I can give an example of this, we needed new printers and so it went to auction for the contract, lowest bidder got it, the printers came they were installed and they stopped working after 3 months, we needed a guy to come out, he comes out, says we need to buy a part, turns out instead of them maintaining the printers under contract turns out we have to pay for everything and that's why they were so cheap, servicing these printers costs like a grand each time and they are routinely broken so I have to walk around an entire building asking people if their printer works. And if we paid a little more at the start we could have had the printers being repaired by them at no extra cost to us and our cost is what some of tax payers money are being spent on, I could have bought a HP printer and had a better time then what we have
@@solaireastora5394 your office still has printers? I'm also part of the civil service and our buildings have all gone fully paperless. There's only like one old printer from like the early 2000s for my entire floor. Funny thing I recently was clearing some documents off a nearby locker as we were putting some food out for the team and turns out the date on the paper suggests its just been left there since 2014!
As someone who has worked on putting bids together for construction projects you are totally wrong. The HS2 contracts haven't been let from competitive bids, being a construction management type of contract. And the projects that are bid competitively don't end up like you think they do.
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.
@jonhack2585 However the laws in France means, its unlikely for local community group to force the builder to tunnel or go around the planned path for Nationally Significant Infastruture.
In a nutsehll in France the developers used tunnels becuase the HSR cant go over or around the mountain and it will be cheaper, in UK the developers had to tunnel 800km in sections becuase it ruined the views or made too much noise for horses, which cost 20 times more than building the rail over land
@@robertlee6338and people wonder why the countryside is dying from population loss....
It's annoying how most of our major cities have no underground networks but in the countryside, where there's plenty of space to put the HSR above ground, they insist on tunneling.
@jonhack2585 sure, but in the country, there's nothing in the way that needs tunneling under in the first place.
@@lazrseagull54ban tunneling in empty areas
Here in the UK, we're not good at anything at all, aside from complaining...
And drinking
Please don't underrate such glories as: going to the pub, enjoying a drink while relishing the dominance of the English Premier League.
And queing! 😂
@@ajodendaal We lag way behind Spain in the littering championships.
We are insanely good at coming up with very creative and funny insults
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.
In fairness to the infrastructure we have, it was the best available when it was built...back in the 50's
And Brits are some of the biggest snobs in the world, because you know, Britain is ✨exceptional✨
@@michaelcoward1902 Naw. When I moved to the UK for five years in late 2007, the rail line near me was in awful shape, the train tossing passengers from side to side as it jostled along. Then a ten billion pound project to fix it and some other lines. Silky smooth. Then, within a few years, bad shape again, tossing passengers side to side as the train went along.
Its all good tory capitalism - its what you all voted for the tories did away with all the building regulations back in very early 80's
I'd take an older 100 year house over a pop up home with cardboard walls any day. The hilarious thing is the 100 year old house will be bigger and a third of the cost to buy.
It's a mix of cant & wont. Won't because lobbyists & the need to stay in power requires pleasing certain voters. Can't because well you've lagged behind in the education needed to build intricate infrastructure & need to outsource which is expensive
I'm not sure it's about lagging behind in education. It's that the EU made certain industrial infrastructure redundant. You can have all the educated people, if they don't have that in place, they can't work. One of the reasons Brexit was insanely stupid.
@@alanrobertson9790 literally anyone below the age of 50
@@humanwhodoesstuffindeed Agreed, that too. Actually my reply was made for another comment and is irrelevant for this one. Presumably a YT fault.
@@DrVictorVasconceloswah, Brexit wah.
Undemocratic remoaners.
Outsourcing is even more expensive if the contracts go to between-taker mates without expertise, who make millions without producing the desired construction, PPE, etc.
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.
It's all bureaucracy and red tape, it takes 6 months worth of meetings of people with expensive salaries just to agree that it's a good idea and should move forward.
@@SaintGerbilUKTry getting anything done in Spain.Everything. Manana.Manana.
I can't remember the last time I drove past the M4/M5 junction and there weren't roadworks, I've done it for nearly 15 years
3 months you source the parts, 3 months to replace them, 12 months to have the "lead director" and "chairman of the planning committee" and all the other fat cats to twiddle their thumbs and get paid £187,000-400,000 a year for it.
Funding. It always comes down to funding. MPs and councillors love to talk about how things need to be done asap...and when you ask them how it's being paid for they say nothing.
As American, it makes me feel so warm and fuzzy to see our ancestral connection to Britain on display 😂😂 If anything, we’re worse
Bad at building infrastructure-something the Anglo world has in common
The thing is americans can chuck so much money at something that they just brute force a result, Britain can't really do that.
The US is worse by far. Our problem is we have one political party that considers all infrastructure spending to be "evil socialism" and the other is willing to just throw money at infrastructure projects without oversight to ensure 90% of the money isn't blown on fluff and waste.
@@wrwarw5457I mean, that is true.
Although it doesn't sound like a very good thing.
@spaghettiisyummy.3623
The way I see it is, if I have a million dollars and can pay 50,000 for a builder to build a house in a year. It's better than having a 100,000 dollars and paying 25,000 to do it in 5.
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.
Too much regulation...
Yup "administrative overhead" costs 10 times what the actual project costs, mostly BS middle management jobs for cronies.
And notice how every politician is willing to keep pouring money into that NHS sinkhole....
Very interesting.....
@@mattevans4377because we all depend it on, ya thick melt.
@@narannavan And yet you are the one who doesn't realize where the money is going. It's certainly not going to frontline staff and services.
So, we're mired by red tape? I guess none of us are surprised at this. ☹
And we can't blame Europe anymore 😂😂😂
@@abuyusufabdulhakim952 Tories will find a way to still blame Europe.
Well in the UK there will likely be indeterminate sequences of committee meetings to decide who will sit on the committee meetings to decide who will sit on the committee meeting to decide who will sit on the committee meetings for many years before the substance of the original purpose of the committees even gets a mention in the minutes. That is if anyone can remember what the original purpose was and if still required. By then the budget will have quadrupled in the interim, what with the fat fees all around for the privilege of attending all of this for the chosen luminaries and their attendant consultants of course. The London Garden Bridge project is a wonderful example of the British ability to put so much public money in to selected pockets whilst achieving absolutely nothing in a plan with no purpose and little use to anyone but a favoured group of luvvies and celebrities. The Marble Arch Mound fiasco is also another amusing tale of UK wasting money with daft ideas badly organised.
Yet people still want more regulation...
@@sulamy1955 If the UK deregulates more the country can soon have the same glorious level of infrastructure as the US.
I served 50 years as an industrial plumber after having served a six year apprenticeship. I was lucky enough to work with and learn from the old guard, the sort that had patience providing you gave 100 percent interest. Over the years apprenticeships vanished and the lads who started just didn't seem to be interested. I don't know if it's the same for other trades but there seems to be very little interest in providing vital services these days.
Apprenticeships didn't vanish at all. Kids just stopped doing them.
In Belgium here. Two weeks ago, a plumber came over with an apprentice. The old plumber was professional, cared about making as little mess as possible, tried to teach the apprentice... The apprentice was complaining about missing his break, about working too hard, declared he wouldn't work past 17:00 and ran off at 16:30. Also said at some point that he's quitting next week as soon as he got his salary.
The worst thing is, he appeared to be a recent immigrant. I sighed and told the old plumber that young people these days come to Europe believing all that crap about rights etc., when in fact every job is hard, and when you're young you should prioritise learning as much as possible so you can later set your own terms. Old plumber agreed. It's not the second time I hired this plumber, even if I'm not familiar with the profession I could tell he has outstanding ethics.
@valerievankerckhove9325 and the migrant will get a mansion so why should he bother working?
In Scotland the Queensferry Crossing (large bridge project notorious for going awry) was built on time and within budget. Professionals are coming from all over the world to find out how this was done. However, as this was achieved by an SNP Scottish Government, it is either not reported or reported in the poorest light possible.
Meanwhile the MSM and "unionists" will freak out about the ferries... do mistakes happen?... yes, the problems is the UKG makes more mistakes that are much more expensive but the yoons are ok with those mistakes for some strange submissive reason.
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.
lol I don’t think so mate we fcked up our skilled workers by bringing migrants
Is that actually true? Where did you get that info from?
@@SASMADBRUV7 no, it's not true. We can easily get the workers but they won't turn up for projects that don't happen. It might be true we pay more for their time than other countries but most qualified people I see talk about this put the cost increase squarely in planning and bureaucracy. HS2 basically went over budget because of things like planning problems, and NIMBYS decided the air vents need to look like their local stone barns to blend in with their countryside areas instead of say, tin barns that are also common and would mostly be concealed by trees and hedges anyway. Hundreds of things like that happened to the route and the budget went completely insane (it's not just that, but it's a huge factor in our big projects).
@@SASMADBRUV7 I don't about skilled personnel moving to Europe, but it is likely, considering that the UK doesn't have a sustained pipeline of work. That's another reason that wasn't mentioned in the video that our building is so expensive: we don't do enough of it, often enough. They say practice makes perfect, and that is certainly true for building. The UK is out of practice, and as a consequence has to constantly rebuild the skilled workforce through training every time we decide to embark on an infrastructure project. Whereas if we had stuff like, I dunno, *rolling programmes* of infrastructure building, which we have been constantly campaigning for, the UK would finally get the practice it needs, we wouldn't need to continually rebuild the workforce, and construction costs would get cheaper with every completed project.
false they're just taking advantage of the rampant red tape that infects every inch of productivity in Britain. Skilled workers are still here, but when they can be slower to stay on payroll, why would they go faster and why would they challenge the red tape? The systems in place enable that behaviour. Other countries can build roads in mere months, but here it takes years. Other countries can build entire shopping malls in a year or two.... meanwhile there's a building near my work that they plan to put a shop in... they've been renovating it for over 3 years now.
The UK is becoming quite depressing.
Because it is the master at putting itself down. It is doing well. It just has a culture of making itself seem worse than it is.
Not becoming, already is and has been. It is quite pathetic. So much red tape and nonsense and so many special interests get involved and stop everything. It is really quite sad actually.
Karma
It's been depressing for a while now
Almost everything in UK is behind compared to other European countries, housing, airports, healthcare, roads, Law Enforcement, right down to the water pressure in the house.
Germany's law enforcement took down a coup, Belgium's healthcare ranks 3rd in the world, France has arguably the best water supply in the world, Italy has on average some of the longest living people in the world with a blue zone in their country. Norway's prison system is great too, meanwhile England still hires surgeons and GP's from Europe even though they left the EU. Their own government doesn't play by its own rules, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock during the pandemic are prime examples. Their healthcare service is collapsing, their teachers and ambulance workers are striking too.
How far has the "5th richest country on Earth" fallen.@@xXMuseFan1996Xx
Sometimes i wonder if most of the London MPs have travelled anywhere outside London.
Seems there's a major disconnect with what's going on outside London and assume it's essentially the same
I think in their minds there is London and then there is everywhere else. Our elites mentally detached themselves from us a long time ago.
London is almost like it's own city state.
@@PlautusScipio yeah, i would love for the capital to get moved. London is a lost cause at this point
I'm all for regulations but man the red-tape and bureaucracy in this country is out of control.
Yeah remember when excessive rules and bureaucracy was supposed to be the EUs fault?... nope it was the British all along 😅
It is in most countries. To be honest.
@@bankylaw3745 Yeah funny thing that France doesn't seem to have this problem despite being one of the most eurocentric countries in the EU.
There is enough red tape to mummify some one. A red tape mummy
@@mrvwbug4423 And France is literally the inventory of bureaucracy.
I moved to the UK in 2019. And although I love this country and the people (mostly), what shocked me - especially coming from Germany - is the quality (or lack thereof) of houses. Shocking.
I remember reading an article somewhere that stated the UK had the worst quality newbuild housing in Europe. And the older houses are never maintained and are left to crumble and rot.
My hot take: Decades of denigrating trades and hard skills. In favour of an academic elitism, which prioritises jobs based on talking rather than doing. And an economy which is built primarily on manipulating abstract financial instruments.
Not really a hot take as it's been happening in other Anglosphere nations like Australia, Canada and NZ, and I'll include America too. Infrastructure here (Australia) also is incredibly expensive and frequently experiences both delays and budget overruns. An example would be the Snowy River Scheme 2.0 which is slated to be 6x over the initial budget of $2bil AU.
@@MrCordycep Yeah, but I'm being hyperbolic in claiming it's the single biggest cause of infrastructure decline. I do think it's certainly a factor though.
@@andybrice2711you’re not wrong though. For the past 30+ years regardless of government the policy around education has been the same, push and push kids into universities even though they maybe shouldn’t go to universities. We should introduce a German style approach to education where some leave early to blue collars and some continue into higher education
@@mohammedhussain6749 And also, the investment banking industry has been head-hunting all the skilled mathematicians who might previously have gone into science or engineering.
@@andybrice2711 you’re completely wrong. We need people to build infrastructure not plan it, we’ve already got enough of it. We need builders, plumbers, electricians and carpenters not engineers. Blue collar not white collar
Corruption…..
Absolutely but the solution people seem to want is a bigger government, which just gives more opportunities for corruption.
@@SaintGerbilUKyou're a Tory and it shows
@@narannavan because I want smaller government?
Remind me who's increased government spending by a lot over the past 13 years?
It's funny that it's the Labour cultists who always think people who disagree with them must be on the blue team.
It's tribal thinking like that which has gotten us into this mess.
noooooooo!
@@narannavanhe isn’t wrong, we just need more people investigating corruption, not bigger departments for everything like some people seem to think
It's idealogical fanaticism. Ever since Thatcher, if it doesn't make an instant profit for private investors, it's seen as bad.
a few things.
1> there is no cost of living crisis. Its just a rebranded wages collapse against inflation.
2> no one cares about long term investing. esp if someone else can claim credit for an opening of something
3> lobby groups
4> "think tanks"
5> revolving doors for gov officials.
put another way, british contractors were involved in making singapores metro. 130+ stations, built in 30-40 years. meanwhile in the uk, *just* electrifying the track in the uk, balfour beatty struggled years & in the end gave up.
roads are not built to last. materials exist, but the way projects are run, its more profitable to repair / resurface. projects are also low balled with numbers to get approval because if real figures were announced - would be canned instantly. in short its the way projects are specified, managed and costed. there is little appetite for forward thinking. anything risky is done by such a large committee that should failure occur - no one is blamed. thats why such things are so expensive.
I can't believe a news channel named after a phrase originally popularised by 4chan has become one of the most respectable journalism outlets in modern britain. I'm always impressed by this channel's ability to tell me about things without telling me what I should think about them.
How about we bring those Spanish builders and bureaucrats to teach us how to do things properly?
As a Civil Engineer, i can list multiple reasons off the top of my head:
-Aging infrastructure (much of it over 100 years old) with little investment during the various financial crises during the 20th and 21st century, meaning that over time newer projects need to be larger to meet current demands.
- UK land ownership rights are very favourable to the land owner, so it is very expensive to buy land, so developers need a high investment.
- UK design and Health and Safety standards are much higher than other countries, so many projects are over designed and take a lot of work to convince the authorities that they are safe
- Lack of skilled engineers. The 2010s saw the highest infrastructure investments ever, but there were't enough people to design or build it all. This means that we couldn't capitalise on a decade of a strong economy.
I'm civil engineering student and I'm looking for a country where I have fewer work hours, work life balance and where I get paid well, maybe even being able to work from home most of the time. I was thinking about the UK but seems like you guys have way to many problems right now. I'm mainly between Germany, Australia, Norway and Canada. You know, I love what I'm studying but I don't see myself in the long term working to live, but instead living to work, I'm staying away from America and those profit over people mindset
You are also missing
- short termism
- corruption
- profiteering
- a government that doesn't want to improve infrastructure due to St upidity.
@@hakohito the problem with countries where worker Unions have too much power e.g France, is that project costs tend to skyrocket and you end up with cities like Paris where infrastructure is aging and doesn't get fixed. I think in the UK and US there is a good balance where worker safety is looked after but they are also incentivised to work quickly
what a surprise that the tories couldn't be bothered doing their jobs and updating the planning policy statement things so the country could keep functioning. They pretend they want small government, but what they actually want is lazy government. Where they get paid the same but don't do any of the work
"They pretend they want small government, but what they actually want is lazy government. Where they get paid the same but don't do any of the work" THIS IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF CONSERVATISM!!
@@theultimatereductionist7592 And that is what I voted for, more money in my pocket instead of dole dossers and immigrants.
what do you mean tories its the entire system who are all the same elites rofl
Missed an open goal by not having thumbnail as Rishi using a hammer wrong…
I went on a tour of a small local hydroelectric power station that had been built about a hundred years ago.
The tour guide told us that the header tank (a big square water tank) at the top of the hill needed renovated, and that so far they had spent more time trying to get planning permission for the renovation of the header tank than it had taken to build the entire power station a hundred years ago.
As with many things, this goes back to the 15 years of austerity, lack of investment, and honestly a lack of vision or ambition from the government.
Building HS2 would have been the bare minimum compared to similar European projects and David Cameron was right to champion it as he couldn't know how his successors would fumble the ball. The kind of gusto, energy and support that should have gone into HS2 has instead gone into arbitrary goals like "Stop The Boats", "Get Brexit Done" etc.
I don't really understand the cancellation when in reality the hardest part has been bending over backwards to get approval from Greenbelt MPs to allow it, which is a one of many factors in the ever-increasing costs of the Project, going further North isn't anywhere near as difficult, because as we know the tories don't give a crap about the North, even the sitting MPs there. The leg from Old Oak Common to Euston, just makes the service functionally useful, without it, it will be quite hard I feel to make the route popular with it's intended audience, which was effectively to link B'ham to the centre of London, so allow the city to continue to increase productivity and at the same time allow the wealth of London to be shared with the "north"(if you consider Birmingham to be Northern) The official reason was cost saving to spend the money elsewhere, but, what money? Its all being paid for with government debt, there isn't a pot somewhere they can redistribute, if they want to do something else, it's the same debt and as we saw, this was just a smoke screen as many of the suggested recipients of this phantom money were for projects that had been completed in at least one case 10 years prior.
Well 100% political leadership has caused issues but this manifests itself in so many ways. HS2 for example was weakness in just pushing the project forward but also a really unhealthy relationship with risk, treating all risk as if they were issues and costing accordingly. HS2 also didn't take into consideration the strain of supply chain, concrete supply alone became heavily constrained due to HS2 consumption, causing the costs of concrete to increase for HS2 as well as others.
s simple story,
a prefab building was ordered and delivered to save £ before the foundations laid,
so extra storage was required for the building, costing more £,
due to being stored unassembled suffered rain damage.
when finally built a year later the building is warped, leaks and has a mould issue and now needs to be replaced
the building is late and over budget
probably the person who okayed the purchase or the prefab got a bonus for saving the company £
Should be noted that this isn't a uniquely UK issue but also parts of the US and most of Europe.
We should also be cautious about "removing red tape" because most politicians will understand "Remove red tape so we can build infrastructure? Yes I agree I also oppose the res tape they call workers rights. Unions are annoying when building. The stupid environmentalists also dont want us to build grey appartment complexes about historic landmarks and lakes. We also oppose the red tape around high taxes. Lets remove taxes that will mostly help the rich, they will help the middle class as well, but they wont be able to own stuff in 5 years anyways."
Thats the problem when I hear people opposing buerocracy and red tapes. Are some bad? Yes, but I often only hear one side of the story and the tapes removed are often the ones that are very much needed.
If worker's need to make £1.4b per mile of rail you're taking the piss.
Embezzlement is why we are are bad at infrastructure
Agreed. I'm all for improving the planning process, but no government ever seems to do it though they all talk about it (including Labour). But we need protections against stupid developments for a reason. There's a project near me being taken over by a new developer, and they've changed the road layout so that instead of the school, shops and community centre being next to each other, there's a Y junction and each is on a different bit of that junction, meaning people have to cross the road for literally no reason. They don't get any traffic or housing benefits from that change, but the council does not have the power to say, 'Your plan is worse, we want this change made'. It's insane. There's no guiding voices handing out sensible decisions about this stuff, so developers just get to reap massive financial rewards while supplying sub standard areas that can't be fixed later because no-one wants to knock down houses.
Sadly, I don't believe the government or the next one will make a single improvement to our planning law and systems and we'll continue to limp along.
Unions can be legitimate problems. In NYC, they are a major source of cost overruns and inefficiencies.
An extensive study was done recently by NYU about transit costs which contradicts your claim. Most European countries are on the lower than average part and some are in the middle section above the average. The UK is at 3rd from the top (most expensive) in the crazy section, surpassed only by Qatar and New Zealand (which is No 1) and above Hong Kong and Singapore. Below this group is the US, still high but $130M less per km than the Singapore and almost $200m less than the UK.
Most expensive European country is Hungary, which has a similar cost to the US, the Netherlands ($80M less than Hungary/US) and Check Republic ($100M+ less than the Netherlands.Germany is at the edge of the high cost side with less than half per KM from the UK. 10 European countries are at or below the world average (which is almost a quarter of the cost in the UK).
That said, while red tape contributes to the cost it's in no way the main and certainly not the only, reason for the high costs. It's deeper than that and most likely has more to do with the way your economy is based on which is rentier capitalism and your over individualism, which is why many of your former colonies have similar problems.
They had already built some of the Leeds tram system when it was cancelled. So now we have a weird bus lane with tram style traffic lights.
Scott Hall Road? I’ve always wondered why there’s a walled channel in the central reservation for buses, it looks like we can’t have a tram but we can have buses on a track.
French can make stuff Brits can’t:
- High Speed Trains. HS1 line & rolling stock were built with French TGV technology. French built in 1981 the 1st true HST line in Europe, world speed record on rails 380 kph (1981), 515 kph (1990), 574 kph (2007).
HS2 trains will be built by Japanese-French JV (Hitachi/Alstom). HS2 line building strongly relies on French expertise: "Dominique" the enormous "launching girder" being used to construct the HS2 Colne Valley viaduct is French engineering.
- Nuclear power plants. EDF owns 56 nuclear power plants (largest number in Europe). EDF is 2nd world power producer, 167,000 employees worldwide. French electricity is almost completely carbon-free by eliminating (almost) all gas, coal and fuel oil in electricity production: 17 gCO2/kWh (Netherlands 98 g, UK 183 g, Germany 196 g)
- 600 dams and 4,253 hydraulic power stations in France.
- In 2023 France was top power exporter in Europe: 50.1 TWh, far ahead of Sweden (28.6 TWh) and Norway (7.3 TWh).
- Big ships. French shipbuilder St Nazaire holds some world records (2005: QM2, biggest Atlantic liner. 2016: 'Harmony of the Seas'. 2018: 'Symphony of the Seas'. 2021: ‘Wonder of the Seas')
UK: can't sent their aircraft carrier to Nato drill duebto problems, hopefully the other is now problem free and will get past Jersey this time.
France is very good at infrastructure, mostly because they didn't neglect it and lose engineering talent by not touching it for decades even when they've had conservative governments. UK Tories are like US Republicans, they consider all infrastructure spending to be "evil socialism"
@@mrvwbug4423because they all go by private jet everywhere.
@@mrvwbug4423 Calling HS2 "evil socialism" is somewhat accurate since the UK Treasury is paying for everything with no end in sight in order to achieve societal goals like "leveling up the North". The same can be said about California HSR. The Lignes a Grande Vitesse were built on time and on budget because the owner (SNCF for the first lines, the builders for the recent Aquitaine and Brittany) financed them with privately borrowed money and needed the TGVs to run in order to pay back the loans.
The British can but the Government can’t!!!!!
The British invented the Rail system and even things like the great tilting system but the government sold it off just like they sold off the great jet powered VTOL aircraft…. Making things fast doesn’t compare to this
Our aircraft carriers today use the STOVL system that works way better in bad weather and doesn’t use the ridiculous Nuclear Power reactors onboard that need more crew to operate and will cause true devastation in warfare but the aircraft can’t fly as far . Most carrier technology is British such as Steam launch system , armoured deck, Optical Landing System, Radar, angled deck so make out that the French made any
One of the major issues in the UK is the ownership of the land these projects need to use or go through. Unlike on much of the continent, the U.K. Government or councils cannot just decide to build on or through land not owned by them. The land owner holds most of the cards and this takes time and money to sort. On the continent, the government can decide to build on land and the owners have less right to so no.
"compulsory purchase Law" Uk can force to buy your land by using that law
You the land owner have no right when the government/council use that.
so acquired land for project is not a problem in the uk.
@@jetli740 Legally yes, but any of them that have money will throw lawyers at it to get a better deal, causing delays. eg. 'My duck pond is worth £1million and wasn't considered as part of my compensation!'
In my own country infrastructure is seen more as a vessel of direct economic stimulus rather then an expense needed to keep the country running.
It’s the difference between replacing a damaged shingle on your roof vs demolishing the entire house and rebuilding it from scratch.
We closed or sold off all our world leading companies. A good example we built the worlds first nuclear power station 70 years ago and now we don't even know how to build one. The Tories (1979) thought you could deindustrialise the country and still have the same economy based on finance and services, well sadly we are finding out the hard way that you can't.
We went for a wide build but realised going tall was meta way too late.
To be fair, the other EPRs, Olkiluoto 3 & Flamanville 3 went way behind schedule(18 years instead of 5 for O3, 10 years behind schedule for F3) with Flamanville 4x the original cost so far. Olkiluoto was a fixed price contract.
How Big Things Get Done should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in large infrastructure projects, as it examines the data behind why some projects go over budget and experience delays.
The A 419/7 between the M4 Swindon and Cheltenham, always closed at night for years. Probably checking that none of the potholes has gone missing.
🤣🤣
A stretch of the A1 has been closed for months, causing massive traffic jams and delays as a 70mph 3 lane dual carriageway gets funnelled into 1 single lane on the other side of the dual carriageway with a 40mph speed limit.
Apparently they’re testing the concrete.
The statement about the crossrail line costing 1.392 billion per mile is mind blowing. A lot of people must have been given a nice envolope under the table
We can’t seem to build anything in Canada either
As someone in the construction industry, there are a lot of problems. Indecision and late changes is a major productivity killer. A lack of large schemes means that there is no scalability from lessons learned. Major mistakes get repeated as people aren't retained for the design duration. Under paid engineers wont have loyalty, over paid HR are busy bodies.
Our standards of building have fallen because we need quick, cheap, throw-it-up architecture that isnt built to last because thats how our building sectors operate. If we could sort our othwr problems out, we could incentivise more meaningful building from our cinstruction companies. But our government doesnt want community centred housing for its people, it would rather turn everywhere into a London Mega Metropolis. All the best architecture in London is the old stuff.
I've used the A428 since I was 17 (25 now) and it's been a such a slow process. If I can notice that in 8 years (and longer if you consider me seeing the process through public transport prior) god knows how slow it's looked to my parents and other citizens of Beds & Cambs
and has per normal London gets a new rail line for the city and other places get nothing yet is cost more to build the new rail line than it would of to build the new metro system in Leeds
I was shocked when I saw a pernment board next to one of London's overground Station saying that there is a refurbishment going on of the bridge and "expect delays for next 3 years. They didn't bild new bridge just to be clear just fixing existing one. They bloked one line of traffic of a very busy road for the entire duration.
Nation of rantiers is worse at building than empire?
Big surprise.
Keep placating homeowners.
It's more keep placating unions and workers, demanding more and more regulations.
placating homeowners? You got a special mortage rate or something?
The bar for nationally significant, be in England. If its a project in Scootland it is not nationally significant. Queensferry crossing for example, one of largest projects in UK, not nationally significant.
You go into a lot of detail without really addressing the underlying cause. Which imo is that the UK hasn't done large scale infrastructure projects for a long time. Other than building "just one more lane". For rail for instance since the 60s the UK has basically not done anything major. On the contrary it has mostly been closing down lines. Even for roads though I do think it was a good decision they haven't really done any large scale projects for at least 3 decades. Just (useless) expansion of existing roads. The last major infrastructure project before HSR was the M3 and planning for that started in 1956.
Why is that an issue? Well because the longer you do not do anything the more the various involved organizations skill erodes. People retire. They don't properly teach their replacement. Maybe there isn't even one since you are downsizing the organization. New people don't have any experience with large scale stuff. And suddenly you find that nobody is really sure how to do this.
A major reason France for instance can build rail so incredibly cheaply is that they have been doing it basically non stop since WW2. They have well established systems. They have a large consortium for which this stuff is routine. France has done particularly well in this regard but even for the rest of Europe the UK does stand out as just not having done anything for decades.
So yeah the only way to fix this is to stop cancelling and delaying everytime there are cost overruns. Because there will *always* be cost overruns when people and organizations are basically having to start from the ground up.
They are a lot better at putting money in their back pockets than they are at putting it to work.
That's the only reason.
Plus builders charge government double, miss deadlines and demand more money.
HS2 point in case.
huh, the IPC has only existed in a Tory era (Cameron came into power in 2010)
01:54 Yep…there’s a road near me that has been planned as a dual carriage way since the initial one lane road was built…34 years ago. Last month they finally started clearing trees next to the road so that the dual carriage way can be completed. Trouble is that with the amount of traffic these days it’s probably not gonna make much difference. 🤷
The consequences of Chinese bureaucracy are exactly the opposite of those in the UK. Chinese bureaucracy will build more and even redundant infrastructure.
Government won’t build a tram for the largest city in Western Europe without any metro as it’ll cost an estimated TOTAL £1.6bn but will shell out £1.4bn PER MILE on yet another line in London 🙄 they never really cared about levelling up
Edinburgh's tram project scandal probably put Leeds and other UK cities off starting any schemes.
Cut bureaucracy and other useless spending.
*It isn't bureaucracy.* 'Bureaucracy' is only ever a hindrances if you already have opposition to your cause. The Tories have 13 years and they fail to build, maintain or upgrade practically every, NOT because of bureaucracy since they are in control. They fail because they never intend to build anything of value. Bureaucracy is merely the scapegoat because most people generally don't bother to understand how it works and what it is for.
@@biocapsule7311and unions have been blocking them most of the way.
@@SaintGerbilUK As oppose to property owners bribing tories against public housing? Granted, tories don't need bribery to be against a lot of things. Aside from that being mostly BS. For every project, you can find opposition to 'something', the major difference between an effective government is that they tend to find out whether a grievance is reasonable and see if they is a compromise. The Tories don't bother with that because building anything wasn't their goal.
@@biocapsule7311 absolutely but I'd prefer the stagnation of the Tories, than the planned decline of the Labour party.
Neither of the two front parties have any values they stand for.
@@SaintGerbilUK Labour is "planned decline"?? As a foreign observer, if you haven't realized that Tories IS the decline and Labour or even Green your only hope. You kind of deserve what you get. There is no equal in both. And the Tories HAVE ALWAYS stand for their values, you just haven't realized their values is screwing over people like you. And if this 13 years have not convince you of that, nothing will.
In 1954 the UK economy was 66% larger than Frances the Uk government said we need to curb spending, France did the opposite and by the 1970s Frances economy was larger than the UK. We've only got worse, the only reason it's not so noticable is because Neoliberalism infected those countries meaning they started to invest less as well.
We are good at building what we suck at is getting the right people managing it. These large projects are filled with corruption of mates hiring mates it’s an open secret on site.
The West Midlands Metro (seen at the start of the video) has and is taking years and years. The whole thing was closed down for months and months TWICE not long ago because they found massive cracks in the Trams. 🙄 they were built by a Spanish company called CAF. Then there is the M6 Junction 10 upgrade which has taken over 5 years to complete, should have been done in 2 years.
Im in the west midlands, when you get off the station in the town centre the first thing that greats you is a hotels full of illegals.
I was having a discussion about this the other day on Reddit. Did you know in the 1850s a British railway company packed up their kit and went to Crimea and built 7 miles of railway in 7 weeks, at cost, during the severe Crimean winter in war time?
And here we are, almost 200 years later unable to build rabbit hutch houses or a single railway line.
Yes, I did, it's mentioned in War and Peace.
Yeah..mate no more free labour, free colonial money, no honey...now pay ur own tax to build 😂😂 bloody british buggers !!!!
This is so true, to many meetings to plan a meeting about a meeting they had last week
From my point of view, the biggest problem of British politics in general is that everything gets micromanaged from London instead of having local governments decide on the matter.
As a Portuguese living in UK I can't talk much ahahah
In Portugal we still don't have TGV (high speed train) to Madrid or the nearest big city Porto, from Lisbon. It takes 10hrs from Lisbon to Madrid by direct train which by the way only leaves once a day at 9pm... The rest of the day is indirect train and it takes 17hrs at least.
Currently I live in Lancashire and right in front of my house I can see traces of a bridge that used to be a train line from 1900's. Then the town next to mine has a train station that is used as a cafe and the trains that come are only used for tourism. Meanwhile I need that train line to go Greater Manchester for work ahahaha (I am laughing but crying at the same time).
Tories think the point of infrastructure are the kickbacks not the investment.
Correct. If something gets built that's actually useful it's a side effect of the main purpose which is kickbacks.
@@chrisj9700 You are completely correct. Of course I wouldn't.
As you in your obvious wisdom already know, that's because I have a finite lifespan. The country has not. So a country can afford to take a long view and can borrow now, when money is cheaper and repay that debt over a period of 60, 80, 100 years, all the while paying just a few procent over inflation.
And as the sum used to construct said project goes straight back into the economy and comes back as taxes, the price is even cheaper.
So while I'm at the end of my life the infrastructure project keeps earning the country money.
I'm really glad an intelligent person like yourself took the time to point that out to all of us.
its the goverment not tories
As someone who works in this industry I can list many reasons here are some:
- inadequate budgets
- IR35 stifling mobility in what is a transient industry
- Wages the job isn’t for everyone especially with UK weather and bureaucracy, wages need to reflect this.
- Corruption at a political level
Private companies, thats where it went wrong. It is true, we cant build anything, even the most simplest thing. Here's some examples ive seen. Footpaths that don't direct water to to a drain, so flood. Footpaths that have a dip ion the middle, causing water to pool. Train stations that haven't been painted for decades. A pot hole filled with A) poor quality tarmac, and B) with no tar edging (water gets in, it all breaks apart after one winter). A pedestrian safety barrier gets knocked down by a truck. a temporary plastic fence appears, and it near leaves, the barrier never fixed, (interesting a local bus stop advert board was blown down a few weeks ago, and that get replace ASAP!). As a nation we are pathetic.
Call the russians to build the nuclear power station at budget cost. And call the chines to build the railway at budget cost. These two are no nonsense countries.
Pretending this is a UK only problem is a bit disingenuous. It's a common problem for most english speaking countries (USA, Canada, Australia, and increasingly Hong Kong and Singapore). This is more than just a problem of British politics and policy, but of a wider culture of HOW we build infrastructure, including excessive use of consultants and over-engineered solutions. The Pedestrian Observations blog has a few articles on this if anyone is interested.
Are public sector projects in the UK (specifically England), open to private sector bidding? That's how it works in the states. Contracts are awarded to the best overall bid (cost, compliance, timeline etc).
Yes but a Tory donor always wins.
@@narannavan hahaha!
4 key reasons,
1. Lack of competition. Oligopoly among a few contractors.
2. Labour union.
3. Too many parties involved in decision making and flawed bureaucracy.
4. Lack of accountability.
We didn't get worse at building, we got worse at costing -with the tender and charging process open to large scale corruption that no one talks about. A public works project will be absolutely milked for its readily available, unending money (even before the pandemic/ cost of living crisis) as greedflation on an epic scale, for decades. There's also something to be said about the spiralling costs placating nimbys and endless consultations with the public, middlemen and lawyers -foil to a litigious culture all of which adds up to the fact things are built at 6x the cost of richer Western nations with higher salaries, such as France and Germany.
It took 12 years to refurbish an escalator at Tottenham Court Rd in the 90s-noughties, whilst it took only 7 years to build the entire Victoria Line in the 1970s. The fact the refurb of the Jubilee Line went from one year to a decade, and involved one charming example of laying the track & cable for a year, then whoops! realising it was the wrong type and having to rip it all out again and start again (plus their attempt to overcharge £2 billion extra that an investigation revealed). Likewise the project to upgrade the signalling system, with a contractor who came back months later saying it was sorry, too complicated for them, without a single thing done and pocketing the £100+ million -yet still managed to get the HS2 contract after. The fact these teams were found to be doing absolutely nothing each night, from secret cams.
Also the high level political corruption -note how HS2 passes certain voter strongholds, and thus will have to tunnel through these 'beauty spots' and not others, and that it doles out new community centres and projects like Santa Claus, to every rich village and commuter suburb it impinges their view on.
The US has similar issues if not worse -some subway extensions come in at $2 billion a mile, have been on the cards for over a century and infamously, one auditor found hundreds of labourers on the project, with no identifiable job in the construction being paid $1000-$2000 a week. She nor the managers, or company could identify their role onsite.
And I thought we Austrians were sometimes slow and incompetent in infrastructure projects
Well, we're very good at the actual getting things built that are cool. The Elizabeth Line/Crossrail is truly spectacular and an engineering marvel. But we did start planning it 70 years ago and recognise that we needed it, including the routes we need to use and so on... I think planning is our biggest cost overrun in the UK vs other European projects. We couldn't completely one high speed rail project, Italy has seven bigger ones going concurrently.
In Austria: Health and Safety rules mean you have to protect kangaroos while working on infrastructure projects. Hence slow work..
@@marsupiomarsupi4421 we are building the largest train tunnel and 2 more large train tunnel right now 😭 and no kangaroo in austria
@@obernot Great! Is it the Sydney-Melbourne tunnel? Do Austrian roos don lederhosen und dirndl? Must be fun!
@@marsupiomarsupi4421Austria. 🇦🇹
NOT Australia. 🇦🇺
When you do big boom projects your not going to get a team that can improve in building and planning. If you adding a station a week you get good at making stations.
Easy answer, it's because of NIMBY.
Yup, our green and pleasant land, not productive and manufactured. Conservatives should be about conserving the land though, so it's on Labour to make the land more productive, I don't understand why Boris wasn't catering to his NIMBY base. Hopefully Keir Starmer can change that, but he isn't exactly brave when it comes to differentiating the Labour party.
I just wanted to say that the Infrastructure Planning Commision was not created in 2012 it was actually abolished in 2012. In that year the IPC was subsumed into the Planning Inspectorate, where it now operates as the Infrastructure Planning Unit.
It's almost as if increasing the bureaucracy, has not increased the effectiveness and efficiency of decisions! 😱
The problem is when the politicians ask the bureaucrats what to do. The inevitable answer will be more bureaucrats. 😱😱😱
This has being going on for years: UK Productivity = 😱😱😱😱😱👷😱😱😱😱😱
As a Spaniard, it amazes me how many comments are pointing "bureaucracy" as the mayor issue. I don't think you realise how much paper work is link to any infrastructure project in any european country. I mean, I doubt UK has more bureaucracy than Germany or the Netherlands. People talk about red tape as if deregulation allows better and cheaper infrastructure (I think you should read something about infrastructures project prices in a deregulation Uthopia called USA) and in reality is not linked. Regulation doesn't mean more expensive works.
I'm not saying bureaucracy isn't part of the problem, of course it is. But it's just one (and a little one). I would say NIMBY movements affect more than red - tape and legislation. Small group of People opposing any major investment could delay, stop or even cancel projects if they start protests and lawsuits. And I would say NIMBY movements are more common in UK than in the rest of Europe (don't know exactly why)
Everything is strapped 4 ways to sunday. The phrase most often heard is "you can't do that"
Because the private sector can achieve absolutely nothing.
you mean public? (non Gov)
What? You mean the public sector which blocks absolutely everything. The private sector are the ones doing stuff, despite the regulation. Do you see the massive government wind farm to give us a sovereign wealth fund? No. It's all private. And Crossrail is a public project but entirely built by privates means and it took 70 years to get it done because governments are completely incompetent.
@@thomasfromswindon7609 No I mean private.
Private sector involvement in any context or capacity in strategic civic development, is fundamentally wrong, as it ultimately is merely only a forum for rentseeking, with no basis in any kind of reality, other than the ideological predilections of the rentseekers.
Yet it's government laws and regulations increasing the red tape and creating the costs?
No you're just a deluded commie.
Hence why countries with high privatization, like the USA, do so badly, & why countries with low privatization, like the USSR, do so well, yes?
I will explain a bit more here, working in the feild of architecture.
Delays in construction projects can increase the cost for construction for many reasons.
1. delays can result in additional labor costs, as workers may have to work overtime or extend their contracts.
2. delays can cause material and equipment rental costs to rise. Materials may deteriorate or expire, you will then need extra cost for storage of materials.
3. Delays can increase the interest payments, taxes, insurance premiums, and fees associated with financing the project. Delays can also affect the cash flow and profitability of the project.
as a general rule, cost of a project can double for every 3 months of delay... so now imagine 18 months of delay as mentioned in the video... good luck
People need to stop blaming 'Bureaucracy' when the problem is political priorities. Bureaucracy is merely the process of organizational function. Whether it aids or hinder something, is dependent on the priorities of the ruling government. Singapore has the "biggest" bureaucracy of it's size as a nation and it is building 24/7 since it's founding, it's notorious as the most over-planned city-state in the world. Bureaucracy becomes a problem to accomplishing something when the accomplishment was never the goal of the particular government in power. If the Tories fail to build something and there isn't some external factor (such as lack of vital material etc.) stopping them, then it was never their goal to build in the first place.
6:18 Edinburgh is alot smaller and our trams are still being built and cost more than that
@Shamur-og1es yeah no that sounds right but I'm 24 and they started it when I was like 8 or younger, was supposed to be 300 million and somewhere close to billion, not to mention from the old Edinburgh tram system it's only a fraction of what it once was, proportionally it's more expensive as it was over 3 times the cost and probably double the expected time
Because of the Treasury department. Simple.
Don't forget the layers of "consultants" employed on lucrative short-term contracts, who always fail upwards as a delay to the project means contract extension (on preferred terms cause, of course, we can't loose someone familiar with the project) or move to consult on other projects, for a higher fee, having had years of experience "working" on a previous project (that still didn't get delivered).
"Red tape for the British citizens,
Red carpet for the immigrants"
😂😂😂
wait till you hear about the infrastructure being built in most of Africa
Like the chinese railway in kenya, built by imported chinese labour, went over budget and is at the wrong rail gauge?
As a civil engineer, I can also say the management contracts which clients employ for a competent body to manage contractors, also doesn’t help as the organization who manages the contracts are paid to ask questions and make what is in most cases a challenging project even more challenging and time consuming as questions need to be closed out and clarified before works continue. Ultimately resulting in delays and additional work which isn’t focused on delivering the project. I see the benefits of the managing contract and it ensures the project is delivered safely and the best quality for the client, but ultimately the contractor has the responsability of also working safely and delivering the contract to the highest quality as the contractor is liable to usually at least a 10 year defect period
My observation as a foreigner is that public always oppose infrastructure projects. Palanning system alows this. HS2 is regularly fighting legal challenges by local councils which cost money and time. Heathrow runway got cancelled because of the same reason.
When talking about public transport, we focus so much on the cost to build a tram or high speed rail. We ought to consider the cost of not having infrastructure. The increased housing and road repair costs. Not to mention the costs of car ownership