Making Britain Build Again
Michael Dnes
Why can’t Britain build? Especially given that, for most of its history, British engineering has been amongst the most imaginative in the world, inventing everything from the railway to the nuclear power plant. Why have we reached a position where some of the country’s biggest projects end up stuck in a decade or more of limbo? And will the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill change that?
In Making Britain Build Again, Stonehaven’s infrastructure experts unpack why it is so hard for major infrastructure projects to reach construction. It is not, primarily, a question of construction, or even design. Instead, the planning system has added more and more requirements on projects waiting to be built – now so many that it prevents elected governments from delivering their promises within a five-year term of office.
The report explains how this came about, paradoxically as a response to how easy building had become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The planning system established in 1947 initially was able to control development whilst allowing huge new networks of infrastructure to appear in record time. But from the 1960s onwards the process began to sprawl – becoming more complex, more contested and more deadlocked. Past reforms have been unable to change that.
At the root of this, there is a tension between the reasonable wish to see the impacts of development managed well through thoughtful consideration, and the unreasonable amount of work that this adds up to. Past evidence shows it is far easier to add to the list of questions than it is to streamline the process of reaching a final answer.
The paper offers a different way to approach the challenge. By putting time at the heart of the planning process, rather than exhaustive consideration, it becomes possible to unite these two impulses. By creating a legally robust way for project teams to prioritise their efforts but retaining the requirement to meet environmental goals and manage developments, it is possible to supercharge the development process. For the most suitable projects, this could even mean getting projects shovel-ready within a single year.
Read our full paper below.
