Tech: infrastructure, energy and how systems fail

Technology on this desk means infrastructure and engineering rather than product launches. The subjects are the things that have to keep working: dams and barrages, rail, road pricing, water treatment, power, and the design decisions inside them that only become visible when they fail.

That focus is why the vehicle quota board sits on this hub. A congestion charge and a registration quota are engineering as much as policy: they are control systems with a measured input, a target and a feedback loop, and they are legible in exactly the way a piece of hardware is legible.

Platform and consumer technology appears where it has a physical consequence: a network build, a standard adopted, a device that changes how a place is used. A funding round does not qualify.