Section 6: Choosing the future · Chapter 31
The 20-year horizon
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In this section
Two clocks
Everything in this report runs on one of two clocks.
The first is fast. A Commons vote, a remit letter, a vesting day, a drawdown from an account that already exists. The powers are on the statute book. Chapter 29 lists them.
The second is slow, and no vote shortens it. An apprentice takes four years to train. A wind farm takes six from consent to power.1 A house takes a year to build and longer to get planned. Concrete cures at the rate concrete cures.
Read the timeline that follows with those two clocks in mind. Where a date looks slow, it is a physical constraint. Where it looks fast, it is because the power already exists and only the decision was missing.
Why the later years are not more of the same
We have written this report as a series of separate projects. Energy. Housing. Transport. Work. Somewhere to go.
They are not separate. Each one lowers the cost of the next, and past a certain point they stop adding and start multiplying.
Take traffic.
Build homes at density near a station and more journeys are short. Run buses, trains and Metros as one integrated network, with one fare and one timetable, and the psychological barrier of not driving disappears. Free up road space and, on its own, it refills. That is well established, and any honest case has to start there. But the Downs-Thomson relationship cuts the other way too: when the alternative gets faster, the equilibrium moves with it. Congestion settles at the point where driving and the alternative take about the same time, so a public transport network that is genuinely quick reduces everyone’s journey time.2
Then the slow part. A generation of children who travel independently from the age of eleven, safely and free, do not acquire a car the week they turn seventeen. Habits formed in childhood last a lifetime.3
None of those four things clears a jam by itself. Together they change what a road is for.
That pattern repeats across every chapter here.
“A warm house lowers the demand the grid has to meet, which lowers what the grid costs to build. Secure work makes a mortgage possible, which changes what gets built. Somewhere to go makes density desirable, which makes the homes possible in the first place.”
How to read the four windows
The unit changes as the window widens, and it changes on purpose.
Year one is decisions. Nothing is built.
Year four is first output. The projects are still separate.
Year ten is rates. A hundred thousand a year, not a total. The projects begin to meet each other.
Year twenty is what daily life is like.
We can be precise about a decision a year out. We can only be directional about a life twenty years from now. The further out the window, the less we should pretend to know, and the more the answer is a description rather than a law or a number.
Year one
Nothing is built in the first year. Everything is decided.
The Charter for Budget Responsibility is revised. A motion, a division, a majority. The remit letter to the Monetary Policy Committee is reissued. Active quantitative tightening gilt sales stop. The Ways and Means account is used again.
Water is taken into public ownership under an Act that has been on the statute book since 1991.
The National Infrastructure ISA opens. The regional investment banks are capitalised. The first Exchequer Notes are issued.
Then the part that is unusual, and the part everything else depends on.
The first apprenticeship cohort is recruited before the first contract is let. Planning departments are staffed. Councils rebuild the in-house engineering, surveying and project accounting they were told to outsource. The procurement framework opens. The twenty-year order book is published, so that a kiln operator, a heat pump manufacturer and a training provider can each invest against it a year before the first order arrives.
No ribbon-cuttings. Nothing to photograph. A year of decisions, taken under powers that already exist.
Year four
The first cohort qualifies. Four years is how long it takes, which is why this window falls where it does and not somewhere rounder.
The first council homes are complete and occupied. Not many. The first ones.
Retrofit is running at scale, because there are now people to do it. Households in retrofitted homes are paying less – and at this stage they are paying less mainly because they are using less. Abundant energy at cost has not arrived yet. Insulation works faster than infrastructure. That is the two clocks, visible in a single utility bill.
Water has been in public hands long enough to have a first set of accounts nobody is hiding.
Manufacturing lines signalled in year one are open. The order book was the reason they were built.
The projects are still separate. A housing programme, an energy programme, a transport programme. They have not yet started meeting each other.
Year ten
The rates arrive.
A hundred thousand council homes a year. Not a total – a rate, sustained, the way Britain sustained a higher one for thirty-five years after the war.
Retrofit at a national rate rather than a bespoke scheme. The second cohort of installers is being trained by the first.
Energy is where the phase-in shows. Everything built off-market from year one is generating at cost. But the existing fleet is under Contracts for Difference that run fifteen years, and contracts signed in the late 2020s run into the 2040s. They have to be honoured. Legal certainty is worth more than the saving, and a state that tears up its own agreements pays for it in every deal it signs afterwards. So the system-wide price falls as the old contracts roll off, on a schedule no government can accelerate. Ten years in, the direction is unmistakable but the job is not finished.
This is also the point where the projects stop being separate.
Homes near stations, on a transport network that runs as one system with one fare. A town centre with a reason to walk into it. Work secure enough that a mortgage is possible, which changes what gets built, which changes where people live, which changes what the network has to carry.
Each of these projects is worthwhile on its own. Together they compound.
Year twenty
Twenty years is one childhood.
A child born in the first year of this programme leaves school in a different country. More than just statistics. A different country to live in.
There’s no meter to feed. No coats on indoors. No damp on the bedroom wall. No food bank in the parish hall. No sleeping bag in the shop doorway on the way into town. No boarded-up unit on the high street. No queue of engines outside the school gates at half past three.
None of that took a campaign. It took a decision about who owns what, and what things cost.
Now look at what’s become normal.
They walk to school, and so does everyone else. They get the bus into town at fourteen and think nothing of it. There is a bus home after ten. The pool is open and it is warm. The library lights are on. The playing field is still there, with trees on it old enough to climb.
They know the names of the people in their street. They ride a bike to their mates’ house and come back. They go out in the morning and come home when they are hungry, the way their grandparents did.
Their youth club is warm, and they can’t remember it being anything else.
That is not a policy. It is what a place looks like when the people in it can afford to live there.
They can hear birds in the morning. The air smells fresh.
And they grow up believing they will be better off than their parents.
Because they will.
- Every project is different and no single figure describes them all. Recent British experience runs at roughly four to six years from development consent to first power. Hornsea 1 was consented in 2014, began construction in January 2018 and delivered first power in February 2019. Hornsea 2 was consented in 2016 and reached first power in December 2021, fully operational the following August. Outer Dowsing received consent in February 2026, with construction expected from 2027 and first power in 2030. Several of these programmes spanned the pandemic, which delayed almost everything. Two things are worth noting. The figure used here is consent to power, which is the part a government controls least; the phase before consent — leasing, survey, environmental assessment, grid agreement — commonly runs longer than the construction itself, and grid connection dates have been the binding constraint on some projects rather than any physical difficulty at sea. And the six-year figure is used illustratively, to make a point about the difference between the speed of a decision and the speed of construction. It is not a delivery estimate. ↩︎
- The Downs-Thomson relationship is named after Anthony Downs, who described it in 1962, and J. M. Thomson, who set it out independently in 1977. It is not the same as induced demand, though the two are often confused. Induced demand says that new road capacity generates new traffic until the road is as congested as before. Downs-Thomson says something more specific about where that congestion settles: on a corridor with a parallel public transport route, the equilibrium speed of driving tends towards the door-to-door speed of the alternative. People switch modes until the two are about equally unattractive. The consequence is counter-intuitive and it is the reason this report treats transport as a system rather than a set of separate schemes. If road capacity is expanded while the alternative stays the same, some passengers switch to driving. Fewer passengers means less revenue, which means reduced frequency, which means longer waits, which pushes more passengers into cars. The equilibrium moves down. Run the mechanism in reverse and it works in your favour: a faster, more frequent, better integrated network raises the speed at which driving stops being worth it, and congestion settles at a lower level. The reinforcing effect on the public transport side is sometimes called the Mohring effect, after Herbert Mohring’s 1972 work on economies of scale in scheduled services. Higher patronage justifies higher frequency, higher frequency reduces average waiting time, and reduced waiting time attracts further patronage. Two qualifications. The relationship holds most clearly on corridors where a genuine parallel alternative exists, which in much of Britain it does not, and that absence is the point. And it describes a tendency, not an arithmetic law; the equilibrium is affected by parking cost, fares, land use and much else. It is well established in the transport economics literature but it is not a formula into which numbers can be fed. ↩︎
- This is a description of what becomes possible, not a proposed rule. When a child travels alone is a decision for their parents and nobody else, and no government should have a view on it. The point is that the decision is currently made under constraints that are not natural. The largest international study of children’s independent mobility surveyed more than 18,000 children aged seven to fifteen across sixteen countries between 2010 and 2012. Finland ranked first on almost every measure. England ranked seventh. The single biggest factor cited by parents for restricting their children was fear of traffic. See Shaw, B. et al., Children’s Independent Mobility: an international comparison and recommendations for action, Policy Studies Institute, 2015. Finnish children are not braver and Finnish parents are not more relaxed. They are making a different calculation because the streets, the services and the distances are different. Free travel and a reliable network do not make the decision for a parent. They change the terms on which it is made. ↩︎