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Why Britain can’t build anything

Why Britain can’t build anything

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution is now a world leader in NIMBYism, bureaucracy and green tape.

Lauren Smith

Topics Politics UK

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Britain was once a nation that built things. Britain sparked the Industrial Revolution. Britain invented the steam engine, then the steam train. Britain built huge, looming factories, connected the country by rail, reinvented the sewer system, and engineered the world’s first ever underground railway.

Today, however, we have forgotten how to build. It’s difficult to overstate just how bad this problem is. Everything from transport to housing to energy has been sorely neglected for decades now. We should be more embarrassed about the fact that Leeds is the largest city in Europe without a mass-transport system. Or that a housing shortage is forcing people to live in crowded houseshares well beyond young adulthood. Even as energy prices skyrocket, we drag our feet over building new nuclear power plants. Just 38 per cent of our railway lines are electrified, versus 71 per cent in Italy.

The UK Labour Party says it is trying to reverse all this – saying it will side with the builders over the blockers. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has even upset Labour’s environmentalists with her backing of a third runaway at London’s Heathrow Airport. But the fact that the infamous third runaway has become such a drawn-out and controversial debate speaks to how deep the rot now runs. Politicians have been trying – and failing – to build this runway for decades now, in the face of legal challenges, green opposition and bureaucracy. Heathrow is Europe’s busiest airport. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the second busiest, has four runways. Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, the third busiest, has six. Heathrow’s limited capacity has been a boon for those other airports. Bosses at Schiphol have started a tradition of sending a conciliatory cake to Heathrow every time its planning application for a third runway is rejected.

Even when we do manage to get things built, projects are invariably delayed and over budget. The ill-fated High Speed 2 rail project is already about £8 billion over budget, despite most of the project having been cancelled. When HS2 was first approved in 2011, it was projected to cost £37 billion (roughly £58 billion in today’s money) to build the line from London to Manchester, plus a branch between Birmingham and Leeds. The Leeds and Manchester legs were scrapped in 2021 and 2023 respectively, leaving just the London-Birmingham line. Still, the estimated cost has shot up to £67 billion.

Mining engineers inspect the progress of the Mary Ann tunnel boring machine in the HS2 Bromford Tunnel in Water Orton, England, 2024.
Mining engineers inspect the progress of the Mary Ann tunnel boring machine in the HS2 Bromford Tunnel in Water Orton, England, 2024.

It’s no wonder we can’t build a high-speed rail line, given we can’t even manage to put up a footbridge. Indeed, construction on an ugly, prefabricated footbridge in Theale station in Berkshire dragged on for longer than it took to build New York’s Empire State Building. It took 13 years and £9.5million to upgrade tiny Theale station, with its new footbridge, lifts and ticket office. It opened recently to little fanfare.

Our woeful track record on building is particularly stark in comparison to our continental counterparts. On the whole, construction projects in the UK are significantly more costly than those in Europe. One study by campaign group Britain Remade found that road and rail projects in Britain can cost up to eight times more per mile than in Europe. Take HS2. The London to Birmingham line is expected to cost £262million per mile, whereas the French managed to build their own high-speed line for £46million per mile in 2017.

The Lower Thames Crossing – which, if it’s ever actually built, will connect Kent and Essex – is even worse value for money. Construction hasn’t even begun yet, and the hypothetical tunnel has already cost over £800million. An incredible £267million of that was spent on applying for planning permission alone. Meanwhile, in Norway, they managed to build the Lærdal Tunnel, the longest road tunnel in the world, for half the cost of the Lower Thames Crossing’s planning permission alone.

Why is building in the UK slower, more expensive and on the whole worse than even our near neighbours? In the case of the doomed HS2 project, one major reason construction is taking so long, and is so over-budget, is because of 105 kilometres of largely unnecessary tunnelling. This is far more time-consuming and costly than running the tracks above ground, but must be done to appease disgruntled locals, upset at the prospect of a high-speed train coming anywhere near their homes.

The UK’s planning system emboldens the blockers. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 gave local authorities sweeping powers over planning permissions. It was no longer enough for an individual or company to simply own the land they wanted to build on – they also had to gain the support of increasingly intransigent councils. And so, the greater good of national infrastructure has been sacrificed to NIMBYism.

Indeed, the NIMBYs have reigned supreme over the planning system for 77 years, helping to foster an unprecedented stagnation in new developments. Anything that might disrupt the nebulous concept of ‘the character of the area’ can and will be stopped. Everything from vital infrastructure to minor home extensions is at the mercy of councillors.

The Town and Country Planning Act also helped to create the concept of the ‘green belt’ – the ring of supposedly green and pleasant land that surrounds major cities and prevents urban expansion. The idea that protecting green-belt land should trump development has since become ingrained in the UK planning system, and is a major reason why infrastructure projects crawl along at a snail’s pace. HS2 makes its way through the Chiltern Hills, an area in the Home Counties that is both a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and belongs to London’s Metropolitan Green Belt. This means developers must prove at every step of the way that they are doing everything possible to minimise the project’s impact on the area’s wildlife and scenery. This is despite the fact that England’s so-called green belt is a lot less green and pleasant than you might imagine. Far from being all rolling hills and lush meadows, much of it actually consists of scrubland, derelict warehouses, disused railway sidings, golf clubs, quarries and gravel pits.

Land protected under a green belt designation in London, England.
Land protected under a green belt designation in London, England.

Conservation laws – most of them enforced by environmental quango Natural England – have resulted in some truly absurd wastes of time and money. Just look at the infamous ‘bat tunnel’. This state-of-the-art structure, under construction in Buckinghamshire, was mandated by the Habitats Regulations, which legally protect all bat species in the UK. This structure is supposed to prevent a particularly rare species of bat from being harmed by the trains on the HS2 line. The one-kilometre-long tunnel (effectively a large shed covered by mesh) has cost £100million to build. As it turns out, it may not even achieve its stated aim of bat-proofing HS2, as it potentially still allows bats to crawl into and become trapped in the tunnel. There is also no evidence that the bats will actually fly over the path of HS2 anyway – while there is a small colony in nearby woodland, the shed is based on pure speculation that the bats might at some point want to travel in that direction. In any case, the colony that has caused all of this absurdity consists of just 300 bats. So HS2’s bat tunnel will come out at about £330,000 per bat. To Natural England, this is a small price to pay. ‘No bat death is acceptable’, it has declared.

Obviously, everyone would rather avoid causing harm to bats, newts, water voles or any other creature that roams the British countryside. But the UK’s insane environmental-protection laws end up putting animal life above human life. EDF’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset is a prime example of this. It’s no secret that the UK is desperate for more plentiful energy. Hinkley, which has been under construction for 10 years now, will generate enough electricity to power around six million homes for 60 years – when it’s finally finished, that is. Naturally, it has been repeatedly bogged down by environmental requirements.

One particular concern was the harm that might be caused to fish in the nearby Bristol Channel, which, it was feared, could swim into the plant’s water-cooling system and meet a grisly end. In order to deter the fish, EDF announced it would construct a system of 288 uber-powerful underwater speakers – seriously – that would blast the fish with noise louder than a jumbo jet, day and night, for the next 60 years, all to repel them from danger. The ‘fish disco’, we were told, would save about 18 to 46 tonnes of fish every year. This is less than the annual catch of a small fishing vessel. EDF eventually decided to give up on the soundsystem. Instead, it suggested flooding nearby land, including farms and homes, to create an alternative habitat for the fish.

This sacralisation of the environment is hampering all kinds of vital infrastructure – and robbing the UK of economic growth. In Hertfordshire, a plan for a £1 billion data centre was refused planning permission over concerns it might damage the local environment. The developers argued that the centre would have brought hundreds of jobs and tens of millions of pounds’ worth of investment in education and training, but councillors said no. In Buckinghamshire, plans for a new film studio were rejected because of potential damage to the surrounding green belt. It would have created about 4,000 new jobs, and been a hugely important addition to the UK’s struggling domestic film industry.

In the UK, all kinds of developments take a backseat to protecting greenery. In Britain’s ‘Golden Triangle’ (the area connecting Cambridge, Oxford and London), building laboratory space and research facilities is severely restricted by local councils – even though this area is home to many of our world-leading universities. Plans for a science park in a corner of an Oxfordshire golf course were quashed by South Oxfordshire District Council in 2023, due to it being an ‘inappropriate development in the green belt’. Former Conservative housing secretary Michael Gove once dreamed of turning Cambridge into the ‘science capital of Europe’, but these grand plans were hampered by the fact that South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council have terrible track records when it comes to actually approving new developments.

Construction work at Hinkley Point C in Bridgwater, England, 2022.
Construction work at Hinkley Point C in Bridgwater, England, 2022.

In a similar way, fracking in England – which could deliver us from soaring energy costs and an over-reliance on foreign imports – has been banned almost continuously since 2019, over environmental concerns. The High Court found that the government’s fracking policy was ‘unlawful’ because it had failed to consider the climate impact. Under the Climate Change Act 2008, the UK government is legally committed to combatting climate change and taking the environment into account when making policy, even though the UK accounts for less than one per cent of global emissions.

A similar piece of green legislation is stopping new homes from being built. Rules around so-called nutrient neutrality require developers to ensure that housing will in no way affect the habitats or water quality for nearby protected species. This is enforced by Natural England, which is estimated to be blocking around 160,000 new homes every year. This includes regions with large numbers of workers, such as Tees Valley, Norwich, the Solent and large parts of Kent.

The cost of all this is tremendous – soaring energy costs, eye-wateringly high rents, a stagnating job market. The consequences are particularly bad for housing, which the UK is severely lacking in. And this is being particularly felt by young people hoping to buy a home. In 1983, it would have taken three years for the average 27- to 30-year-old to save for a deposit on a house. In 2016, it took 19 years. Instead of getting on the property ladder, young people are spending extortionate amounts of money on rent – often for decades of their lives. The younger generations are being forced to delay family formation due to the high costs of rent and energy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can mitigate harm to wildlife, while still allowing communities to grow. We can preserve historic buildings without protecting every grotty ‘historic garage’ we come across. We can protect Britain’s countryside without sacrificing all growth and development. It’s time to cut the green tape, take on the NIMBYs and upend this culture of terminally low ambitions. It’s time for Britain to build things again.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.

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