Will Labour’s planning bill actually get Britain building again?
The UK’s planning system is in need of a radical overhaul. Will Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure bill deliver? Sam Richards, CEO of Britain Remade, takes a look
The most significant element of the Budget was the bleak growth forecasts produced for Rachel Reeves by the independent Office of Budget Responsibility. After ‘scoring’ Labour’s first Budget for 14 years, the watchdog revealed the Chancellor’s plan for the economy would increase living standard by an anaemic 0.5 per cent a year for the next five years.
It’s clear the new occupant of Number 11 is trying to get all the pain of tax rises out of the way as early as possible, but it is very possible that she will have to return to the well in her next Budget. The only way to escape this doom loop is to get Britain building again.
But to enable this the government needs to radically overhaul the planning system.
To its credit, Keir Starmer’s government gets this and has already made progress. They’ve lifted David Cameron’s mad ban on new onshore wind farms being built in England. The introduction of grey belt land should make it easier to build on the old petrol stations and car parks that are bizarrely classed as green belt land. And approving major solar farms in their first week in office was a statement of intent.
These are all steps in the right direction, but they are at best a down payment. Britain needs the government to set out clearly how it’ll fix our planning system.
Will the new planning bill help?
This will be done through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. First promised in the King’s Speech back in July, precious little is known about this hugely important piece of legislation.
The simple truth is that our energy bills are kept high because we’ve made it too hard to build new sources of energy. Our homes are unaffordable because housebuilding is illegal in vast swathes of the country. When we try to build new railway lines, costs balloon because the planning system makes it impossible to build cheaply. In many cases we still rely on the inheritance bequeathed to us by the Victorians.
Yet we have become their opposite, binding our builders in reams of red tape and making them beholden to the will of quangos, lobby groups and vested interests. There is no better recent example of this than HS2 Ltd being forced to build a £100m tunnel in Buckinghamshire to protect rare bats in order to appease Natural England. In total HS2 Ltd had been forced to obtain 8,276 consents from other public bodies in order to build the first phase of the railway between London and Birmingham.
From George Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Victorian builders epitomise the spirit of ‘move fast and break things’ so loved by their 21st century digital equivalents. Sadly, when it comes to physical infrastructure we can only dream of building on the scale we did over a hundred years ago.
It is no accident that it takes up to 13 years to build an offshore wind farm and connect it to the grid, or 11 years for an onshore wind farm. Building a few hundred miles of railway line shouldn’t cost over £100bn and one part of the government shouldn’t have to pay another bit of government almost £300m just for a planning application to build a new road tunnel.
These are the consequences of decisions made by governments of all colours. Decisions that mean the application for an offshore wind farm runs to 4,000 individual documents. Decisions that mean that Hinkley Point C is forced to spend millions of pounds on a ‘fish disco’ to protect less than a trawler’s worth of fish.
Who would have thought plans to reopen a railway branch line just a few miles long would require a 79,187 page planning application. If printed out and laid end to end this mountain of paperwork would stretch 14.6 miles, more than four-and-a-half times the length of the line to be reinstated.
Three steps for change
So, what needs to change? Firstly, the government is going to need to change the way judicial review works. It is simply impossible to see the government delivering on its pledge to build 1.5m homes over the next five years, decarbonising the energy grid by 2030, securing investment in data centres or building the transport links needed to get Britain moving without rebalancing how judicial reviews work.
The weaponisation of judicial review is clear. Before 2020 just 16 nationally significant infrastructure projects were subject to review with only one challenge being successful. In the last three years there have been seven projects taken to court, of which four succeeded. Even unsuccessful challenges can bog down projects for years in delays – pushing up costs for taxpayers.
Secondly, they will need to rewire environmental protections. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. From farmland birds to insect life – all our key biodiversity indicators are in decline. Yet at the same time as failing to protect nature, our hugely complex framework of environmental protections is a nightmare for developers to navigate and adds huge amounts of cost and delay to building almost anything in Britain. The £100m bat tunnel, that may not in fact save a single bat, is a prime example of this phenomenon.
Finally, ministers themselves need to make decisions in line with their rhetoric.
During the General Election campaign Labour said they would be the “builders not the blockers” but research done by Britain Remade, the organisation I lead, has found that 45 per cent of major infrastructure decisions have been punted into the long grass by the new government.
More investment in infrastructure is overdue, but without bold reforms to our planning system Britain faces another lost decade. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill could deliver the fundamental overhaul that our outdated planning system needs, but ministers cannot hang around.