The Infrastructure Cost Review set out extensive recommendations to reduce the cost of infrastructure delivery. As highlighted in Chapter 6, the Government has already made considerable progress in realising savings and identifying opportunities to improve delivery. It has:
• started driving out duplication and redundancy in technical standards, through the work of an Industry Standards Group. For example, London Underground aim to reduce the number of pages in their in-house standards from 12,400 to 400 by March 2012, greatly simplifying requirements and focusing on performance and outputs;
• begun adopting a programme-based rather than project-based approach to procurement, through which, for example, the Highways Agency is targeting a £443 million saving across 14 major projects; and
• is publishing the complete pipeline of over 500 major infrastructure projects, to give clarity to investors and businesses and help infrastructure companies plan for the future. This will allow industry to realise savings through greater efficiency and supply chain sustainability.
The Government is also supporting work by industry and regulators to bring forward investment in the regulated sectors where this can realise savings through greater efficiency and supply chain sustainability. For example, partly as a result of supply chain considerations, Ofgem has approved in principle the £1 billion Western high voltage link from Scotland to England, subject to the completion of certain conditions. The Government will also work with Ofwat and the water companies to consider measures to smooth out investment cycles in the water sector to reduce costs.
In addition, the Government recognises that metal theft is a serious and growing problem that imposes major costs on infrastructure companies, as well as causing wider disruption to business and communities. The Government is establishing a dedicated £5 million national taskforce, led by the British Transport Police, to tackle metal theft. This taskforce's first steps will include an immediate programme of action targeting scrap metal dealers that are suspected to be trading illegally in stolen metal.