Great British Plans

Who made them and how they worked

Ian Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317290193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Can the British plan? Sometimes it seems unlikely. Across the world we see grand designs and visionary projects: new airport terminals, nuclear power stations, high-speed railways, and glittering buildings. It all seems an unattainable goal on Britain's small and crowded island; and yet perhaps this is too pessimistic. For the British have always planned, and much of what they have today is the result of past plans, successfully implemented.

Ranging widely, from London's squares and the new city of Milton Keynes, to 'High Speed One', the motorways, and the secret first electronic computers, Ian Wray's remarkable book puts successful infrastructure plans under the microscope. Who made these plans and what made them stick? How does this reflect the defining characteristics of British government? And what does that say about the individuals who drew them up and saw them through?

In so doing the book casts refreshing new light on how big decisions have actually been made, revealing the hidden sources of drive and initiative in British society, as seen through the lens of 'plans past'. And it asks some searching questions about the mechanisms we might need for successful 'plans future', in Britain and elsewhere.

Includes foreword by the Right Honourable the Lord Heseltine CH.

Part One
Context

1
Manoeuvre Well Executed?

On Rational Plans and British Plans

Nations begin by forming their institutions, but in the end are continuously formed by them…

Lord Hailsham, 1987

At 1900 hours on 11 November 1940 the British aircraft carrier Illustrious, with its escort of four destroyers and four cruisers, steamed towards its final ‘flying off’ position, 170 miles south east of the Italian port of Taranto. On deck, gleaming in the moonlight, was the first flight of twenty-one Swordfish biplanes, antiquated yet resilient aircraft, with a cruising speed of only 130 mph, each carrying a single torpedo. After supper and a final briefing the first wave of aircraft took off at 2040 hours into a lightly cloud covered sky. Less than two hours later the biplanes were nearing their target – the main capital warships of the Italian Navy, moored in the harbour of Taranto.

Their audacious torpedo attack crippled much of the Italian fleet; the battleship Conte di Cavour lay beached with her decks under water; two other battleships were badly damaged and out of action for months; a cruiser, several destroyers and oil storage facilities sustained damage. Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, sent a terse signal: ‘Manoeuvre well executed’. Britain’s most respected Second World War Admiral had pulled off his first masterstroke. In six hours flying time, twenty aircraft had inflicted more damage on the enemy than was sustained in the First World War by the German Fleet at the Battle of Jutland (Barnett, 1991).

Cunningham’s leadership style was direct and to the point. He had formidable personal authority: ‘A stern visage ruddy from the sun, a rim mouth and a jawline like a battleship’s bow, a searching stare … an impatience often manifested to his wary staff by a tigerish pacing of the deck’ (ibid., p. 221). His approach to plans and decisions was in marked contrast to his predecessor Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. On taking command of the Mediterranean fleet in May 1939 his staff presented Cunningham with detailed plans and orders for his first sea exercise. Cunningham wrote on the top of the thick document: ‘too long, too complicated, cut’ and returned them to his team. They duly returned a set of orders reduced to only 15 pages of text. On the revised orders Cunningham inscribed another note: ‘I agree with the second sentence of paragraph 29, and little else’. Feverishly no doubt, his planning staff turned to paragraph 29, where the second sentence simply read: ‘The Fleet will be manoeuvred by the Commander in Chief’ (ibid., p. 222).

Figure 1.1 Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. A brilliant admiral, Cunningham did not suffer planners gladly, comparing his methods with those of Nelson, that skilled improviser and ‘discoverer of advantages as they arose’.

Writing later about his individualistic and devolved decision-making style, Cunningham compared his approach to Admiral Nelson, whose instructions, given days before Trafalgar, were as follows: ‘In case ships cannot be seen or clearly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy’ (Nelson, quoted in ibid., p. 222). It was an instructive parallel. Commenting on Nelson’s leadership style, his friend Admiral Collingwood had remarked on the huge importance of his flexibility: ‘Without much previous preparation or plan he has the faculty of discovering advantages as they arise, and the good judgment to turn them to a use … but it was the effect of system and nice combination, not chance’ (Rodger, 2004, p. 538).

British Plans

This is not a book about naval or military strategy, though occasionally such matters may intervene (and at this stage some readers may be wondering whether they have picked up the wrong book). It is about the central questions of how the British plan, how the balance is struck between individuals and central power, the role of British institutions as well as objectors, and how these have changed (or remained constant) over time. Was Cunningham’s style (admittedly a special style in a singular and especially important British institution) that of a wild one-off maverick, or does it have deeper lessons and implications for how the British organize themselves and plan successfully?

Our focus will be on great British plans – plans which delivered nationally significant infrastructure or profoundly shaped the physical environment (and sometimes both). These are almost always physical plans, although one of the case studies takes us into the realm of infrastructure for information technology, and another into what is increasingly known as the ‘knowledge economy’. By British is meant plans prepared and delivered within Great Britain. By great is meant plans which have been successfully implemented, have stood the test of time and are still widely regarded as achievements (or at the very least are not criticized as failures). These plans often incorporate high levels of innovation and act as pioneers and path breakers, triggering change and sometimes imitation. It is an exploration of achievement and of the conditions for achievement.

It is widely believed that Britain does not excel at the planning or execution of major projects. An independent review of Britain’s long-term infrastructure planning by Sir John Armitt concluded that its infrastructure has not been renewed or improved as it should. In 2012 Britain was ranked twenty-fourth in the world for the overall quality of its infrastructure; a study in 2006 warned that rising congestion could cost the country £36 billion per annum by 2025; lack of runway capacity in south-east England is threatening the country’s position as an international air hub; with a fifth of the country’s electricity generating capacity due to be retired in 10 years, we face the risk of power shortages. Governments are not planning for a projected rise in population to 73 million by 2035 (Armitt, 2013).

Another recent report claimed that the lack of a comprehensive planning framework to deal with issues across local authority and regional boundaries threatened the nation’s capacity to deal with environmental shocks, whilst reducing efficiency and increasing inequality. Unlike Scotland and Wales, England has no government department, or agency, charged with addressing strategic problems across the country (TCPA, 2012). No less than 60 per cent of the country’s infrastructure is now in private ownership – the highest proportion in the world – and this clearly poses an additional obstacle for state intervention. There is a high degree of policy uncertainty and too much silo thinking and bureaucratic drift within the confines of one or another Department of State (Armitt, op. cit.).

This depressing litany is not new. In his seminal book on great planning disasters, Peter Hall dissects four celebrated examples – London’s third airport, London’s motorways, the Anglo French Concorde, and the British National Library (Hall, 1980). Some of these causes célèbres failures are still with us. In 2012 the British government launched a Commission chaired by Sir Howard Davies, to once again examine the options for an expansion of London’s airport capacity, making its first report by the end of 2013, and reporting finally after the next general election in 2015 (Simmons, 2013). By February 2015 the Commission had considered fifty-eight options and received 50,000 submissions. Having narrowed the choice to only three options – two at Heathrow and one at Gatwick – it planned to consider the submissions behind closed doors, before making its recommendation to government after the May 2015 general election (Hollinger, 2015).

An explanation for these problems lies in economic and political history. As the historian Peter Mathias puts it: ‘Britain saw an industrial revolution by consent. It owed nothing to planners and nothing to policemen’ (Mathias, 1969). Yet the resonance for British strategic planning and political decision-making is clear enough: Britain has few of the characteristics of a ‘developmental state’ (Johnson, 1982), by which is meant a state which concerns itself with setting and achieving social and economic goals. In Britain big infrastructure planning can be frustrating and frustrated. We shall return to Johnson’s concepts later in the book.

Success and Uncertainty

Judging success is difficult. For it is usually the case that projects which flow from great plans have a long-term impact and a long shelf life. And as time goes by the context for judging them can change. What exactly do we mean by success and how can we define it? As if to balance its message, an admirable recent book on British government mistakes set out several examples of British policy success: the National Health Service, post-war public house building, the Clean Air Act, the Green Belt, seat belt legislation, the sale of council houses, inward investment in the automotive sector, the Trade Union Act 1994, the privatization of public utilities, and others. But no rationale was offered for the selection of these examples (about whose success there has sometimes been legitimate debate). Tellingly, the examples focused on central government initiative by regulation, rather than action (King and Crewe, 2013).

Planning is by nature riddled with risk and uncertainty. It operates over long time scales in plan-making and implementation, and even longer timescales in terms of impact on outcomes and wider effects. In a seminal book on strategic choice, the operational research specialists Friend and Jessop identified three key sources of instability and uncertainty: uncertainty about the relevant planning environment; uncertainty about decisions in related decision areas; and uncertainty in value judgements (Friend and Jessop, 1969)

Uncertainty related to the planning environment includes everything in the world outside the decision-making unit, the expected patterns of future change in the external environment and expected responses to future policies. This is a conventional kind of uncertainty which finds expression in forecasts of costs and forecasts of demand. Uncertainty in related decision areas includes future intentions and choices in all sorts of fields outside the problem under consideration. It relates to external agents who may have considerable independence. Uncertainties related to value judgements reflect the importance which decision-makers attach to consequences, either because these are of a fundamentally different nature, because they relate to different sections of the community or because they relate to different periods of time. Different groups in society may have different values and these values are likely to change over time, even within the same group. During the 1960s for example political leaders in Britain widely believed that high-rise flats were the ideal solution to housing problems. Within little more than a decade high-rise public building was seen as a failure; partly through experience, and partly through the emerging view which favoured conservation and refurbishment.

The density of uncertainty leads Friend and Jessop to see planning as a process of strategic choice, where decisions are made between alternative courses of action on the basis of an inadequate picture of their total implications. Throughout the process there is the possibility that decision-makers will place too much emphasis either on value judgements, on external decision areas, or on their own planning environment.

As Hall points out (Hall, 1980) even this tangled web of uncertainties may underestimate the problem, for the three types of uncertainty may not be quite as separate as they seem. Problems with the planning environment and related decision areas, he argues, can all be traced to changes in values. Thus population projections are reduced because the birth rate falls, partly because of changes like abortion law reform, but in turn reflecting changes in social values like feminism or pessimism about the future. Plans for London’s motorways, unveiled in the 1960s and finally dropped in the early 1970s, failed partly because of inadequate demand forecasts and partly because of changes in external policy that made investment in public transport more attractive. But the main explanation was almost certainly a major shift in values (Hall, op. cit.).

With hindsight we can see the 30 year era between 1945 and 1965 as a golden age for technocratic planning and mega-projects – an era the French refer to as Les Trente Glorieuses. In the Western world there was stable and predictable economic growth built on suburban expansion and new consumer industries, and stable energy supplies. Economic forecasting in this climate was effective; trends could be extrapolated with some certainty. The systems approach to planning, based on rational goal setting and forecasts of demand, was a logical consequence (McCloughlin, 1969).

In the United States four distinct phases in the history of urban public investment can be identified (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003). Prior to 1950 localities were reactive rather than visionary in their investments, received little aid from federal government and never imposed disruption on communities. Between 1950 and the late 1960s cities carried out massive investment projects with large-scale federal support, in order to restructure the urban fabric. Starting in the late 1960s and into the 1970s there was a backlash, with increasing popular and community protest. Beyond the mid-1970s public investment in big projects remained high, but projects without environmental mitigation or with serious disruption were much harder to advance. A similar pattern was experienced in Britain, France and many other Western countries. For some reason in the mid-1970s, popular support for the products of technocratic planning fell away, though the techniques and ideology still remain, notably in the importance of cost benefit analysis and demand forecasts in the evaluation of big investment projects.

Plans, Forecasts and Assessments

There are those who are sceptical about the benefits of strategic planning in general, and mega-projects in particular. These sceptics tend to fall into two camps: first, there are the ‘forecasting doubters’, who doubt whether long-term planning is possible at all; second, the ‘project doubters’, who argue that those involved in planning large-scale projects very often overestimate their benefits and underestimate their costs. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a ‘forecasting doubter’. His provocative book argues that forecasting is a delusion, that the fut...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Planning, History and Environment Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Figures
• Context
• Case Studies
• Explanations and Implications
• Index