When the first government announced that it was going to build a integrated transport system in Leeds, Gareth, how old were you?

I was two years old.

Now, how old is your...

She is two years old.

Okay.

Generational delays, literal generational delays. Okay. All right.

Generational delays, literal generational delays.

Quite something.

Pretty good.

Yeah. Oh boy.

So yeah, so that's argument, whether that's arguments, whether that's a failure of oversight

within the command authority, whether it's central government going, ah, no, you're moving

too fast.

By the way, the review has said, you're moving too fast. By the way,

the review has said, you're moving the planning part and the business case part in parallel. You can't do that, even though that would, you know, reduce the design times by two years because the business case, a completely fucking pointless process, by the way. If politicians have said they're going to build a thing, why do they need a business case to tell them whether they should or shouldn't build the thing? Either build the thing or don't build the thing.

Don't pay consultants upwards of 10 million quid to just run around in circles and say,

oh yeah, here's some utterly meaningless numbers that have absolutely no bearing on reality.

Just what a cut country we are. Anyway, genuinely, it does go back to, I think, the governing

philosophy that was

instilled when we decided that the UK government was to be a service procurer instead of an

entrepreneurial state that did things, which is largely if the state wants to do something,

what it's able to do is try to create incentives, de-risk, commission studies. But it's so allergic to the digging of a hole.

...