“The NIMBY Lobby” Thought Piece

The Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, spoke to the BBC at weekend to outline plans to give local authority planning officers the power to “rubberstamp” development proposals without permission from council planning committees, if they comply with local plans and national standards. If implemented, these changes could see the power dynamic significantly altered in favour of professional planners and reduce opportunities for elected officials to say “no” to development in their area, often influenced by what their electorate want.

 

This follows the theme of the Prime Minister’s article in the Times last week, where he vowed to stop houses and other infrastructure being “held to ransom” by NIMBYS and environmentalists and will push through reform of Britain’s “ruinous” planning system. He has criticised the “blockers and bureaucrats” who, he says, have “choked off” economic growth and made homeownership unaffordable. DHA’s Jack Karagoz has some personal thoughts on the issue…

 

Those of us lucky enough to work in the planning profession and others who have had professional or personal dealings with the planning system will be able to think of examples of what the Prime Minster is referring to and, in all likeliness, share his concern that the planning system can deliver infrastructure and new homes slower than we would like.

 

Sadly, the UK has a poor track record for investment versus our peers. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000 people, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000 people.

 

Okay then, so why has the UK has failed to invest? The answer is quite simple - it’s cost. It costs the UK a lot of money to build anything worth having, almost more than anywhere else in the world. The Prime Minister cites the case of High Speed 2, which was forced to spend £100 million building a tunnel for 300 bats (£340,000 per bat) which he describes as an “absurd spectacle” that needs to end. Hard to disagree.

 

It's these eye-watering costs incurred on projects that mean we do not do them in the first place, or at best, scale them down to provide value for money for the taxpayer. But why does it cost so much more here? Well, part of it can be linked directly to the planning system. While it is difficult to fault individual objectives and isolated elements of the planning system, for example: giving local communities a say on development that may affect them or improving ecological habitats as part of developments; when all these competing and sometimes conflicting requirements are layered on top of each other however, it can lead to what some see as disproportionate and rather expensive outcomes.

 

Those with an interest in major transport projects will be aware that plans to build Britain’s longest road tunnel - The Lower Thames Crossing linking Kent and Essex - have been in the works for 15 years without any progress. The planning stage alone has reportedly cost £300 million so far and is the longest planning application on record with a whopping 360,000 pages spread over 2,838 separate documents. By comparison, in 2000, Norway completed the world’s longest road tunnel connecting Oslo and Bergen at the cost of £120 million… to build, not just to approve! There are plenty of other high-profile examples of this, but the same is true of much smaller projects that get gummed up in planning as well.

 

The failure to invest in key infrastructure and services also leads to them declining and then we have to keep patching them to keep them going and that becomes very expensive – think about that the next time you experience a signalling failure on your train journey. Crucially, it is not just the capital costs of infrastructure projects that planning adds to, it is also the opportunity cost of uncertainty and delay:

 

Let’s say you are a global electric car manufacturer that is looking to invest in a new bespoke facility somewhere in the world. You might be put off investing in the UK because of its highly politicised and unpredictable planning system. Why spend years persuading local decision makers that new highly skilled jobs are a good thing for their area, only for a government minister to call in the application at the eleventh hour and refuse permission because of political pressure from a minority of supposedly important voters that would rather not see it built near to them? For a country that has suffered from anaemic levels of growth since 2008, this is not a system we can any longer afford.

 

The Prime Minster blames the “blockers and bureaucrats” for holding Britain back, but it might be more accurate to say the system has been designed for the blockers and only implemented by the bureaucrats. Ultimately, the planning system is only a reflection of the political priorities and the will of the individuals that built it over a number of years - the Government.

 

To their credit, this Government appear to be making the right noises about planning. The Prime Minster and Housing Secretary have cited plans for new laws that would streamline complex environmental rules derived from EU law; designating areas of the country as sites for types of key infrastructure to speed up approval of individual projects; modernising local authority planning committees; and a target of building 1.5 million homes by 2030. These are measures that should help but simply saying you will take on the NIMBY lobby is easy. Actually taking them on will be much, much harder. After all, this is hardly the first Government to talk a big game on planning reform in recent years.

 

Jack Karagoz is a Senior Planner in DHA’s London office