Is this another Action Plan for Jobs?

We’ve built a tracker to monitor the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce’s recommendations. It’ll go live after the action plan is released, at 11.00. Check it out here from 11am.

The Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce’s Action Plan gets published at 09.30 today. We haven’t read it yet1. But it’s important enough to cover anyway.

Taskforces are committees of serious people, brought together to tackle the biggest and thorniest problems.

This can be a good or a bad thing. It’s good if the seriousness of the taskforce is used to solve the difficult problem. It’s bad if the difficulty of the problem necessitates a serious-looking taskforce response — but without the attendant action.

In Ireland we’ve had both kinds of taskforces. 2012’s Action Plan for Jobs was a great one. Under that plan, the whole of government aligned around a single objective. The actions were specific, and the pressure on officials was total. The results were excellent.

Less successful taskforces would include the 2016 Action Plan for Housing, the 2024 Housing Commission and the 2024 Dublin City Taskforce. Why did they not succeed?

A taskforce-worthy problem is never small or simple. A taskforce-worthy problem is deep and wide, touching on multiple arms of the state. The narrow or shallow problems have been solved already.

The taskforce remedy is a peculiarity of the Irish system. The Irish government is centralised and siloed. The arms of the Irish state do not intersect anywhere except at the Taoiseach’s desk. There is nobody in Cork City, for example, to broker deals between the local transport and housing departments. Our system does fine with narrow problems, but it struggles with wide ones that require coordination between departments. Hence the taskforces.

This is why the Action Plan for Housing, for example, and the Housing Commission didn’t drive change. Housing is bigger than the Housing Minister. There is no single elected official with the power to arrange housing, planning, transport, and power. It’s too multifaceted. And the Commission wasn’t able to compel the many arms of the state to do the needful.

A bad taskforce, then, is one that can point out thorny multifaceted problems… but can’t make the system align around solving them. There’s a go big or go home quality to these things.

Monitor the action plan's implentation

The 12 sins of Irish infrastructure

To take its place in the pantheon of successful action plans, the one thing the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce’s Action Plan must do is persuade the system to align around it. Infrastructure is the deepest and knottiest problem of the lot. It impacts the capital budget of every government department, agency and semi state company. To succeed, this taskforce needs create a sense of action and urgency.

It’s not hard to get a sense of the plan by reading the taskforce’s interim report from July. The taskforce spent the spring and early summer consulting and interviewing. The report noted 12 barriers to infrastructure delivery that turned up in the course of the taskforce’s research.

The first was public acceptance. Infrastructure suffers from concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. Opponents of infrastructure are much more motivated than its supporters. This dynamic is reflected in consultations around new infrastructure.

The second was a growing regulatory burden. The report noted complex and overlapping layers of EU, national primary / secondary legislation, policy statements and strategies.

The third was risk aversion. Faced with piles of complex regulation, risk-averse officials and regulators rely on process. As a result, the volume of documentation needed for any application, big or small, has exploded.

The fourth was the rise in the use of judicial review. For project opponents, judicial review has become a low-risk tool to delay or obstruct. Its use has increased in the last decade. Applicants have little or no downside risk. Public bodies rarely recoup costs, even when they win.

The fifth is the grave consequences of judicial review. Judicial reviews are not just more frequent. They’re also slower, more expensive and more legally risky than they need to be.

The sixth is poor coordination. Multiple state bodies feed into projects. They have narrow mandates and don’t naturally coordinate with each other. The result is processes that work sequentially when they could be in parallel and duplication of oversight.

The seventh is slow internal processes. The early appraisal and procurement stages for government projects are viewed as slow and burdensome. Are they worth the time and effort?

The eighth is inconsistent planning approvals and timelines. As I wrote last week — even within one local authority area — planning guidelines are inconsistent and they are many (434 in Dublin’s current plan). Big projects must deal with multiple local authorities, which multiplies complexity further. The upshot is that applicants face different rules in different areas, unpredictable conditions, delays agreeing pre‑commencement details, and uncertainty over timelines.

The ninth is weak prioritisation. The state’s many arms have many priorities. There’s no framework for ranking nationally important projects against trivial ones.

The tenth is procurement. Procurement relates to what the state buys from its partners, and how it buys them. When it comes to infrastructure, the Irish state has a bad habit of handing off as much risk as possible to contractors. This is a penny-wise strategy. Contractors build the extra risk into their bids, and the overall cost of the project goes up. The most efficient infrastructure builders recognise that risk is inherently expensive, so they are good at bearing and managing it. They pass on as little risk to contractors as possible.

The eleventh is short pipelines. The Irish state is loath to commit to projects in advance. This, again, is penny-wise. Commitment to a long pipeline of work attracts more and better contractors. And it justifies the state’s investment in its own capabilities.

The twelfth is low productivity in construction. Though this is a global problem, Irish construction sector productivity is particularly poor. The report chalks this up to sub-scale firms, cyclical demand and complex planning.

Pressure

Progress Ireland agrees with the taskforce on the 12 problems. We’ve written about most of them before in one form or another. While we don’t know the remedies the taskforce will seek, the right diagnosis of the problems is more than half the battle.

These problems are deep and broad. They’re also pretty much impossible to fix on a case-by-case basis. They’re too knotty, and there are too many of them. We see the accelerating infrastructure taskforce as a unique opportunity2 to focus the attention of dozens of secretaries general, TDs, cabinet members, and agency CEOs on this one issue, for one moment. If it can convince the system that change is inevitable, it might even succeed.

Getting this done will require pressure. It’ll need unrelenting pressure from the top of government, as well as from the outside. If deadlines start slipping, the whole thing could unravel.

So we’ve done some coding. We’ve built a tracker. It monitors all the Infrastructure Action Plan’s actions, and when they are meant to be completed, and whether they’re on track to being completed. You can see the tracker here from 11am.