black boxes and smoky rooms

problematic communications, part 2

Following on from last week’s post on the “I Never Said That Button”, I find myself worrying quite a lot about the strategic uses of communication. Ironically, I realise that I’ve been making a version of this argument myself in conversations with people over the last six months, but have been resisting writing it down because I am not sure if I’ve got a formulation that I’m prepared to defend publicly.

And I think this is part of a general governance problem which is working alongside and intertwined with that of “state capacity”. Consider my favourite practical example – the Hinckley Rail Freight Interchange project, as discussed in “The Problem Factory”. In my mind, it’s an example of three things. First, how complicated the modern world is – the sheer number of things that have to be taken into consideration when you’re building a railway loading yard in Leicestershire[1]. Second, how difficult it would have been to spot the show-stopping problems in advance. And third, that there was just no way to communicate.

Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers. If you had to pick between “vibration from construction work will damage the foundations of a historic building” or “the acoustic barrier is next to a Gypsy/Traveller campsite”, I don’t think it would be easy ex ante. Even when all the analysis is there, it’s hard to tell. Which is the root of my argument that UK (and Anglosphere) infrastructure procurement is beset by a problem of excessive risk aversion – since it is so difficult to know in advance what might be a show-stopper, the developers tend to gold-plate everything, and to address all possible objections, even quite low quality ones.[2]

One way of dealing with these issues would be to allow the developers to call up the Inspectorate, or meet them for a coffee or whatnot, and just say “come on Sam, which of these are looking like show stoppers? We’ve got a budget to mitigate real problems, we just don’t want to waste it commissioning surveys on crap. How about this one – this looks like it would be really expensive, are you looking at it seriously or is this bad faith interference? Does this one have any real local support, or is it just two or three loudmouths with a website?”.

But that’s impossible. In the first place, you can’t call up the Examining Authority for a nationally significant UK infrastructure project and have this kind of conversation, because the likelihood is that they won’t know. At the crucial stage where the planning work, mitigation options and surveys are being done, the Examining Authority consists of two or three people, none of whom have seen any of the papers before.

That’s the “state capacity problem”. But in many ways the bigger problem is that if you suggested doing this, everyone would throw an absolute fit of “what the hell are you doing?!?!?”. Back channel conversations between developers and the planning authorities just don’t seem right, and allowing similar conversations with the objectors wouldn’t cure it. There’s just a very strong intuition that if the inspectorate (which has a quasi-judicial role) is going to say that a particular planning issue is unimportant, or unfounded, or in bad faith, the only way they should communicate this message is through a reasoned decision in an official report.

Maybe we need to think more carefully about what we’re worried about, and whether there are better ways of solving the problem than the ones we’ve chosen. I think the key worry about back channel conversations is that they might be a vector for bribery or influence, but I’m not sure that the potential harm from that is of the same order as the harm from constantly delayed infrastructure. There’s also a general issue that communication systems which facilitate telling one person one thing and another person another can also be misused strategically. I’m not sure, more to come.

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[1] In this case, there was comparatively little contribution from the endangered species and heritage sites which usually get the blame. The key questions mainly revolved around “Can the local road system cope with that kind of heavy goods traffic?”. Which obviously isn’t a problem that our Victorian forebears had to worry about; they were starting from a much more blank slate, rather than a slate heap.

[2] Like those repeatedly raised by Buckinghamshire Council. I’ve suggested elsewhere that this is its own governance problem – strategic use of the planning system is antisocial behaviour just like graffitiing trains, and ought to be penalised, through the criminal justice system if necessary. My guess is that it would be almost impossible to get a conviction on this basis, but my guess is also that the kind of people who work the system this way are likely to be extremely risk-averse with respect to personal consequences. So you might be able to get risk-aversion working on your side.