Why size matters: measuring success in the world of megaprojects

Crossrail, HS2, Hinkley Point C nuclear power station: three massive infrastructure projects, costing billions of taxpayers’ money, and all subject to controversial and time-consuming debate before getting the go-ahead.

But were these megaprojects in fact easier to get politicians to approve than other, smaller investments in UK infrastructure and transport?

That is the intriguing notion put forward by Isabel Dedring, global transport leader at Arup and London’s former deputy mayor for transport. At a recent seminar on whether bigger infrastructure projects really are better, Dedring told the audience this is often the case, politically, at least.

Why should this be so? Bridget Rosewell, a commissioner at the National Infrastructure Commission and one of the other panellists at the seminar hosted by the Institute for Government thinktank, pointed out that there’s plenty of analysis to show that smaller, more incremental infrastructure and transport projects work better, because it is easier to gauge their impact.

Dedring also demolished the notion of the “glory project” – the idea that politicians approve big projects so they get to cut the ribbon on, say, a power station. As she noted, the one certainty on any really big project is that someone else will take that moment of glory, because by the time it gets built, the politician who approved it will have long moved on.

The counter argument is that since all infrastructure projects produce protest, politicians might as well put all their eggs in a single basket. “The noise politically generated by small projects is much greater in relation to their size,” noted Dedring, in part because it’s easier to get people together to mobilise against smaller projects. “And politicians understand that.”

What’s more, once the ball does finally get rolling on a megaproject, it’s then pretty hard to stop. It may move on to the back burner for a while, Crossrail being one example, but big projects, noted Rosewell, get that advantage of “continuing, rolling time”.

And if your favoured project isn’t already huge, make it an indispensable part of a megaproject. That was the tip from Ed Hoffman, the former chief knowledge officer at Nasa, who is now a strategic adviser at US-based non-profit project management specialist PMI. Hoffman said when he was at Nasa, smart project leaders running small projects used to protect themselves by demonstrating their tremendous value to a key mission, preferably one with international interest. “The ones that get threatened are those that go over-budget and are not part of a key mission and have no international collaboration,” he said. “Once you have an international project, it’s harder to kill.”

One obvious example is Hinkley Point C, which is being built by French nuclear contractor EDF and its Chinese partners. The contract for the new power station was signed in September 2016 by UK business secretary Greg Clark, alongside Jean-Bernard Lévy, the chair of EDF, and He Yu, chair of China General Nuclear, who said the programme was a “triple win for China, Britain, and France” and the culmination of years of cooperation between the three countries.

Many people might think the biggest risk with megaprojects is the financial risk, but that is manageable, according to these experts. Far harder to manage is the social and political risk, not to mention the challenge of bringing together hundreds of experts in different fields and getting them to collaborate, as is the case at Nasa, for instance. The danger, pointed out Hoffman, was each of those experts focusing on their own subject, and leaving everyone else to do theirs. But to achieve real results, he said, everyone has to collaborate and communicate. Rosewell agreed – getting different experts in a room collaborating was, she said, “most exciting”. Managing that process, agreed Dedring, is the key skill in running megaprojects.

Sign up for your free Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with comment and sector views sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us: @Guardianpublic