Published in London Assembly Budget & Performance Committee, 1 November 2025.
The argument
The Elizabeth Line is simultaneously fantastic and a cautionary tale — four years late, £4 billion over budget, and its legacy includes an aversion to building another. The foreword to this Assembly report argues that the solution is creating a self-reinforcing system of success: modular designs that open in phases, decisive political leadership, and local funding that liberates projects from Treasury vetoes. When new infrastructure becomes normal, costs fall and politics improves — as Madrid’s metro proves.
Full article
Foreword: How can we build capital projects in London?
Neil Garratt
Isn’t the Elizabeth Line fantastic? Slashing journey times, seamlessly linking east with west: it’s a magnificent piece of railway engineering that does us proud. Alas, it’s also a sad flagship of all that’s wrong with major capital projects in the UK: four years late, £4 billion over budget, a bespoke one-off whose legacy includes the powerful aversion to building another. Simultaneously fantastic and anti-fantastic, it is Schrodinger’s Railway.
We’ve grown used to new railways, bridges, and tunnels being talked about for decades and rarely built, but it was not always this way. In 1890, the world’s first deep tunnel railway opened between the City of London and Stockwell, a bold experiment not just in tunnelling but the unproven new technology of electric power, as lack of ventilation ruled out steam trains.
It proved so successful that within 17 years it had been repeatedly extended and joined by so many other tunnelled railways that the 1907 London Underground map looks very similar to today’s. Not plans on paper but real trains criss-crossing the city, carrying passengers. We still enjoy the fruits of that burst of activity which transformed not just London for ever but cities around the world.
If that seems ancient history, consider that staple of east London life: the Docklands Light Railway. A report on route options was published in June 1982. Funding was agreed with Acts of Parliament passed in 1984 and 1985. By August 1987 it was open for passengers, with an initial network of two lines serving 15 stations with 11 self-driving trains which has been repeatedly expanded since.
In this report, you will read similar dramatic stories from a metro railway in Madrid and German rail electrification, to nuclear power stations in France, where major programmes were agreed and completed, sometimes in a few short years, leaving benefits that improve people’s lives for decades.
The question we set out to answer is, how can we recreate this magic?
When asking why big projects in Britain cost so much and take so long, many people seem to have a pet theory. Some popular favourites include rip-off contractors, Treasury Says No, the public sector, the private sector, the planning system, lack of ambition, useless politicians, gold plating, NIMBYism, and the myopic electoral cycle. Perhaps you have your own favourite.
What we found was something different. Although there is some truth to each of those theories, I’ve come to realise that the solution is not about fixing one single problem but creating a self-reinforcing system of success. This is what we find in other European countries.
A slow project generates more risk and more opposition, as each passing year provides new reasons to object but no tangible benefits. When was the last time someone got up a petition to demolish a railway, tunnel, or bridge once people were using it? So a modular project that opens in phases lets people enjoy the success sooner, generating public support, while decisive political leadership eliminates dither and mission creep.
Keeping things simple with modular, repeatable designs not only shortens the build time and risk, but lowers costs because with experience the people working on it get better, the supply chains develop, so they find new efficiencies and make fewer mistakes. Better still, a pipeline of projects maintains this skill base and supply chain as activity moves smoothly from one project to the next.
Lower cost then brings local funding into play. There are only three groups of people who can pay for new infrastructure: the users, via a fare or toll; local land owners, by capturing the land value uplift; and the taxpayer, via a subsidy.
The first two are limited, so as the cost rises the taxpayer subsidy grows. This puts the Treasury in the driving seat and sets up the begging bowl politics we’re so familiar with. But if you keep costs down, the fares revenue and uplift in land value cover all or most of the cost, so the project effectively pays for itself. This is how the Nine Elms Northern Line extension was paid for.
In this way, if London can fund and authorise its own new infrastructure, we not only liberate ourselves from the dreaded Treasury veto, we can create the steady pipeline of long term projects that keeps driving down the cost. And we reduce the zero-sum politics of north v south.
When new bridges, tunnels, and railways become a normal thing that people expect, we don’t just de-risk the individual projects but the politics around them. In Madrid, people loved their new metro system so much that elections became a contest to build even more: this report is a practical roadmap for London to navigate to that El Dorado. I hope you feel inspired to start the journey.