KEITH BOWERS | INTERVIEW
Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) tunnel route
and Gravesend on the south bank are only about a mile apart. Why would people not want to live in one and work in the other? The answer, fairly self-evidently, is that there’s a river in the way and it’s not very easy to cross it. “So we have the nationwide issue of
getting goods from south to north; and the local issue of allowing people to travel to the county next door. If we remove the constraints on movement we potentially help solve both. “You get into things like that as part of
the benefits of a Lower Thames Crossing, and that’s a good example of planning nowadays. We very rarely develop these transport infrastructure schemes with just one objective in mind. We look much more than we used to at what we get returned in social value, the community benefits. By adjusting the infrastructure you spin off business opportunities. Someone running a business in Gravesend previously had no clients in Tilbury; he could only look south. When the crossing opens he can look north as well as south: all of a sudden you double his market. “As well as those kinds of
considerations we can do a bunch of other community things off the back of a big infrastructure investment. We are intending to create new parklands, plant comfortably over a million trees, create new habitat areas. That is a project requirement. We will want to design it properly in ecological terms to get the best balance of species, so you suddenly find that in developing your tunnel scheme there is a whole relationship with
FOR THE BIG URBAN JOBS THERE ARE TWO KEY PROBLEMS THAT YOU TEND TO RUN INTO EVERY TIME.
Natural England [the government body responsible for the environment] and various agencies for birds and different types of wildlife. All of these groups have proper and legitimate interests that you want to serve; you end up with a fairly complex set of stakeholders. “So infrastructure planning today looks
at a much wider community than simply the people who actually want to make the journey through your tunnel. We have to look at social value, which is the legal term but it includes all of the wider range of things. “Biodiversity and carbon footprint are
two of the big ones but there are many others. Another big one for us at the
moment is around skills and training, because although the LTC is close to London it goes through areas that are definitely at the lower end of national deprivation scales. “We are going in there to do a job, so we
shall need people to do the job. We see a lot of benefit in providing local employment; so that has taken us into working with local authorities, local colleges and educational institutes and so on to look at the whole skills and training agenda. “The delivery phase is at least six
years, which is big enough and long enough to justify some reasonably substantial investment, but then to make that investment truly effective you really do need to focus around skills that are relevant to us, certainly, but actually skills that are generally in somewhat short supply across the construction sector and that will be of benefit long after the tunnel is completed. “So on both sides of the river at the
moment we are developing skills hubs which are basically training facilities.
Above: Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) tunnel section February 2026 | 35
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