No open unit-cost benchmarking observatory for UK infrastructure

HS2 Phase 1 costs about £396m per mile against about £46m for comparable French high-speed lines, and the Lower Thames Crossing consent alone cost about £300m. Britain Remade compiled a one-off dataset of 138 transit and 104 road projects across 14 countries showing UK costs running two to eight times EU peers, and it is static campaign research. NISTA's pipeline portal lists projects and values rather than standardised outturn unit costs, and official benchmarking stays internal, neither public nor machine-readable.

Cost disease that goes unmeasured goes unfixed. Without standardised, public unit costs, every project negotiates in the dark, overruns face no comparative scrutiny, and the £718bn pipeline risks repeating HS2. Open benchmarking is cheap, and it demonstrably shifted the debate the one time it was done.

A statutory open unit-cost observatory inside NISTA: mandatory standardised cost-breakdown and outturn reporting for every public project over £100m, published as machine-readable data with international comparators, the official successor to Britain Remade's database.

// Build now: First artefact: maintained open unit-cost database from published/FOI-able outturns, extending Britain Remade; statutory NISTA mandate is end-state.

The £718bn pipeline keeps overpaying while outturn unit costs stay unpublished, and the proven, cheap benchmarking instrument sits unfunded.