Britain's Crumbling Infrastructure Problem

Astronomical costs, delayed openings, unreliable services - these are the words that best describe the UK's infrastructure failings. For the fifth wealthiest country in the world, this is unacceptable

The government recently unveiled a plan to build a new tunnel underneath Stonehenge, one of this country’s most revered national heritage sites, in a bid to reduce traffic congestion on the A303. At a cost nearing £2 billion, the project would see barely 2 miles of road built underneath the site, diverting traffic away from the strained highway. After reading this report, two questions immediately spring to mind: 1) Why is the government actively encouraging the desecration of our iconic historical sites?, and 2) Why does this fairly simple infrastructure project carry the eye-watering sum of £2bn? The Stonehenge Tunnel offers us an encapsulation of everything that is wrong with building in this country - projects are either costly, arbitrary, delayed, or all three.

It’s not just the simple issue of failing to combat traffic congestion. The inability to finance reliable infrastructure projects is having a detrimental impact on other segments of the UK’s economy and society. Chronic housing shortages have led to a higher cost of living and slower rates of productivity growth; major cities in the north still lack an adequate system of public transportation, crippling any attempts to turn them into economic hubs; the UK’s world-class research universities have failed to capitalise on their potential due to a shortage of commercial lab space; and, due to limited alternative energy sources, there is a genuine risk significant parts of the country may be plunged into blackouts over the winter. Thus, the chronic infrastructure problem isn’t just an international embarrassment, in a lot of ways, it’s also a national security risk. After all, how can we expect this country to thrive when the basic needs of the state aren’t being met?

While the rest of Europe builds modern cities re-purposed for the future, the UK continues to lag behind, and at quite a distance. Centre for Cities, a non-partisan, independent research unit, recently conducted a study into how the UK’s public transportation system compared to other Western European countries, and the results are bleak. Since the document is so vast, I’ll only include some of the key findings here, but I’ll provide a link to the full document for anyone curious about reading it in its entirety. Urban public transport commutes to city centres in Europe were found to be much easier, with 67% reaching the centre in under 30 minutes, compared to just 40% for the UK. Poor urban transport design was also found to limit labour flexibility in a way it doesn’t for most of Europe, costing the UK approximately £23.1bn per year. Concern was also raised surrounding the time it takes for the UK to actually complete infrastructure projects. A case study used was Spain’s high-speed railway construction. Over the decade between 2011 and 2021, Spain built 1,500KM of high-speed rail. In comparison, the UK is still struggling to build HS2, a high-speed railway line of 230KM that links the two largest cities, London and Brimingham, together, and isn’t expected to be completed until 2031, two decades after the project started. That’s without even going into the chronic gulf that seperates infrastructure in the north of the country from the south of the country.

One of the most significant reasons for this failure is the government’s outright refusal to even consider amending this country’s archaic planning laws. Under this system, it is close-to impossible for the Government to deliver its 2035 zero-carbon power plan. The same is true of Labour’s even more ambitious target of 2030. To provide an example, Hornsea 3, a wind farm located off the coast of Norfolk, isn’t scheduled to be connected to the national grid until 2027, despite originally being proposed in 2016. In other cases, offshore wind farms have taken as long as 13 years to go from development to deployment. This isn’t just limited to wind farms hundreds of miles off the coast. This slow rollout manifests itself in every major project needed to transport this energy across the country, from building transmission lines to building battery storages to provide a baseload power so the lights stay on when the wind stops blowing. Of course, this example only offers a microcosm of the wider problems plaguing our economy.

Analysis has show that the decisions needed to greenlight new projects has started to take longer, increasing from an average of 17 months in 2012 to 22 months in 2020. The share of projects being delayed has also increased from 20% in 2014 to 43% in 2021. The 2008 Planning Act process has been described by detractors as “a highly formalistic regime”, where “strict compliance with statutory requirements is necessary in order for an application to be successful.” To make matters worse, the perplexing and, often times, redundant bureaucracy has bred an expansion in the extensive documentation needed for major planning projects. Now, in order to secure a permit and prevent themselves from a legal challenge, developers have to comb through hundreds, if not thousands, of new documents, slowing the process down to a halt. And the number of documents submitted per application is only growing, balloning from 381 in 2012 to 1,143 in 2020.

As the projects slow to a crawl, our country risks falling behind our competitors. Longer delays mean we are locked into polluting technologies for longer, our cities are unable to develop and expand because transport cannot keep up to pace, house prices continue to soar due to a lack of supply and British industry is put at a competitive disadvantage, jeopardising thousands of jobs. But, the problem isn’t just it taking an extra year or two to build critical infrastructure projects. The unpredictability and risk of legal challenge deters further investment, especially from our international partners. While this analysis has focused on the projects that have been put to the planning inspectorate, it’s possible that under a more predictable and faster planning likely many more would have been proposed and approved. 

So, how can the government best remedy this malaise? Obviously, with an issue this multifacted, there is no straightforward answer. However, publishing up-to-date national policy statements is a good place to start. Another solution could be creating Clean Energy Zones. Similar to the free ports, these would be designated areas where projects would be able to gain planning permission without filling out all of the complex environmental impact assessments. Where possible, the government must find ways to streamline the planning process, eliminating as much unnecessary bureaucracy that is feasible, perhaps by lowering the thresholds needed to obtain permission or by reducing the amount of paperwork developers have to sift through. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it provides a few good starting points policymakers can use to help structure a response to this growing catastrophe. Until these archaic planning laws are tackled, any hope of progress on this front is futile.