34. Hugh Pearman, 'The only way is up', Sunday Times magazine, 2004, page 38 to 47

35. Rebecca Bream, 'Train delays caused by crumbling infrastructure fall by 20%', Financial Times, 1 June 2004

36. Dennis Lenard, reported in Jim Pickard, 'Britain 20 years behind, says building adviser', Financial Times, 1 June 2004, page 4

37. Professor Sir David King, Future flooding, Office of Science and Technology, 22 April 2004 and posted on www.foresight.gov.uk

38. Kevin Done, 'Airlines attack BAA on Heathrow', Financial Times, 7 June 2004, page 1

39. John Elliott, quoted in 'Petrol truce threatened as minister goes on the attack', Daily Mail, 5 June 2004, page 19

40. Tessa Mayes and Jack Grimston, '"Fit" offices help staff fight the flab', The Sunday Times, 9 May 2004, page 12

41. Dennis Lenard, reported in Jim Pickard, 'Britain 20 years behind, says building adviser', Financial Times, 1 June 2004, page 4

42. James Woudhuysen, 'How IT can make city life better', IT Week, 27 April 2004, and posted on www.itweek.co.uk

43. See www.iee.org

44. Matthew Gwyther, 'Food, booze and big cheeses', Management Today, June 2004, page 3

45. See for example 'Why al-Qaeda may save the world', leader, New Statesman, 7 June 2004 and on www.newstatesman.com

46. See for example 'How to deliver services closer to home: a round-table discussion on new localism', special supplement to the New Statesman, 7 June 2004

The continuance of Victorian Britain - concluded

Writing prior to the joint Hill & Knowlton and spiked! seminar Mind the Gap about the backwardness of construction and transport, James Woudhuysen takes a look at the decrepit state of British innovation.

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. (34) Witness www.newcityarchitecture.com. Train delays are down as lines are gradually being overhauled. (35)

Still, construction is so backward that even the government makes rhetorical attacks on it. Thus Dennis Lenard, chief executive of the Department of Trade & Industry's influential £7.5m quango, Constructing Excellence, has condemned UK building as '... trapped in an 1980s timewarp'. (36)

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 £240m, by a German firm to an Irish one.

Despite some technical advances, UK construction remains backward. UK civil engineering is also backward. London has few bridges. The Thelwall Viaduct, which carries the M62 over the Manchester Ship Canal, has been half shut since July 2002. The Mersey's second, £335m 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 £1bn year over the next two decades: that on flood defences. (37)

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, but rather with the property and retailing giant BAA - for filling up its £4.2 billion fifth terminal, due for completion in 2008, with planes almost entirely run by BA. (38)

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'. (39)

As for movement within buildings, even that is now held a bad idea. The recent discussion on how buildings can help their occupants fight obesity by making speedy, automatic lifts less accessible reveals much. (40) It speaks of a desire to get right away from technological innovation. The people-carrying that Otis Elevator pioneered in America in the late 19th 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. (41)

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 to having a section on IT on its website, let alone allowing that forum do discuss what IT could do for Scotland's capital city. (42)

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. (43) But for IT to be adopted in transport, as in construction, people will have to rally round a wider agenda.

'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'. (44)

He 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 19th century, not the 21st.

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 point of prefabricated building is productivity

The same holds true 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. (45)

In local government itself, the potential for IT is seen in terms of local e-democracy and local e-procurement. (46) Electronic voting and electronic buying - these are the only significant ways IT is pressed into service for urban regeneration and urban transport systems.

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 face of Isambard Kingdon Brunel. James Woudhuysen 10 June 2004

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