Why Britain stopped building

This article was first published in CapX.

The Government’s plan to tunnel under Stonehenge has been struck down, having its planning consent formally revoked. The cost of this current stint of planning and consultations amounted to an eye-watering £179 million. At the same time, HS2 continues its slow progress northwards: continuously scaled back, delayed and vastly more expensive than when first promised. 

A shocking waste, but not surprising.

The pattern is now well established. From Crossrail to HS1, from Thameslink to successive expansions of the M25, major infrastructure projects in Britain have been characterised by optimism on inception, but crushing disappointment in delivery. Budgets and completion dates may as well not be considered, so routinely are they exceeded – 66% of UK roads face overruns when work is completed, as does 56% of social infrastructure. By contrast, comparable schemes in countries such as France, Germany and Japan are typically delivered more quickly and at significantly lower cost. 

So how bad is it? After a decade and a half of Tory failure to build or even maintain infrastructure, there is a cross-party consensus that ‘planning’ needs reform. The Nimby vs Yimby divide has become a major faultline in British politics. Focusing, as many do, on the Town and Country Planning Act risks understating the problem. The labyrinthine complexity of Britain’s regulatory environment, the inability of developers to stick to scope and the vested interests of many so-called ‘stakeholders’ comprise the many ropes that bind the Gulliver of British infrastructure development.

Major infrastructure projects must navigate not a single framework, but a dense accumulation of them. The A303 Stonehenge tunnel, for example, was subject to a highly complex statutory regime. Alongside the general Development Consent Order (DCO) application under the Planning Act 2008, environmental assessment rules required by the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 applied, meaning that cultural heritage, landscape and other environmental impacts had to be fully assessed as part of planning consent.

National planning documentation for the projects also referenced key heritage-protection laws, such as the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, underscoring just how many layers of law attach significant weight to preservation. 

On the environmental side, EU-derived regimes such as the Habitats Directive and its UK successor laws have placed stringent obligations on protecting designated sites and species. European Court of Justice jurisprudence pushed these rules towards near-absolute protection in some cases, which meant that even minor changes to habitats risked protracted mitigation planning. While the UK is no longer in the EU, much of this legal architecture remains embedded in domestic statute. Reform UK’s Treasury Spokesperson, Robert Jenrick, has pledged to repeal this corrosive piece of regulation, and others; however in the here and now, it still acts as a real impediment on how quickly and cheaply projects can proceed. 

Nor does the complexity end there. The Highways Act 1980 and Railways Act 1993 introduced additional procedural requirements, while the Localism Act 2011 has encouraged communities to whip out the marker pens and placards, and contest development in ways that can significantly prolong decision making. Public inquiries, judicial reviews and environmental permission structures add yet further levels of scrutiny. The cumulative effect is a system in which the journey from proposal to construction is both lengthy and uncertain.

As the saying goes, ‘time is money’. In infrastructure, this is especially true. Each year of delay compounds costs through inflation and further financing, and that’s before contracts need to be renegotiated. What begins as a manageable budget can over the course of a decade expand beyond recognition.

The much-ridiculed HS2 project illustrates this phenomenon with particular clarity. When HS2 Ltd was established in 2009, Gordon Brown projected that costs would be about £37.5 billion (in 2009 prices). By 2015, that figure had risen to approximately £55.7bn, and later reviews suggested final costs of about £80bn. More recent analyses now put the likely total well over £100bn once inflation and project scope changes are taken into account. 

Indeed, the project’s difficulties have become so pronounced that even its defining characteristic is now under review. This week, the Financial Times suggested that ministers are considering reducing HS2’s speed in order to attempt to save billions. A railway conceived as one of the fastest in the world may ultimately run more slowly – a quiet admission that the original specification was as costly as it was ambitious. 

Part of that escalation in cost has been driven by scope creep. Originally, the line was conceived with relatively limited tunnelling. Over time, however, additional tunnel sections were added, the most notable of which was eight miles of tunnelling between Chalfont St Peter and South Heath, largely to placate local political pressure. In 2012, the then Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, threatened to resign her post unless the route through her Chesham and Amersham constituency was tunnelled. Such late changes impose disproportionate costs and delay.

Political incentives do little to counteract these dynamics. Large infrastructure projects are often announced with considerable fanfare, their benefits framed in terms of economic transformation. Yet the political cycle rarely aligns with the delivery cycle. Governments change; cabinet reshuffles and priorities coalesce around the latest ‘crisis’. The result is a tendency towards repeated review and partial abandonment, kicking the can down the road for the next government to pick up, before finally throwing into a receptacle.

The mayoralty of Boris Johnson, with him often adorned in a high-vis jacket and hard hat, offers a useful illustration of a related, though distinct problem: the cost of ambition without execution. During his tenure at City Hall, a number of high-profile proposals were advanced, from the Garden Bridge to a new airport in the Thames Estuary, often referred to as ‘Boris Island’. Few of these schemes came to fruition. Yet they nonetheless absorbed considerable resources in feasibility studies, planning work and preliminary design. In a system as procedurally intensive as Britain’s, unrealised projects can impose significant costs. 

There is an alternative model.

The Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) and the development of Canary Wharf in the late 1980s and 1990s offer a stark contrast to today’s malaise. In that era, private and semi-private bodies such as the London Docklands Development Corporation and Jubilee Extension Ltd were granted considerable leeway to deliver complex projects. This model cut through much of the procedural drag that now characterises public infrastructure projects. There were fewer veto points along the development phases; and delivery bodies were given real autonomy over scope and execution and were also designed to have limited avenues for legal challenge. The result was urban renewal and transport expansion, delivered on a timetable that would be remarkable by today’s standards.

The makeup of institutions further compounds the current problem. Responsibility for infrastructure is dispersed across central government departments and quasi-independent agencies. Each faces the regulators and has its individual set of priorities and processes. Decisionmaking is therefore inherently fragmented, and accountability diffuse. In countries where infrastructure is delivered more efficiently, authority is often far more centralised, which creates clearer lines of responsibility and quicker resolution of disputes.

There is also a cultural dimension. Britons like to do things ‘by the book’, following rules to a tee, even at the expense of common sense or efficiency. By expanding the rulebook, development must repeatedly justify itself at each stage of the process. Delay becomes the norm, rather than the exception. 

None of this is to suggest that similar nations operate without constraints, or that Britain should abandon its protection altogether. The issue is one of balance. At present, the cumulative weight of regulation, combined with political and institutional fragmentation, tilts the system decisively towards hold-ups and cost escalation.

A more effective approach would bring realism into the fold. Projects of national significance could be subject to streamlined approval processes, with clearly defined and time-limited stages of review. Estimates for project costs should always reflect the full complexity of the regulatory environment from the outset, rather than relying on overly optimistic assumptions. 

There is also the case for reconsidering the proliferation of overlapping statutory requirements, particularly where they duplicate one another in practice. If private or semi-autonomous delivery bodies, akin to those used for the Jubilee Line and Canary Wharf, were permitted greater leeway also, Britain might again find itself capable of building at scale within reasonable timeframes. 

Ultimately, the difficulty is not that Britain lacks the capacity to build, but that it has constructed a system in which building at scale has become uniquely difficult. The failure of the A303 Stonehenge tunnel and the ongoing struggles of HS2 are not aberrations, but logical consequences of the framework within which such projects are pursued. The failures of the Tories and now Labour are ultimately inexcusable, but partially understandable given the scale of the problem. Overcoming our malaise isn’t as simple as ripping up the vilified Town and Country Planning Act or a few bits of retained EU law. It’s a Herculean task.

But until this is addressed, Britain will continue paying more, waiting longer and delivering less than it intends, with the gap between ambition and execution continuing to widen.