Professor in Economics at Oxford and advisor to the European Commission Dieter Helm has added his voice to the Armitt/Labour argument that infrastructure projects should follow the ‘ODA/Olympics’model. Writing in the Financial Times on 1st February 2013 he said:

Delivering infrastructure at scale, on time and on budget is not rocket science. The Olympics showed the way to do it: there was a hard deadline, few losers and government money. What is needed is a set of clear system plans, planning procedures that compensate losers, and brutal honesty about what it is going to cost and who is going to pay. We must stop fretting about government accounting rules and tinkering with project lists and get on with it. Otherwise we will be left on the international sidelines.

A few days later he received the following response:

Sir, Dieter Helm (Comment, February 2) writes that “delivering infrastructure at scale, on time and on budget is not rocket science. The Olympics showed the way to do it.” Which upward revision of the Olympic budgets was he referring to? Who’s he kidding?

Tony Blackburn, Great Kimble, Bucks, UK

Not, I fear, the TB of Radio One fame, but we might as well turn to such founts of wisdom when professors and government advisors are given space to spout this kind of rubbish in august publications like the FT.