the only growth industry is excuses

anel y trefniant yw be mae'n eu wneud

This news story (“Nuclear power plant ‘blocked after concerns for Welsh language’”) has been forwarded to me from several directions, variously described as “massive bait”, “a precision guided munition at you” and generally, the sort of thing that was bound to trigger a tetchy rant. I resisted the temptation for several seconds, then succumbed. The story is indeed very annoying, and extremely inaccurate (or rather – it’s an accurate story, accurately reporting an extremely misleading claim). But its inaccuracy, I worry, does point to a pretty deep pathology of the system. Just not the one that people think.

To start off with – it’s just not right. The Wylfa Newydd project on Anglesey/Ynys Môn was dropped before the publication of the Planning Inspectorate report, because Hitachi and the government weren’t able to come to an agreement about financing. The Inspectorate report was later published, but they can’t block anything – they make recommendations to the Secretary of State. The report did in fact recommend that consent should not be granted, on two grounds; the effect on biodiversity hadn’t been sufficiently mitigated, and nor had the socioeconomic effects of the 9000 temporary workers that would be needed during the building phase.

If you look through the 906 pages of the report (it’s not really that long, half of them are a record of all the consultation responses), you can chase up the specific issues. In section 8.8.36 (page 199), we have:

In the conclusions on the socioeconomic section (8.8.5, p200):

And (8.10.7, also p200).

So, in other words, the issue is housing – if you try to bring 9000 workers into one corner of an island with a population of 66,000 you are going to cause chaos of many kinds. The effect on the language is one issue, but the effect on tourism (having all the B&Bs occupied for a couple of years, then suddenly empty) was a bigger problem.

Not only that, but on p201, the Inspectorate actually gave a suggestion as to how this could be mitigated. (This is quite unusual; the Examining Authority, or ExA in the documents, is usually made up of only two or three people, and isn’t set up to give detailed guidance as to how to deal with the issues it raises).

So what’s actually happened here is that the planning system noted that there was a genuine problem of accommodating the temporary workforce and suggested how it could be mitigated (they also suggested the plant would need to build a medical campus because there’s no hospital on Anglesey with an A&E department). Then the project was dropped for unrelated reasons before the Secretary of State had to give a decision. I don’t think that can fairly be characterised as “blocked after concerns for Welsh language”, it’s not the reader’s job to guess that “after” might not imply causation.

But now the factoid is out in the wild – the nuclear power station was cancelled because Homer Simpson doesn’t speak Welsh! Haw haw! How ridiculously unserious! No wonder we can’t build anything!

And it’s that last exclamation which troubles me. One of the key points in the manifesto of this ‘stack has always been “take jokes seriously and metaphors literally, you will be surprised what you discover”. And having been working in this area a bit recently, I think there’s a bit of a pattern – this, the “bat shed” and the fish deterrent at Hinckley C.

That pattern is – at an industry conference, someone who has recently been associated with a pretty big failure comes up with a striking and funny-sounding thing. The details might not check out wholly, it might be quite arguable whether it’s all that it sounds like, but the important thing is the image that it cements in the mind. Some trivial furry mammal or minority language is being allowed to stand in the way of progress! I, the Great Engineer, am being forced by Johnny Penpusher to waste my time on considering girl stuff like biodiversity or socioeconomic impact, when I could be Building!

What’s going on here is the construction of a very interesting emotional accountability sink which might be nicknamed “Tell Me More About This Not Our Fault Theory, I Find It Strangely Compelling”. If you create an image of the planning system as so ridiculous that it’s literally impossible to build anything, then nobody can criticise you for failing to build the specific thing that was your job. If you proliferate anecdotes about underwater fish discos and words with no vowels in them hahaha, then you avoid awkward questions about what actually went wrong. In general, the aim is to encourage a complete resignation that the whole planning system is broken, so as to avoid consideration of what specific things are actually broken.

Because as well as creating a duty on you to make positive suggestions as to how to fix them, that might involve someone noticing that “where are the workers going to live” is not actually an unreasonable thing to expect the developer of a nuclear power station to have an answer to. A lot of people who don’t want to come out with their whole chest and say “biodiversity is just not something we can afford” or “minority languages are worthless” seem to be trying to achieve the same goal by delivering the funnies and leaving “well, what are we going to do then? Get rid of it all” hanging in the air. “Builders”, in this model, should only be concerned with things that look like technical issues of engineering; everything else is to be swept out of the way.

I might do a post on Friday about the things I learned from Will Butler-Adams, the CEO of Brompton bikes, but the single phrase of his that has stuck with me the most is “respect for the problem”. It’s just kind of dishonest from an engineering standpoint to fail to properly engage with the full set of tradeoffs and constraints - you just identify the most difficult parts of the problem as nothing to do with you, and then you can deliver a perfect solution which will remain perfect because it can never be implemented. The British problem isn’t NIMBYs - it’s NOMFUPs.

---

Some disclaimers that arguably should have gone at the top: I know quite a bit about Ynys Môn / Anglesey because I grew up there, and I’ve kept in touch with its political news because I was at school with Rhun ap Iorwerth, the current leader of Plaid Cymru and AS for Ynys Môn. It’s also fair to say I have a generally sceptical attitude to the nuclear industry, mainly because of all the PR people who used to regularly visit schools in North Wales. I also have a particular set of experiences with respect to the specific question of influxes of temporary workers into Welsh-speaking communities, because my family happened to move to Anglesey in 1977, at the same time as a large proportion of the construction workforce for the Dinorwig “Electric Mountain” pump storage station.