Mr. Peter Strachan:

The Deputy's question is a bit like a previous question about whether we are good at project or not. "Yes" and "Yes" are the answers to both questions.

Could we build these things quicker? Yes. Let us consider certain other countries around the world, which I will not name because that would come back and bite me in the proverbial. While "cavalier" is probably too strong a word, there are places where there is a more direct and directional attitude to stakeholder engagement and planning and all of those things that I personally believe we must be respectful of. If we are not respectful of them, the project will take even longer because people will take judicial routes to have matters reviewed, get in the way and so on. I am not a massive advocate of saying we should just chuck all of the planning legislation out of the window, not bother with stakeholder consultation and instead just build it because it is the right thing to do and we know we are right. Sometimes a bit of arrogance comes through with that approach. We need to be very clear about what it is that we are specifying. We need to do all the good planning, by which I mean planning in the round, not just planning on the ground, in other words, the planning of the service specification, the procurement process and the execution and delivery fees. We need to get all that right upfront so we are not then chopping and changing through the piece. In my experience, the worst thing that can be done in any project, be it a rolling a stock order, a bus order or an infrastructure project, is to say you did not want something this way around but another way around or that it would not be a really good idea to build an intermediate station at this point or a spur over to that point because that is what is now needed. Those are the things that cause delay and, most important, cost changes and overruns, which goes back to what we said about fiscal constraints.

I am not shying away from the fact that in the big projects we do the groundwork now to make sure we have got it right for the future. Then when we proceed, we execute swiftly and professionally and to the specification that we first thought.