National Infrastructure Commission
The really broken infrastructure is our byzantine government structure
Boy, they must really have their work cut out, mustn’t they? In the face of unchecked population growth, Britain’s infrastructure is failing or nearly failing across the board. To mention just the most obvious horrors: transport, energy, water, housing, healthcare, border control. Still, it’s good to know that in the National Infrastructure Commission we have a high-powered committee of the Great and Good that’s on to it.
They are certainly an august body: of the National Infrastructure Commission’s 10 commissioners, eight have been honoured with CBEs or OBEs, and four hold professorships. To be fair, most of them are getting only £20-25k pa for doing their bit for National Infrastructure.
But wait: what’s this? Their next National Infrastructure Assessment, due in August next year ‘will focus on three key strategic outcomes:
reaching net zero
reducing environmental impacts and adapting to a changing climate
supporting levelling up.’
You get the picture: the NIC isn’t really about infrastructure at all, it’s about indulging the Establishment’s pet projects.
Which might explain their latest emanation. From the Daily Telegraph: ‘Homes with paved driveways could face higher water bills’. Yes, that’s right, the answer to Britain’s water-industry disgrace is not to force the utilities to actually, you know, build the infrastructure we need, but rather: ‘Let’s nail the bastards who’ve got paved drives’.
Or as NIC’s 72 page report puts it: ‘Water companies can incentivize customers to reduce impermeable areas by adopting ‘Area Based Charging’. This is where drainage charges are made proportionate to the site area that drains into sewers, excluding areas with natural drainage. Some, but not all, water companies have adopted this approach. Ofwat is encouraging water companies to trial approaches for extending Area Based Charging to residential customers.’ (Page 28)
Maybe the Telegraph is being unfair: the NIC’s report mainly just wants the relevant parts of the public sector to talk to each other to deal with this very predictable problem. And this gets us to the knotty question of: ‘who’s in charge?’ It turns out this problem laps up on at least nine levels of establishment governance: upper tier local authorities; highway authorities; district councils; water & sewerage companies; internal drainage boards; the Environment Agency; the Dept for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Ofwat; and flood and coastal committees.
No wonder nothing gets done. Imagine trying to get that lot to work together for a solution. I think I can spot the underlying problem.
Various reviews of the problem have been ignored, or at least not acted on, since at least 2007. It’s a shame, then, that the bulk of NIC’s report urges yet further elaboration of the existing public sector involvement.
Still what can one expect: the NIC’s Commissioners are ‘supported’ by by a 40-strong phalange of civil servants with temps deployed as necessary (at £245 a day). Employee costs come in at around £3.67mn pa (ie, around £75k per desk). Total running cost in 2021/22 came to £5.45mn.
Surely that £5.45mn would have been better spent on working out how to cut out whole tranches of public sector involvement? Then something might be done. In the meantime, you can see why it’s just easier to make people with paved driveways pay ‘incentivize residential customers’.