How contractors manipulate infrastructure projects leaving us all out of pocket and frustrated - David Behrens

It’s not as if the place is unattractive. The gentrified marina and Fruit Market quarter is as good an example of urban renewal as you will find anywhere in England. But to the casual traveller it remains hidden behind the street furniture in which the city seems to specialise: the orange cones that outnumber the people by perhaps 1,000 to one.

The A63, the sole thoroughfare through the centre, has been coned off for five years now and will remain so for at least another. National Highways budgeted £355m to build an underpass beneath it that would connect the remaining shops to the north with the restaurants and waterside to the south. It was supposed to be finished by now.

But last Christmas they let slip that the project had been more “challenging” than they expected. Turns out, Hull is on an estuary and it’s built on soft clay. Who knew?

Not being able to get freely through the city is bad enough but for two years National Highways made it as hard as possible to even get near it. Lane closures on the M62 where it crosses the River Ouse had slowed traffic to a crawl while joints on the bridge were replaced. The work was finished only last autumn but this week it appeared to have been for nothing. The joints had failed so back came the cones.

How could they have got it so badly wrong, not once but twice?

Put simply, they listened to the wrong people. They allowed themselves to be manipulated by their contractors – the big engineering consortia to whom they outsource projects and who then subcontract the menial jobs of imposing speed limits, laying out the cones and generally leaning against their shovels.

They are not the only transport authority to have been wrong-footed. On Wednesday the Planning Minister, Matthew Pennycook, admitted that Britain’s failure to get a grip on the HS2 rail project made us an international laughing stock. The gravy train of HS2 has seen at least two subcontractors investigated for fraud and it will be another decade before the first service runs.

HS2, like the A63 and M62, is a casualty of contractor culture, a tail-wagging-the-dog system that gives hired hands the upper hand. It runs right through public spending.

I saw how it works when I took a job at the Highways Agency, forerunner of National Highways. The name has changed in the 20 years since then but nothing else.

They had hired me to build them a website, which I knew a bit about, but when the job was done they put me in charge of rolling out TV traffic screens in motorway service stations, an area in which I had no knowledge and even less interest.

“Don’t worry about it,” said one of the many managers, a man who had got where he was despite a depth of ignorance even greater than mine. “You’ll hire a consultant to do the work. They’ll tell you what it costs and you’ll sign it off.” That was the gist of the conversation.

“What’s the point of me being here, then?” I asked. “Well, someone has to manage the contractors,” he said. It sounded as unrewarding for me as for the taxpayers who would have to pay both the consultant and myself when one of us was clearly surplus. So I left them to it and returned to the private sector. I would not have been surprised if my successor had hired a spaceship to beam traffic information to Toddington services, so long as it was what the consultant recommended.

That was how public money got spent and still gets spent – not just in transport but on defence, health, education and everything else we’re bad at delivering. Every pot is managed by an official like the former me, covering his back by hiring a consultant he lacks the specialist knowledge to gainsay.

The bigger the pot, the higher the stakes. One day it’s service stations, the next day HS2 or the A63 through Hull: they’re all contracted out and the same tail-wagging arrangement applies to them all.

The Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, says she wants to learn from past mistakes to avoid a similar fiasco with Northern Powerhouse Rail, the next big transport project which will connect cities across the Pennines, though probably not Hull.

She could learn a lot about what not to do by visiting Whitefriargate one lunchtime. If she can get there.