In a recent post, Alon Levy of the Transit Costs Project pushes back (persuasively) against this narrative. I don’t think Levy would go as far as to say that regular funding is irrelevant to infrastructure costs, but it is clear from the examples that consistency of funding isn’t a necessary or sufficient condition of being able to build cheaply. Some feast-or-famine approaches to investment correlate with high infrastructure costs, but some don’t. Italy has stayed cheap despite multiple funding famines. Indeed, one famine where projects were delayed until tougher anti-corruption measures were brought in saw projects get cheaper over time. Likewise, still-quite-cheap Sweden got more expensive after a spending famine, but no more expensive than Finland and Norway (both of whom had more regular funding).

Establishing causation is not easy either. Feast-or-famine funding might cause higher costs, but causality could just as easily go the other way. Infrastructure isn’t exempt from the laws of supply and demand. When goods get more expensive, people buy less. High costs are often the reason why projects are cancelled or scaled-back.

Even though I take a slightly different stance overall, I think Levy’s contribution to the debate is a useful corrective. There are some who leap from the defensible (and in my opinion very, clearly true) claim that there are advantages to consistent funding streams for infrastructure to the much more controversial claim that our infrastructure cost problem can be solved if only we spent more. In other words, there’s no need to take on special interests and reform the planning system, all we need to do is keep the faith, build more, and eventually we will get good at it.

Britain, it should be noted, isn’t an especially low-spender. As a share of GDP, Britain invests more in transport infrastructure than our lower-cost European peers. And while learning curves exist in the data, they are not sufficient to explain why some countries are so much more expensive than others.

With that said, there are a few reasons why, all things being equal, I think Britain would benefit from more consistent funding streams for infrastructure.

There’s the obvious advantage of funding certainty: the ability to plan and invest. A lack of funding certainty (and also, a lack of certainty within the planning process) make investments in physical and human capital much riskier. They also make firms more reliant on subcontractors as a means of spreading funding risk to the supply chain.

As a result, Britain’s biggest construction firm, Balfour Beatty, is relatively small by international standards. In fact, Balfour Beatty is the 32nd largest construction firm globally. Far smaller economies like Sweden and Austria have a larger firm while Italy, France, Spain and South Korea all have 2 or 3 firms larger than the largest UK firm. Economies of scope and scale are lost as a result.

Then, there are the lost learning curves. Lessons learnt on a project one can’t be ported to project two if there’s a five, ten, or even thirty year gap between projects. Clearly, a lack of experience and the ‘first-of-a-kind’ problem isn’t sufficient to explain why Hinkley Point C is the most expensive nuclear power plant ever built, but having to train up a workforce from scratch (and rely on temporary migrant workers) clearly didn’t help. When I visited HPC for example, EDF told me that welding on the second reactor at Hinkley Point C is being done four times faster than on the first one.

Beyond those two, I think there are structural reasons to favour more certain funding streams.

In a previous post, I responded to another blog of Levy’s which dismissed the claim that excessive centralisation was a cause of Britain’s high construction costs. I argued that Levy wasn’t wrong per se that national systems don’t clearly underperform local systems, but that a lack of local decision-making, and crucially, a lack of local growth incentives helped explain, with a few steps in between, why Britain didn’t adopt some of the key institutions, structures and practices that Levy believes are essential to keeping projects cheap – things like the state maintaining in-house engineering capability and preserving institutional memory by keeping project teams together once they end.

It isn’t hard to see how infrequent funding for infrastructure projects might push Britain away from the model that Levy sees as lowest cost to the ‘neoliberal model’ that Levy criticises with its heavy reliance on outsourcing core competencies. It is difficult to justify keeping in-house engineering expertise within the civil service if that expertise is unlikely to be deployed.

Another problem with inconsistent funding is it affects what gets funded and how it gets funded. When funding streams are uncertain, the power of HM Treasury to veto or delay projects often increases. This has two negative side-effects.

First, business cases become far more important to whether a project goes ahead or not than in other countries. This creates an incentive to present a business case in its most favourable light. HM Treasury inevitably counters by applying more scrutiny. Not only does this cause delay and unnecessary expense, it also undermines accountability as infrastructure promoters rarely have to worry about the knock-on impacts of overspends.

Second, it can lead to harmful micro-management. Take the A14 Huntingdon Bypass, which is by most accounts, one of Britain’s most successful recent infrastructure projects. (When Britain Remade held a business roundtable in Cambridge, multiple entrepreneurs gushed about.)

Yet, it is also a good example of how Britain’s over-centralised and uncertain funding process can make projects more expensive and, frankly, worse. After the 2010 General Election, the A14 upgrade was the biggest road infrastructure project on the books. There was a serious risk of cancellation by the Coalition. To avoid cancellation, the Department for Transport persuaded the Treasury to begin a cost saving project where over 18 months they reduced the scope of the project. However, while the scheme initially cost £1.2bn, it ended up costing £1.5bn and was delivered a number of years later than originally planned.

To some extent, the Coalition learnt the lesson of the A14 false economy and moved to a more certain process for roadbuilding known as the Road Investment Strategy (RIS). Instead of HM Treasury deciding what should and shouldn’t go ahead, Highways England (now National Highways) would be given a large protected pot of funding and the freedom to execute projects from a longlist of schemes supported by large strategic studies. Though construction costs remained somewhat higher than the European average, more projects (including some decades in the making) were completed and at dramatically shorter time-scales. Unfortunately, a tougher fiscal environment and delays (covid plus legal challenges) have in practice moved us closer to the system we had before where stuff couldn’t happen without repeated Treasury sign-off.

It is hard to deny that Britain’s transport infrastructure would benefit from greater funding consistency, yet regular funding is not a panacea. Funding volatility alone is nowhere near sufficient to explain why Britain’s construction costs are so high. To bring them to European levels will almost certainly require a lot to change. After all, when you’re two, three or even eight times more expensive than your European counterparts, you are probably messing up on more than one dimension. More than anything, it will mean difficult conversations about planning and procurement. If these aren’t fixed and costs stay high, it will be even harder to protect infrastructure funding from the scrutiny and uncertainty of the political process.

Details

Role: Policy Researcher/Senior Policy Researcher

Location: London (with flexibility to work from home 1-2 days per week)

Salary: Competitive, dependent on experience and role seniority

Duration: Permanent

Application closing date: 25th June 2026

Overview

Britain Remade is the nation’s leading pro-growth campaign with over 40,000 supporters. We combine in-depth policy research with modern political campaigning to tackle Britain’s biggest problems from expensive energy to the housing shortage.

We are looking to expand our Policy/Research team and hire one or two members of staff to produce cutting-edge research to make the case for policies that lower rents, lower bills, and get Britain’s economy growing again. We are open to appointing candidates at different levels of seniority. For exceptional candidates, there may be scope for a more senior appointment, including leading our research function.

About the Role

As part of Britain Remade’s Policy and Research team, you will:

• Work closely with the Head of Policy to develop Britain Remade’s policy positions.

• Analyse data to generate practical policy insights.

• Write briefing papers, opinion articles, and blog posts on key issues.

• Keep track of policy developments in energy, housing, and transport.

• Use research to identify new campaigning opportunities.

• Represent Britain Remade publicly across media platforms (broadcast, print, social media).

• Present findings and engage with policymakers, industry stakeholders, and media representatives.

Examples of recent Britain Remade research projects include:

• Using AI/coding to track changes in the length of planning applications for major infrastructure projects.

• Analysing private data on planning applications to forecast whether the Government will reach its 1.5 million home housing target.

• Working with nuclear engineering experts to identify shortcomings in the way nuclear power is regulated and put forward a more proportionate approach.

Britain Remade is a national campaign. If you’re successful, expect to travel across Britain visiting everything from nuclear power stations in Wales to offshore wind farms off the coast of Aberdeen.

What We’re Looking For

Essential:

• Excellent persuasive writing skills.

• Solid grasp of economics and public policy with the ability to clearly explain complex ideas.

• Genuine passion for economic growth and Britain Remade’s policy areas.

• Strong attention to detail with the ability to deliver quality work quickly.

• Comfortable with data analysis and interpretation.

• Quick learner.

Desirable:

• Experience with statistical software like Stata or R (advanced Excel skills are equally valued).

• Experience with econometrics.

• Previous experience writing policy reports.

• Specialist knowledge in housing, transport, or energy policy.

The Ideal Candidate(s)

We’re looking for someone proactive, self-motivated, and genuinely interested in shaping UK policy. You might have experience as a policy researcher, a relevant master’s degree, parliamentary experience, or simply an active interest demonstrated through your own writing or blogs. You’re comfortable with data and statistics and eager to learn new skills—whether that’s using AI to assess planning applications, mapping software for urban planning, or digging through archives for research.

We don’t expect you to match every detail perfectly—Britain Remade is a flexible organisation willing to shape the role around the right candidate. So don’t be deterred if your background doesn’t perfectly align. Whether you’re a town planner interested in moving into policy advocacy, a nuclear engineer keen to influence regulations or an experienced policy professional looking to lead a research function and shape the direction of a growing organisation, we’d love to hear from you.

How to Apply

Please send your CV, a short cover letter (150 words max), and a list of three blogs, articles, or reports you think every policymaker should read (and one they shouldn’t!) to communications@britainremade.co.uk.

If you have any examples of your writing, it is encouraged to include these within your application.

Reminder: send your application before 11pm on Thursday 25th June.

It was welcome then that a few weeks ago, a judge threw out a legal challenge against a proposed solar farm in Kent. In the past, this would be the first skirmish in a conflict that could go on for over a year, but thanks to new powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Act, Mrs Justice Lieven was able to cut that process short. All things being equal, it looks like that solar farm will be operational a year sooner than it would have been under the system.

So, has Labour solved Britain’s judicial review (JR) problem?

Rachel Reeves doesn’t think so, and I agree. Last week, she announced two additional measures to make it harder for legal challenges to delay and derail infrastructure projects.

For the most important energy projects, subject to Parliamentary approval, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero will be able to designate certain projects as being of ‘critical national importance’ and give it the same weight as an act of Parliament. This would make legal challenges near certain to fail. This is a slight throwback. Britain’s most iconic infrastructure was historically built via private acts of Parliament, not the bespoke Development Consent Order process that exists today.

For everything else, Reeves is proposing to change how the JR challenge period works. Currently, opponents of a scheme have a six-week window to bring legal challenges once the Secretary of State has published their decision letter. Under the new system, opponents would still be able to bring legal complaints during that window, but the Secretary of State would then get an opportunity to modify their decision letter once the challenges have been lodged. For example, if a retired computer scientist sued a road project on the grounds that the Secretary of State failed to consider the carbon impacts of the project, then the Secretary of State could update the decision letter to show they had in fact taken these impacts into account. This would make it much easier for judges to dismiss challenges as ‘totally without merit’ (like they did with the Kent solar farm case) and end the process then and there.

On top of that, only challenges brought within that short six-week window could be taken to court. Legal challenges bringing up new issues not covered in that six-week window would be blocked outright.

We are still awaiting the full details, but at face value, both measures are welcome. The former, in particular, could be extremely powerful and is a workable version of an idea that’s been floating around for a while in abundance circles.

But if the Planning and Infrastructure Act’s reforms to JR are working, why is Reeves looking to go further?

Let me explain. There are two major problems with JR.

First, there’s the obvious and relatively recent problem of legally sound infrastructure projects being delayed by legal challenges that are extremely unlikely to succeed. That’s a real problem – and it’s certainly been exacerbated by international treaties like Aarhus which mean unsuccessful claimants are not liable for the full legal costs they impose on the other party - but it isn’t the main problem. Rather, it is the measurable, or visible, problem. The cost of delay in time and money is easy to track.

There’s a second bigger, but harder to measure, problem with JR. It is how the threat of a successful JR (most attempts fail, but some succeed) has a chilling effect. Planning and environmental law is extremely complicated. There is, and it’s debatable how avoidable this is, enormous scope for interpretation. What is or isn’t an adverse effect? What counts as a sufficient level of consultation? What level of evidence is needed to rule out a potential environmental impact?

If a JR attempt succeeds and planning permission is quashed, it can, at best, massively delay a project and, at worst, kill it altogether. Infrastructure builders, whether or not they’re private or state, will rationally go to great lengths to avoid being JR’d. Caution is embedded throughout the process. Every single time there’s a grey area, lawyers will push developers to the more expensive (but legally robust) solution.

This is the real reason why EDF spends £700m protecting fish at Hinkley Point C, why HS2 spent £100m on a bat shed, and why National Highways’ planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing was over 350,000 pages long (and cost £350m).

This is inherently hard to measure. First, because it is difficult, even for the brightest lawyers, to work out what is legally required and what is goldplating. Second, because we typically don’t get to see the options developers rule out due to legal risk.

It is the reason why environmental impact assessments get longer and longer over time. It is also why the time it takes ministers to decide whether or not to approve projects has grown over time. When every single line is set to be scrutinised by litigious campaigners, a simple ‘yes’ isn’t sufficient. Every element of the Secretary of State’s reasoning must be set out in pain-staking detail, guarding against hundreds of potential objections.

The hope is that these reforms push against that culture of extreme caution. In theory, the ability for Parliament to confirm the project in a straightforward vote should put an end to the ‘belt-and-braces’ approach and instead allow for developers to argue the case for their project on the merits.

There is a trade-off. It makes planning decisions more political. Some developers might not like that risk. At the moment, it seems unlikely that Parliament would overrule a Secretary of State and block a project. In the future, majorities might be thinner (or non-existent) and concentrated opposition to specific infrastructure projects (say pylons in East Anglia) might lead to Parliament voting down permission.

Still, it’s a trade-off worth having for two reasons.

First, planning is already politicised. I find it hard to believe that the decision to block the Aquind Interconnector had nothing to do with the fact that it made landfall in Penny Mordaunt’s Portsmouth North seat. (JR in theory came to the rescue – overturning the decision – but the project appears to have stalled.)

Second, it isolates the consequences of controversial infrastructure decisions. When locals want to block a project, the best course of action would be to make a persuasive case aimed at a majority of parliament. Under the status quo, locals fighting development often end up setting new legal precedents. Precedents that are hard to reverse and bind not just a gas well in Surrey, but renewable and nuclear projects across the country.

The refreshing thing about Reeves’ plan is that Parliament will once again be accountable for decision-making. MPs might get it wrong from time-to-time (they will), but at least they won’t be able to hide behind processes and or shift the blame to unelected quangocrats. Crucially, if Parliament chooses to block vital infrastructure, voters will be free to punish them at the next election.

In the town of Sandbach in Cheshire, there is a planned development of 160 homes and a 70-resident care home on the edge of the town. Attempts to build on this site have been ongoing since at least 2014.

The developers are going to extraordinary lengths to deliver community benefits. Just a quarter of the 44-acre site will be housing. Contributions agreed by the developer include:

• Developing a 33 acre Countryside Park on site

• £242,218.50 payment for local outdoor sport

• £28,598.75 for local indoor sport

• £345,000 for new cycle paths and a pedestrian crossing

• £144,640 for an expansion of the local primary care centre

• £222,789 for local secondary schools

• £425,155 for Special Education Needs provision

• a new hall for the Foden’s Brass Band and other community uses

The development itself also achieved many of the council’s stated goals, with the 70-bed care home meeting a need the council themselves had identified and 30% of the housing on the development designated affordable. The site was also going to deliver a significant biodiversity net gain.

After subjecting it to the usual lengthy planning process, planning officers were supportive. The application, which was 1,917 pages long, included 348 pages of documents assessing options for achieving Biodiversity Net Gain, 247 pages of bat-related documentation, as well as a 2-page statement in favour from the local Brass Band. And this is only for ‘outline’ approval; more detail will be required at a later stage. Nevertheless, it did appear that Waint Estates had done enough to get the development to the next stage.

The Councillors Speak

However, Cheshire East Councillors had other ideas.

Councillor Gardiner, leader of the Conservative group and member for Knutsford, led the charge. He began by talking about ‘food security’ as a potential reason for rejection, despite the fact this is quite obviously a national policy matter.

Slightly more relevant were his complaints about potential highways impacts, though they were expressed in hyperbolic terms, saying that he was worried what they would say to parents of any ‘injured children’ at a nearby primary school.

However, it was quickly made clear by the Highways Officer there was no evidence at all for this assertion. The access to the site is actually 100 metres from the school and has been designed to make sure it doesn’t conflict with school traffic as much as possible.

Councillor Gardiner also complained at length about the ‘urbanisation’ that the development will create. He was particularly upset at the ‘trails for keeping people healthy’ and ‘playgrounds’ that the developers planned. We aren’t thinking of the children anymore.

Councillor Gardiner also brought up an issue around the 15-metre gap between the site and an ancient woodland not being sufficient. However, Natural England, hardly the developer’s friend, as well as the Council’s own ecology and tree officers, felt this was ample.

Councillor Gardiner conceded that while none of these reasons alone was likely to be sufficient to reject the application alone, taken together they may be sufficient.

After listening patiently to these complaints, the council’s own planning officer explained, politely and in diplomatic language, that these objections were of no merit and would be rejected when the developers appealed. The councillors were either simply wrong on questions of fact or were bringing up issues that were so small that any planning inspector would accord them either no or very little weight in the planning balance.

The planning officer went on to explain that a lot of the reason schemes like this one, which the councillors clearly dislike, are being applied for and will ultimately be approved is because the council has failed to demonstrate a five-year supply of deliverable housing sites. This is where councils set out where they think housing should be built, in line with their centrally imposed housing targets. If they fail to do this, developers have much more leeway to pick sites for themselves, and a ‘tilted balance’ in the developer’s favour applies when the planning inspector reviews appeals. The planning officer is clearly long suffering, as he was reminding councillors of how they had been in a similar situation in 2017 and had lost many appeals.

The planning officer was essentially ignored by the councillors. Attempts by council staff to give a formal costs warning, as any appeal was likely to be very expensive for council taxpayers, were also ignored. After over 2 hours of discussion, they voted to reject the proposal by 7 votes to 2.

The appeal

As the planning officer had warned, the developer appealed. Ultimately, the rejection by the councillors was so obviously wrong that Cheshire East Council decided not to contest the claim at all. However, the Planning Inspector’s enquiry went ahead anyway. Inevitably, and for almost exactly the same reasons the planning officer had stated at the council meeting, the Planning Inspector concluded that the appeal was upheld and the developer could proceed. This was all very expensive.

For the national taxpayer, this meant paying for the planning inspector to visit the site, read thousands of pages of documents, conduct the hearing and write his report. It will have cost thousands of pounds in his time and expenses.

For the developer, and ultimately the homebuyer, there were high costs too, as they had an expensive barrister who called six different experts to give testimony.

However, it is the Cheshire East residents, especially in Sandbach, who paid the highest costs. Firstly, the council had its own expensive barrister and two of its council officers attended the hearing, as well as sending in lots of documentation for the hearing. This likely cost thousands of pounds in council tax payer money.

More substantially, though, the inspector also found that some of the payments Wain Estates had agreed to were not in fact supportable under planning law. The inspector therefore cancelled the requirement for the developer to contribute £345,000 to local cycling and pedestrian infrastructure and £144,640 to a nearby primary health care centre were not justified. The council therefore appears to have given up nearly half a million pounds’ worth of local benefits from the scheme on a completely groundless rejection that they ultimately concluded it was not worth trying to defend.

This is the system working

Relative to many other attempts to build the housing Britain needs, this is a ‘success’ for the current planning system. The homes will get built eventually. But thanks to Cheshire East’s performative refusal, we will get them later, more expensively, and with fewer improvements for local people. A system that encourages grandstanding, punishes housebuilding and leaves residents to pick up the bill is not one that works.

The Telegraph reports Natural England told EDF that even after spending £500m on special low-velocity intake heads, £150m on a fish recovery and returns system, and £50m on an acoustic fish deterrent (AFD), Hinkley Point C is still deemed to have an adverse effect on protected species of fish in the Severn Estuary.

It should be noted that despite much mocking, the acoustic fish deterrent (otherwise known as the ‘fish disco’) appears to be very effective. Natural England’s Chair Tony Juniper recently posted a photo of himself ‘electronically tagging’ a Twaite Shad, one of the species of fish affected by Hinkley Point C, to test the deterrent. The tagged fish study found that the number of protected shad within 30m of the plant’s intake fell by 93% when the AFD was on. The study also found that on (or off) it was extremely rare for salmon, another legally protected fish, to get within 100m of the power plant.

This evidence wasn’t enough for Natural England, who have instead told EDF that they must secure additional ‘compensation’. What that further compensation would involve is unclear. In the absence of the AFD, EDF previously agreed, in the absence of the AFD, to create 900 acres of salt marsh across several locations along the Bristol Channel, including in Arlingham, a 70 mile drive from Hinkley Point. The effectiveness of the AFD implies that the full 900 acres of salt marsh previously agreed will not be necessary, however Natural England are yet to provide any detail to what level would be seen as acceptable. Not only is the saltmarsh proposal deeply unpopular with the farmers who would have their land acquired via compulsory purchase, if Natural England continues to press for additional compensation measures in advance of operations it risks delaying Hinkley Point C’s switch-on date by years.

The problem is twofold. First, the farmers don’t want to lose their livelihoods and sell to EDF. As a result, there’ll be a long-drawn out legal battle that will need to be settled before work can begin. Second, salt marshes, like Rome, aren’t built in a day. One similar project, in Gloucestershire, has taken five years to get up and running. Crucially, Natural England won’t be satisfied until the salt marsh is in place (and there’s evidence for it working). And, EDF needs the permit before that 2030 switch-on date. My understanding is that the permit is necessary for works due as soon as 2028. In other words, if Natural England demands the salt marsh then expect long delays.

In theory, EDF could apply to change the Development Consent Order to remove the requirement for a salt marsh. This isn’t a fast process, nor is it fool-proof. There is a risk of legal challenge and ministerial delay. EDF could end up back where they started.

Here’s what’s at stake. When complete, Hinkley Point C will produce enough electricity to power six million homes, and provide 7% of the UK’s total electricity. All of that power will be low-carbon, and crucially, reliable. Nuclear, unlike wind and solar, works around the clock whatever the weather.

If there’s no salt marsh shaped delay to Hinkley Point C, then EDF should have one unit online by 2030, with a second coming online in 2032. What happens to the grid if that 2030 switch-on date is pushed back two years? Well, Britain Remade actually modelled this in 2024. We tweaked the assumptions in the National Energy Systems Operator’s model for Clean Power to see what would happen if, among other things, Hinkley Point C Unit 1 missed its 2030 deadline.

Our assessment is that a two-year delay to Hinkley Point C Unit 1, even with reactors in Heysham and Torness kept online, would mean about 24TWh less clean firm power on the grid, between two to four billion cubic metres more gas burnt, and as a result between four and eight million additional tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The impact on bills is less certain and depends on gas prices. If they fall slightly, then the bill saving might be small (a few pounds) but if conflict abroad leads to another spike (and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz just might) then we could be talking about £20 for each year of delay for every household in Britain. This is all reliant on keeping the older advanced gas cooled reactors (AGRs) online. If regulators decide that cracks in their graphite core mean they cannot be safely operated past 2030, then the impact on bills (and beyond) would be even greater.

In short, if Hinkley Point C is delayed Britain will be more vulnerable to fossil fuel price spikes. Natural England is a threat to Britain’s energy security.

***

Natural England, it should be said, disputes the story. They have published a rebuttal and its Chair, the environmentalist Tony Juniper, has been active on twitter defending the organisation. I don’t find their response convincing at all.

There’s a degree of blame shifting. They state that they ‘do not sign off’ nuclear projects. Their job, they argue, is merely to advise other regulators whether or not Hinkley Point C is (or isn’t) compliant with laws designed to protect wildlife. At one point, they suggest that failing to heed their advice will mean the project will be delayed regardless due to legal challenges.

Yet, this is far from clear cut. When I’ve spoken to planning and environmental lawyers, some have argued that disproportionate decisions, like requiring £700m to save a small number of legally-protected fish, are not an inevitable result of the Habitats Regulations but rather are a result of culture at the organisations. They argue that in fact the regulations give substantial room for regulators to apply them proportionately, such as the level of evidence demanded and whether or not certain impacts are ‘adverse’. In fact, this is often given as a defence of the Habitats Regulations. Hate the player (or at least, argue the player needs better human resourcing), not the game.

The Government’s lawyers seem to believe Natural England does have more leeway. They are consulting on updating Natural England’s statutory guidance to encourage more proportionate decisionmaking. (The PM has sent them and other regulators a strongly worded letter telling them they need to be more proportionate.)

This is welcome, though I can’t help but worry what if Natural England are right and that this really is what the law requires? That’s why I believe going further and using primary legislation to change the Habitats Regulations (or at least, give the guidance sufficient legal weight) is the prudent course of action.

One problem we have is a lack of accountability. Natural England deny having ever ‘demanded design changes’. This is similar to their line that the £120m bat tunnel isn’t their fault. Now, it is true Natural England does not have a team of engineers that designs £500m low-velocity side-entry intake heads or £120m bat sheds. But, they do have enormous power over what can and can’t be built. If they assess that your project will have an adverse impact on a protected habitat or that your proposed mitigation won’t work, then it forces the developer to either cancel the project or design a mitigation that will pass their muster.

Where I am more concerned is that Natural England (or at least, its chair) appears to dispute some of the facts. Tony Juniper tweeted a link to a debunked Wildlife Trust post that claimed that Hinkley Point C’s special intake heads (£500m) and fish-returns system (£150m) were not environmental measures, but vital to the plant’s operation. (The implication being that without either, the plant’s cooling system will get clogged with millions of fish.) This isn’t the case. As I and the Nuclear Industry Association have pointed out, other plants in the Estuary and similar plants overseas do not include these features, suggesting they are not in fact operationally necessary.

Natural England also disputes that they risk delaying the plants opening. I think this is misleading. Their stated position is ‘Natural England does not control the project timetable and is not aware of any delay to the project timetable arising from the current work on AFDs.’ Yet, the dispute isn’t over whether or not the fish deterrent is delaying the project, it is about whether or not the fish deterrent is sufficient to mitigate the plant’s impacts. If not, then EDF will be required to provide additional compensation in the form of a 900 acre salt marsh. It is extremely unlikely that this salt marsh will be ready by then.

***

This really matters. The Government needs to act fast.

So, how can we avoid an unnecessary delay to Hinkley Point C?

First, it is vital that the Government press on with reforms to the Habitats Regulations. In particular, reforms to ensure that very small adverse impacts (e.g. one salmon every ten years) do not count against projects would make it far less likely projects like Hinkley Point C end up in this situation. The guidance they are currently consulting on is, for the most part, in line with what John Fingleton recommended in his Nuclear Regulatory Review. There is a chance, but not a guarantee, that this will be enough to change Natural England’s stance.

The Government must go further. The King’s Speech promised bills on Nuclear Regulation and Energy Independence. The Government should use them to go further and put the changes into primary legislation so there’s no way they can be unpicked with legal challenges.

But, passing legislation, at least complex legislation like that, takes time. And EDF can’t rely on that legislation passing unscathed – the Planning and Infrastructure Act itself was watered down as it went through Parliament.

One option, call it the nuclear option, would be to pass a targeted one-line bill to deem Hinkley Point C’s existing mitigations sufficient to satisfy the relevant DCO, marine licence and Habitats Regulations requirements. Unlike complex legislation, a limited project-specific bill could be passed quickly in Parliament where there’s strong support for nuclear in both houses.

In the long-run however, it is important to ensure that this can never happen again. The most radical measure within the Fingleton Review was a call to create an alternative route to comply with the Habitats Regulations for nuclear energy. Instead of the standard process, there would be a recognition that nuclear will have large impacts on nature, but that the benefits of nuclear (for climate and energy security) are even larger. If requiring bespoke mitigations delays nuclear delivery (or adds costs by making designs more complex) then that too is bad for the environment. Fingleton’s proposal was that instead of studying potential impacts and designing bespoke solutions, developers could simply make a large payment to a national nature fund.

This is less about direct cost savings (Hinkley Point C might pay close to £700m under this scheme) but financial certainty (£700m won’t become £1bn), speed (fewer surveys and fish tagging studies), and design certainty (plant designs can be fully repeatable with as few site-specific changes as possible).

What’s interesting is that the Labour government has half-accepted this recommendation. Nuclear projects for defence will get a special alternative route, but civil nuclear projects don’t. Instead, civil projects (e.g. for energy) will be able to use new ‘Environmental Delivery Plans’, a measure from the recently-passed Planning and Infrastructure Act. In theory, EDPs, which identify likely environmental impacts from projects and require developers to pay into a Nature Restoration Fund to offset those impacts, could work.

There’s just one problem. The Government body tasked with setting EDPs up? Natural England.

Since 2011, there have been 37 separate legal challenges against planning decisions on Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. Almost all of these challenges fail. Only four have been successful (and two of those were challenging planning refusals).

Judges tend to take a dim view of many of these challenges.

For example, take retired computer scientist (and former Green Party councillor) Dr Andrew Boswell’s attempt to block three major road upgrades to the A47 because, in his view, they had failed to do their carbon assessment properly. High Court judge Mrs Justice Thornton accused him of “demand[ing] an impossible level of comprehensiveness.” He lost, but appealed to a higher court. They were even less polite. They judged his case had “an air of complete unreality.”

Yet, even when legal challenges fail they still cause damage. Unsuccessful cases have taken a collective 11,995 days to hear and decide.

Delays are expensive. National Highways (the body responsible for building major roads) estimated that the average legal challenge added between £60 and £120m to project costs. This wasn’t because National Highways were hiring particularly expensive lawyers. It’s because every delay means people in construction are paid to stand down, while the cost of raw materials goes up. In the last decade, construction inflation has consistently outpaced the CPI.

The last Government asked Lord Banner KC to look at ways to stop likely-to-fail legal challenges from holding up major infrastructure projects. Their big concern was that NGOs face little-to-no consequences when their legal challenges fail. Unlike most lawsuits, judges are limited in their ability to force the losing party to pay for the legal costs of the successful party when challenges are brought on environmental grounds. Costs are capped at £5k for individuals and £10k for organizations.

Banner’s solution wasn’t to get rid of the caps, but to speed up the whole process. At the time, litigants got ‘three bites of the cherry’ when they launched a lawsuit. First, their case is reviewed ‘on the papers’ at the High Court. If that’s unsuccessful, they can either give up or renew their claim at an oral hearing where they present their case to a High Court judge in person. If that doesn’t work in obtaining a JR, they may then be granted permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal. This process on average takes just over a year (14 months).

Lord Banner suggested cutting the number of bites to just two – getting rid of the papers stage altogether. In many cases, Banner thought one bite should be enough. He proposed that high court judges be given the power to stop a challenge altogether if they thought it was ‘totally without merit’.

Labour were elected on a pledge to ‘get Britain building again’ and they were in the market for ideas. To their credit, they weren’t precious about where they came from – even if that meant accepting in full the recommendations of a report by Conservative peer commissioned by a Conservative PM. Lord Banner’s proposals became part of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which became the Planning and Infrastructure Act, just before Christmas.

Four months on, it’s working

Banner’s reforms are already having an impact. Last week, a High Court judge threw out a legal challenge from Aldington and Bonnington Parish Council. The Parish council had attempted to block a 99MW solar farm near Ashford, Stonestreet Green Solar, on a number of grounds. She ruled that their challenge was ‘totally without merit’. In the past, Aldington and Bonnington Parish Council would have had three chances to persuade a judge to grant them permission for a full judicial review. Now, because of the Planning and Infrastructure Act, they only got one.

It’s impossible to know for certain how long it would have taken under the old system to deal with Aldington and Bonnington Parish Council’s legal challenge, but on average cases drag on for just over a year (14 months). Something that in the past took on average 14 months to resolve was sorted in just two.

And that’s an average, some cases go on for even longer. For instance, a challenge against the East Anglia One offshore wind farm, took just under two years to resolve. Every month of delay is time with less clean power on the grid. Delays to clean power projects mean higher emissions, and fundamentally, burning more gas.

How much more gas burnt and how much more carbon emitted? It’s not always sunny in Kent. Solar’s load factor is just under 10%. Still over a year, a 99MW solar farm should produce enough electricity to power just over 32,000 homes at current usage rates (2,700 kWh per year). If that power was generated via gas, you would need 15 million cubic metres of gas. That’s about one-sixth of a large LNG tanker’s cargo (or enough to fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools). Every million cubic metres of gas burnt emits around 2,050 tonnes of CO₂e into the atmosphere. Burning 15 million cubic metres of gas would emit 31,000 tonnes CO₂e, or the equivalent of adding 21,000 Ford Pumas — 2025’s bestselling car — to the road.

And this is just the emissions and gas savings from a single project. In the years ahead, many more projects will be sped up. I have repeatedly argued that the Planning and Infrastructure Act could and should have been much stronger in a number of areas. While the Planning and Infrastructure Act failed to deliver the scale of planning reform needed, many of the measures it contained were meaningful steps in the right direction.

Yet there’s one massive flaw in the Planning and Infrastructure Act’s crackdown on no-hope legal challenges: it only applies to challenges to Development Consent Orders (DCO). Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C faced delays due to lawsuits questioning the decision to grant a DCO, but they have also faced delays due to lawsuits to the granting of permits post-consent and to their site license conditions. My fear is that NIMBYs won’t give up, they’ll adapt. This is why it is essential that when Parliament returns, the Government legislates to implement the Fingleton Review’s recommendation to extend the Banner reforms to permitting and site licensing.

It takes far too long to build things in Britain. It doesn’t have to. In just a few months, the Planning and Infrastructure Act has cut a year off the time it takes to build a large solar farm.

Why rip out your gas boiler and install a heat pump if electricity is 5 times more expensive than gas? Why invest in an EV if high power prices mean it is not that much cheaper to run than a petrol car? Why build a massive data centre in Britain if it costs four times more to power it here than in the States? For that matter, why keep your factory open here when you’re spending that much more on energy than your international competitors?

None of these are theoretical concerns. Open AI recently cancelled a major investment in data centres in Britain citing power costs. The list of British manufacturers closing down is long and growing, with 217-year-old Derbyshire pottery Denby the latest, its administrators again citing “soaring energy costs’. EV and heat pump take-up is increasing, but not fast enough to meet government targets.

The problem isn’t just that expensive electricity kills jobs and makes it harder to decarbonise, though it certainly does, it’s that massive investments in pylons, wires, and substations are premised on electricity use growing.

That growth doesn’t seem to be emerging. For the past twenty years, electricity use has been falling. In fact, it’s fallen at a relatively consistent rate of 1% per year (moving up and down a little during economic downturns and recoveries).

Every few years, some part of the British state publishes a forecast of how much electricity British households and businesses will use in the years to come. And every single time, they get it woefully wrong, predicting big increases in demand that never seem to arrive. Instead of learning from past mistakes and revising down future estimates, more recent forecasts see it surging.

The chart below tracks nine separate forecasts of future electricity use in Britain. All of the forecasts come from the government directly, with the exception of the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios (FES), which are explicitly required by government regulation.

It is hard to emphasise just how wrong past forecasts were. Every forecast of the last twenty years predicted big rises in the demand for electricity. In reality, demand didn’t just fall. On a per capita basis, it fell faster in Britain than in any other developed country. Between 2000 and 2019 electricity demand per capita fell by 22%. Only Yemen, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Tajikistan and Syria saw electricity demand drop by more.

It might be tempting for greens to argue that falling electricity use isn’t a problem. In the last 25 years, Brits have adopted LED lightbulbs, energy-efficient white goods, and insulation at pace. There’s something to this, electricity use is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The thing that really matters for climate change is not how much electricity we are using but whether we are electrifying the ‘dirty’ parts of our economy. Are we adopting EVs, heat pumps, and converting blast furnaces into electric arc furnaces?

So, is the share of primary energy demand met by electricity growing or falling?

Since 2000, it has grown slightly (+2.4%) but in the last decade is essentially flat (+1.1%). Currently, 17.5% of our primary energy consumption is electric. We are far behind Sweden and Norway (50%), France (32%), and China (23%).

To reach Net Zero by 2050, Britain will need to reach the same electricity share as Sweden and Norway. If the share grows at the rate it has since 2000 that will take over 300 years. At current rates, Britain won’t even reach Chinese levels of electrification until 2086. And if anything, our modest growth in electricity share has been flattered by deindustrialisation. Since 2000, industrial gas demand has fallen by 54%.

Why were the forecasts wrong?

So, why were the forecasts wrong? There are multiple reasons, but all linked to a common cause: a failure to predict higher bills and a failure to predict the scale of the response.

They missed the rise in grid defection due to rooftop solar, massively underestimated the uptake of energy efficiency measures, assumed a relationship between GDP growth and electricity use that didn’t hold, and crucially, they did not foresee a big drop in demand from industry. Industrial electricity consumption dropped by a third between 2005 and 2024. Some sectors like iron and steel saw electricity use fall by even more (75%).

It is hard to imagine the same response if electricity prices had not risen by over 100% in real terms for households and nearly 175% for industrial users over the last two decades. Part of the problem was that past demand forecasts were based on models that used wholesale fuel prices — the cost of gas and coal — as their price input. But wholesale costs are only part of what consumers actually pay. Network charges roughly doubled in real terms. Policy levies grew from almost nothing to around 25% of the bill.

Until 2014, policy costs were being tracked. The then-Department for Energy and Climate Change published semi-regular forecasts of the impact of policy on bills and prices. In its final 2014 report, DECC projected that policies would push up domestic electricity prices by around 37% by 2020 in the central scenario, and small business prices by around 50%. These forecasts weren’t perfect — they excluded network integration costs for renewables (DECC explicitly acknowledged this gap) and assumed higher consumption than actually materialised. But they were at least a serious attempt to quantify what policy was doing to prices.

Frustratingly, the predictions weren’t factored into the demand forecasting model. After 2014, they stopped forecasting electricity prices. In 2017, the Climate Change Committee did produce a version, but it predicted bills not prices. This was a problem because big improvements in energy efficiency disguised the fact that electricity was getting increasingly expensive. Still, it was better than nothing. For the past eight years, the UK has been making major electricity policy decisions with no official forecast of what those decisions will do to the price of electricity.

And that was not the only problem, the forecasts of electricity demand also assumed that industry was much less responsive to electricity prices than they were in reality. In the short term, electricity demand is pretty inelastic to price. Households might run their tumble dryers a bit less to save money in response to a price hike, but they are limited in what they can do to cut back. Over time the picture changes. If you expect electricity prices to stay high for the next decade, then you start making real changes. You buy more energy efficient appliances, put solar panels on your roof, and if you rely on electric heating, invest in things like insulation. If you’re a business, high prices might deter you from investing in new energy-hungry kit. High prices may, of course, force you out of business altogether. The best academic estimates suggest that in the long-run electricity use is three times as responsive as it is in the short-term.

Why didn’t the forecasts use prices?

It is worth stepping back to recognise how unusual all of this is. The Climate Change Committee, the National Energy Systems Operator, and the government department responsible for energy policy treat electricity demand as basically independent of price. The laws of supply and demand, the idea that as price rises quantity demanded falls, are ignored.

In more recent years, forecasts have become increasingly wishful. They effectively ask, what would happen to electricity growth if the Government’s targets on EV and heat pump take-up are met. They are not forecasts of business as usual. They assume that policy will change to ensure legally-binding climate targets are met. That doesn’t make them completely useless. The necessary policy changes may come. And it is worth figuring out what our generation and capacity needs will be if our complete policies succeed. The problem is they might not, and that as electricity gets more expensive, politicians (of all stripes) will be less likely to push mandates for heat pumps and EVs. As a result, they’re probably going to err on the side of more grid investment than is strictly needed.

The forecasts are typically black boxes. The general public can’t open them up and play around with the assumptions. As a result, we can only guess the underlying logic. Here’s one explanation: in order to comply with the Climate Change Act, the government of the day must have a plan to meet its legally-binding carbon budgets. This forces external bodies to assume that the government’s green policies like the heat pump rollout will be a success. If they published a forecast that showed electricity demand falling, not rising, then it would essentially concede that it is massively off track to meet the carbon targets it has set itself. In other words, process comes above common sense.

Why do bad forecasts matter (and why are our bills so high)?

Why are Britain’s energy bills so high? The simple story, and the one accepted by most of the public, is that gas is the problem. Britain needs gas to keep the lights on, gas has got very expensive, and wholesale power prices are set by the most expensive source required to meet demand. There’s some truth to this. The spike in gas prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the main reason prices got so high recently. If gas prices fell a lot or Britain added cheaper alternative sources of power to the grid then wholesale costs should come down.

But that’s not the full story. At a recent Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee hearing Octopus Energy’s regulatory head Rachel Fletcher pointed out that even if wholesale costs were to fall to zero, Britain’s energy bills will still probably rise by about £200 per year by 2030. Her comments surprised the MPs on the committee, though she was backed up by the other energy execs at the hearing.

Bad forecasts are such a problem because if we act on them we are likely to make our expensive electricity problem much worse.

Wholesale costs are just one part of our bills. There’s the cost of generating power, but there’s also the cost of running and upgrading the grid, running billing systems, dealing with unpaid customer debt, subsidies for poorer households, subsidies for cleaner forms of power, and subsidies to pay for backup capacity. On top of all of that, there’s the cost of dealing with the fact that electricity grids need to near-perfectly balance supply and demand. Wind farms and factories can both be paid to switch off at short notice.

If we build in anticipation of electricity demand surging (and it doesn’t) then all of these fixed costs become concentrated on a small slice of demand.

Most of the energy debate – and Government policy – has focused on the wholesale side. Clean Power 2030, the Government’s plan to cut the gas share of the grid to under 5%, is set to lower wholesale prices a bit. The issue is that wholesale costs make up a shrinking segment of our electricity bill. In 2010 wholesale costs made up about 40-50% of the bill. Today, they make up closer to a third. In 2030 that will fall to a quarter.

At the same time, all of those other costs I mentioned are going up. In some cases by a lot. The cost of transmission – building pylons and wires to get power from the wind farms in the North Sea to where people actually live – is set to double. Money spent on distribution, like upgrading substations, will go up too. This investment is there to accommodate a huge surge in forecast electricity demand and a grid where power is increasingly generated by intermittent renewable assets. Still, the amount spent paying wind farms to switch off because the grid can’t take the power they produce will more than quadruple.

Billpayers will also start paying levies for carbon capture, new nuclear under construction, and subsidies to lower industrial power prices. One reason why wholesale costs are falling as a share of bills is that new renewables are financed via long-term fixed-price contracts (known as CfDs). When the wind is really blowing, there will be days where wholesale prices are near zero or even negative. Power won’t be ‘free’ then. Wind farms with CfDs will still get paid the price they agreed at auction.

Britain is also connected to the continent via interconnectors. When prices are near-zero (or lower), Britain will be sending ultra-cheap power to Belgium and France lowering their bills. Meanwhile, British billpayers will be paying to top up the difference via CfD payments. We effectively will be subsidising French households and business, while paying much higher bills ourselves.

Asleep at the wheel

Britain’s leaders have sleepwalked into a crisis. For the past two decades, the assumption has been (and still is) that electricity demand will go up massively in the years to come. Yet, predictions of a surge in the demand for power have been consistently wrong. High prices caused by bad policies (and to some extent, bad luck) led to a 16% drop in electricity consumption over the past 20 years.

There’s plenty to do to make electricity cheap.

• Going to locational (nodal) power pricing would cut the amount spent paying wind farms to switch off and create the incentive to build new energy infrastructure in the places where it is most needed

• Making it easier to connect to the grid (and getting tech giants to make a larger contribution to the cost of upgrades) would help spread out fixed costs.

• Removing (or at least, reforming) carbon taxes from electricity generation would avoid the absurd situation where carbon taxes make mostly renewable powered electricity more expensive relative to carbon-emitting gas. Update: The Government has now announced that the Carbon Price Support will be axed from April 2028.

• Moving levies designed to pay for hydrogen, carbon-capture, legacy renewables, and discounts for people on low incomes to general taxation would straightforwardly lower prices. Something that tax receipts from a more liberal policy on North Sea exploration and drilling could help fund.

• And of course, radically reforming the planning and procurement rules that make all kinds of new generation (and particularly, clean, reliable nuclear) far more expensive to build than necessary.

But, there is a risk that rather than adopting policies that would cut prices, Britain will instead double down on more expensive power. In response to oil and gas prices spiking after Trump bombed Iran, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband pledged to bring forward the next renewable auction. The justification was to reduce fossil fuel dependency, yet the last auction saw offshore wind clear at prices well above average wholesale costs. And that’s before you factor in all the system costs. Higher energy costs (expensive gas makes renewables more expensive to build), higher interest rates, and reduced competition from an accelerated timeframe make it likely that the next auction will be even more expensive.

It is remarkable how little scrutiny MPs have applied to the non-wholesale bits of our bills. Despite sky-high prices, there has been a tendency to treat bills as a magic money tree – a way of spending money without raising taxes. There might be a case for subsidising hydrogen or discounting bills for the least well-off, yet instead of raising taxes through our broadly progressive tax system the money is levied from our bills. It’s ironic that we apply a lower rate of VAT to energy to make our tax system more progressive– the poor spend a greater share of their income on energy than the rich– while simultaneously applying dozens of levies to bills to pay for everything from hydrogen and carbon capture to subsidies for poorer households and support for heavy industry.

The root of the problem is that we’ve completely failed to keep track of what policy is doing to the price of electricity, and even when we did we didn’t factor it into models forecasting electricity demand. It is a scandal. The figures on rising network and policy costs cited earlier come not from official forecasts but from independent analysis by energy analyst Ben James — work that fills a gap the government itself no longer attempts. This is not because the work isn’t necessary, it is. Without it, we are likely to repeat mistakes that have made British electricity some of the world’s most expensive.

The British state’s track record at forecasting electricity use is, to put it bluntly, crap. Yet forecasts matter. The response to bad forecasts shouldn’t be ditching them altogether, it should be better forecasts. To that end, three things should happen.

1. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero should resurrect DECC’s Estimated Impacts of Energy and Climate Change Policies on Energy Prices and Bills and publish annual forecasts of the cost of policy decisions on retail electricity prices.

2. Future forecasts of electricity use by the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) or DESNZ should be required to use these price forecasts when estimating future power use.

3. DESNZ (or NESO) should publish their estimate of short, medium, and long-run price elasticities of demand for electricity use.

Click here for a version with interactive graphs

Leeds, its German twin Dortmund, and its French twin Lille are all Cities with around 700,000 people living within 10km of the city centre, with an industrial heritage and below average GDP per capita for their country.

Unlike Leeds, Dortmund has an eight-line, 47-mile Stadtbahn network, essentially an underground tram system, with trains running every ten minutes. The city is also part of the wider Rhine–Ruhr S-Bahn network, a faster commuter rail system with four lines and about 25 miles of track running through the city.

Lille, has a slightly more modest system but still far more extensive than Leeds: two driverless metro lines and two tramlines with a combined network of 38.9 miles. The metro can run extremely frequently, with trains every 66 seconds on one line at peak times.

Why the difference?

Part of the explanation is cost. Infrastructure projects in Britain are unusually expensive. Our analysis suggests that tram projects in the UK cost about 85 percent more than in France and more than three times as much as in Germany.

But governance also plays a major role. The decisions, and the funding, for what happens in Leeds do not primarily come from Leeds or even the wider West Yorkshire region. Two years after the local Mayor was elected on a promise of building a tram the government is still ‘assessing the business case’ while writing reports about how maybe it should be a bus instead.

This is because every stage relies on permission and funding from the Department for Transport and other central government bodies in London. Tram projects are typically funded largely by central government, and even funding that is notionally local mostly comes from redistributed national taxation.

In France and Germany it is very different. More decisions are made locally, and far more funding is raised locally.

Getting permission: how rail projects are approved

A Leeds Tram in a Museum. I know that was then, but it could be again.

In Lille and Dortmund, the political decision to build a new rail line is made locally. In Leeds, the key decision is national.

In Lille, the metropolitan authority decides whether to pursue a new metro line. The metropolitan council votes on whether to begin the project and fund the initial studies. The French state becomes involved later through regulatory procedures such as environmental assessments, public inquiries and a Declaration of Public Utility if compulsory purchase is required. But the core political decision to build is taken locally. The city-region identifies the route, commissions studies, decides whether the project should proceed and assembles the funding package. National procedures mainly function as legal checks on projects that have already been decided locally.

In Dortmund the process also begins locally. The city council decides whether the city will pursue a new Stadtbahn line or extension. Council committees examine options and recommend whether to proceed, and the council votes to begin planning and later to approve construction. The project then passes through a formal plan approval process under German transport law. This process is overseen by the state authority in North Rhine–Westphalia rather than the federal government. The state’s role is regulatory: reviewing plans, environmental impacts and technical compliance before construction can begin. The political initiative, project design and delivery remain local.

Leeds operates very differently. In England, a new tramway normally requires a Transport and Works Act Order (TWAO). This order is granted by the Secretary of State for Transport after a statutory process that may include consultation, objections and a public inquiry run through the Planning Inspectorate. The order provides the legal powers needed to build and operate the line and to acquire land compulsorily.

This means Leeds cannot simply decide to build a tram and move forward. The city and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority can develop plans and business cases, but the project only becomes legally buildable once central government approves it.

Central involvement does not end there. Large transport schemes in England typically have to return repeatedly to Whitehall as they progress. West Yorkshire will need approval for the statutory order authorising the line, the business case securing government funding, the outline business case confirming the funding package and the final business case before construction contracts can be signed. They will also need permissions related to the environmental assessment. If and when objections are raised, the scheme will also go through a public inquiry run on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport.

The result is a very different dynamic. Lille and Dortmund make decisions locally and drive projects locally, even while complying with national standards. In England, cities develop proposals but progress depends on repeated central approvals.

This also affects capacity. Dortmund’s civil engineering department alone employs almost as many people as the entire Highways and Transportation team in Leeds. British cities face a circular problem: because they have not been given the powers to deliver major infrastructure, they have had fewer opportunities to develop the expertise needed to do so. The resulting lack of capacity is then used as a justification for keeping those powers centralised.

Over time the UK should move toward a system closer to those in France and Germany, where cities make the core political decisions about local transport infrastructure. In the meantime, the current process could at least be simplified. Instead of repeated approval gates, major transport schemes should require no more than two approvals through the Treasury Approvals Process: one from the Department for Transport and one from the Treasury and Cabinet Office.

Paying the bills

The biggest difference between Lille, Dortmund and Leeds is not only how much they spend on transport, but how much revenue they can raise and control locally.

Lille benefits from a dedicated local transport tax. The Versement Mobilité (or Mobility Payment in English) is a levy paid by employers to fund transport. Local areas can set their own rate, some choose lower taxes, some pick more transport. In Lille this raises more than €300 million per year, forming the backbone of the metropolitan transport budget alongside fares and borrowing. Because the tax is locally controlled and predictable, it provides a stable revenue stream that can be used to finance major projects such as metro upgrades, new rolling stock and network expansion.

Dortmund does not have a dedicated transport tax like Lille. Instead it has significant control over its own tax base. German cities can set the rates for major local taxes, including the trade tax on businesses and property tax, through locally determined multipliers. Most of the revenue stays with the municipality and can be spent through the city’s own budget. This gives cities like Dortmund the ability to generate substantial local funding and allocate it to infrastructure priorities alongside federal and state grants.

Leeds has far less fiscal autonomy. Its main local taxes are tightly controlled by the national government. Business rates are largely set nationally and councils face strict limits on council tax increases. They also have limited discretion about what they spend their money on with most council budgets spent on statutory requirements councils have to prove. Therefore, major transport projects typically depend on funding packages negotiated with central government. Local contributions do exist through mechanisms such as developer contributions or borrowing, but there is no equivalent to Lille’s dedicated transport tax and far less ability to increase tax revenues locally.

The result is a very different starting point for infrastructure investment. Lille can rely on a large dedicated transport tax. Dortmund can raise substantial revenues through locally controlled taxes. Leeds must depend far more heavily on funding decisions made in Whitehall.

In very prosperous places with strong opportunities for land value capture, such as London, cities should be able to finance all their own infrastructure with minimal central involvement and no central money. Other cities may still require some support from national government, but probably far less than today if they were given the right fiscal powers.

Lille offers a useful example. It is the largest city in mainland France’s poorest region, yet it still covers most of its transport costs locally. Lille has a GDP per capita very similar to that of Leeds. British cities poorer than Leeds may struggle to pay all of their own bills, but if given enough freedom they could likely fund the majority of their own transport investment.

What can be done now

In the long term the UK should move toward a system more like France’s, with transport-specific local taxation, or Germany’s, with much greater freedom for councils to raise and spend their own revenue. Central government using the fact local politicians have a mandate to deliver something as a reason to block it has to end.

In the meantime, several existing UK mechanisms could be expanded or simplified.

Cities should be allowed to introduce a tourism levy on overnight stays in hotels and short-term lets, creating a small but reliable revenue stream linked to visitor demand.

Land value capture should also be strengthened. Mayors should be able to levy business rate supplements without requiring a local poll, learning from London’s Crossrail experience where a similar levy helped fund a transformational transport project. A council tax precept on properties near new stations could also be considered, expiring once construction debt is repaid.

Finally, Workplace Parking Levies should no longer require approval from the Secretary of State. At present new schemes can take up to three years to secure sign-off from the Transport Secretary. Decisions on whether to introduce such levies should be fully devolved to local authorities and metro mayors, as they are fundamentally regional transport policies.

Giving cities more power over both transport decisions and transport funding would speed up projects and over time build up the expertise needed to reduce costs. We need to Let Mayors Build.

The obvious effect of the cut will be to lower electricity bills a bit, estimates of the magnitude suggest a £8 to £20 saving for the average household, but it might have another surprising effect: lowering emissions. Carbon taxes are designed to make emitting carbon more expensive and encourage the switch to cleaner alternatives, so how can scrapping one be the green option? To understand, it’s worth going back to why the CPS was first brought in.

Your watch is over

In September 2024, 142 years after the first coal power station in Britain opened in 1882, Britain’s last coal power station was taken off the grid. Coal is by a long way the dirtiest way to generate power. When it was up and running, Ratcliffe on Soar, Britain’s last coal plant, was emitting 2 and half times more carbon per unit of electricity produced than nearby gas power plants.

Getting coal off the grid was just about the most impactful way Britain could cut emissions. The problem was the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) wasn’t working. In theory, ETS permit prices were meant to gradually rise as they were taken off the market, but instead they collapsed. The Great Recession temporarily caused emissions to collapse and meant firms were able to build big surpluses of permits (exacerbated by generous free allocations). The result was that by early 2013, permit prices fell to about £2.50. This was not a strong incentive to get off coal.

The Carbon Price Support (CPS) was brought in to top-up prices so they hit the level that policymakers intended ETS permit prices to reach so they would actually start changing behaviour. And they did.

The tax played a huge role in moving coal off our grid, generating massive reductions in UK carbon emissions. Per unit of electricity produced, Ratcliffe on Soar was therefore paying 2 and half times more Carbon Price Support than a gas power plant. The carbon price support was therefore serving a genuine policy purpose, removing coal off the grid and encouraging the uptake of carbon-free renewables and still lower carbon sources of electricity like gas.

Gas isn’t going anywhere and we don’t just pay this tax on gas

Gas is lower carbon than coal, but burning gas still emits carbon. The CPS makes gas more expensive – about £6 per megawatt hour more expensive.

In the short-term, we are stuck with gas on the grid. Renewables will need a back up for when the wind isn’t blowing. Batteries are nowhere near cheap enough to provide this backup and will not be any time soon. The government’s progress on nuclear regulation is impressive, but it will be years until it shows results. Therefore, gas is going to be part of our electricity grid for years to come. Increasing bills with taxes does not change this reality.

These taxes don’t just make gas more expensive, they make all of our electricity more expensive. 17% of our electricity comes from renewables on fixed term contracts. 30% comes from the wholesale market with a ‘Renewables Obligation’ top up. The rest comes straight from wholesale markets. Electricity producers bid to sell electricity, with the market clearing at the point where supply meets demand. All producers are paid the price of the marginal unit of electricity (aka the most expensive source), which is often gas. In wholesale markets gas almost always sets the price. Pushing up the price of gas therefore pushes up the price we pay to producers in the wholesale market that are not gas. The bulk is older renewables and our ageing nuclear fleet, as well as some sales to the grid from rooftop solar.

Therefore, driving up the price of gas means driving up the cost of nuclear and renewables that don’t emit any carbon at all.

Decarbonisation needs cheap electricity, the carbon price support got in the way

Decarbonising the whole economy involves two major steps.

1. Decarbonising our electricity supply

2. Electrifying everything that currently isn’t electrified.

On 1, we have not done badly. Removing coal from our grid, replacing it with gas, and increasing the renewables share of electricity has reduced emissions dramatically.

On 2, we are doing very badly. Only 21% of our energy comes from electricity. In transport, buildings, industry and agriculture we need households and businesses to make expensive investment decisions to convert from pure fossil fuels to electricity where 2/3rds of the energy comes from zero carbon sources. But they won’t do this if electricity is too expensive. In fact, prices are so high that despite the rollout of heat pumps and EVs, electricity use has been steadily declining.

The BBC recently documented a man in Glasgow who had bought a heat pump, but has opted to switch back to his gas boiler because it was costing him too much.

While heat pumps can be 3 or 4 times more efficient than gas boilers at converting energy into heat, electricity costs around 4 and half times more than gas. Turning off his clean heat pump and switching on his fossil fuel burning boiler made economic sense. Gas based electricity that carbon efficiently powers the heat pump has to pay the CPS. The less efficient gas boiler does not. Remember, the CPS only applies to electricity.

For those of us who don’t already have a heat pump, buying one is one and a half to twice as expensive than a gas boiler, even with generous taxpayer funded subsidies. It is going to be very difficult to get people to invest in a more expensive technology that will put their bills up. This is why Britain Remade have been campaigning to get the Government to make cheap power (not clean power) their top priority.

Returning to the decarbonisation two-step of decarbonising electricity and electrifying everything, sometimes there is a trade off between the two necessary steps.

The government’s Net Zero Power 2030 push will result in our electricity supply being less carbon intensive. However, it has resulted in buying offshore wind at £91.20 per MwH on 20 year contracts. This will likely push up bills for decades and slow the adoption of technologies like heat pumps necessary for the electrification of everything.

However, with the carbon price support there was no conflict, it was all downside. As gas is going to stay on the grid for many years to come regardless of the tax treatment (and new clean generation is funded via fixed contracts), all the CPS was doing was pushing up the price of electricity, and therefore slowing down our decarbonisation. That’s why retiring this carbon tax was a key ask for our Cheaper Energy campaign.

Ditching the CPS good news for bills and good news for reducing our carbon emissions.

The UK’s capital is on a par or has better productivity than every other G7 country’s main city, while our small towns and countryside hold their own our ‘secondary cities’, but big cities that are not London, do far worse than French, German, Japanese, Canadian and Italian equivalents. And all of these countries’ cities are far behind the US.

British cities look big but are actually really small

One of the main reasons for the lack of productivity is that transport outside of London is really poor. All else being equal the bigger a city is the more productive it should be. There are more opportunities for firms to specialise, more competition, bigger pools of workers for firms to recruit from and more places for people to choose to work at and buy from. In France, Germany, the US and almost every other developed country this is true. It is not true in the UK. Part of the reason for that is that, at peak times, the UK’s big cities are nowhere near as big as they look.

Our road networks are nowhere near as good as in the vast majority of US and Canadian cities. And our public transport is significantly worse than European and Japanese cities. This means that at peak times, due to cars and buses stuck in traffic jams and small or non-existent metro and tram networks, it can be very difficult for many people in our big cities to get to the centre.

Productivity and City Populations

From Rodrigues and Breach, 2021

Tom Forth has shown that, at peak times, the number of people who can actually travel into Birmingham City Centre in half an hour or less by bus from their nearest bus stop is just 0.9 million. However if Birmingham had a high-quality tram network that would rise to 1.7 million.

Mind the transport gap

We have compared UK cities to the Cities they are twinned with in France and Germany, the developed countries most similar to the UK in economic and population size. Cities twin with foreign cities because of shared history, to promote business and cultural ties and possibly also because it is an excuse for councillors to go on a trip abroad.

Many important British cities like Cardiff, Bristol and Leeds have no metro or tram infrastructure at all. Most of the places that do have a network, it only covers a small percentage of the city making it inaccessible for most residents, and less useful for those who can access it.

Why the difference? Too expensive and too little local power

There are two main reasons that tram and metros are less common in the UK. First, it is that tram projects cost more than double in the UK than they do in Europe and rail projects as a whole are 83% more expensive than they are in comparable nations. The UK gets significantly less money for its transport investment.

The other reason is that, especially in England, control of transport budgets is just too far away from the places that spend them. In Germany, local governments have extensive tax raising and cutting powers that allows local governments to make decisions on what to invest in. In France there local governments have the power to raise a transport levy on employers to spend on public transport.

Let Mayors Build

In the long run we need to give Mayors similar powers to what local governments in France and Germany and almost every other developed country have.

In the meantime, several existing UK mechanisms could be expanded or simplified.

Cities should be allowed to introduce a tourism levy on overnight stays in hotels and short-term lets, creating a small but reliable revenue stream linked to visitor demand.

Land value capture should also be strengthened. Mayors should be able to levy business rate supplements without requiring a local poll, learning from London’s Crossrail experience where a similar levy helped fund a transformational transport project. A council tax precept on properties near new stations could also be considered, expiring once construction debt is repaid.

Finally, Workplace Parking Levies should no longer require approval from the Secretary of State. At present new schemes can take up to three years to secure sign-off from the Transport Secretary. Decisions on whether to introduce such levies should be fully devolved to local authorities and metro mayors, as they are fundamentally regional transport policies.

Giving cities more power over both transport decisions and transport funding would speed up projects and over time build up the expertise needed to reduce costs. We need to Let Mayors Build.

It goes without saying that this is all extremely poor value-for-money. It is possible for £700m to do a lot more for nature. The Government appears to agree. They accepted the findings of John Fingleton’s review into nuclear regulation ‘in full’. The Fingleton Review recommended that instead of being required to provide ‘like-for-like’ compensation for adverse impacts on protected sites and species, developers should be given the freedom to fund a much wider range of measures so long as they represent a more cost-effective way of helping nature. (We called for the same thing in our Policy Playbook for Cheaper Nuclear.)

So, is the problem solved? Not quite. The Government endorsed giving developers more flexibility, but opted to do so through guidance only. That’s better than nothing, but it still leaves the door open for nature regulators like Natural England to interpret the guidance as they see fit. If Natural England (or the Environment Agency) still believe the law requires like-for-like compensation then they will demand it. And even if Natural England follows the guidance, there will still be activists ready to test whether that guidance is legally robust in the courts. Risk-averse developers wary of delays and legal challenges may simply opt not to take advantage of any new flexibility.

The Fingleton Review was about how to make it easier to build nuclear powerplants, but the fact that the Habitats Regulations require like-for-like compensation isn’t just a problem for nuclear. One of the worst affected sectors is offshore wind. From time to time, kittiwakes (a sort of posh seagull) fly into the turbine’s massive rotating blades. Like-for-like compensation here typically means creating new artificial nesting structures for the birds. Known as ‘kittiwake hotels’ these are typically towers in the sea with big boxes on the top where kittiwakes can nest.

Building kittiwake hotels isn’t cheap. Across the UK’s offshore wind pipeline, developers are set to spend over £300m on the structures. There’s another problem: kittiwake hotels aren’t a scalable solution. When you build 300 million pounds’ worth, you soon hit diminishing returns. There are only so many sites you can use and so many kittiwakes to use them.

If you really wanted to help kittiwakes, you’d be better off focusing on making sure they have enough food. Sand eels are kittiwakes’ snack of choice and have seen their numbers decline massively (70% by some estimates) because of overfishing and climate change. We can’t do much in the short-term about the latter, but we can address the former. The problem is that because fisheries are managed by other policies, any action to reduce sand eel overfishing doesn’t count as additional. The most effective environmental remedy is ruled out.

There are other problems too. It isn’t enough to build a hotel for kittiwakes, developers need to show the regulator the rooms are booked out too. This can take time – four years according to one RenewableUK blog.

In response to energy prices spiking in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the last Government committed to build a lot of offshore wind in a short amount of time. Put simply, the Kittiwake hotel and wait approach wasn’t going to work. Instead they committed to a special package of strategic compensation where offshore wind developers could pay into a ‘marine recovery fund’ instead of designing (and testing) inefficient site-by-site solutions.

Now here’s the curious thing. For nuclear, the Government is relying on guidance. Their view is apparently that the Habs Regs themselves aren’t broken – they’re just being interpreted badly. For offshore wind, they seem to have taken a different view and have chosen to legislate putting a statutory instrument before Parliament

The Conservation of Habitats and Species (Offshore Wind) (Amendment etc.) Regulations 2026 amends the requirement to provide like-for-like compensation and clarifies that compensation must instead “benefit the UK MPA (Marine Protected Area) network in a manner which is reasonably proportionate to the adverse effects…” and this only applies to “relevant offshore wind plan or project[s].”

Remarkably, days after ruling it out, the Government has done exactly what the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce called for on like-for-like compensation just for offshore wind farms.

I have a few questions for DESNZ.

1. Is new guidance sufficient to allow non-like-for-like compensation? If so, why are we legislating for offshore wind?

2. If guidance isn’t sufficient and legislation is necessary, then why are we not legislating to amend the Habitats Regulations for nuclear too?

3. If we’re not legislating to fix the Habs Regs for nuclear (but we are for wind), then is the Government really serious about delivering a ‘golden age for nuclear’?
   

“Cutting the cost of living is this government’s number one priority.”
Rachel Reeves MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer

There’s been a clear shift in how the Government talks about the economy. A year ago, ‘growth’ was the priority. Today, it is ‘affordability’. It is easy to exaggerate what this means for policy. After all, the point of boosting growth is to put more money in people’s pockets so they can afford more stuff. But when the public talks about affordability and the cost of living, they are likely to be referring to two things, energy bills, and the cost of the weekly shop.

Unlike energy, Britain’s groceries are not particularly expensive by international standards. In the United States, the price of eggs went as high as $8 a dozen in late 2024. That’s more than twice as expensive as a free range pack here.

Still, the weekly shop is getting a lot more expensive. Average grocery prices are now around 23% higher than they were in 2022. Some goods have risen by much more. A 1kg bag of sugar cost about 53% more in January 2025 than it did in January 2022, while a loaf of bread costs about 30% more.

Most of the Government’s interventions post-affordability push have involved spending. Rail fares, for example, have been frozen at a cost of £600m. Extra charges are being taken off energy bills (and in most cases put onto general taxation). There are limits to this approach – we are already close to maxing out the national credit card. The good news is there is a way to cut the cost of the weekly shop without running up the deficit. Let me explain.

It is common to blame high prices on profiteering, but Britain’s supermarkets run on tight margins. The average supermarket profit margin is under 3% – about as low as any industry gets. Margins are low because Britain’s grocery sector is intensely competitive. And we have good evidence that competition has cut prices here.

Discount supermarkets Aldi and Lidl went from having a combined market share of just under 3% at the turn of the century to having 19% today. In that time, average profit margins have fallen a lot. The IFS studied Aldi and Lidl’s rapid expansion and found that when Aldi/Lidl enter an area, households make big savings. It’s not just that Aldi and Lidl have tighter margins and cheaper products, even shoppers who stick with Asda, Tesco or Sainsbury’s see lower prices as supermarkets respond to local competition by lowering prices, stocking cheaper ranges, and running more aggressive promotions. Some supermarkets even launched explicit “Aldi Price Match” marketing campaigns.

Aldi and Lidl want to open even more stores, yet there is one big problem stopping them from doing it as fast as they would like: the planning system.

Almost every time Aldi or Lidl try to open a new store, they face a legal challenge. Between 2020 and 2022, Aldi’s rivals submitted 77 planning objections and launched 12 separate judicial reviews designed to block the low-cost retailer’s expansion strategy. At the time, there were 40 Aldi stores held up due to planning complaints from rivals.

There’s nothing to suggest that the problem is getting better. Just last year, Tesco brought a lawsuit to try to block the opening of a new Lidl shop in Stockport. They were unsuccessful, but even the threat of legal action can lead to planning permission being withdrawn, as it did when Tesco threatened legal action against Wiltshire council’s decision to approve a Lidl.

By the way, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a story of heroes and villains. Aldi and Lidl are the losers’ overall from legal challenges against new stores because they are the supermarkets with the biggest expansion plans, but when they get a chance to block their rivals from expanding they take it. In an interview with The Telegraph, former Aldi UK Chief Exec Paul Foley stated “Aldi and Lidl also object to competitors that are opening up in areas where they are already established … It’s just the way it is.” In other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Even when legal challenges fail, they still cause damage. Supermarkets are less likely to open new stores if they know there’s a risk of a long drawn-out (and expensive) legal battle. And every week of delay is a week of higher prices for shoppers.

Britain isn’t the only country with this problem. The problem got so bad in New Zealand, that as of 2009, supermarkets (and all other businesses) are heavily restricted from bringing planning complaints against competitors in the same trade. Supermarkets can only object if there’s a direct environmental impact on their store.

While I’m sympathetic to it, this wouldn’t solve the problem. It is much harder to restrict access to JR and even if a firm is restricted from objecting they can still bring a legal case down the line. Restricting standing (whether or not you’re allowed to bring certain legal challenges) is worth trying but if the challenges are on environmental grounds, even loosely, then it is likely to be incompatible with some of Britain’s treaty obligations.

Better to target the source. Since 1996, England’s planning system has had a ‘town centre first’ policy. The fear that out-of-town shopping centres and supermarkets would kill the high street led to rules that blocked out-of-town development unless developers could prove that there were no viable sites within the town centre (or edge-of-centre).

New out-of-town retail developments are also required to carry ‘retail impact assessments’. Just like a railway project might have to carry out an impact assessment to see whether a new line might kill rare bats, a new Aldi or Lidl must carry out an impact assessment to see whether it might kill any high street shops.

Planning policy is a devolved matter in Britain. Scotland, initially, didn’t bring in a ‘town centre first’ policy and when they did, they brought in a less strict version. This created a natural experiment for economists to study. LSE academics Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber and Ioannis Kaplanis did just that.

The aim of the ‘town centre first’ policy is to protect the high street and cut car use. The evidence suggests it has failed on both fronts.

Consumer shopping patterns in England didn’t change much. People still preferred to drive out-of-town and do a big shop. And because supermarkets have greater ability to pay than smaller independent retailers, it pushed up rents for small shops as supermarkets opened up ‘Tesco Express’-style smaller branches. In fact, a policy designed to help small independent retailers appears to have had the complete opposite effect. A further study from the LSE’s Raffaela Sadun found that the extra competition from smaller centrally located supermarkets caused by the policy led to a 15% decline in employment among independents.

Worse still, it made England’s supermarket sector much less productive pushing up prices as a result. High street properties are more expensive to rent, often awkwardly shaped, and can’t stock as broad a range as bigger out-of-town stores. The study’s authors estimate that labour productivity in England’s supermarkets is between 20-25% lower as a result. In a competitive sector like supermarket retail, the benefits of higher worker productivity are likely to be quickly passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices.

This isn’t the only study to find that ‘town centre first’ policies cut productivity. A further study by Raffaela Sadun and Imperial’s Jonathan Haskel found that by nudging retailers to smaller stores, the entire retail sector saw declines in productivity. They estimate the policy explained 40% of the slowdown in retail sector productivity growth.

It’s likely that the full productivity loss is even greater than the above studies estimate once you take into account the impact on competition and the expansion of more efficient discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl.

Town centre first policies make up the bulk of the grounds supermarkets bring against the opening of new rival supermarkets. In the last decade, a multi-year court case was fought over it in Stockport (Tesco v Lidl). Planning appeals and inquiries have also been fought in Altrincham (Tesco v Lidl) and Sutton-in-Ashfield (Asda v Lidl) on the same grounds.

It would be one thing if there was evidence that the ‘town centre first’ policy works. Politicians would have to judge the benefits of lower supermarket prices against the risk more out-of-town shops would lead to less high street footfall. But the best economic evidence we have suggests that the ‘town centre first’ policy fails on its own terms. If Rachel Reeves is telling the truth and the number one priority really is cutting the cost of living then they should scrap the ‘town centre first’ policy and unleash supermarket competition. As one supermarket nearly said, every Lidl helps.

In Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, Britain is building more new nuclear power plants than most countries. Yet, Hinkley Point C is set to be the most expensive nuclear power plant ever built. More than 75% more expensive than France’s, in theory identical, Flamanville C. Sizewell C will be cheaper, but not by much. And both projects are massively behind schedule. If we want to build our way out of dependence on fossil fuels, then we need to cut costs and speed things up.

The Government tasked ex-competition enforcer John Fingleton and a team of experts to come up with a plan to fix the way Britain regulates nuclear power. They set out radical reforms targeting everything from the way reactor designs are approved to the habitats regulations that force companies like EDF to spend the best part of a billion saving a trawler’s annual take of fish. Many of the suggestions mirrored ones we called for in our Policy Playbook for Cheaper Nuclear. They promised a radical reset and they delivered.

Of course, it’s not enough to just have the answers. We need politicians to have the courage to implement them. And let’s face it, this Government has a track-record of U-turning when the going gets tough. To its credit, the Government gave a full-throated endorsement of the review, with Starmer suggesting the entire economy should be subject to similar scrutiny. Yet their wording, “we agree with each and every recommendation in principle” gave wiggle room.

In the past few months, nature NGOs have mounted an aggressive campaign to discredit the report. They claimed that some of the review’s stats and facts, such as the claim Hinkley Point C spent £700m on fish protection measures, were essentially made up. This, to be clear, was entirely untrue. (For a claim-by-claim rebuttal, click here.) There was also a letter signed by a number of prominent leftwing backbench MPs and peers calling for some of the key nature measures to be scrapped. In anticipation of this, we organised our own letter, signed by leading figures from academia, business and politics, urging the government not to U-turn.

After months of waiting, we finally have the Government’s full plan to implement the Fingleton Review. Is it implementation in full, or have they given in to the green NGOs? Here’s Britain Remade’s assessment.

This is a massive step forward for nuclear power in Britain. It is nothing short of a complete transformation of the way Britain regulates the design of nuclear power stations.

We have a new single commission for nuclear to end the absurd situation where nuclear projects have navigate a maze of different quangos. The unscientific semi-urban population density criteria, which if it remained would have greatly held back the rollout of SMRs, will be revised to allow SMRs to be built in a much wider range of locations, including on the site of ex-coal plants. There will also be serious action to get rid of the duplicative requirement for ‘regulatory justification’.

There is a return to proportionality in regulation. Nuclear is the safest and cleanest way to produce power, but current policy forces vendors to redesign reactors in the pursuit of miniscule reductions (e.g. one banana’s worth) in radiation exposure. The way ALARP, the idea that risks be reduced to ‘as low as reasonably practicable’, works will undergo deep reform. There will be a clear steer to regulators over what is (and isn’t) a tolerable risk, while numerical targets on radiation exposure will be reviewed and made proportionate.

This is huge. It is the radical reset of nuclear regulation that we were promised. The era of Hinkley Point C being forced to make thousands of design changes to its French equivalent to comply with ONR regulations is over.

If you told me a couple years ago that not only would the Government commit to this, but also that these reforms would face essentially no opposition, I would have laughed at you. It shows how fast the debate on nuclear has moved.

Yet, as I suspected, this is not implementation in full. On planning reform in particular, some recommendations have been watered down, while one has been dropped altogether. While this is still a big step in the right direction, they could and should have gone further.

Let’s start with the positives on planning. Anti-nuclear activists have, in recent years, had great success in delaying nuclear construction. Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C have faced over a thousand days of delay due to legal challenges. Some, such as the challenge trying to stop Hinkley Point C dumping some mud in a mud dumping site, have caused delays that plausibly increased costs by tens of millions (if not more). Legal challenges on environmental grounds benefit from a ‘costs cap’ that means judges can’t force claimants to pay for the other side’s full legal costs if they’re unsuccessful. The Government’s response commits them to modernise the cost cap regime, though the specific proposals from the review (e.g. special caps for crowdfunded challenges) aren’t mentioned. The Government is also taking forward a sensible idea to indemnify nuclear projects against legal challenges. In other words, EDF will be allowed to crack on with Sizewell C even if they’re still waiting for a legal judgment.

In a show of political courage, the Government is taking action to scrap Michael Gove’s vague ‘national parks’ duty. I suspect the clincher in this debate was as much Fingleton as the fact that legal challenges designed to scupper the planned grid buildout were likely to rely on this duty.

What about the Habitats Regulations that led to £700m being spent on fish protection at Hinkley Point C? It’s a mixed, but still positive, bag. The key changes Britain Remade pushed, such as screening out de minimis impacts, broadening the types of compensation that can be offered (i.e. not just like-for-like), and removing the requirement for a bespoke Habs Regs Assessment for each regulator, are there. However, they plan to deliver the changes through new guidance for regulators, not via legislation. I suspect they will need to revisit this.

The most radical reform in the Fingleton Review on planning was the idea of an alternative route to comply with the Habs Regs. Instead of site-specific surveys, mitigations, and compensation, nuclear developers would instead be able to pay a ‘per-acre’ fee to a nature fund to discharge the obligations. New nuclear will inevitably disturb some habitats, but it is a net good for nature. Not only does nuclear cut climate-change causing carbon emissions, it also uses much less land than other forms of power. A simpler, faster process would be a win-win for nuclear and nature.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been taken forward in full for energy. Instead, the Government intends to rely on reforms from the recently passed Planning and Infrastructure Act to meet the same goal. Our assessment is that this is unlikely to work and is reliant on Natural England to proactively create ‘Environmental Delivery Plans’ (EDPs) for all of the impacts of nuclear development.

Intriguingly, this reform will be taken forward for defence, which suggests the Government recognise that the Fingleton proposal is more effective. Of course, these days it is hard to separate energy from defence. How can we re-arm to face new threats when heavy-industry pays some of the world’s highest industrial electricity prices.

There are other dilutions. Fingleton called for legislation to create ‘modular low-carbon acceleration zones’. In these areas, nuclear projects would face radically reduced planning barriers. This would be the nuclear equivalent of a Spanish solar reform that led to a rapid rollout of cheap low-carbon solar panels in the wake of the gas crisis. The Government instead has committed to using existing policy tools, including the Planning and Infrastructure Act’s EDPs, to deliver it.

The Government has also opted not to introduce statutory time limits for decisions on permits. Their view is time limits can have perverse consequences, but that other measures can be used to speed up permitting. I hope they are right, but I fear few things will beat a deadline for focusing heads.

Disappointly, they’ve completely rejected the proposal to have community benefits count as material factors in the planning process. In a persuasive blog, Ben Southwood of Works In Progress described this as the Taskforce’s secret weapon. It would have meant that if a nuclear plant (or a wind farm) wanted to give locals who otherwise would object money off their bills, it would be a reason to grant permission. When a wind farm tried this in 2019, they were told that ‘planning permission cannot be bought or sold’ by a top judge. Even though in practice local opinion plays a massive role in whether planning permission is or isn’t granted, the planning system forces us to pretend and act as if all decisions were made completely independent of it on purely rational criteria. As a result, we get developers paying huge sums to directly address local objections about traffic or visual impact (think of burying pylons) when it would be far cheaper (and popular) to pay cash to affected locals. This is a case where eight decades of planning ideology trumps political reality.

***

Make no bones about it. This is a huge step forward for nuclear power in Britain. This isn’t implementation in full, but it is the radical reset the sector needed. The last few weeks are a reminder that reliance on imported fossil fuels carries great risks, yet the recent wind and solar auctions show that simply going hell-for-leather on intermittent renewables won’t deliver the bill reductions voters were promised.

To get bills down, boost industry, and make us energy secure again, it is vital that the Government sticks to their words and follows through on this plan.

I find this debate baffling. Preston is doing reasonably well for a northern former industrial town. Productivity is below the UK average but above nearby towns such as Blackburn and Blackpool. Preston’s wider region has higher productivity than anywhere else in Lancashire, Merseyside or Cumbria. However, it is almost certainly not due to the ‘Preston model’ of shopping locally. Preston Council’s entire budget is just under £30 million a year. That is less than half a percent of Preston’s GDP in 2023 of £6.2 billion.

Nevertheless, Preston is a model for the nation, just not for the reasons that got lots of people down south excited or angry. Let me explain.

Preston builds a lot

New homes under construction in North West Preston The Paddocks, Higher Bartle | Our Developments | Wain Homes

I spend a lot of time looking at housing stats. Naturally, I look for places I know and Preston, where I lived for many years and still visit regularly, is one of them. Whether it is for raw housing delivery, delivery relative to affordability or delivery relative to population size, Preston always appears near the top. In fact, relative to its central government imposed housing targets Preston built more housing than anywhere else in England from 2021 to 2024. Since local housing targets were introduced in 2018, Preston has exceeded its target by a substantial margin every year.

Compare this to Camden, where I live now, which has one of the worst housing shortages in the country.

Preston’s performance is set to get even better and Camden’s even worse. Camden is projected to build just 60 new dwellings in the next two years, while Preston received the second highest number of planning applications relative to its housing target in England.

This matters because councils need far more planning applications than homes they intend to build. Around 90 percent of applications are approved, and only about 70 percent of approved schemes are actually built. A council that wants to hit its target needs a large pipeline. Preston comfortably clears this hurdle.

Preston Council is also much better than average at converting permissions into completed homes and is likely to remain so.

What makes building so hard?

The median voter is mildly NIMBY.

There are a decent number of hardcore NIMBYs everywhere. They turn up to council meetings and send endless letters and emails. But these people are usually a vocal minority. The median person in most places is neither a committed NIMBY nor a passionate YIMBY. They are slightly sceptical.

Living next to a building site is annoying. More people might mean more traffic. The area will look different to the one they moved to. So the reasonable question is: what is in it for me?

Most of the time the answer of the British planning system is: not much.

Despite thousands of pages of documents for every planning application and tens of thousands of pounds flowing to various public bodies, very little of the uplift from granting planning permission is experienced directly by existing residents. Some of the gain goes to the previous landowner. Some goes to the developer, which provides the incentive to build at all. But a large amount is dissipated through a slow, expensive system that produces paperwork rather than visible improvements.

The result is a system where developers spend huge sums satisfying overlapping and often contradictory requirements, but the average resident sees very little. The process is extractive for developers but gives little to locals.

The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), a local tax councils can levy on developers, and the New Homes Bonus, a payment councils receive from central government for building, are meant to change that. These are the mechanisms through which councils directly receive money from development. But how it is used matters enormously.

Take Camden, where I live,CIL revenue is spread very thinly. In 2022–23 over half of Camden’s CIL money was spent on general repairs to roads and street lighting. Another large share was divided into many small ward-level projects such as minor playground upgrades. Most residents likely assume these are funded from council tax. Few will connect them to new housing.

Camden doesn’t even appear to spend a lot of its CIL money and has created a system for reallocating funds from wards with more than half a million pounds saved up to wards with less. Camden uses the New Homes Bonus to fund general council budgets. The effect is to detach development from visible local benefit. Housing arrives. Money disappears into general spending. The median voter remains sceptical.

Preston chose a different path.

Making housing pay for locals

Preston’s CIL payments and New Homes Bonus are almost all paid into the ‘Preston and Lancashire City Deal’. Since 2013, because of Preston’s rapid building, these payments have amounted to £60 million, 2/3rds from developers, 1/3rd from central government.

The City Deal is an agreement between Preston City Council, South Ribble Borough Council, Lancashire County Council and several central government departments and agencies.

Under the deal, £47 million from the sale of Homes England assets in the area was retained locally, with the uplift in land value captured and reinvested. A further £80 million was committed by the Department for Transport. Around 2 percent of Lancashire County Council’s pension fund, worth approximately £100 million, was redirected into investments within the City Deal area. In the context of an annual council budget of around £30 million these are vast sums of money.

The central government and Homes England funding was conditional on Preston and South Ribble delivering at least 17,420 new homes.

Preston agreed to put the vast majority of its New Homes Bonus receipts, most CIL income and additional business rates into a single infrastructure pot, combined with the Homes England and Department for Transport funding. Housing delivery was the price of admission.

This cash was then used to fund very clear, very visible and very concrete improvements for local residents which the council made clear were only happening because of the housing.

The largest of these was the West Preston Distributor, now known as Edith Rigby Way. This created a new junction on the M55, effectively creating a large bypass around the north-west of the city. Road capacity has been increased far beyond the extra demand created by the new housing. It would not have happened without development and has delivered clear benefits across the city.

The West Preston Distributor

Another smaller road across the north of the city, called William Young Way, was funded using additional, CIL-like payments from nearby housing developments. It has played a major role in mitigating congestion from new housing in North Preston.

Other major projects include the South Ribble Western Distributor, the Penwortham Bypass and the Broughton Bypass. Both bypasses removed long-standing congestion bottlenecks from residential areas and had been planned for decades, forty years in the case of Broughton, but remained unfunded until the City Deal.

While a small minority of residents were and remain implacably opposed to development, the clear causal link between allowing housing and receiving new infrastructure significantly reduced wider resistance. Woodplumpton and Catforth Parish Council, where much of the new housing has been built, were initially sceptical and questioned why infrastructure could not be delivered in advance. In practice, promised roads were built, in some cases ahead of schedule, and the parish council received a share of CIL funding. Opposition softened as a result.

Preston is now preparing its local plan for 2026 to 2041. The strategy is to complete the build-out of North West Preston, then expand into West Preston between the new dual carriageway and the suburbs of Cottam and Lea.

Further growth is explicitly linked to delivering a new train station, Cottam Parkway, which received planning permission in 2023. Preston only has one train station and the promise of a second station is tied directly to building homes.

Cottam Parkway station will have regular service to Blackpool, Preston and onwards to Manchester.

This is the crucial difference. In Preston the mildly sceptical resident can see the bargain. More homes mean new roads, bypasses, parks and potentially a train station. The link is repeatedly made explicit.In Camden the link is largely invisible.

Get the incentives right, the housing will follow

Preston’s success is partly a story of good local leadership. But it is mostly a story of incentives. The City Deal meant that Preston councillors and staff knew that building enough housing would lead to real benefits. And they were able to show those benefits to voters and residents.

Preston shows that the mildly NIMBY median voter can be won round. Not everyone becomes a YIMBY. But many can be persuaded to accept development in their backyard if the bargain is obvious and credible.

Housing delivery was turned into the ticket to visible, city-wide improvements. Camden, by contrast, has less development money to spend and what it does have it spreads thinly across general maintenance and small projects that feel unrelated to new housing. The result is weak incentives for councillors, sceptical residents and poor delivery.

The median voter is not a NIMBY zealot. They are asking a simple question. What’s in it for me? Preston has found a convincing answer.

This is 10-24 Lamb Lane in Hackney. Standing on it currently is a derelict office block built in the 1950s. For the last five years, Hackney businessman Ben Chesterfield (pictured) has been battling with the council to obtain permission to re-develop it and turn it into this.

When complete, it will include 19 newly-built flats and 10,000 square feet of new office space. Chesterfield wants to do the right thing both environmentally and for residents’ bills, so the flats are designed to be extremely energy efficient and heated via low-carbon heat pumps.

The original plan was for all of the homes to be heated via a single communal air-source heat pump, however after talking with experts Chesterfield identified a better solution. They told him to swap out the communal air-source heat pumps for new exhaust-source heat pumps, which capture warm indoor air from kitchens, bathrooms, and utility rooms.

Exhaust-source heat pumps don’t work for every property but for extremely well-insulated properties like the ones Chesterfield wants to build they are a good option. There’s an added benefit for residents for switching. Communal systems mean complicated communal billing and maintenance arrangements. Individual heat pumps don’t.

This is a real concern. For example, one development in Greenwich saw residents hit with a surprise £200,000 heating bill due to issues with the billing arrangements.

The expert analysis suggested that using an exhaust-source system would be more than twice as efficient as a communal system. In terms of emissions, installing the latest exhaust-source heating technology across the 19 flats would produce around 3.5 tonnes of CO₂ per year — almost 27% lower than the 4.8 tonnes produced by a district heating network supplied by air-source heat pumps. Compared to communal heat pumps producing 7.4 tonnes per year, the exhaust-source system would mean 3.9 fewer tonnes of CO₂ were emitted each year, a cut of more than 50%. And that’s comparing heat pumps, relative to gas we are looking at 23 tonne annual saving across the 19 flats

Hackney Council declared a climate emergency in 2019 and have pledged to reach Net Zero by 2040. You might think then that the developer’s request to switch to an even greener option would be swiftly approved. You would be wrong.

Under Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, the whole of the capital is designated a Heat Network Priority Area, creating a presumption that developments should use communal systems with the ability to connect to a district heating network.

Unlike the communal heat pump, individual exhaust-source heat pumps cannot be connected to a district heating network. As a result, Hackney Council is blocking the change.

There’s just one small problem.

There is no district heating network for the development to connect to. Nor are there any concrete plans to build one it could connect to. The council has highlighted areas where heat networks could be viable (with additional grant funding), but none that cover this building. There is a proposed heat network nearby that could, in theory, be extended to cover the property, but as it stands, there is no business case, no planning application, and no funding secured.

In fact, there is just one district heat network in Hackney – the Shoreditch Heat Network – which serves three estates in the area. It’s cut emissions, but it has not been without problems. The BBC recently reported that hundreds of residents have been left without hot water this winter due to frequent outages. The article quotes one resident who ‘resorted to boiling saucepans of water in order to have a hot bath’ because her taps didn’t run hot enough. She also claimed one Hackney official told her to leave her oven door open for a few hours. (Hackney denies this latter claim.)

This isn’t to say heat networks can’t work. Visit Copenhagen and you’ll soon be disabused of that notion. In the Danish capital, 98% of buildings are heated via district heating. More of Britain’s homes, particularly in cities, could and probably should be heated via them.

Still, the developer’s exhaust-source heat pump is cheaper and greener than a communal heat pump connected to a district heating network. The experts who advised him to switch to exhaust-source heat pumps estimated that a communal heat-pump attached to a district heat network would use more than a third more energy (about 1.2 tonnes more CO2 each year).

In other words, Hackney Council isn’t making the perfect the enemy of the good. They are, incredibly, making the good the enemy of the perfect.

***

As the process dragged on, Hackney eventually (or at least appears to have) conceded the point that incompatibility with a non-existent (and unplanned) district heating network wasn’t sufficient grounds for blocking the more efficient heat-pump. However, they haven’t given the developer the green light yet. The Council are now demanding more evidence on the merits of the proposed heating system. It’s a slow process. As developer Ben Chesterfield notes, there’s a lengthy back and forth with month-long gaps between council responses.

All of this adds cost. With the building’s existing tenants out and work ready to begin, Chesterfield reckons that each month of delay costs something like £20,000. Add to that all the specialist reports he needs to commission, which he tells me cost ‘probably another £10,000 per month’. Trying to do the right thing for residents and the planet isn’t cheap.

***

It is often assumed planning regulations protect the environment. Yet our biggest environmental problem is climate change and it isn’t being caused by new development, it is caused by us continuing to burn fossil fuels to do things like heat our homes.

Just as it was an error to stall electrification because trains might one day be fuelled by green hydrogen (or bionic duckweed), it is a mistake to block a housebuilder from installing ultra-green exhaust-source heat pump because they can’t one day connect up to a district heating network that might never be built.

But in the planning system, small changes in wording can have large real-world consequences. Some of the brightest minds in the country are paid huge sums to spend months arguing over the definition of words in the NPPF. The precise phrasing of national policy often determines whether homes are built or blocked. And even when the courts rule in favour of development, legal uncertainty can delay the impact of pro-building reforms for years.

There is a real risk that the pro-development intentions of the NPPF are thwarted by unclear drafting. Several aspects of the draft risk undermining the reforms’ positive direction. Three problems stand out: a structural “get out clause” in the presumption in favour of sustainable development, a new national restriction on development outside settlements, and the rewriting of established policy in ways that could create legal uncertainty.

Problem 1: the S4(2)(c) get out clauses

Policy S4 establishes a presumption that development within settlements “should be approved unless the benefits of doing so would be substantially outweighed by any adverse effects,” but a few lines later policy S4(2)(c) states that development should not be approved where it:

“Fail[s] to comply with one of the national decision-making policies which state that development proposals should be refused in specific circumstances.”

This creates a structural flaw.

Across the framework there are numerous national decision-making policies on things like design and flooding that contain “should be refused” language. Because S4(2)(c) treats those policies as overriding the presumption, they effectively operate as automatic vetoes.

The result is creating a list of get out clauses for councils that don’t want to build and other NIMBYs to exploit that do not exist under the old version of the rules.

In practice, many planning appeals turn on exactly this kind of interaction between broad presumptions and detailed refusal policies. The way the draft is currently written risks giving objectors and resistant councils a ready-made list of routes for arguing that the presumption does not apply.

Even if the policies on flooding and design are, in practice, not that restrictive, it is likely that councils (or residents) who oppose development are likely to lean heavily on them. The planning inspectorate may eventually rule in favour of the development, but it could take years before it meaningfully changes council behaviour. At which point, another Housing Secretary will probably redraft the national decision-making policies again recreating the problem.

This Government cannot afford a few years of delay. Looking at housing starts, competitions, and the planning pipeline suggest that without a very large increase in planning approvals, they will not only miss their 1.5 million home target, but even fail to outbuild the Covid-hit last Government.

So, a better approach would be for those policies to weigh strongly against development without automatically flipping the presumption. Planning committees would then have to consider both the harm arising from conflict with national policy and the framework’s clear intention to encourage development within settlements.

Problem 2: a new national restriction on development outside settlements

A more worrying development is policy S5, which forms the counterpart to S4’s pro-development approach within settlements.

Policy S5 states:

“Only certain forms of development should be approved outside settlements.”

Development outside settlements is therefore supported only where it falls within a specified list of categories. Proposals outside those categories may only be approved in exceptional circumstances.

This represents a clear shift from the current framework. The existing NPPF does not impose a national restriction on development outside settlements. Instead decisions are largely shaped by local plans and, where housing targets are not being met, by the presumption in favour of sustainable development.

The intention is presumably to shift development away from car-dependent greenfield to land near train stations or within towns and cities. The risk is it stops the former, without boosting the latter.

For example, the rule may stop rural councils that actively want to build to keep villages affordable and vibrant places for people of all ages from building what they need.

Under the current system councils that don’t want to build in rural areas can find lots of excuses not to. However Policy S5 means that even those that want to build will find it difficult to do so and that the scales will be tilted against rural development.

It is understandable that ministers want to prioritise development in settlements. But introducing a national restriction on development outside them, before we have seen the impact of the Government’s pro-building policies inside settlements, risks unnecessarily constraining housing supply.

If building within settlements does not increase as much as expected, this change could end up actually reducing the overall number of homes delivered. The pro development approach in settlements is welcome, but this does not mean we need to have an anti-development approach outside of them.

Problem 3: rewriting flood policy creates avoidable uncertainty

Rewriting the whole NPPF allowed ministers to introduce major reforms. But it has also created avoidable uncertainty.

For example, the language on flooding has been completely rewritten. The apparent aim is to consolidate policy and clarify how the system should operate without making major changes.

However even small changes to long-standing policy wording can have significant consequences in the planning system.

Where ministers intend to change policy, that should be explicit. Where they do not, it is usually safer to retain established wording. Otherwise there is a risk that policy is unintentionally altered. The old wording has been interpreted through many appeal decisions and has therefore developed a substantial body of precedent. Planners, developers and local authorities broadly understand how it operates in practice.

One example is language about what alternative sites developers have to consider when building in areas with a low level of flood risk. The current language refers to “reasonably available sites”. The new draft suggests instead “catchment of the development in terms of its likely occupiers or users.”

It is not clear whether the new language is more permissive of development, less permissive or exactly the same. But we can be sure that planners, developers, councils, the planning inspectorate and ultimately the courts will have years of fun finding out. NIMBY councils will see this as a way to delay development. If the Minister’s intention is for the rules to remain the same in this area, they should keep the language the same.

These problems are fixable

None of these issues should be allowed to undermine the overall direction of the reforms. The draft NPPF still contains some of the most pro-development national planning policy England has seen for decades. But small drafting choices can have large consequences in the planning system. The government should respond to the consultation by fixing the S4(2)(c) get out clauses, softening the hard new national restriction on development outside settlements and removing unnecessary changes to language that can create delay. Then the new framework would be far more likely to achieve the Government’s stated goal: building more homes.

One of Labour’s first acts in office was to bring back mandatory housing targets. Councils failing to build enough homes (or without a valid local plan) would now, in theory, find it much harder to block new homes. At the same time, annual housing targets went up across the country.

In London, the place with England’s most acute housing shortage, where the average monthly rent for a one bedroom flat is £1,500 and the average house price is 12 times the average wage, annual targets went up. The Mayor would now have to plan for 88,000 homes, up from the 52,000 homes required for the current London plan.

Since Labour reinstated housing targets and added 36,000 extra homes to London’s annual target, a number of London boroughs (including Camden, Haringey, and Tower Hamlets) have put new local plans out for consultation. You might expect that a two-thirds increase in London’s target will translate to boroughs planning to build (or at least approve) far more homes than before. You would be wrong.

Here’s the problem: London boroughs like Camden, Wandsworth and Lambeth don’t get their housing target directly from the NPPF’s ‘standard assessment of housing need’, they get it from the most recent London Plan. In other words, whatever the London Mayor decides their share of London’s overall target is. The issue is the last London Plan was published in 2021 when the capital was expected to build 52,000 homes per year. That’s a problem because it allows boroughs to dodge tough choices on density and ‘nice to haves’ when determining their plans.

A new London plan is in the works, but it won’t be ready this year. The Mayor recently ran a consultation on what should be in the draft London Plan, which will itself need its own consultation. If all goes well, we could have a new London Plan in place by 2027, though some suggest 2028 is more likely. From then on, all new local plans will have to use the new London Plan’s higher targets.

However, a new London Plan does not immediately require boroughs to rewrite their existing local plans to take account of higher targets. In fact, once a local plan is in place, there’s a five year window before it’s treated as ‘out of date’.

In theory, London councils could delay higher housing targets by drafting new local plans that come into force just before a new London Plan is made official. There are measures within the new NPPF designed to mitigate this risk, but they don’t solve the problem fully. First, councils are required to have a five-year supply of land released for development capable of meeting their housing target. From July 2026, councils with valid plans working off old targets, like many London boroughs, must add a 20% buffer to their five-year land supply. This applies as long as their plan’s target is less than 80% of their new target. Second, if targets set by the London Plan (or any other spatial development strategy) increase significantly then boroughs should begin preparing a new local plan early. So how long will that take?

The process of preparing a local plan normally takes 30 months, but that’s without any ‘slippages’. The draft NPPF doesn’t define a significant increase, so expect some boroughs to haggle for months over what is and isn’t significant. Expect delays.

Even if everything goes to plan, local plans based on 2024’s higher housing targets will not be in place in London boroughs within this parliament!

In the last year or two, housebuilding in London has collapsed. John Burn-Murdoch at the FT reports that London is building fewer homes currently than any other major world city. It is possible that even under London’s old lower housing target, many boroughs would have underbuilt by so much that the tilted balance in favour of sustainable development applies. However, London’s extreme collapse is likely temporary. As the Building Safety Regulator backlog clears and the relaxation of affordability requirements takes effect, it is more than possible that London returns to recent housebuilding highs. That’s still far too low, but it might mean that many boroughs are at least hitting or close to their old housing target. In that case, higher targets take effect again.

Closing the London Loophole

It isn’t hard to think up alternatives where London’s new higher targets take effect much sooner. One simple way to close the London Loophole would be to force London’s boroughs to, at the very least, revise their plan on the presumption of a proportional increase in the capital’s target. In other words, if a borough is meant to deliver 2% of London’s old housing target, then it must now figure out how it can deliver 2% of London’s new target. Safeguards could be put in place to account for the fact that some councils are currently delivering far more homes under the London Plan than they are expected to under the old method. For these councils the requirement to plan for a proportional increase in housing numbers could be waived.

When he took power, Sir Keir Starmer chose to pull the housing target lever. In some parts of the country, such as Cambridge, higher housing targets are already having an effect. Yet in the bits of England where housing is most unaffordable, his higher housing targets won’t fully take effect until 2030. If the polls are correct, there’s a good chance someone else will be PM then. This is no way to run a country.

Rather than blame ‘a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies’ for frustrating his agenda, he should remember that he is in fact a Prime Minister commanding a massive majority. He can get rid of them. In this case, he does not need to wait five years before London’s higher housing targets bite in places like the borough of Camden. He can simply close the London loophole.

And this is not just an Islington problem. Across London, councils miss targets year after year while rents climb and waiting lists grow.

So what did Islington Council propose as a small step towards fixing this? Eighteen new homes. Half of them would have been socially rented. The site? A patch of council-owned concrete hardstanding in Morton Road Park.

The council would have expanded the surrounding green space to compensate, including extending the park into a surprisingly wide nearby road. The result would have been a small reduction in total open space on paper, but an increase in actual green space.

The development would have been four to five storeys, in keeping with surrounding buildings. It sits around the corner from Essex Road station and about a 15-minute walk from the Tube. Even by Islington standards, Canonbury is expensive. If there is anywhere in the borough where a modest infill scheme like this makes sense, it is here.

It is hard to imagine a lower-impact development in a dense inner London neighbourhood.

It never even reached the planning application stage.

Instead, a misleading and disingenuous campaign took off. Signs appeared declaring “Save Morton Road Park”, as if the entire park were under threat. The concrete slab earmarked for housing was described as a “football pitch”.

On a recent visit, the playground and grass were full of children. The hardstanding was empty. While a football could technically be kicked around on it, calling it a football pitch is generous to say the least. There was no mention in campaign materials of the additional green space that would have been created.

A search online reveals other objections: claims that removing the hardstanding would increase knife crime, complaints that some nearby flats might lose their view of fireworks on the Thames. Others were more straightforward. They opposed the development because it was happening near them.

In the end, the council caved. Citing a petition signed by less than 3% of local residents, the New Homes Project Manager, backed by local councillors including the Executive Member for Homes and Neighbourhoods, chose not to continue with the scheme. This, in a borough with 16,000 people waiting for social housing.

The letter from Islington Council announcing that the project will not go ahead

According to the council’s own website, there are now zero housing developments under way in Canonbury.

Unlike some private schemes, there is no appeal route here. This was the council proposing homes on its own land. It could have built these 18 homes under the current planning system. It chose not to.

Sixteen thousand people are waiting for a home. Eighteen would not have solved the crisis. But when even 18 modest homes on a patch of concrete are too much, it becomes much easier to understand why the crisis continues.

And yet there is still no guarantee it will go ahead.

After more than 9,000 pages of documentation and a meeting that ran until almost midnight, the committee’s effective conclusion was simple: more documents are required.

The evening illustrated something deeper than disagreement about one development. For the most part, councillors and officers were trying to make the system work. The problem is that the system itself makes coherent decision-making extraordinarily difficult. Poorly drafted rules and expansive interpretations of vague policies mean that even where there is broad support, schemes can become trapped in procedural quicksand.

How does a development that most people like, and most elected representatives appear to support, end up here? This is an anatomy of a planning committee meeting.

Planners out of step with councillors

One of the main objections from officers was that the building failed to meet heritage and design standards set out in Hackney’s rules, particularly those governing the South Shoreditch Conservation Area.

The officers’ report described the scheme in strongly negative but also subjective terms: “overbearing”, “incongruous”, not “respecting the grain”. The height in particular was treated as a decisive problem. At one point the lead planning official made clear that, given the scale of the building, a recommendation for refusal would have been likely regardless of concessions elsewhere.

Councillors were largely unpersuaded.

Councillor Desmond, Hackney’s longest-serving councillor, dismissed the idea that the building was too tall, noting much larger towers just streets away. Councillor Wrout, who was often sceptical of the developer’s assurances, praised the design and thought the height struck an appropriate balance between nearby skyscrapers and the conservation area. Councillor Narcross, who ultimately voted against the scheme, nonetheless described the buildings as “really nice” and said they would improve the streetscape. Councillor Suso-Runge questioned the premise of treating contemporary development as a threat to heritage at all, observing that today’s buildings become tomorrow’s heritage.

The issue is structural. Design and heritage standards are necessarily vague. Whether something is “overbearing” or “following the grain” is a matter of taste. That vagueness transfers discretion from ordinary people to elected representatives to professional planners and heritage experts. Planning becomes less about clear compliance and more about aesthetic assessment. And we see time and time again that planning officers, architects and heritage officers have aesthetic preferences completely different to the general public who will be subject to their decisions.

In this case, there was a clear gap between officers’ conclusions and the instincts of most councillors. While most of the fault lies with the out of touch planning officials, Councillors bear some responsibility here. If they believe certain policies are either unimportant or so vague that officers can reasonably interpret them in ways councillors themselves reject, why were those policies adopted in that form? And why are they not being clarified?

A policy no one could explain

If heritage exposed a cultural gap, affordable workspace exposed a drafting problem.

Hackney’s Local Plan states that new developments should provide affordable or low-cost workspace equating to a minimum of 10 percent of gross new employment floorspace.

At the meeting, the developer argued that providing 10 percent of the additional workspace on the development as affordable met that requirement. They relied on a KC’s opinion and said the interpretation aligned with the understanding of a former council officer involved in drafting the policy.

Planning officers took a different view. In their interpretation, it was 10% of the sum total of all workspace on the site that had to be affordable, meaning the requirement was effectively higher.

Councillors repeatedly sought clarity. The developers wielded their KC opinion to argue one interpretation. Senior planning officers argued another. It wasn’t really obvious to anyone impartial who was right.

If a senior Assistant Director of Planning at a large London council and a KC disagree on what a policy requires, the policy is not clear enough. And if it is not clear enough, it is not fit for purpose.

The result was confusion at the committee table. Councillors were asked to apply a policy whose meaning was itself contested. That is not a recipe for confident decision-making.

The Chair and the breakdown of process

Councillors, planning officers and the developers conducted themselves professionally and were all clearly trying to do their jobs to the best of their ability in an insane system. The same cannot be said for the chair.

Councillor Webb made no secret of her agreement with the officers’ recommendation. That in itself is legitimate. But a chair’s role is to facilitate scrutiny, ensure members can test evidence properly, and allow the committee to reach a considered decision.

On at least four occasions, councillors attempted to ask direct questions to the developer, particularly on affordable workspace. The chair intervened to prevent the developer from responding. Instead, officers were asked to answer on the developer’s behalf, often speculating about their positions or intentions. This contributed to the meeting running late and left councillors visibly frustrated.

The contrast with earlier items was striking. For other applications that evening, councillors were able to question both officers and applicants freely.

Councillor Samatar’s exchanges were particularly revealing. She repeatedly sought clarity on the affordable workspace issue and, at one point, expressed doubt in her own understanding. Yet the central reason for confusion was that the chair has prevented competing interpretations from being aired fully in real time.

Later, Councillor Samatar explained that although she had historically followed officer recommendations, she felt compelled to support this scheme because it represented the kind of development she entered politics to champion. The chair responded by admonishing her for “grandstanding” and emphasising that the committee’s role was to apply policy. The exchange was sharp, unnecessarily personal and not behaviour that would be tolerated in most workplaces. While the tone from the chair was consistently combative it was noticeably sharper towards Councillor Samatar.

Another instance of bias was that councillors representing the area where the development would take place were also prevented from speaking on Shoreditch Works, though relevant local councillors had been allowed to speak on earlier items. This was despite clear interest from committee members in hearing from them. This is likely because Councillor Walker and Councillor Sizer had both spoken in favour of the development previously.

As the debate progressed, concessions from the developer appeared to be shifting the arithmetic. They offered to alter the sequencing of works to prioritise the protection of Grade II listed buildings and to increase payments to address affordable workspace concerns. Councillor Wrout, a clear swing vote who had pressed the developer throughout the evening, seemed increasingly persuaded.

With four councillors clearly supportive and a fifth likely leaning that way, it appeared possible that a form of conditional approval might be put to a vote.

Instead, the chair advised that councillors would not be voting to approve the application, but only whether to defer it. Councillor Desmond objected, noting he had first attended a pre-meeting on the scheme two years earlier and that progress was overdue.

After a break, further legal advice was presented. Councillors were told they could not vote to approve in light of changes proposed during the meeting and could only defer. The committee voted 5–2 to do so, with a revised recommendation to follow after additional documentation.

The procedural position may have been technically correct, though this isn’t clear. But the way it unfolded left the impression that the outcome was shaped as much by process management as by substantive debate.

The System is changing

As several readers pointed out on my first blog about this project, changes are coming. The National Planning Policy Framework is likely about to be substantially revised this year. If the draft survives consultation, it materially changes the way schemes like Shoreditch Works are assessed.

Under the draft NPPF, proposals within settlements:

“should be approved unless the benefits of doing so would be substantially outweighed by any adverse effects…”

Hackney’s planners’s recommendation of refusal found the heritage impact to be “less than substantial harm”. That matters because developments can only get out of this tilted balance in favour of development if there is substantial harm or total loss to a designated heritage asset.

That means Shoreditch Works would fall squarely within the tilted-balance test. All of the supposed “harm” around the building casting a shadow on itself, damage to heritage that only professional planners can see, and affordable workspace confusion would still be part of the debate. But under the draft framework the question would not be whether harms merely outweigh benefits, but whether they substantially outweigh them.

The threshold for refusal therefore becomes materially harder to meet. This does not guarantee approval. But structurally, the draft framework makes refusal significantly more difficult to defend.

If the draft framework is adopted as written, Shoreditch Works would be much more likely to succeed at appeal than under the current framework. It seems unlikely Hackney planning officers would risk that, particularly given that most councillors on the committee appeared to support the scheme. If the new NPPF rules are adopted as drafted, Shoreditch Works should be happening.

Shoreditch Works shows the dysfunction of the current planning system. Labour’s proposed NPPF reforms are probably the last, best hope for making the current system work. Shoreditch Works will be an early test case of whether the system is reformable, or whether it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

It is true that building a house takes time, and the planning process takes even longer. Therefore today’s completions mostly reflect rules and decisions made under the previous government, not the current one. Which is why a fairer way to judge the government is not completions or even housing starts, but planning applications.

Planning applications are the earliest reliable indicator of future housing supply. If the system were gearing up for a surge in housebuilding, it would show up here first. Unfortunately, it does not.

The maths of the target

To hit 1.5 million homes over a five-year Parliament requires an average of 300,000 homes per year. But after the weak first year, the required pace rises sharply. From here on, England would need to build about 339,000 homes every year for the remainder of the Parliament.

Planning data make clear just how implausible that is. Historically, around 90 percent of planning applications are approved, and around 70 percent of approved permissions result in a completed home. Taken together, that means roughly 63 percent of applications turn into housing.

At that conversion rate, delivering 339,000 homes per year would require around 538,000 planning applications annually. That is roughly 44,850 applications per month.

England is nowhere near that level.

What the planning data actually show

Data from Barbour ABI, reveals across 2025, planning applications averaged just 18,389 per month. In the final six months of the year, the figure rose slightly to 19,769. Even in the strongest month, October, applications reached only 24,304.

That is 54 percent of the level required to stay on track.

There has been no sustained upward trend, and certainly no surge. In fact, application levels are lower than they were in both 2022 and 2023.

If applications continue at this rate, under realistic assumptions about approval and build-out, England would deliver around 706,000 homes over the course of the Parliament. Even under an optimistic scenario, assuming 90 percent of approved permissions turn into homes, delivery would reach only around 806,000.

Both outcomes fall dramatically short of the 1.5 million target. Indeed, the more realistic figure would fall short of the 742,000 homes delivered in the 2019 to 2024 Parliament.

Almost everywhere is missing

This is not a problem confined to a handful of areas. The vast majority of the country is set to miss its housing targets based on this planning application data.

Almost every council in England is receiving too few planning applications to meet its housing requirement.

Under realistic assumptions, only 3.4 percent of people live in a local authority that is on track to meet its housing target given their 2025 stats. Even under the optimistic assumptions, that figure rises to just over 12 percent.

Map of English local authorities on track to achieve their housing targets under realistic build out assumptions.

In other words, even if the planning system performs unusually well, nearly nine in ten people live in places that are not building enough.

Why delivery may be even worse

These projections may still be too generous. There are strong reasons to believe the conversion rate from permission to completion will be lower than in the past.

The Building Safety Regulator now has to approve all new buildings over 18 metres. Its rollout has been deeply disruptive. Around 69 percent of pre-construction applications have been rejected, and median approval times have stretched to nine months.

This matters most in large cities, especially London, where new housing is disproportionately delivered in the form of tall apartment blocks.

The Barbour ABI data and our projections show that London is on track to achieve 27.1 percent of its housing target. However, Mollior, a specialist London housing market research practice, looks in more detail at individual projects. They think that London will achieve just 8 percent of its housing target in 2027 and 2028.

Why delivery may be better

There is one important caveat. Data from Terraquest shows an increase in planning permissions in 2025 from 2024 outside of London of 60%, though London applications are fairly flat.

The discrepancy with the data we use from Barbour ABI is that Terraquest also includes outline planning permissions. Outline planning permissions can be applied for by any development, but are generally used by larger developments.

However, the drop-off rate from outline planning permission being sought to an actual home being built is far higher than the drop-off rate from full planning permission being applied for and resulting in a completed home.

The surge in outline planning permission applications happened in the last six months of 2025. It is possible this will lead to more full applications, but it is far from guaranteed.

The other reason to think these projections might be an underestimate is the reforms to the National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF) announced by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook in December, which if implemented could result in a large surge of planning applications.

Will Labour reach the 1.5 million target?

No.

In fact, it still remains possible that this Parliament will deliver fewer homes than the previous one. However, the green shoots of the outline planning permission surge and the NPPF reforms mean the likelihood of that has fallen, even if they have come too late to make the 1.5 million target achievable.

There is also the possibility that the outline planning applications will not lead to more full applications. And it would not be out of character for the government to U-turn on elements of the NPPF reforms.

But even if the Building Safety Regulator’s problems are resolved, the outline surge is real and the NPPF reforms are delivered in full, it will not be enough to get close to 1.5 million homes within this Parliament.

It could be late 2028, or even well into 2029, before the first new homes built under the new NPPF rules have people moving into them. Labour has left these reforms too late for them to have a big impact on this Parliament’s figures. With full planning applications showing no meaningful progress, time has almost certainly run out for the target.

Britain Remade worked with ITV Economics Editor Joel Hills on this research. To watch his report and see Britain Remade’s Chief Exec Sam Richards discuss the findings at a building site in Worcestershire on a very rainy February morning, click here.