David Gauke
Hello, this is David Gauke, Chair of Negotient. And welcome to the latest in our Negotiating Government podcast. I'm delighted to be joined once again by John Hall, a former Treasury and Department of Health official. John, welcome.

John Hall
It's nice to be back, David.

David Gauke
Now we are talking today about infrastructure and infrastructure in the UK. It would be fair to say the UK doesn't have the best reputation for getting infrastructure built and getting it built on time and on budget. We're seen as being pretty expensive. We're going to kick the tyres a little bit on that because not every country gets everything right here. But we do know that there are problems in terms of cost escalation and delays, issues with planning, energy grid constraints, all sorts of pressures on water and sewage systems, for example, that can constrain-house building. Um, and there's a lot of policy uncertainty about public and private models. What we want to focus today is a little bit on why are there these problems? Why do they keep appearing? Is this a cross sector point, or is it a series of matters that are not terribly linked? But we don't want to just talk about why does the government get this wrong? We want to look at it from the perspective of private sector counterparties. And is there anything that they can do differently when working with government to ensure that the process runs better than it might do? And it's familiar territory to anyone who listens to these podcasts? Why? This is as much about negotiation as anything else. So there's a few things to run through. But let's start off with this question, John, on whether we really are worse than other countries. Is it a sort of fairly simple matter that we're just hopeless in this, or is it a little bit more complicated than that?

John Hall
I mean, I think it's very easy just to wallow in despair on this stuff, David. And I think most people have got their favourite examples, whether it's the escalating cost of nuclear power stations or everybody's favourite kicking boy at HS2. It's certainly true that in some sectors we do look very inadequate compared to other countries. Leeds is the largest city in Western Europe, which doesn't have a mass transit system. We haven't built a water reservoir in thirty years, despite ten million extra people in the country since then. But we're not unique. Anybody who flew into Berlin over the last two decades will be very familiar with the delays to Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Even France, which has built many, many nuclear power stations, had huge delays on the Flamanville 3 project. And this isn't confined either to to Europe or to democracies. I remember being in Thailand the day after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government, and the Bangkok Post, which is English-language, the next day was full of letters saying that they didn't want the new military regime to use the coup as an excuse for further delays for the airport train link being built. So this is very familiar when you look at it across the board, though, the level of infrastructure we have actually looks quite similar to France. And when the World Economic Forum, the group that meets at Davos every year, rated the quality of infrastructure the UK was eleventh in the world. So behind France and Germany, who we might like to compare ourselves with, but not off the scale.

David Gauke
So it sounds like this is not an area where we should necessarily despair. Um, also one where perhaps our performance is a bit uneven. Is it the case that there's maybe a few projects that go very badly wrong, but some things that do work perhaps better than we give ourselves credit for.

John Hall
I think that's right. I mean, we certainly spend less than other countries, and we spend that money in a more volatile stop-start fashion. But it feels when people have done research like the National Infrastructure Commission, that the higher costs are largely contained to certain sectors. I mean, high speed rail, nuclear generation, rail electrification are three areas which they consistently highlight. But it's also true that across sectors, we've got a long tail of poorly performing projects. So for roads, for example, some projects just cost an awful lot more per mile than others. When you look across this, these don't look like we've got some systematic failure in engineering or anything like that. It looks like systematic problems in how we make decisions. So the National Infrastructure Commission said that across the programme as a whole, it might be possible to reduce costs by between ten and 30 per cent with those costs concentrated in certain projects, particularly the large mega projects, because there are some things that we get right. National Grid did the big project in London recently on time and on budget. London Underground reduced the cost of Bank station refurbishment by 10 per cent by better engagement with the sector. So we've got some success stories.

David Gauke
Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom, but we definitely have some problems. Now, of course, there's a big political argument that you very often hear. We need to spend more on infrastructure. Now, that might be right, but it's not just about spending more. And John, you've already touched on this at this point about volatility, that sometimes we go from feast to famine. And that has some real downsides in terms of getting value for money. Um, what would you sort of particularly highlight from that?

John Hall
I mean, I think that's right. On average, in fiscal consolidations in the last two or three decades, we cut capital spending by 20 per cent in the public sector. I think in the late twenty tens, we had five spending reviews over eight years, and four of those decided they would start from scratch and do a zero budget approach to capital. It's quite questionable to use our infrastructure policy to fine-tune our fiscal policy, it seems to me, because it has some big consequences. The first is every time you pause a project, you delay it or you rescope it. It drives up costs. Typically, the project costs continue. The project team continues and ramps up costs every month, and construction industry inflation continues to increase the cost of it. So pausing increases the costs of projects. The second thing is when you turn the taps on and you try and spend money, you really struggle. I mean, over the last few years, when capital budgets have increased, the UK government's only spent five pounds in every six pounds that they wanted to, and Germany recently, which is due to have a huge increase in infrastructure investment, is only actually spending seventy-five per cent of what it wanted. So stop doesn't work, but start doesn't work either. More fundamentally, I think it affects the credibility of the UK economy to invest in that. If you're a private sector organisation, how can you commit to invest in the skills and the capacity and the technology in developing your supply chains? If you don't have a consistent pipeline of business to work on? So, for example, while Boris Johnson announced forty major new hospitals were going to be built, we couldn't, because he didn't allocate a budget. But if he had figures in the industry, they said, well, we couldn't have built them anyway. We haven't done a major hospital development for ten years. We don't have a sector any more. It needs to be built. So I think what's really important is we develop a stable pipeline because it allows that expertise, whether it's firms, whether it's individuals, whether it's technology to move from project to project learning from each project as we go along and giving people the confidence to invest. Having said all that, it's not just stop, start. We underspend other countries by quite a margin, less so in the public sector than the private sector, where we've got consistently the lowest investment to GDP share of any country in the world's seven largest advanced economies.

David Gauke
And that, I guess, might come back to credibility as well. But it's hard to invest if you're a private sector investor, you don't quite know where you are. And I think there is a point here about, um, what should the private sector be saying in this debate? And we'll draw this together later on in the podcast on various issues, but rather than just campaigning for more money, which of course private sector providers could do, it's also worth thinking about looking to get a credible long-term pipeline that the engagement with government, the asks shouldn't just be about the money that how the money is spent, the certainty. the clarity on policy objectives, essentially ensuring that government understands some of the certainty that business needs and the risks that they're prepared to take on, but also the risks that make it harder to invest. And that is a bit of a problem that we have. I also want to move on to this issue of a point that we hear, I think, increasingly and with some justification, is that it's just so damn expensive building stuff here compared to other countries. And there's a whole host of reasons for that much of it to do with regulatory matters and so on. But John, what are your views in terms of the UK cost pressures and why that is a problem for investment here.

John Hall
I think most of us actually just struggle with the sheer price tags on these things. It just sounds so expensive. I mean, HS2 was effectively a billion pounds for every mile. We spend about sixteen billion pounds for every gigawatt of nuclear energy we want to generate. Estimates of the Heathrow expansion and associated terminals costing forty billion. I mean, these are just enormous sums and the UK genuinely has had a bit of a challenge over the last couple of decades. The construction sector is very energy intensive and we know the UK has very high energy costs. It's also very labour-intensive and that's a problem because we've got both skills shortages and obviously increasing costs of labour in recent years. It's not just all on public sector policy. Productivity in the construction sector is flatlined since the financial crisis in two thousand and seven. It hasn't been great in the UK economy. In fact, it's been very tepid. But the construction sector has been worse than that because outturn costs. With that combination of high input costs, inflation and low productivity, I think the outturn costs have risen by something like a third over twenty-years. Now, if you combine with that, the fact that it costs the public sector here more to borrow than the eurozone, I think we do have a situation where infrastructure is looking more expensive to us than the other things we could spend our money on, because relative prices have risen, but because the cost of this project has been rising quicker than our GDP per head, it's actually more expensive in terms of what we can afford. I mean, the interesting thing, of course, is what's been driving all of this. I mean, what's your take on that, David?

David Gauke
So I do think that some of this is perhaps a hyper-responsiveness to public opinion, resulting in an awful lot of planning burdens that are placed on businesses. So let's come back to HS2. We have ended up and that is the key phrase ended up with a position where pretty well — I think you touched on this — all of HS2 is in a tunnel or a green tunnel or what have you, and that is much more expensive. And that wasn't the original design. So you've come up with something with one plan and then over time, as a concession maybe to local residents, you end up with something else and chopping and changing the design as you go along adds to costs. It creates less certainty all round. There's greater risk than would otherwise be the case. And I sometimes think that there's a failure to really get to grips with all the trade-offs. And, you know, the oft-reported bat tunnel and so on. If we were to spend one hundred million pounds on helping bats, that's what we want to do. I'm not sure that's what we would be doing. Or perhaps a more sensible way of putting it is if we wanted to spend one hundred million pounds on supporting biodiversity and environmental objectives. That doesn't make a lot of sense either. So I think there's some real sort of policy difficulties there. I do think one of the things we've really got to get better at is identifying all the issues at the very beginning. So sometimes, understandably, there are complaints about delays in getting something started. But if in that time where there is a delay, you actually resolve a number of issues so that by the time you start, everybody knows precisely what they're doing, it's not going to be deflected, not going to be moving in another direction, then that might be quite a cost saving.

John Hall
I mean, I think there's a lot of evidence for that. The, um, the advice that's always been given in government strategies is that we should decide better and build quicker, that there's a bit of a rush to get shovels in the ground. And by that stage, many of the problems are already baked in, and re-engineering the solutions as you go increases costs. So the National Infrastructure Commission reckons that over 50 per cent of those cost savings it thought were available needed to be achieved before any construction began at all. And it's quite stunning when you look at this. I mean, I think the original numbers for HS2 were something like thirty billion pounds to build a high-speed railway from London to Manchester and Leeds, which would have been opening about now. We've now got a situation where we're going to spend roughly three times that to go to Birmingham, and the first train is only going to run on the first section in ten years time. And in a sense, the HS2 highlights many of the key areas which have been generic to a lot of sectors, but just in a very extreme form. The first which you've alluded to is very poor initial decision making and limited staying power. And I think we'll probably come back to that. The second again is the, the client capability of the public sector and knowing what it wants, engaging with the market and planning. Thirdly, is getting planning and consent. And how we do that in the UK. And then fourthly of course is supply chain. I wonder if it's worth looking at each of those. Yeah. In turn.

David Gauke
Yeah. Let's let's let's do that. So I think that makes a whole sense that we've talked already quite a bit about poor strategic decision making and limited staying power. I guess this is a point about defining what you're wanting to do and how you're wanting to do it. I guess in a world where we've got quite a lot of political volatility, trying to build a political consensus on all of this also helps. And as we've talked about, making sure that before we start, before incurring the costs, we know really what we're doing.

John Hall
I mean, it's just interesting because there was a surprising amount of political consensus about it, but it wasn't an informed consensus. And, you know, I probably like lots of people. I mean, I had a train set when I was a kid. I love fast trains. I thought, oh, that would be great. But the government was very unclear about what problem it was trying to solve. You know, was it to have faster journey times between London and Birmingham? Was it to build the capacity of the rail network in the South East, which is highly congested? Or was it to regenerate our second tier cities in the north, which lagged behind the capital to a far greater extent than most countries in Europe? If you had one hundred billion pounds to regenerate Manchester and Sheffield and Newcastle, you probably wouldn't spend it building a railway which doesn't go there. So I think being clear on what you're trying to achieve is very important. Estimates were that at the time we give the go ahead, less than 10 per cent of the relevant civil engineering facts about building this route were known. So that trade off you want to have between how much something costs, what it's supposed to achieve, and what are your engineering standards that you go along. were not resolved. What people start is they start building and then they have to keep resetting the budget. And as part of that, you alluded to the fact that evidence from Spain, where they've built an entire network of high-speed trains, um, with high-speed trains, while we've been struggling to build one line from our, between our two big cities. Um, is that the bigger proportion of the railway line in the tunnel, the more expensive it costs? And I think something like 96 per cent of HS2 will be via viaduct, bridge or in a tunnel. In fact, the only bit where the public sector isn't paying for tunnel is the section from Old Oak Common to London Euston, which you might have thought was slightly higher up on the list.

David Gauke
Yeah, trouble being how we tend to do things in central London. But there you go. Second point you raised, John, was the weak public-sector client capability. Um, really this issue about, you know, can you deal with people who've got the right expertise and so on? I think, you know, a lot of work was done on procurement, for example, in trying to improve things. Um, but it's still an issue about the lack of commercial technical capacity. I guess, again, looking at it from the perspective of the private sector, that's something where the private sector needs to help the government understand the commercial realities without appearing to be self-serving.

John Hall
Yeah. And I think it is a challenge. I mean, we don't have enough civil engineers and project managers in central government. I mean, if you think about the team in Treasury, which has the biggest concentration of infrastructure projects, it's the transport team. And typically this will be less than a dozen people. And none of them will be civil engineers. So it's very important that government as a whole works together to provide an intelligent client to the public sector. And secondly, I think the public sector tends to be a little bit nervous about market engagement. And you see this widely across sectors. The Strategic Defence Review said exactly the same because we're slightly worried it's going to prejudice us under competition law? When we come to do the procurement. But if you don't have the expertise and you're not willing to find it out, then you get in the pattern where we over-scope things in the centre from a position of too little knowledge. I also slightly worry, and this is more contentious, where the centralized nature of the British state makes this problem worse, that seven pounds in every ten pounds of capital we spend centrally. So any political change or changing priorities at the central level then radiates out. In Western Europe, it would typically be three to five pounds would happen centrally. Much more of that would be delegated to regional levels or local levels, and have slightly more stability on it. And this issue can be even stronger when it comes to public services. So one of the ways that the NHS has dealt with capital scarcity, and the fact that the demands for hospital refurbishment and hospital building are far greater than the capital budget that allows is to hold that capital at the center, to fragment it into time-limited pots which deliver certain things and then get the NHS to bid for it. So I was chatting to a strategic finance manager in a hospital in the northwest who said, you know, over the next decade, their priorities was the need to refurbish their emergency departments. They needed to update their women and maternity care, but there was no money for either of those things. So they spent quite a lot of their operational capital patching up clapped-out estate just to make sure the power didn't go off and fires didn't break out. And the thing that was available from the centre was money for a surgical unit for elective surgery. So they'd scoped that out and knew, well, it's not our priority, but over the next decade or so, we need a unit of about one hundred million capacity. But there was only fifty million available in the fund. So they built something at inefficient scale on their third priority thing. And this finance director got in touch with me again in early February and said, well, it's great news. Um, the integrated care system has released some money now that we've got available to improve our emergency services, which is what we really wanted, but it needs to be spent by the end of March. So we're going to put up a temporary structure in our car park, which will, you know, provide some relief to people waiting in A&E. And when I've chatted to people across hospitals, I've heard myriad other examples like this. So it's a situation in which shortage of capital compared, combined with repeated sort of changes in political priorities in an attempt to control things over from the centre can lead to astonishing waste of public money.

David Gauke
Yeah, that's a really good illustration of some of the problems there, and a bit of feast and famine as well, that the feast tend to be quite wasteful. Absolutely. So, no, I think that's that's a really interesting point. Just to pick up your other issues planning and consent complexity. Um, clearly a problem when you look at if you talked about, it's important to get this right before you put the first shovel in the ground. There are projects where you look at all the costs that are incurred before the first shovel goes in the ground, and it's still pretty breathtaking. The projects where, you know, other countries get a whole project done. And for the amount of money that it takes for us to put together the preparatory document, it did.

John Hall
I mean, I think the classic example there is the Thames Tideway, which I understand is a huge tunnel under the river full of sewage. Um, and the planning applications and consent, um, went to thirty thousand pages and cost two hundred and fifty million pounds. Now, I contrast that with Norway, which built the world's longest bridge for, for less than that. Um, and that does raise a question about whether we're getting something wrong. The A428, which was the dual carriageway of that road within Cambridgeshire. There was a legal challenge which was found to have no merit at all. And yet the launch of that added twenty-four million to costs and delayed the whole project by over a year without changing the outcome at all. Obviously, everyone loves puffins, and I don't want any of our Twitcher listeners to think I'm advocating anything else. But the five years in the late 2010s, five separate offshore wind farms collectively had a delay of two and a half years in their construction because each of them independently had to assess environmental impacts so that we didn't damage puffins. What's important here — puffins? Ridiculous. The issue here is that a lot of big projects have very diffuse benefits and very concentrated costs. And in a democracy where people have got costs, yes, we want to build infrastructure, but we want to mitigate the impact on the environment or the impact on local communities. This is not something that I'm not advocating deregulation. What I am advocating is that we make those trade-offs efficiently and consistently, because the uncertainty about what's needed and the cost escalation is making so many projects unaffordable and is very difficult for private sector firms to manage the risk, both of delay and the cost escalation that they get. Give an example. Since twenty ten, the average time it takes to get consent for a major project has gone up from two years to four years. That's before any construction starts at all. And yet, despite all of that additional work put in up front, they're much more likely to get legal challenge. It used to be about 10 per cent of projects went to legal challenge in 2022. It was over half. So I think we need to think very carefully about the structure of overlapping regulators, the lack of clear outcomes. So there's a risk that every lobby group sees each project as an ATM to sort of furnish all of their hopes and dreams. And we try and get to decisions quicker, which obviously resolve those trade-offs.

David Gauke
Yes. Um, that makes a lot of sense. And then the final point on this section is supply chain capacity, which you highlighted, John. And it's connected to some of the other issues. The stop-start nature makes it hard. But we do have problems with the fragmented construction market and skills shortages. There's a whole immigration issue here as well. Um any thoughts on that?

John Hall
I mean, I think, you know, we were never well endowed with construction workers, civil engineers, planning professionals. But I think we've lost about 20 per cent of the construction sector since the pandemic. And there's something strange about our construction industry, which I don't really understand. It's much more fragmented, as you say, than a lot of our comparators. So it means on some of these big projects, You've got seventy or eighty subcontractors, and that makes it. I mean, if you just think of the effort and cost that goes into trying to integrate those structures and for government, which puts a lot of energy into writing the contracts with the prime contractor, that only works if all those subcontracts then have incentives aligned in all of their projects. What I fear is when things go wrong, it leads to buck passing and legal arguments about where the blame lies rather than collective endeavor to get the solution done. I think, as we've said many times already. Stop start funding and big one-off projects as opposed to a continuous programme which you develop through modular things, makes it very hard for the construction industry to invest appropriately. I mean, if you look at rail electrification with the UK, we'll do a big East Coast Main Line twenty-years ago and so on. Germany has just had a continuous programme, and as a result of that, it's over one third cheaper per kilometre of track to electrify in Germany than it is in the UK, because the professionals and the equipment and the skilled expertise move from project to project learning as they go along, innovating and improving.

David Gauke
So let's bring all of this together. And we have so far been kind of quite focused on what government needs to do differently. But bear with us, because I think we probably just want to kind of complete that point. So, John, give us six recommendations in terms of what government ought to be doing. And then we'll look at it from the perspective of the private sector.

John Hall
It's a very unfairly specific challenge, David. I'm going to start with a controversial one, which is set a real infrastructure strategy. And at this stage, people put their heads into their hands and cry because that's the last thing we need. I think we've had over ten industrial strategies or plans for growth in the last decade. Um, but what I mean by that is government sets out its objectives. I always found in development, it was slightly strange. The World Bank gets less developed countries to do twenty-year strategies on its electricity needs, its water needs, its stuff. And so we would never do things like that. Well, maybe we should rather than stop and start. It's an example of that trade off. We've ploughed ahead with building new generation capacity and electricity, but we've made nowhere near the progress on transmission and distribution. Yeah. And as a result of that, there's huge delays in connecting new generation capacity to the grid. And there's been estimates that's adding up to half a billion quid on to people's bills every year. So the trade-offs matter, the sequencing matters. And the second thing is you've got to put credible budgets behind your priority projects. You know, you can take a bit of time if you want, but you've got to resolve those trade-offs about what you're trying to build, the standards you're trying to build to, and how much you've got at the start, rather than just plowing ahead and then having to build in very expensive redesigns. I think you need more design before you commit to delivery. We love getting shovels in the ground. It's a great photo opportunity, but you've baked in most of the problems by then. I think we need to build that pool of expertise in the public sector, and we both know that's hard, because buying in scarce expertise can cause havoc with civil service pay structures. We've also got a problem if you take the New Hospital Programme, that when they're trying to recruit public sector professionals, what they've actually recruited is a whole bunch of private-sector consultants who do the design work, and then will move on instead of moving to the next project. I think we need to reform planning, not to deregulate, but to give clarity and pace to the environmental planning requirements that we want. Private firms need to find it easier to predict what they need to do to get through planning. And I think some of the government ideas in terms of a single agency doing an overarching mitigation plan for things like housing, you know, could add considerable benefit there. And then, and I probably am becoming slightly a bore on the subject of this, but try and move from one-off projects to repeatable programs, standardise, modularise and try and get those things sorted out. For example, in hospitals on lifestyle models for new neighbourhood health centres, for rail electrification, for all of those things that we do not feast and famine, but continuous, boring programme of work. I think that would be my six.

David Gauke
Excellent. This is what government should be doing. And maybe government will, um, be doing this. No doubt Andy Burnham will tune in to this podcast and take all these recommendations up. But there's a role here for the private sector one way or another, to try and make the case in the same way and to be propositional because a lot of these points essentially, yes, they're what the government should be doing, but it can be reframed as what does the private sector need from the government to be able to play its role to the full, and how it might be prepared to invest more, how it would be able to deliver on time and on budget. And this is the context where I think it's necessary for the private sector sometimes to be more propositional that government can sometimes struggle to correct itself. Um, that, um, some of the commercial understanding of what are the points that really matter need to be made, and it shouldn't be just a sort of wish list, if you like, of these are things that we would like, plus we'd like more money. It should be a bit more about here is, um, something that if you do this, we'll be able to do that. So in that sense, it becomes transactional in a positive sense of the word that we can start to meet your objectives if you give us that greater certainty, if you meet these conditions, that just enables us to invest and perform in the way that you want us to. So I think that's the challenge in a way for the private sector in its engagement, not as a lobbying exercise, but to some extent there's a bit of a negotiation.

John Hall
I think that's exactly right. And I mean, in slightly challenging language, I would say for private sector firms, the challenge is, do you want to whinge from the terraces and bemoan the fact that the government is not giving you the clarity at the time that you would like it, or do you want to get on the pitch and help the government make a difference to what you need to help you unlock that delivery? I think you need to be propositional. If you're the private sector firm and you want to do that. And I guess there's probably four things that I'd look at doing. Firstly, translate your commercial need into the government's objectives. As we've said, government sometimes struggles to engage. It doesn't necessarily have the skills to understand your sector and what needs to happen. Help government solve its problem. You need to understand their objectives and help them deliver it. And I, like I'm sure yourself, have seen some very successful interactions by firms and trade associations in ministerial meetings by saying the thing you're trying to do doesn't work. But here's an alternative way of delivering your objectives, which would work given market realities. Be propositional on that. The second thing is you need to think very carefully about risk, that there has been a tendency shown in endless reports that the UK government tries to pass too much risk to the private sector: policy risk, planning risk, demand risk, all that sort of stuff. And for the private sector that can make things uninvestable, or it can put so much cost into your project or increase the cost of finance that this is simply poor VFM. So you then struggle to get government approval. And I think by advocating to the government what they can do to manage risk better, you can get a better outcome. I mean, I think a classic example on Hinkley Point C, was government covering the insurance costs of flooding during the construction phase. That helped bring the cost of finance — the private finance of that project — down to pretty much typical level of regulated asset base. You know, that was a good combination of allocation of risk to the public and private sector where they could best bear it. My third bit of advice was engage earlier, but more intelligently. Government is sometimes just worried about falling foul of competition law and procurement law, but it matters. We give the example earlier that London Underground got the cost of a big refurbishment of Bank station, um, down by 10 per cent by engaging. And we know that constantly government tries to do too much getting its ducks into line in-house before it even speaks to the private sector and confronts that with reality. And I think the fourth thing in terms of negotiation is the government agency you're negotiating with — your counterpart, who you may often see as your enemy, is actually your advocate to get that coalition of interest within Whitehall, including big beasts like the Treasury and No. 10 — onside. The person you deal with. They may seem like they're tough on you, but they will understand your sector and care about the outcomes you're trying to deliver more than any other bit of government. They need to build that coalition within government to get the approvals and the policy alignment that they need. And I think the more you can help them by being propositional and help them sell that solution across Whitehall, the easier things will be for you.

David Gauke
John, I think that's excellent advice. And as we've discussed, yes, we do have a problem with infrastructure and there is an issue with money and engineering and planning. All of that is true, but it's also about decision making, incentives, capability and negotiation. Government needs to be clear about what it wants, what it can fund, and what risk it should hold. But also, industry needs to be better about saying what it can offer, what conditions it needs, and how to frame those conditions as part of a public-interest proposition. The prize is not just cheaper projects, it's a better relationship between government and the private sector. with infrastructure delivered through propositions both sides can actually stand behind. Let's conclude. John, thank you very much for your time. Um, I thank our listeners for tuning in. I hope you agree that there's been a fascinating discussion on what we do well and what we don't do so well, and how we can improve things in what is going to be crucial for this country. Thanks very much. Goodbye for now.