Jeremy's Blog 4th August 2023: Magic or Hard Work
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 3rd August 2023
“Wish upon a star.” It might work in Disney films but it is no basis for engaging with reality to answer the many large challenges we face. These require focused thought, effective mechanisms, planning and logistics and sustained attention with leadership giving explanation, not magical thinking.
An immediate illustration of grand aspiration meeting reality lies in HS2. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s Annual Report for 2022/23 (page 54) has just given Phases 1 and 2a a red “unachievable” rating – Phase 2a was green last year. The Chief Executive left days before this was published. Somehow, being “unachievable” does not look to stop HS2 continuing while its cost and timescale grow. The Lower Thames Crossing is only rated amber despite no shovel being used after longer than it took to finish the Second World War and a cost greater than the world’s longest road tunnel.
Similarly, both parties now look for necessary housing at scale to be built on the other’s territory but neither look to impose the mechanisms with binding targets that could start to make this effective – even before thinking of how the houses would be built.
We equally face this with energy, climate and environmental matters. The Government aims for electricity to be fully renewable by 2035; Labour for 2030. Yet connections are now being quoted into the 2040s. Tomorrow may see an announcement of planning and other reforms to halve the building time for power lines and substations in response to the Electricity Networks Commissioner. However, not only will this collide with the political process but, when National Grid says that the target requires building five times as much infrastructure in the next seven years as in the last 30, permissions are only the first imponderable hurdle. Where are the contractors, the skills, the components and the materials at the scale needed? Will OFGEM approve the financing and its impact on electricity charges?
The Levelling Up Bill would answer nutrient neutrality – now an “interim solution” – partly by requiring minimal discharges from waste water treatments plants by 2030. Again, with similar questions, what are the logistics for that to be meaningful?
Many people are reading many things into the Uxbridge by-election result, a surprise hold for the Government seen to turn on the imposition of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) on an area with and needing high car ownership. While ULEZ is primarily about air quality, it may be over-reading the result to see it as the evaporation of general support for climate change measures once they require direct change and cost. It seems far more relevant that the consultation for this only closed on 29th
July 2022 with the decision announced last December to be implemented this month. Such timings may have mattered less in inner London with fewer cars. It simply made it look like a money raising measure to allow so little time for people to adjust when a car will be the second largest capital cost for many households, not ordinarily replaced within a year. An unreasonable demand met its reply.
That need for proper consideration of practicalities and forward warning is shown with MEES. Michael Gove now implies that the targets of England’s 2021 consultation are now unrealistic but no decision has been made, let alone how this might apply to owner-occupiers as the private let sector implodes. It may be that we have exhausted the effective potential of this specific approach, based on an EU law of 2012, when over-provision of renewable generation might be the more deliverable, if still contentious, answer to deliver the real heavy lifting for climate change mitigation.
Forcing the pace as in ULEZ is as impractical as setting a target two elections away and not acting. If we want to deal with these essential questions and so also our productivity and income weaknesses, we should not be striking complacent poses on the sinews of the future economy.
As Cromwell is reputed to have told his men, “Trust the Lord but keep your powder dry”. We need to get the planning and logistics right, not fail through magical thinking. The aspiration and virtue of a goal gives it no protection against failure.