Construction and transport: Victorian Britain lives on

Risk-aversion, short-termism and technophobia are holding back the UK’s roads, railways and buildings.

In Britain, both homes and transport links are subject to extraordinary delays, whether they are being refurbished or repaired (rare) or being fashioned anew (rarer still). The relentless continuation of Victorian construction methods on-site is also so great that Britain’s roads are often made impassable not just by direct road works, but by endless building work nearby.

British architects, builders, developers and clients for buildings have something else in common with people involved in transport and distribution. For in New Labour’s environmentalist policy and funding framework, mass retailers, haulage firms, motorists, airlines and airline users are all getting away with cheap fuel. As a result, people in transport meet a barrage of politically correct disgust similar to that encountered by British construction.

In Britain, construction and transport are widely criticised, not just for the leisurely pace of their actions, but also for being too fast. People in and around these sectors are, we are constantly reminded, too ready to:

• build on and so damage the British countryside – with homes, roads, airports;
• burn dwindling fossil fuels and so add to global warming;
• behave recklessly, so putting at risk the lives of building workers and pedestrians

Altogether, construction and transport are joint symptoms of an economic and cultural immobilisme that is common throughout the Western world, but especially acute in Britain. UK firms in construction and transport do innovate, but at a rate even slower than that achieved by UK firms in other sectors. And in both British construction and British transport, information technology plays an outrageously modest role. Ironically, IT – after construction, transport and utilities, the fourth and most modern leg of modern infrastructure – is all too rarely applied to the worlds of…construction and transport.

Just as an illustration, take telework. In 2003, people using IT who spend the majority of their working time in their own home, those that use home as a base, and those who occasionally work from home rose in numbers by 12 percent, to 2.113million, or more than 7.5 percent of the workforce (1). No doubt the pain and anger of modern commuting have something to do that. Yet while BT promises to bring broadband to every home in Britain by 2006, the country’s crisis in the supply of homes can only restrict the spread of telework.

It is true that in 2002/03, 34 percent of newly built homes in England had four or more bedrooms, compared with only seven percent in 1971 (2). But newly built homes throughout out the UK are at levels so low, they have not been equalled since the mid-1920s: just 130,000 were built in England in 2003. And while semi-detached homes, at a third of Britain’s 25million households, are the most common type of dwelling, just 28 percent of them have been built in the past 40 years: all the others are older (3). As a result, only a minority will be able to go teleworking in anything like a modern, dedicated ‘home office’. Many more will have to make do with a cramped bedroom or kitchen.

There is no need to be alarmist. Even with revived UK rates of divorce, living alone and immigration, homelessness will not really multiply sellers of The Big Issue any time soon. It is still possible, just, to move around the country. Moreover Britain is not alone in the relative weakness of construction and transport as sectors. In America, you have to go through 218 of the nation’s top companies before you find a housebuilding firm (4). As for American transport – governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will spend $90million building 200 hydrogen fuel stations in California by 2010, in the hopes that 500,000 of the state’s 28million vehicles will be equipped with fuel cells by then (5). But on the East Coast things are rather different. There, inter-city railways run by Amtrak have been plagued by problems for years.

Worldwide, construction and transport exhibit little of the dynamism of the IT sector. But they do highlight the Victorian nature of twenty-first century British capitalism.

Space, the past, and the Brits

As Daniel Ben-Ami has argued, Britain is ‘perhaps the most financialised of the main world economies’ (6). Indeed, the City of London plays such a leading role in the British economy that the country’s building and transport problems largely centre on it. Similarly, the City relies, for its continued physical existence, on big modern trading floors and big antiquated transport systems. But perhaps of even greater significance than this is the fact that the City relies for its everyday financial survival on big, often state-backed schemes in construction and transport.

Banks and building societies have had to move into mortgage finance – so much so that the annual pace of mortgage borrowing has hit an 11-year high. And banks, investment banks, consultants, lawyers and others have moved into the construction of schools, hospitals, and rail infrastructure. Through a myriad of partnerships and through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), corporate parasites with the appearance of dynamism have ‘shared the risk’, as they like to say, with stateised sectors that exude backwardness from every corner. They are the grateful beneficiaries of chancellor Gordon Brown’s major spending programmes.

Of course, in today’s whingeing media mythology, building societies like Abbey National rip off mortgage owners. Meanwhile, a venal conspiracy of firms like Goldman Sachs and Jarvis is supposed to do the same to passengers, through an all-too willing state apparatus run by corrupt New Labour politicians. But the reality is rather different. Abbey National – slogan ‘because life’s complicated enough’ – runs at a loss. The corporate locusts that cluster round Britain’s Victorian public buildings and railway tracks are better at filling out state contracts than making a real difference to infrastructure. They cannot make a decent profit independently of the state.

It is very one-sided to represent New Labour simply as a pliant, hapless or corrupt tool in the hands of bent builders, shyster developers and fast-buck operators like the notorious Stagecoach plc. What about the growth of state bureaucracy and regulation? Among firms in construction and transport, New Labour consciously or unconsciously weaves what Phil Mullan calls ‘a widening web of state-capital links’ (7). By the same token, New Labour also seeks, through regulation, ever more points of control over private individuals – otherwise known as consumers, homeowners, tenants, motorists and passengers.

Apart from making money through transactions today, the City is sometimes interested in tomorrow, in the sense of technological breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals and defence. Much more often, however, financiers in Britain are nowadays fascinated by property. That shows how much the country has had to fall back on its ageing, largely Victorian installed base of buildings and transport routes.

If one defines construction narrowly, in terms of the 170,000 contractors working on-site, it is worth a very significant five percent of GDP. Defined more broadly as the 350,000 contractors handling all aspects of the construction supply chain (on-site construction plus materials, products, assemblies, and services, including land and facilities management), construction is worth a colossal 10 percent of UK GDP (8). But however one measures it, the sector is largely engaged in remedying the past.

In 1997, when new building was stronger than it is today, it took just 24.1 percent of UK construction output. For the refurbishment of Britain’s residential and non-residential building stock, the figure was 38.1 percent. For the repair of same, the figure was 37.8 percent (9).

Property is one of the dominating forces in British political economy. Only in Britain can multi-millionaires in land and property make up no fewer than 190 of the top 1000 richest people in the UK in 2004 – an increase of dozens on the figure for 2003 (10). Only in Britain can there be an orgy of discussion on the putative takeover of Marks and Spencer, at the same time that so few commentators really bother with the fact that this £8-10billion ‘fashion retailer’ sits on a High Street property portfolio worth £2billion.

The interests of the City

It is not UK commercial pioneers in biotechnology that interest the City. Most, despite their innovatory prowess, are just allowed to fail – when they are not being bought by overseas concerns. The Belgian group UCB bought Celltech, the Great White Hope of British biotechnology companies, in May.

No real City excitement surrounds breakthroughs in nanotechnology, chemicals, or even in IT. Rather, the City is preoccupied with the chance to make a paper profit on something that, crucially, the state ensures is always in short supply. More than a century after Cecil Rhodes led the imperialist scramble for Africa, major investors are in a scramble for Space, UK.

What interests the City is lending money to people buying houses whose values are inflated – inflated by a state regime of town and countryside planning that is restrictive and that dates from the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. What also interests the City is a new financial instrument, property investment funds, or Pifs – New Labour’s answer to the USA’s fashionable Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS). Pension funds, in particular, are set to move further out of conventional stocks and shares and into Pifs: while they had 6.4 percent of their funds invested in property in 2003, the figure could perhaps go to 15 or 20 percent (11). Life insurance companies also regard Britain’s £450billion market in commercial property as an important ‘asset class’.

The City is just as interested in clipping coupons around transport, in the sense of the construction and operation of spatial links. Just before his re-election as London mayor, Ken Livingstone waxed lyrical about one solution to London’s housing crisis in…the property that lies above the capital’s railway stations (12). Or take London and Continental Railways’ Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The CTRL is routed through an intermediate station at Ebbsfleet, an obscure enclave in Kent that is of no use to anyone. But the decision for Ebbsfleet did not just reveal, behind it, the usual lash-up of financiers, land sharks, big building contractors and Westminster PR firms that specialised in lobbying ministers during the last Conservative administration. It also revealed how much store modern capitalist interest sets by state decisions on the spatial location of transport nodes – even if the decisions turn out to be completely irrational.

Once the state acts irrationally on this scale, it cannot be a surprise that transport chaos in Britain has become a way of life. We need not dwell on the London Underground. Instead, take trams. Passenger numbers on nearly all the tram systems built since 1980 have fallen short of forecasts, while construction costs have in many cases gone over budget (13).

In the UK, even the smoothest transport projects take forever. Between October 1998 and September 2003, Section 1 of the CTRL, from the Channel up through Kent, was built and opened on time and on budget. Work on Section 2 began in July 2001 and completes the new line into London’s St Pancras. Section 2 is scheduled for completion by the end of 2006, but will only open in 2007. In Section 2, much of which goes through and under London, saw no fewer than eight tunnel-boring machines. Nevertheless, as Austin Williams and the Transport Research Group have pointed out, this line is the only serious piece of new track construction in Britain for more than a century (14). Altogether, to build just 68 miles of railway will have taken more than 10 years since the passage of the CTRL Act in 1996.

Inside a dense space like London, the potential for irrational state policy and action in transport is finally realised. A complete set of working drawings and documents for Crossrail, the £10billion link between Liverpool Street and Paddington Station, was ready in 1994 (15). The Hackney-to-Chelsea tube featured in Ken Livingstone’s election manifesto for 2000 is, today, at least 25 years in the future: as such, it will worsen London’s prospects of siting any of the 2012 Olympic Games in the Lea Valley. Last, Hackney, the one London borough without a tube station, will lack an East London Line extension for years to come (16).

Yet the City is prepared to stump up perhaps £2billion to finance Crossrail. City employers need employees to arrive on time; more importantly, they want to make money out of transport projects. Even Tony Blair keeps saying he wants Crossrail.

He has yet, however, to authorise it.

The interests of the State

What, then, really interests the government about construction and transport? As with the City, government concerns itself less with The Laboratory, and more with The Land: brownfield, greenfield, you name it. Beyond that, there seem to be two broad approaches.

First, New Labour wants to go about raising taxes to choke off demand – demand for:

• Houses. New Labour has raised Stamp Duty, a Treasury charge on house movers, four times since it assumed office.
• Access to central business districts. Alasdair Darling, secretary of state for transport, has let it be known that London mayor Ken Livingstone’s Congestion Charge scheme is likely to be emulated nationally. Indeed for his innovatory fiscal tightness, and the innovatory physical tightness he imposes on motorists, Red Ken was named one of the world’s top 50 leaders in research, business and policy in 2003 – by no lesser an authority than the illustrious US magazine Scientific American (17).
• Fossil fuels. Gordon Brown’s tax hikes are the formal source of protests against £1-a-litre petrol prices. Livingstone condemns as ‘complete idiots’ parents who drive their children to schools in SUVs. With flying, it is only a matter of time before the government taxes aviation fuel.

Second, New Labour is keen on policing, in our cities:

• What deputy prime minister John Prescott calls housing ‘sprawl’. Through the Commission for the Built Environment (CABE), whose aim is ‘keeping every client of a new building on their toes’ in terms of design (18).
• The design of the encounters that people have with the state. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, leads the government’s ‘design champions’ of its Better Public Building initiative (19).
• Central business districts. Designated as worthy of ‘business improvement’. Here, to raise levies for litterbins and security guards, local businesses must conform with 14 regulations of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (20).
• Motoring speeds. Through road bumps and other measures of traffic calming. More and more motorists have also been fined for speeding.
• Parking. Here, too, fines are on the increase. Nearly 10million tickets were issued in 2003 – a 12.5 percent rise on 2002 (21).

Government has long been in the tax business. Critics of the government who focus too much on taxes and fines miss what is new about construction and transport today – that, in these two sectors, a safety-first, therapeutically inclined New Labour is fearful of deaths, injuries and the attendant litigation. It is also desperate to engage with business and consumer users of construction and transport. Finally, the government’s naturalistic perspective on the environment means that it also fears that global warming will shortly overwhelm Britain with floods.

The results are plain enough. New Labour favours the imposition of statutory requirements in design and in personal behaviour. Limits, bans and prohibitions are the name of the game in construction and transport, just as they are in matters to do with smoking and obesity. Things have got so bad that motorists and pedestrians alike find the nation’s streets infested with metal signs telling motorists what they can and cannot do – though signs with street names on them are very often lacking.

New Labour is so hostile to fossil fuels that its energy policy looks as if it could directly restrict the movement of trade itself. The government has run headlong into intermittent wind farms, built to the size of the city of Nottingham and located off the coasts of Scotland and other areas. In the process, it has overlooked the likely – and literal – impact on container ships. The House of Commons select committee on transport said that the government’s policy was:

‘…overseen by a steering group of 15. Six members of the group were from government departments, five were from government agencies, three were from environmental NGOs plus a representative of the Wind Energy Association. There was no representation from the Department for Transport or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, nor from port or shipping interests.’ (22)

It is a sign of the times that Ed Mayo, previously chief executive of the National Consumers’ Council, now heads a government committee to press people to adopt greener lifestyles (23). We can expect the Department for Transport’s ‘procedural guidance’ for local authorities, in the shape of its Framework for a local walking strategy, will detain Mayo a fair bit. If local authorities can persuade people to walk, the thinking goes, they could reduce traffic, and link up with local health improvement programmes and health action zones (24).

The growing gap between what we need and what we accept

In the popular perception, there seems little realistic alternative to the current state of permanent grief in both construction and transport. A few green alternatives are trotted out, such as even more bans on road-building; but these things fail to convince the British public. Any sane person can see how much must be done in construction and transport over the next 20 years.

The British like to engage in self-loathing, and nowhere more than in matters of urban regeneration and general transport. Yet if we take a quick look at some statistics, it’s evident that the retarded nature of British construction and transport is, in principle, something that can be overcome.

If Britain were able to emulate the capital intensity of construction in Germany and France, or the deployment of information and communications technologies (ICT) in construction in the USA, there would be big improvements:

(25)

The story in research and development (R&D) in building is even more favourable for Britain – if its construction sector can catch up with practice in Northern Europe:

(26)

Of course, just to spend a Finnish £25 on building R&D for every £1000 of UK building output by no means guarantees, on its own, that innovation will really happen. Nevertheless, no amount of brilliant British boffinry can compensate for the abysmal level of research that goes on in UK construction.

In the late 1990s, R&D in UK construction was £140million. But higher education and trade associations spent 88 percent of this. In other words, the UK’s mainstream building firms spend perhaps £17million on R&D (27). Yet if fragmented private contractors have abdicated much of the responsibility for this state of affairs, so has the government.

The table below looks at government spending on R&D under a number of headings. While the Department of Industry (DTI) has duties with regard to boosting construction industry technologies, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister looks after housing, planning and what it calls ‘sustainable communities’. Here are the figures:

(28)

The government money spent on the Department of Transport was £44.9million in 1995-6. (29)

A few things are immediately clear:

• State expenditure on R&D in major civilian domains (MRC, DTI, etc) is an order magnitude smaller than that on R&D for the Ministry of Defence.
• However much of the DTI budget is specifically devoted to construction, it is likely to be a further order of magnitude smaller than that spent on defence.
• The government money spent on R&D in housing is derisory.
• However much government transport R&D budgets have changed since the mid-1990s, they too are derisory.

It is true that the powerful therapeutic and naturalistic currents evident in all aspects of British culture today are likely to hold back and distort the outcome of what is required: big and intelligent increases in spending on innovation in buildings and transport. But the facts show that Britain’s neglect of these two sectors is a policy that is preferred as much as it is endemic.

The revitalisation of infrastructure

The City, a noxious but dominating excrescence on the body of British capitalism, clearly festers on two other unpleasant black spots upon that body: construction and transport. Yet Britain’s record in these sectors is not all bad. Skyscrapers are on the up. Train delays are down as lines are gradually being overhauled (30).

Still, construction is so backward that even the government makes rhetorical attacks on it. Thus Dennis Lenard, chief executive of the Department of Trade and Industry’s influential £7.5million quango, Constructing Excellence, has condemned UK building as ‘trapped in an 1980s timewarp’ (31). In the case of that 1980s icon to architecture in the City, the Lloyds insurance building, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership and engineered by Arup, concerns over cracks have in the edifice have delayed its sale, for a cool £240million, by a German firm to an Irish one.

Despite some technical advances, UK construction remains backward. UK civil engineering is also backward: just look at the country’s bridges. London has few bridges compared with cities such as Paris. In Lancashire the Thelwall Viaduct, which carries the M62 over the Manchester Ship Canal, has been half shut since July 2002. The Mersey’s second, £335million bridge, between Runcorn and Widnes, still awaits a government decision this year. The only serious prospect in UK civil engineering is for one item of government spending to double to £1billion year over the next two decades: that on flood defences (32).

Ultimately, developments in UK property determine much of the course of UK transport. When Lufthansa, United Airlines and other members of the Star Alliance got into a lather earlier this month, they were not, in fact, angry about rising oil prices, regulation, striking pilots or unruly passengers. They were furious with the property and retailing giant BAA – for filling up its £4.2billion fifth terminal, due for completion in 2008, with planes almost entirely run by BA (33).

In transport, everyone rushes…to impede movement. Motorists are so hated, environment minister John Elliott says: ‘It’s right that the people who use the most fuel and pollute the atmosphere the most should pay for the damage they are causing’ (34). As for movement within buildings, even that is now held as a bad idea. The recent discussion on how buildings can help their occupants fight obesity by making speedy, automatic lifts less accessible reveals much (35). It speaks of a desire to get right away from technological innovation. The people-carrying that Otis Elevator pioneered in America in the late nineteenth century is too much, it seems, for today’s architects and building clients.

Hopes that the successful deployment of IT would lead to revolutionary improvements remain largely unfulfilled. Dennis Lenard is right to attack UK construction for its lengthy refusal to adopt advances in robotics and computer aided design (36). There is a similar tale to tell in urban development. Take Edinburgh – Britain’s fastest growing conurbation, and one that defines itself as a ‘smart city’. Edinburgh City Council operates a useful portal for planning and building control. But it does not run even to having a section on IT on its website, let alone allowing such a forum to discuss what IT could do for Scotland’s capital city (37).

IT in transport is an equally sad affair. Beyond Putney, where I live, there is still no way that UK motorists can use a mobile phone to pay for their parking: meters, complete with parking attendants who, in one recent case, can find themselves sacked if they do not issue enough tickets – these remain the national rule. IT is also weak in air travel. After software testing went wrong one night early in June, an errant flight data processing system based at West Drayton, supplying information to the new National Air Traffic Services control centre at Swanwick, prompted the cancellation of 100 UK flight departures.

Once again, the situation is not all bleak. The same Institution of Electrical Engineers that hosted the Guardian conference on key worker housing runs special interest groups on Road Transport Information and Control, and on Railway Information Systems (38). But for IT to be adopted in transport, as in construction, people will have to rally round a wider agenda.

Conclusion

‘There’s something Victorian’, writes the editor of Britain’s leading magazine on management, in his current issue on UK urban movers and shakers, ‘about the concept of the local man who fights his way up from a modest background to become the Big Cheese in his town. Yet despite the increased influence of multinationals on our lives, these individuals wield considerable power at a regional level’ (39). Management Today is right: there is indeed something Victorian about British cities’ attempts to revive their fabric and their transport systems.

We are in a regime of individual entrepreneurs, not collective innovation. We encounter, equally, an endless succession of grand, one-off buildings, often of a municipal type; cultural red flags waved as mental warnings in front of each internal combustion engine; speeds of inner-city traffic that, notoriously, are down to those of the original horse-drawn carriage. All these recall the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first.

At least the Victorians were concerned, some of the time, with efficiency and innovation in the production processes that surround construction and transport. But New Labour is concerned with something very different. It wants to legislate for, and measure in pounds and pence, the real and mostly imagined social and environmental impacts of buildings and transport systems as finished Consumer Products. Every architectural detail in buildings and towns must be accompanied by evidence that it will improve the health, welfare and social cohesion of those who use them. Every carbon emission from structures and vehicles must be accounted for. Meanwhile, every building and every railway siding must be given tons of branding, to make sure all us consumers get the point about its impact.

Today the demand everywhere is for ‘evidence-based’ architecture, for Key Performance Indicators, Design Quality Indicators and Environmental Performance Indicators. Every innovation in transport is assessed in terms of its contribution to human injury and death, and in terms of its polluting effect. Yet the exaggerated claims made about the use of construction and transport distract from the role that IT could play in their production.

Fixing UK construction requires a focus on productivity and organisation, much more than on the design of buildings or the education and culture that surround their erection. Buildings as exquisite products, after all, detain the popular media to an inordinate degree; consultation, training, teamwork and the need to cultivate non-adversarial attitudes detain dozens of UK building industry quangos.

The call for a greater synchronisation of building design to user need might appear innocuous enough. It is true that many buildings in Britain are oblivious to the real working and living habits of their occupants. But it is also true that a slavish devotion to stated or perceived market need does innovation no favours. The initiative for technological innovation and the application of IT must lie, not with end-users, but with suppliers.

The same holds good in transport. There, the government ensures that hundreds of reorganisations, planning enquiries and lawyers attend the supply of roads, railways and airports; but its real goal is to curtail demand among users.

More and more, official feeling in Britain is that life should be more local. As a result, the whole concept of transport is denigrated. The idea that supermarkets should truck agricultural produce over motorways is now seriously in question: local produce grown for local inhabitants is the preferred alternative (40).

In local government itself, the potential for IT is seen in terms of local e-democracy and local e-procurement. Electronic voting and electronic buying – these are the only significant ways IT is pressed into service for urban regeneration and urban transport systems (41).

A long political and cultural struggle must be begun if IT is ever to expand British construction beyond key worker housing and the Victorian concept of the deserving poor. And a long political and cultural struggle must be begun if IT is to rescue British transport from a fate that, were he alive today, would bring a blush to the cheeks of Isambard Kingdon Brunel.

Footnotes and references

(1) Telework statistics increase again, Leeds EQUAL Telework Project, quoting Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey statistics

(2) Social Trends 34, Office for National Statistics, 2004, table 10.4, p151

(3) Social Trends 34, Office for National Statistics, 2004, table 10.2, p150

(4) See the ranking of America’s top 1000 firms in Fortune, 5 April 2004

(5) ‘Schwarzenegger hits gas pedals on Hydrogen Highways plan’, Christopher Parkes, Financial Times, 23 April 2004

(6) Deflation: inflated concerns, by Daniel Ben-Ami

(7) Propping up the private, by Phil Mullan

(8) See The Social and Economic Value of Construction: the Construction Industry’s Contribution to Sustainable Development, David Pearce, Construction Industry Research and Innovation Strategy panel, 2003, chapter 3

(9) Sustainable Construction: The Data, Nigel Howard, Centre for Sustainable Construction, Building Research Establishment, 2000, cited in Why is Construction so Backward?, James Woudhuysen, Ian Abley, et al, Wiley-Academy, 2004, table 2, p14

(10) ‘The Sunday Times rich list 2004’, Philip Beresford with Stephen Boyd, Sunday Times, 18 April 2004

(11) ‘Investment enjoys a renaissance’, Simon Targett, Financial Times, 4 June 2004

(12) Ken Livingstone, keynote speech, ‘Key Worker Housing: Building on Foundations to Crack the Crisis’, Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, 25 May 2004

(13) Improving Public Transport in England through Light Rail (.pdf 128 KB), National Audit Office, 27 April 2004

(14) Austin Williams, introduction to a Transport Research Group Debate, ‘Infrastructure: What Infrastructure?’, Bloomberg Auditorium, London, 20 February 2003

(15) Infrastructure: What Infrastructure?, speech by John Smith, Bloomberg Auditorium, London, 20 February 2003

(16) ‘Hello, Ken. Goodbye, Oxford Street’, Paul Barker, New Statesman, 7 June 2004

(17) The 2003 Scientific American 50 List of Winners, Scientific American, 10 November 2003

(18) Aims, on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment website

(19) Design champions, on the Better Public Building website

(20) Consultation paper on the Draft Business Improvement Districts (England) Regulations 2004, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 18 March 2004

(21) ‘Sacked, the parking warden who didn’t issue enough tickets’, Daily Mail, Olinka Koster, 5 June 2004

(22) Navigational Hazards and the Energy Bill: Ninth Report of Session 2003-2004 (.pdf 870 KB), House of Commons Transport Committee, 3 June 2004

(23) ‘Britain must prepare for coming of the great floods’, Valerie Elliott, The Times, 23 April 2004

(24) Framework for a Local Walking Strategy (.pdf 233 KB), Department for Transport, 28 March 2004, p2

(25) Britain’s Relative Productivity Performance: Updates to 1999 (.pdf 451 KB), Mary O’Mahony and Willem de Boer, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, March 2002

(26) Innovation in construction, A Manseau and G Seaden, Spon, 2001, cited in The Social and Economic Value of Construction: the Construction Industry’s Contribution to Sustainable Development, David Pearce, Construction Industry Research and Innovation Strategy panel, 2003

(27) The Social and Economic Value of Construction: the Construction Industry’s Contribution to Sustainable Development, David Pearce, Construction Industry Research and Innovation Strategy panel, 2003, chapter 7

(28) Net Government Expenditure on R&D by Departments in Real Terms, 1987-1988 to 2004-2005, table 5 (.pdf 85.8 KB), Forward look 2003, Office of Science and Technology

(29) Net Government Expenditure on R&D by Departments in Real Terms, 1987-1988 to 2004-2005, table 5 (.pdf 85.8 KB), Forward look 2003, Office of Science and Technology

(30) ‘Train delays caused by crumbling infrastructure fall by 20%’, Rebecca Bream,Financial Times, 1 June 2004

(31) Dennis Lenard, reported in ‘Britain 20 years behind, says building adviser’, Jim Pickard, Financial Times, 1 June 2004

(32) Future flooding, on the Foresight website

(33) ‘Airlines attack BAA on Heathrow’, Kevin Done, Financial Times, 7 June 2004

(34) Quoted in ‘Petrol truce threatened as minister goes on the attack’, Daily Mail, 5 June 2004

(35) ‘“Fit” offices help staff fight the flab’, Tessa Mayes and Jack Grimston, Sunday Times, 9 May 2004, p12.

(36) Dennis Lenard, reported in ‘Britain 20 years behind, says building adviser’, Jim Pickard, Financial Times, 1 June 2004, p4

(37) How IT can make city life better, James Woudhuysen, IT Week, 27 April 2004

(38) See the Institution of Electrical Engineers website

(39) ‘Food, booze and big cheeses’, Matthew Gwyther, Management Today, June 2004

(40) See, for example, ‘Why al-Qaeda may save the world’, New Statesman, 7 June 2004

(41) See, for example, ‘How to deliver services closer to home’, New Statesman, 7 June 2004