‘Uninvestable’ UK takes 30 years to do a nine-month project, says billionaire
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/18/uninvestable-uk-takes-30-years-to-do-a-nine-month-project/
Posted by Low_Map4314
‘Uninvestable’ UK takes 30 years to do a nine-month project, says billionaire
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/18/uninvestable-uk-takes-30-years-to-do-a-nine-month-project/
Posted by Low_Map4314
18 Comments
He’s not wrong. Practically everything we do across the uk trebles in price and takes way too much time to complete. He mentions dual carriage, look at the A9, gone from 3bn to 4bn and a completion of originally this month (end of 2025)…to end of 2035. We may be lucky and get it under 5bn by 2050 at this rate. They’re doing about 11 miles every 10 years…
Yep. The country that wanted to get out of the EU because it had become an administrative monster is now… a separate administrative monster.
There’s projects i get involved with and i can tell you there is a lot of doing full circles on nothing.
I watch those old archival footage on bbc / british pathé and think to myself the people in that era just got on with things. Whether it was digging the channel tunnel, building the m1/m25, extending the tube network or just mass building council houses.
Is it any wonder when all you have is this layer of Middle management at most companies that are just Uni- Graduates that have no actual experience in doing the tasks
No joke. Even roadworks that take two days in any other European country takes a week and a half in UK.
In fact there were roadworks done near my home recently. They were literally working on it from around 9AM till 12PM and would fuck off for the rest of a day.
Half the bloody neighbourhood closed off for two weeks to do maybe total of 100m of a street.
Meanwhile two streets away there is a patch of potholes which have been there for more than 10 years now. Yes, fucking 10 years and I’ve got photos to prove it.
Meanwhile the council is replacing old paving slabs outside my house that took 50 years to break, with teenie tiny white slabs that take 6 months to break (as evidenced by the opposite side of the road they did at the start of the year). And they look like shit as well, as a bonus.
It’s because we don’t have experts anymore.
We believe that you can just transfer project managers in fields they have no understanding of, and then we’re shocked that they didn’t have the experience or knowledge to foresee the issues they encounter.
Then we rinse and repeat, for every single field.
True. You can find a million reasons for this but I would say a big part of it is poor human resourcing. Let’s find people qualified by experience again. Doing an undergrad in business and economics with 5 years experience “project management” in Deloitte shouldn’t qualify you to project mange a dual carriageway upgrades
I mean if civil engineering actually paid a decent wage, then maybe we could have that conversation.
You get more for being a project manager than you do for being an engineer, so you are heavily incentivised to do that instead as you become more senior.
It’s almost as if worshipping privatisation and contracting out literally everything essential from binmen to bus services, cleaners to roadworks, IT services to security guards, has created an ecosystem where the public purse is incessantly and systemically plundered by companies like mosquitoes on a very tasty fat man.
The country doesn’t seem to understand urgency. There is a belief that cutting, slowing down or not building something magically saves money, they peddle this to voters. The country seems to collectively believe that we will magically have money later and everything will be cheaper so long as we do nothing now. It’s as if the entire country has decided Britains as good as it will ever get and now we need to power down.
There is also another belief that if the government borrows or spends money, that the government is simply putting money into a big fire and burning it. However that’s not true if the government takes 100 billion and spends it within the country (preferably favoring British businesses) then that is a 100 billion going into Britain. It isn’t as simple as saying it’s wasted money because much of it will end up back in the governments hands eventually. The really wasted money is the interest we would end up paying.
The truth is it doesn’t save money and never will. There is a debate over whether something is or not necessary and it muddles the water.
For example HS2/3/4/5/100 is not really debatable.
Things we know. Rail capacity is maxing out, the trains and lines we have now are incredibly dated and strained, traffic on the roads is getting worse and worse due to a growing population and with it accidents and road wear increases. On the other side economic data shows having it would increase the economy.
Cutting HS2 to Manchester isn’t saved money. We will still need to build something in the future and it will cost more and we will have had less time to benefit from the economic impact of having a HS2 to Manchester.
It’s the same with the renovation for Parliament. Postponing it only endangers the building and costs more money.
Ultimately the government needs to borrow £1 and turn it into £3 so that it can pay back the debt and interest without losing money.
It’s literally taken them 2 years to resurface a roundabout and add a short section of dual carriageway, and add another roundabout at the top of my town.
They have had to relay a section of road 3 times as they used the wrong type of tarmac.
It’s still not finished and nobody knows when it’s going to be finished.
Ok parasite, what smart policy can the UK implement to generate obscene wealth like you have?
“Employ” children?
Artificially choke supply chain unto our national products are scarce, while pumping money into marketing to get everyone desperate to buy scones and British staples.
I don’t think being a diamond mine owner makes you qualified for anything else, and as one of the most offensive billionaires to exist, he should probably keep quiet.
As a country we seem terrified of upsetting anyone who doesn’t like the sound of something. Rather than just tell people to grow up and stop moaning we go through endless consultations to try to appease them or end up putting in ridiculous mitigations. This is why we end up with twenty year delays for badly needed new reservoirs or completely unnecessary bat tunnels.
We had to put up a small amount of fencing. Before we could start we needed to produce the following documentation, all with a 14 day review period. An SWP-safe work pack, an EMP-Environmental Management Plan, a QMP-Quality Management Plan, an SWMP- Site Waste Management Plan, a CPP-Construction Phase Plan, a WPP-Work Package Plan. Plus all the usual things like permit to dig, Risk Assessments, etc. The actual work was 1 day.
It’s a lack of technical expertise in leadership positions. When the engineers and scientists are all at the bottom of the pile and their recommendations can be ignored and debated by layers of Boris-like leaders who have to justify their existence, then things very quickly become slow and complicated.
Every system is incredibly slow, inefficient and expensive in the UK. Just to get into the army, I am looking at waiting at least 2 more years on top of the 11 months I have already spent doing paperwork. And that’s being optimistic
I’m a consultant involved in checking a major infrastructure project is not causing more carbon than necessary. All well and good, that should be done. BUT I am about to be involved in the fifth meeting this year about a 3rd 300 page document on the subject, to which the only sane response is “the design is not sufficiently progressed to assess carbon emissions at this stage, the scope of the assessment to be undertaken at a future stage has been agreed and is appropriate.” I will be considered odd by the authorities involved if I don’t pad that out to 50 pages.