Daily Mail

Easing the project pile-up

- Alex Brummer

Aconsequen­ce of the long Brexit hiatus is that so many of the biggest decisions to be taken by government ended up in nowhere land. now they are arriving at the door of 10 Downing street in a mad rush.

As part of the Johnson government’s effort to speed up connectivi­ty across the country, it wants to get 5G networks and ultrafast broadband done.

Anyone who has scanned the headlines will know the fastest way of doing this stuff is to deploy chinese telecom whizz Huawei Technologi­es.

Therein lies the problem. The us is seeking to marginalis­e chinese technology on security grounds.

uK security services are none too enthusiast­ic either. Their view is that using Huawei to build infrastruc­ture is fine, as long as it doesn’t get near the sensitive stuff. That may solve the political problem, as the uK pivots between Washington and Beijing, but may create an engineerin­g problem.

using multiple contractor­s creates its own issues – as on crossrail, where the engineers who built the signalling have struggled to match their software with the advanced trains, and so postponing the start-up until at spring 2021. other big decisions left hanging include Hs2, the high-speed rail link between London and the north, future nuclear developmen­t and Heathrow.

It looks as if Hs2 might survive. It is worth listening to Michael Heseltine. He pressed on with the infrastruc­ture for canary Wharf in spite of huge opposition inside government. In the process he helped to cement Britain’s place as a world centre of finance.

As the national Audit office report has found, original costings on Hs2 were built on a european model which took no account of uK geography. The important thing for the future is to tighten oversight and hold management feet to the fire.

Another outstandin­g issue is nuclear. Hinkley is under way in spite of a contentiou­s funding model. French contractor eDF is shortly to pitch for a new super reactor on the sizewell site using different financing, similar to the pay-as-you-go interest structure being used on the Thames Tideway.

Finally, there is Heathrow. Given Boris’s threat to lie in front of the bulldozers I suspect no one is holding their breath.

Scam artists

BrITAIn may be the best place for committing white-collar offences.

Investigat­ions by the city regulator, the Financial conduct Authority (FcA), take a lifetime.

The FcA is still living with a backlog of cases dating back to the financial crisis of more than a decade ago.

new high profile probes pile up, including those into neil Woodford’s fund empire and mini-bond firm London capital & Finance.

The serious Fraud office struggles to bring cases to a conclusion. All this at a time when financial scams proliferat­e.

In the last few days alone, I have been subjected to two prospectiv­e scams.

The first to my home phone purporting to be Mastercard. The claim was that someone had sought to make a €600 payment overseas on my card. could I press ‘1’ on the keypad to go through a series of checks? I chose to directly call my Mastercard provider santander and was told it was the ‘dial 1 scam’ with which the bank was familiar. Why santander hadn’t chosen to communicat­e a warning of this to cardholder­s was not explained.

The second scam came by letter from a purported cTBc Bank in Hong Kong. It was handling the legacy of a John Brummer they thought might be a relative. Would I consider making a claim on the $11m estate? If I chose to do so, they would split the inheritanc­e ‘50/50’.

As a financial journalist I found both of these approaches suspicious. But I couldn’t but help think that the less knowledgea­ble victims of such attempted scams might easily be sucked in.

The uK spends up to £1.7bn a year on enforcing regulation and financial justice. online finance has been a gift to the crooks. Banks may regard the scams as a cost of doing business. That is no comfort to the victims and allows enforcers to pretend they are doing their job.

That cannot be acceptable.

Red faces

More egg on face for the FcA. It has been fined £2,000 by the Pensions regulator for poor governance of the house pension fund over its failure to provide a compliant ‘chair’s statement’.

Whoops!

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