But HS2, the UK’s largest and most significant build in decades, has been denounced as an “appalling mess” by the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, for being over-budget and behind schedule.

It is by no means unique.

Other major schemes appear to be taking an age to get over the line, most notably the Lower Thames Crossing, Sizewell C nuclear power station and Northern Powerhouse Rail, which would transform journeys in Liverpool, Manchester, Warrington, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and York, with services running on to Newcastle and Hull.

Rachel Reeves backed this massive undertaking last month by committing £1.1billion to the scheme, with the Chancellor having already approved a raft of major projects in her quest for growth, including East West Rail between Cambridge and Oxford and Heathrow’s third runway while major funding has been secured for a tram network in Leeds. In total £113billion has been pledged to improving roads, rail, schools and social housing, in a bid to boost economic growth and modernise UK infrastructure.

But will all this money restore Britain’s reputation as a global leader or are we now destined to be a nation that struggles to get anything major done on time and on budget?

Sir John Armitt, senior vice president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, served as the final chairman of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission, a government agency replaced by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority.

He emphasised the need for consistency and long-term planning to improve the UK’s ability to get projects over the line.

“They don’t think slow and act fast; they do the reverse,” Sir John said.

“And therefore they tend to kick off with things before they’ve really thought through what is the actual purpose of what they’re doing.”

He added that in the construction industry, there is a tendency to spend 10% of budgets during the last 5% of the works, because engineers are going back and putting things right which were not done correctly in the first place.

Sir John pointed to countries in Europe that have been more efficient, and therefore have a more permanently skilled labour force.

“If you look at the French or the Spanish railways, what you see is a consistency of intent, a continuity of projects, so that designers and contractors are able to learn from each project,” Sir John said.

Projects to improve train services in Spain, which has one of the largest high-speed rail networks in the world, are “considerably cheaper” because “it’s just been building it out consistently for the last 30 years”.

But the UK tends to do “one-off projects, and then everything stops”.

Analysis has suggested that when it comes to building costs, the UK is pretty much on a par with other places.

However, when it comes to big civil engineering projects, the country tends to perform worse.

Professor Colin Turner, pro vice chancellor and executive dean for the faculty of computing, engineering and the built environment at Ulster University, described construction in the UK as too “stop-start”, which has an impact on the workforce, as a big chunk is upskilled for a build, before a lull means it then has to be trained again for the next big scheme.

Professor Turner added that the repeated undertaking of judicial reviews stalls projects.

“The planning system is the bit that causes the biggest problem,” he said.

“[It’s] the big killer because that makes every other problem a bit worse.”

“The fact is that the UK needs infrastructure, but nobody really wants it to be in their backyard,” Professor Turner added.

“That’s kind of understandable, but the difficulty then is no matter what sort of big public piece of infrastructure you try to build, wherever you try to put it, somebody doesn’t want it to be that specific place.

“That’s one of the things that caused difficulties for HS2 – you end up having to try to have big public procurements of the land, and all of that drives up costs.”

Sir John specified that, in 2010, it was taking an average of two and a half years to approve nationally significant infrastructure projects.

By 2020, the average had become more than four years.

“Smart people who are opposed to you will use every trick they can find in the law,” he said, recalling how when delivering the HS1 railway line in the South East, noise concerns were raised before opponents also cited the visual “intrusion” of overhead wires.

Engineers ended up having to install embankments alongside the line.

China, he highlighted, does not have this problem.

“In China, you can just drive a coach and horses through all of that, so there’s no real comparison,” Sir John said.

These factors are exacerbated by political “toing and froing”.

“You get to the point where when construction starts, you’re still not necessarily fully understanding what it is that you’ve got to build,” Sir John said, referring to HS2.

Professor Turner said there has been a “two-party pendulum” in Britain, which means experts are “relying on a baton pass from one administration to another”.

“That’s typically when you get vulnerabilities,” he said.

“A project may have been started under the ideology of one government, and then it’s another government that’s trying to implement it six years down the line.”

Moreover, he highlighted that China is notable for having had a significant amount of engineers in its political system, whereas the UK tends to be dominated by individuals with an arts background.

There is a risk that the UK’s capacity to deliver may not see major improvement, as Sir John worries that the country’s education system is fundamentally not fit for purpose.

“It starts in primary school,” he said.

“If children are taught not to like maths, don’t be surprised if they’ve turned away from it altogether by age 12.”

Sir John added: “We’ve devoted ourselves for the last 30 years to ‘university, university, university’.

“But 50% of young people are not going to go to university, so they’ve got to have a belief which says that there are real career opportunities outside of having a university degree.”

In particular, electricians are “going to be absolute gold dust,” he predicted.

Dr Hilary Leevers, CEO of EngineeringUK, specialises in the engineering sector’s workforce.

She highlighted a recent Institute of Engineering and Technology skills survey, in which 76% of respondents said they were struggling with recruitment, an increase from 50% in 2021.

“We are almost at risk of being the sector that cried wolf a long time ago, but actually is really feeling that crunch at this particular point in time,” Dr Leevers said.

“Engineering and technology roles are paid about 30% above the median, yet we aren’t opening up these pathways for young people.”

“We’re not seeing much commitment to doing more with young people,” she added.

“It isn’t present in the curriculum.”

This is particularly important as regards boosting the amount of female engineers, she emphasised, as if women were as present as male employees, there would be four million more people in the workforce.

“Those workers would make a massive difference,” Dr Leevers said.

The current supply of workers is being shuffled around rather than freshly recruited, she explained.

“You can’t go and recruit from defence or transport because they have their own needs,” Dr Leevers said.

“We need to be increasing the pool rather than just shifting people around it.” She called for longer-term planning from the Government.

“At the moment it feels like they’re really focused on the workforce needs up to 2030.

“Then there’s an assumption that after that things will be OK.”

Both Dr Leevers and Sir John said the Great Grid Upgrade – an overhaul of the National Grid – is perhaps the most important scheme currently in the offing.

The former said it is expected to create 55,000 jobs, with Sir John calling electricity “the mother of infrastructure these days”.

“It is the absolute critical area,” Sir John said.

“Without that, nothing else works.”

Sir John emphasised that the UK is predicted to be a totally electrified society by 2040, adding: “The transmission network is not sufficient to cope with the amount of offshore wind that is being generated.

“Wind generators are being told to literally close down because the grid can’t cope.”

Whether the picture improves hinges on the effectiveness of the Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act, which became law in December and aims to speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure.

“The new legislation should reduce the number of judicial review points in development which should definitely speed things up,” Professor Turner said.

But he cautioned that changes to enhanced funding for planning could take a while to really be felt.

“In the meantime other issues that may still cause challenges would be skill shortages and whether any change of government could affect longer running projects.

“I think Heathrow will be the one to watch.

“It is a logistically complex development that is still highly contended and there will likely be continued debate and legal challenge around it especially in terms of environmental matters.

“It will be interesting to see if the new legislation is successful in streamlining infrastructure development in general.”

If so, then Professor Turner believes there can be optimism and some forward momentum.

“The most important thing is consistency of purpose, consistency and vision,” Sir John said.

“My worry is that they intend to review the national infrastructure strategy over two years.

“But if you start pulling it up every two years, there is a grave danger that the fiscal pressures at that time are going to mean the Chancellor’s looking for savings.”

On the Government’s approach, he added: “I’m impressed by their ambition.

“But as I constantly say, ambition is great, delivery is what people can actually measure at the end of the day.

“So it’s no good just having great ambition if you don’t actually deliver it.”

Looking ahead, perhaps we should look back at recent success stories.

Sir John highlighted the A46, which was “finished ahead of time, and I think either below or on budget”.

But his crowning achievement was overseeing the delivery of the 2012 Olympics, when the eyes of the world were on Britain and its capacity to deliver.

Pitching it as a prime example of the right long-term thinking, he said: “The Olympics was relatively straightforward, because the IOC knows exactly what it wants, and each sporting federation knows exactly what it wants.

“So the technical specification of what has got to be provided for a sport, is very well established.”

In addition, there was a very fixed end date.

“Therefore, there was a recognition that, if necessary, time was coming of the essence, and therefore time would override cost,” Sir John explained.

These high stakes perhaps need to be applied to every British infrastructure build, as the world, instead of seeing an astounding recreation of the Industrial Revolution in the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony of a tremendously successful games, sees the UK lag behind countries on the move across the globe.