The National Infrastructure Commission is less than a year old. But it's already thinking about the infrastructure Britain will need in 2050. The NIC's chief executive Phil Graham sits down with Mark Leftly to discuss HS2, Heathrow – and what running a theatre company taught him about people
National Infrastructure Commission CEO Phil Graham, photographed for CSW by Photoshot
Phil Graham chuckles lightly as the squawks of urban gulls crowd out his soft voice. The 43-year-old is sitting on a nondescript balcony off his open-plan office in Eastcheap Court in the heart of the City of London.
The neighbouring 37-storey Walkie Talkie skyscraper, best known for melting a Jaguar XJ when the sun reflected off its concave structure three years ago, casts a shadow over Graham, the chief executive of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC).
The NIC’s location is symbolic. Although ultimately part of the Treasury, Graham’s staff have been placed a 15-minute tube ride from Whitehall to reinforce the notion that this is an independent body as concerned with the needs of City-based engineering firms that build the UK’s bridges, roads and power plants as the careers of their political masters.
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The NIC was established in October 2015 by George Osborne, and was mandated to set out the UK’s major infrastructure priorities to 2050. The government wanted to create a unit that would not be tied down by political expediency and was instead free to recommend what rail links, energy grids and broadband the UK needed within realistic funding envelopes over the coming decades.
Osborne boasted the NIC was “about jobs, growth, living standards and ensuring Britain is fit for the future”. The then-chancellor hoped the NIC would foster economic growth across the UK and improve the country’s international competitiveness.
Lord Andrew Adonis, a former policy adviser to Tony Blair who pioneered the idea for the High Speed Two (HS2) railway when he was transport secretary under Gordon Brown, resigned the Labour whip to become the NIC’s four-day-a-week chairman.
Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood phoned Graham, a civil servant since 2000 who had held a variety of senior positions in the Department for Transport, on a Thursday telling him he would start as chief executive on an interim basis four days later.
“There was a half-hearted attempt to imply that I had a choice,” smiles Graham. “But I think it would have been a fairly career limiting choice if I’d gone in the wrong direction.”
Less than a year later and Graham has taken on the job permanently, but has lost a chancellor in the wake of the nation’s referendum vote for Brexit. When he greets Civil Service World in late July, Graham has yet to meet Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.
But he is adamant the uncertainty this political earthquake has caused the nation’s finances will not delay the NIC’s timetable of publishing a National Infrastructure Assessment in 2018. This will outline the UK’s needs in sectors from transport to sewerage, water to energy, flood defences to digital communications, out to 2050.
Graham admits the economic impact of Brexit is likely to make “the fiscal position potentially tight”, but insists “it’s not a black and white picture” that means a vote to leave the European Union automatically results in less money for infrastructure.
“Our job really is to work out, whatever the pot of money is, how you spend that most wisely,” Graham adds. “Our job is not to decide on behalf of the government how much money it should be spending on infrastructure. It’s to provide robust, credible, influential advice about how you get the best value and the greatest returns out of the money that you have.”
Graham has a team of 20, including secondees from Big Four consultancy EY and communications regulator Ofcom. He wants to increase his staff to between 30 and 35 by the end of the year and change the current split of 80% civil servants to 20% private sector secondees to a 60:40 ratio.
Like many other senior civil servants, Graham frets about how public sector pay constraints make it difficult to hire “the toughest analytical brains in the country” needed to solve “some of the hardest problems in the country”.
"[Pay restraint] does have implications, but we can offer people the opportunity to work on some of the most interesting, varied, and challenging problems that the country faces" – Phil Graham
He smiles: “That does have implications, but the flipside of that is we can offer people the opportunity to work on some of the most interesting, some of the most varied, some of the most challenging problems that the country faces. And even more so than sort of standard parts of a civil service department, we can offer people the opportunity to work in what is a genuinely unique organisation, which is doing something that no-one else anywhere in the world is really trying to do: to set a long-term, cross-sector infrastructure strategy looking [ahead] about 20-30 years.”
Graham appreciates that attempting to calculate the UK’s infrastructure requirements so far in advance is an ask fraught with “uncertainty”. After all, 20 years ago, few would have anticipated that Graham’s own career would see him advising transport secretaries and chancellors or being secretary to the Airports Commission that recommended the expansion of Heathrow last year.
Prior to entering the civil service Fast Stream, Graham was a director, co-founding Brute Farce, a theatre company he claims “did a very good production of Frankenstein”. His colleague from that time, Rob Crouch, is currently performing a one-man show as legendary hell-raising actor Oliver Reed, though Graham says he never directed anyone famous.
“Sadly I can’t point to having directed Benedict Cumberbatch in a theatre above a pub in south London,” laughs Graham, explaining that he left for the civil service when he realised he wasn’t going to end up running the Royal Shakespeare Company.
But Graham argues his four-year foray as a budding Sir Peter Hall helped in the civil service, because he learnt how to “bring people together”. Today, he eschews having his own office for sitting in the middle of a row of computers next to his team, having not enjoyed the seclusion the one time he did separate himself from colleagues as head of transport security strategy several years ago.
His other main roles at the DfT involved advising on the government’s high speed rail strategy and the aforementioned time on the Airports Commission. Graham is a fervent believer in the need for HS2, even though costs for the project, which will carry commuters from London to Birmingham at speeds of 225mph before splitting to go to Leeds and Manchester, have risen to almost £56bn.
“I think case for HS2 is very strong,” argues Graham, who is father to an 18-month old son called Patrick. “I also think HS2 has a symbolic value that is greater than simply the strong case that it has as a transport project. The UK’s international reputation, as a country that can take hard decisions on infrastructure, has really grown over the last few years, through our ability to get on with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, to get on with Thames Tideway, to get on with Crossrail 2, to deliver the Olympics. I think HS2 is part of that as well.”
He also argues that the Airports Commission, chaired by former London School of Economics director Sir Howard Davies, “made a very strong case” for a third runway at Heathrow.
However, the Conservative government delayed a decision on whether to approve an £18.6bn additional landing strip at the west London airport or a second runway at Gatwick, which would cost half as much but have fewer direct economic benefits.
“I think HS2 has a symbolic value that is greater than simply the strong case that it has as a transport project" – Phil Graham
David Cameron had delayed a decision that could have split his Cabinet until after the EU referendum, but, having resigned and been replaced by Theresa May, will not make a choice at all. Ministers have said there will be a slight delay until the autumn.
Graham is not frustrated by these additional few months, and says the situation is understandable.
But he warns: “I think it is incredibly important now… that, come the autumn, the government does crack on with this and take a position.”
Overhead, engines from the planes flying east-to-west to Heathrow now threaten to overwhelm Graham’s voice. But the gulls remain louder, the growth of Britain’s most important economic infrastructure seemingly closer to the end of the NIC’s 30-year remit as the beginning.