Why Britain Can't Build

Britain, it seems, just cannot build. The half-built HS2, nuclear power plants waiting more than a decade for government approval, the search for a new runway for London that began in 1968 or the tunnel under the Thames that has spent a quarter of a billion pounds on planning applications without ever disturbing the soil – the evidence is depressingly plentiful.

Then there are the absurd reasons – the bat tunnels; the fish discos; the stations questioned over their impact on the local availability of snooker tables; the nuclear power plant turned down in part because the construction workforce was unlikely to speak sufficient Welsh.

But the real obstacle here may not be the mad but the sane. The planning system the government has set out to reform has built itself over the past 80 years, in order to deal with genuine concerns. It is only now that policymakers have learnt how hard it is to pave any road, to hell or otherwise, with such a supply of good intentions.

The weightless weight

Few of the barriers that stand between people and the buildings proposed to serve them are ‘real’, at least in the sense that transporting a tonne of earth or auguring a foundation would be.

Britain’s engineers and architects are respected worldwide; but before they can break ground on a major infrastructure project, the law demands that they secure the permission of the state to build. That can only be secured by going through a planning inquiry. Before the inquiry, it is necessary to gather a shopping list of documents, typically running to thousands of pages of information. It is mandatory to consult the people affected by the project to support this information and to placate up to 27 different government bodies along the way.

For that to be possible, they must examine multiple different ways of delivering the same project, built on another evidence cycle of its own.

This planning system has not been created in one enormous act of folly, but in dozens of tiny, reasonable steps. Every contributing measure has felt like common sense

According to the government, this process takes around four and a half years – up from two and a half in 2010 when the current legal regime came into force. In practice it is more: these figures ignore the work that goes in before the formal applications begin. For highways, the full pre-construction process was reckoned at just over five years when things run well; and has been over a decade for projects as seemingly trivial as a new slip road on to the A12 in Essex.

And this means that it is now increasingly unlikely that a politician elected today on a promise of building something will have anything to show for their efforts by the next election, other than a tower of planning documents. With the current government so committed to greening the energy system by 2030, the slowness with which projects develop is acting as a silent block on their democratic mandate.

It is also remarkable that these barriers all exist on an abstract, intellectual level. This does not lessen their impact, but it does heighten the absurdity of the situation. As a nation, we profess our wish to get building – even half of Green Party voters believe planning rules should be flexed for some projects. Yet infrastructure building in the UK is trapped under a seemingly immovable weight, which on closer inspection is made of nothing more solid than thought.

The unplanned system

How did this come about? Paradoxically, this inertia is the consequence of how easy building has become.

When we think of the great building works of Victorian Britain, we imagine an Isambard Kingdom Brunel or a George Stephenson. But at the same time, another group of innovators were at work. Across the 19th century, a project was under way to reinvent nature. Poets reimagined it; sportspeople colonised it; institutions such as the National Trust acquired and protected it. The battle for England’s green and pleasant land had begun in parallel with the rise of dark satanic mills.

By the interwar years, there was little doubt that the builders were winning. Mechanised equipment and modern materials, coupled with unbounded confidence, meant that construction was surging. To take one example, London’s boundaries moved by four miles in 20 years, swallowing the entire county of Middlesex. The Second World War saw all restraint surrendered: between 1939 and 1945 the Air Ministry laid out 444 new airfields, including the six-runway RAF Heathrow, and built close to a million outbuildings.

These were not casual facts – the impacts were felt deeply at the time, but were beyond what the law could control. Partly to address this, Clement Attlee’s government brought the use of land under direct state control. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 established the idea that all development needed to be approved by the state before it could proceed. This was consciously intended to prevent the ‘wrong’ kind of development, and ensure building would be yoked to the making of a better society.

At first, this system was no brake on development. Attlee’s ministers approved National Parks and green belts alongside 11 new towns on greenfield sites; 50s Britain nonchalantly created the motorways, the Supergrid, and two thirds of the world’s atomic power.

The barriers that have stopped Britain from building in recent years are anchored in this basic tension: a thousand reasonable questions making an unreasonable examination

However, as the cranes went up, so too did the objections. Public unease about the impact of new construction grew, and by the 1960s something had to be done. New laws in 1968 required plan-makers to engage the public as a matter of course.

The consequences for this were not what was anticipated. Within a few short years, acrimonious public inquiries led to shock defeats for plans to redevelop Covent Garden and to build a network of urban motorways in London. Realising that development plans could now be defeated, objectors rushed to arms.

The effect of these changes was sharp. During the 1960s, Britain had been approving and building between two and three new reservoirs a year. But from 1973 new plans became enmeshed in planning inquiries lasting five or six years. It transpired that flooding villages and valleys could, remarkably, be contentious for the people living there. As a result, there has been no successful planning application for a new reservoir since 1976.

Since then, the knots have only tightened. Species protection laws multiplied to form our system of habitats and species protection, spread wider and deeper as modern environmental science began to chart shockwaves through nature. The 1970s saw the arrival of European environmental law – which imposed more detailed process, and also broke the ministerial overrides that could unlock complicated projects. Reforms in the 2000s sought to eliminate the endless planning inquiry; but the price was an even greater rise in the amount of preparation before the inquiry could be held.

The reasonably unreasonable

Some of the blocks on development seem to have spilled out of a comic novel. Keir Starmer, announcing his planning reforms last week, pointed to 137 homes in Bradford held up by concerns over the speed of cricket balls as an example of how the system had gone astray – a story that seems more the province of PG Wodehouse than the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. But looking across the piece, what is striking is not the ridiculous, but the sane.

Few people actively seek to destroy protected species, or would profess themselves indifferent to historic heritage. No one would consider it unwise to consider and mitigate flooding risk or traffic impacts. The need to consult with local people is anchored in a sense of natural justice. New ideas, like climate change, are natural additions to the process. When a matter has to be considered, it is logical that decisions should be based on full and accurate information. It is only when you then step back, and realise that the combined process will take the better part of a decade to complete, that the problem becomes apparent.

This planning system has not been created in one enormous act of folly, but in dozens of tiny, reasonable steps. Every contributing measure has felt like common sense.

The barriers that have stopped Britain from building in recent years are anchored in this basic tension: a thousand reasonable questions making an unreasonable examination. All the signs are that this sprawl will worsen: it has proven far easier to care about one more thing than it is to declare entirely reasonable questions to be out of bounds.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill sets out one answer: centralising some of the most challenging tasks such as environmental mitigation, so they can be addressed coherently on a national level. At a minimum, over-built mitigation measures like the HS2 bat tunnel should be replaced by smarter, more effective projects that enhance the overall environment. There is reason for optimism, now we’re seeing proposals for a genuine reduction in the planning workload brought forward.

This will help. But perhaps beneath it all there is something deeper. For 80 years, we have tangled ourselves in a net of our own fears and worries. We have made building as hard as we can bear, but what we have really wanted was not slower building, but the wisdom to know when to stop. Process brings that no closer: there is no mathematical way to balance a wading bird against a gigawatt of green energy. But judgment – the ability to see two sides of a question and choose freely – does give something to work with. With reform in Parliament, and eyes open to the madness of the system for the first time in an age, there may be some hope that Britain will find its way to build again. 

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