The Rocket @therocketuk

Since 2022, Civic Future has grown from a single Fellowship into policy courses, workshops, crisis simulations and two Talent Programmes. It’s a school in all but name. So today we’re making it official: the Civic Future School for Government 🏛️🧵 civicfuture.org/school-for-gov…

This and more in Issue #5 of The Rocket. Free every Sunday: rocketnewsletter.substack.com/p/999000-reaso…

Also this week: UKRI plans £3.3bn over four years for discovery research and to halve grant processing times. Great British Railways has its first chair and a Derby headquarters. @omasstx raised $310m; @saliencelabs $125m.

Jensen Huang said the UK has “superpowers in intellect” but “999,000 reasons to fail”. He has spotted a symptom, not the cause. The binding constraints are more practical.

This is exactly right and it's why @ArguablyMag is hosting the AI debates that Westminster too often ignores. Read @dc_lawrence from this week on why AI acceleration is the safest option for Britain. arguably.uk/p/ai-accelerat…

Josh Glancy @joshglancy

2 weeks ago

The world is being reshaped daily by AI. Yet after a month of party conferences, I was taken aback at just how little interest our political leaders seem to have in what's going on My @thetimes column thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

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@KaneEmerson Great piece. Particularly liked the solve for planning fees, which fell about £330m short of what councils spent handling applications in 2024-25. Let mayors charge more for a faster, properly staffed decisions. Applicants get speed, councils get more capacity. Everyone wins.

Also in the issue: two solar farms consented in two days, a court cleared Northern Ireland’s A5, and HS2 finished the core of its Wendover tunnel. Free, every Sunday: rocketnewsletter.substack.com/p/half-the-too…

City Hall says the Mayor of London’s call-ins this year will deliver 10,058 homes across eight schemes that would not otherwise have been built. Four of the other six had been recommended for approval by officers and then refused by councillors. Mayors elsewhere get similar powers under the English Devolution Act from early next year. Issue #4 of The Rocket, link below.

My colleague @pdmsero has written a really important piece on the supposed access to capital gap between Britain and the US. He argues, against popular opinion, that access to capital isn't the reason why British companies are small. The issue is that a range of different problems can appear like access to capital problems. If a firm has a bad idea, or the market is too small, or regulatory and infrastructure costs are too high, these will all limit a company's ability to raise capital. European founders will then complain about access to capital, when the real problem lies elsewhere. Pedro argues that we can see this in returns data. If European countries were underpriced by capital markets, we would expect to see returns that outpaced US counterparts. But this is not what we see in the data. Instead, Pedro argues that European companies are "constrained by barriers to scale that make them less capable of delivering the returns required to encourage more investment." These barriers can be regulatory, or the result of smaller market size, or high costs of infrastructure (housing, energy, construction). The policy implications are significant: if capital is not the main issue, then we should spend less time trying to force capital into British firms (e.g. through pension mandation or financial incentives). Instead, we should focus on making Britain, and Europe, an easier place to scale, with fewer regulatory barriers and cheaper fundamentals. Read the full piece on the @BritishProgress substack here: britishprogress.substack.com/p/access-to-ca…

All of this is in this week's issue of The Rocket. Free, every Sunday: rocketnewsletter.substack.com/p/clearing-the…

The chart uses figures from @Ben_A_Hopkinson’s new report for @CPSThinkTank , which sets out 40 ideas for going further, from a national standard for trams to making utility companies pay more to move their own pipes.

Ben Hopkinson @Ben_A_Hopkinson

3 weeks ago

Britain has an infrastructure costs problem. But what's causing this and how can we fix it? HS2 will cost up to £102.7bn for 140 miles. Spain built the second longest high speed network in the world, 2,500 miles, for less. It isn't just HS2 though. Underground extensions cost

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Three changes last week made it easier or cheaper to build in Britain. None of them made the front pages. What changed, and how much it matters. 🧵

Britain has an infrastructure costs problem. But what's causing this and how can we fix it? HS2 will cost up to £102.7bn for 140 miles. Spain built the second longest high speed network in the world, 2,500 miles, for less. It isn't just HS2 though. Underground extensions cost twice the per-mile average of France or Italy, and six times Spain's. Heathrow's third runway, excluding new terminals, is expected to cost 10 to 70 times more than other runways. British trams cost more than double the European average. Why are these projects so expensive? There are eight key reasons: 1. Planning: it took 14 years, £300m, and 360,000 pages for the Lower Thames Crossing to go from being designated a national priority to receiving permission. 2. Environmental and Habitats Regulations: these gave us the £216m bat tunnel and the fish disco, as well as an 18,000 page environmental statement to re-open just 3.3 miles of railway on an existing alignment. 3. Judicial review: of 36 legal challenges to approved major projects, only four forced a re-decision. All four were approved again, but fighting a legal challenge can add £120m+ to a project's cost and mountains of paperwork. 4. Funding: the Treasury pays, but cannot directly control a project's spend, so it instead requires long business cases. Once given funding, promoters don't have the incentive to build more cheaply. 5. Procurement: currently generalist teams rely on consultants and are more focused on social value than past performance and value for money. 6. Regulation: quangos and departments create regulation that they don't bear the costs of. E.g. new tram projects must pay for 92.5% of the cost of moving utilities, which means utility companies demand a completely new set of pipes and wires. 7. Lack of state capacity: Madrid trebled its metro at a tenth of London's cost led by nine in-house engineers. The DfT has the second highest staff turnover of any department and cannot effectively oversee a project from design through construction. 8. Centralisation: Mayors cannot fund and approve their own infrastructure. If they could, they'd have strong electoral incentives to build quickly and cheaply, as seen in France and Spain. The good news is that every one of these is a policy choice, which can be reversed. Some fixes need only a letter from the right minister and none require significantly more spending. My new @CPSThinkTank report lays out these fixes and how to lower infrastructure costs. If we implement them, Britain could once again build the infrastructure it desperately needs. cps.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

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Clearing the Way: Natural England steps back from routine planning applications, the rail regulator cuts fees for outside investors, and ministers promise self-build grid connections. rocketnewsletter.substack.com/p/clearing-the…

A mile of HS2 costs £734m. Spain builds high-speed rail for £28m a mile. This week brought three moves to make building in Britain easier or cheaper. Issue #3 of The Rocket covers them, and how far there is still to go. Link below. Data: @CPSThinkTank