Trains in the UK are much less likely to be electrified than they are in many other developed countries.

One of the often stated reasons for why Britain has done such a poor job of electrifying our railways is that we have a ‘feast or famine’ approach to procurement:

This makes it difficult to learn lessons from previous projects. It also makes it difficult to retain a work force. If you worked as a 20 something on the East Coast Mainline electrification in the late 80s and early 90s you might now expect to be very experienced in electrification. Instead you likely changed careers or moved abroad during the 30 year period where Britain barely electrified any railways at all. The next big project was the Great Western Mainline and Midland Mainline Electrifications. However, both of these have stopped due to running massively over budget. For workers who gained experience on these projects there is very little for them to work on. They will likely emigrate or change industries. Every time we build a new project the work force needs to be trained from scratch.

But saying that Britain does this is a bit unfair. More accurately it would be that England and Wales do this. North of the border a steady pipeline of projects has been underway for over 20 years.

With the slow but steady progress of its rail electrification programme and its more reasonable costs, Scotland looks far more like a pretty normal western European country compared to the rest of Britain.

A steady pipeline of projects

Since 2005 Scotland has had a steady stream of electrification projects, with at least some rail electrification underway almost all of the time.

It has long been the case that if you are travelling between England and Glasgow or Edinburgh you are likely travelling on an electrified railway. In the last 20 years improvements in the central belt mean that almost all commuter trains into Glasgow, all trains between Glasgow and Edinburgh and some commuter trains into Edinburgh are now electric. Planned improvements mean most commuter trains into Edinburgh will likely be electric by 2031. There are also longer term plans to electrify up to the northern Scottish cities of Perth, Dundee and ultimately Aberdeen and Inverness.

Cost impact

Scottish rail electrification programme is likely a little on the expensive side by European standards. But compared to the vast majority of English and Welsh projects most Scottish projects are incredibly cheap.

This is pretty noteworthy as Scottish projects are delivered through contracts awarded by Network Rail, exactly the same as they are in England.

Scots (probably) do it better

Rail electrification is the clearest example, but it is probably the case that Scotland is slightly better at building all types of transport infrastructure compared to England and Wales.

The sample sizes are small, but Scottish projects do seem to be cheaper on average than their English equivalents in other areas too, even when controlling for the lower population densities that surround some Scottish projects.

Scottish readers may be surprised given the national scandal of the incredibly expensive Edinburgh Tram, but when it comes to getting value for money from transport infrastructure, Scotland is almost certainly doing a better job than England.

Devolution has probably helped with this

In some ways Scottish success is hard to explain. Their processes look pretty similar to England’s. Their funding is at a similar level. And for rail electrification uses the same UK-wide nationalised organisation (Network Rail) procuring from the same private companies that build infrastructure in England.

I strongly suspect that the reason Scotland gets results closer to the European norm is that the power for making decisions lies at a similar level of government as it does in Europe. Most European countries are small. Those that aren’t have decision making made and projects funded at a sub national level.

National and regional governments making transport decisions for populations of around 5 million people is the norm across Europe. In Britain, Scotland and Wales are the exceptions.

England should follow Scotland’s example. Much more transport decision making should be decided at the regional level. It is absurd that the Mayor’s of major conurbations like London, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire do not have the power to make basic decisions about what is built and how it is funded in their regions. This is not the case anywhere else. But Scotland shows that it is possible for the incentives for decision makers to be better when dealing with smaller populations, and that this can lead to more and cheaper infrastructure.

My fear isn’t so much about what the next PM might do, but what he might not. Under Starmer’s leadership, Labour have pursued an agenda of planning and regulatory reform. It has been too slow, too timid, and occasionally, tactically unwise, yet there has been hard-won progress.

In two years, Labour have lifted the ban on onshore-wind, eliminated the need for extensive pre-application consultation for infrastructure projects, reinstated housing targets and raised them too, made it much harder to delay infrastructure projects with no-hoper legal challenges, legislated for a dramatically simpler system of environmental protection, got rid of the solar cliff edge, and made it easier to build on the grey bits of the green belt.

Some of these reforms are already bearing fruit, but on their own they’re insufficient. Labour are set to fall 700,000 homes short of their 1.5 million homes target. British infrastructure projects are not just slower, but also cost, on average, 65% more than their international equivalents. Hinkley Point C, a new nuclear power station in the South-West, is not only the world’s most expensive, it is also at serious risk of delay. There is clearly much more to do.

Under Starmer and Reeves, Labour got that. You can certainly criticise them for not recognising the chasm between rhetoric and action sooner (and I have), but they have put forward a second wave of planning reform, which is in some areas genuinely radical. It would be a grave mistake if Burnham were to let it fall by the wayside.

Here’s what Burnham should keep.

The new National Planning Policy Framework

Let’s start with housing. The most important document in planning policy in England is the National Planning Policy Framework. It sets out, in broad terms, what can and can’t be built in England. When councils draw up their local plans, they do so following the policies of the NPPF. When planning committees decide on an individual planning application, their job is to work out whether the project is complying with the NPPF’s policies. This is the second time Labour have attempted to change the National Planning Policy Framework. When they got into office, they made sweeping changes, including reinstating housing targets, scrapping the de facto onshore wind ban and opening up large chunks of the Green Belt for development. Their second attempt to reform the NPPF is much more radical in three key ways.

First, it is a complete rewrite. In the past, the NPPF has typically evolved like a track changes document. A paragraph here is removed, a paragraph there is added, the word “substantial” is crossed out and replaced with “significant” and so on.

This is completely different. It dramatically simplifies the policies within the NPPF and creates new national decision-making policies. These are designed to trump local development management policies. This dramatically simplifies things. Instead of having hundreds of local authority-specific policies, developers can instead follow clear national guidance on what can and can’t be built.

Local policies often are more stringent than national rules. For example, in London, many boroughs have extremely strict policies around embedded carbon, the emissions that come from building. The problem is, from an environmental perspective, this is self-defeating. Londoners emit less per capita than residents in many other cities for the simple reason that in London there are excellent public transport options. If you make it harder to build in London by insisting on greener building standards, you end up with the paradoxical result of a less green outcome because fewer people live in the capital and use public transport, and instead more people live in the car-dependent suburbs.

There is an added emphasis too on proportionality. At the moment, councils can insist on massive amounts of paperwork even before they review a planning application. For example, in Walthamstow, developers trying to build a small block of flats were required to submit 73 different documents. The planning application stretched to 1,250 pages – 25 pages longer than War and Peace.

Second, there is a new, beefed-up presumption in favour of suitably located developments. This makes it very hard to refuse developments provided they meet certain conditions. Previously, this only applied to developments in council areas, in local authorities where they were failing to meet their housing targets or their local plans were out of date or invalid. Now, it applies anywhere provided they meet the policies in the national decision-making policies that I mentioned.

This will mean a ‘default yes’ in favour of new homes within walking distance of train, tube, and tram stations. It will apply both to homes near stations in cities and towns, but also to well-connected stations outside cities and towns, including on greenbelt land. This could be huge. Some estimates suggest that the government could easily exceed its 1.5 million home target for the parliament merely by building near stations in London and the South East. If you factor in higher densities in urban areas, you could see even more homes coming forward. This, put simply, is the biggest pro-supply move since World War 2.

Third, the new NPPF contains a strong policy in favour of the densification of existing developed plots. Under this policy, homeowners will have the freedom to add additional floors to their property (e.g. via a mansard roof) and build residential annexes, also known as granny flats, in their back garden.

This could be transformative. In one Tower Hamlets neighbourhood, planning policy was changed to automatically allow mansard roofs, the think tank Create Streets estimates that this reform alone created 300 additional bedrooms in the borough. While in California, a similar law encouraging the building of granny flats led to the construction of 100,000 additional homes. In LA, one third of all new homes built are granny flats.

In theory, all of these measures were meant to be in place by now. The new NPPF was put out for consultation last December. The consultation closed in March, but the Government is still yet to publish its response. Some reports suggest that a response is unlikely to be published until after the Summer Recess due to the change of PM. If that’s the case, then it will be one of the most consequential decisions in Burnham’s first 100 days.

Implement the Fingleton Review

Britain is the most expensive country in the world to build a new nuclear power station. As PM, Sir Keir Starmer challenged former competition regulator John Fingleton to figure out why and identify regulatory reforms to cut the cost of building. His review was widely praised, and its recommendations were accepted in full by Sir Keir.

Progress has already been made, but many of the changes called for by John Fingleton require legislation. For example, Fingleton called for the elimination of the recently-created ‘National Landscapes duty’. This would reverse a change from the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 that has imposed unexpectedly large costs and delays on development. The King’s Speech set aside legislative time for a new Nuclear Bill, but a change of PM and potentially a new King’s Speech is cause for concern.

There’s an opportunity for Burnham here. The Fingleton Review was widely backed by industry and could potentially unlock thousands of jobs in areas where Labour MPs are under threat from Reform. However, despite Sir Keir’s full-throated support for the Review, many of Fingleton’s recommendations have been watered down.

For example, the Review proposed major reforms to the Habitats Regulations designed to avoid repeating the absurdity of EDF being forced to spend £700m on fish protection. Fingleton wanted legislation, but the Government opted for guidance. It is unlikely that guidance alone will be sufficient to change Natural England’s behaviour. Likewise, the most radical measure within the Fingleton Review, which would have created an alternative means of complying with the Habitats Regulations by allowing developers to make large contributions to a nature fund (based on the nuclear site’s acreage), was dropped altogether. That’s a shame because it would, more than anything else, dramatically cut the time it takes to start construction on a nuclear project.

If he were to re-commit the government to implementing the Fingleton Review in full (including the changes dropped by Starmer), then Burnham would send a powerful signal to the bond markets that good growth isn’t just a slogan.

Judicial Review

It is far too easy to delay or block infrastructure projects by bringing lawsuits. This problem is made worse by the fact that when people challenge planning applications on environmental grounds, they benefit from special cost caps, which means that if the case were to go against them, they’re not liable for the legal costs they have incurred on the other side.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act cut the amount of time it takes to deal with legal challenges that have little-to-no chance of success. In the past, litigants would have three opportunities to challenge planning decisions via the courts, now they have just two (and in some cases, just one).

There are however two problems with JR.

First, there’s the ability to delay infrastructure projects on grounds that are unlikely to succeed. This is a serious problem – it is estimated that unsuccessful legal challenges add between £60m-£120m to the cost of major road projects. It is a problem mostly (not entirely) solved by the Planning and Infrastructure Act’s reforms.

Second, there’s the impact of operating in an environment where every single document, survey, and study will be scrutinised in-depth and could be challenged in the courts. The French statesman Cardinal Richelieu once said: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Of course, planning applications for major infrastructure projects aren’t six-lines long. One recently approved solar farm had a million word planning application. The massive growth in planning application length is itself a direct consequence of the risk of judicial review. Developers attempt to avoid legitimate challenges (e.g. the Secretary of State failed to consider all environmental impacts) by providing extreme amounts of information. Even when the risk that a project might impact a projected species is, at best, remote, developers will still carry out extensive surveys to pre-empt legal challenges.

Unlike the first, this latter problem is, as yet, unsolved. The risk remains that vital infrastructure projects can be blocked (or at least heavily delayed) on a technicality, even when elected decisionmakers are persuaded that a project is necessary and should go ahead. To her credit, Rachel Reeves put forward two strong measures that would tackle this latter problem (and in turn, reduce the need for ‘defensive medicine’.)

Under her plan, the existing window to lodge legal challenges after the Secretary of State grants the Development Consent Order (DCO) would remain with one twist. At the end of the window, the Secretary of State would have the opportunity to revise the DCO to address any issues that came up in the judicial review window. Opponents of the project would still be able to bring a legal case, but the chances of success for any litigant will be low. This will, in turn, either deter legal challenges or if they continue, make it much more likely that judges will dismiss them at the earliest possible stage.

For certain projects, such as those critical to the nation’s energy security, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero would be able to designate them as being of ‘Critical National Importance’. Parliament would then vote twice (once when the project’s application is accepted and once when the project is approved) to confirm their status. This would, in effect, give individual planning applications the same status as an Act of Parliament. This would close off essentially all routes (except human rights) to legally challenge such projects. As I’ve mentioned before, this might seem like a radical approach, but it actually is the restoration of an approach that until recently most of our nation’s critical infrastructure was built on. The M25, Thames Barrier, and Manchester’s Metrolink were all built via Private Acts of Parliament.

Transport and Works Act Orders

If Andy Burnham stands for anything, it is the idea that too much power is concentrated in Westminster and that devolving it to the nation’s cities and regions would boost growth. One area where Burnham is almost certainly right is in approving new local transport infrastructure. Unlike in most European regions, Mayors lack the power to fund and grant planning approval to new tram or metro systems. This is one reason why 28 French cities have trams, while only 7 British cities do.

Though more could be done, Mayors now benefit from new local tax raising powers in the form of a tourist tax. However, Mayors will still have to ask permission from the Department for Transport to obtain planning permission if they want to build a new tram or metro system. Applying for a Transport and Works Act Order can take over four years. Applications can stretch to thousands of pages too. For example, the TWAO for the West Midlands Metro was 5,718 pages long.

This process is one reason why French tram projects are delivered substantially faster than British tram projects. For instance, the West Midlands Metro - a mile tram extension – took over a decade to build from start to finish. Just over three years was spent on the TWAO process (ignoring the time it took to prepare the application). By contrast, Dijon’s two tram lines were built in just five years total.

This is why Britain Remade (and a host of other groups including Create Streets and ThinkLabour) have called on the Government to devolve the TWAO process to metro mayors. To their credit, the Government has listened and is currently consulting on devolving the process. All signs suggest Starmer and co. planned to follow through and devolve it.

***

Andy Burnham will want to do things differently to his predecessor. The polls suggest the public wants the same. But, it shouldn’t be change for change’s sake. If Burnham is to succeed in his mission of delivering good growth in every postcode, then he should follow through on his predecessor’s agenda of planning reform.

First, because planning reform remains one of the most powerful levers to boost economic growth (and in turn, generate revenue to pay for better public services). And second, because if Burnham wants more council homes and wants better infrastructure for places like Manchester and Leeds, then he needs to reform the planning system that constrains both.

Returning powers to local government (Britain wasn’t always this centralised)makes a lot of sense. And Burnham believes, with some justification, that Manchester is a model of what local government acquiring more powers can do for the economy.

But there is still a lot of detail left to be filled in. What powers should mayors actually have? And what should mayors do with those powers? Mayors themselves have set out many of the powers they want. This is a great place to start, but Burnham should be more radical. And while ‘Manchesterism’ remains quite vague, there are concrete policies other places can copy and adapt from actually-existing Manchesterism.

Believe in mayors

When Burnham becomes Prime Minister, he will inherit a pretty grim situation in most areas of public policy. But one area where Britain has been moving in broadly the right direction is mayors.

This began in London under New Labour, spread to city regions under the Tories, and has been continued by the current government. Britain now has more mayors with more powers. The model is proving surprisingly popular. Most existing mayors were re-elected in 2024, and even those who lost often ran well ahead of their parties’ performance in other elections.

The current government has made some progress, creating a viable route for bus franchising powers achievable for any city or region that wants them. Greater Manchester has used them to create the Bee Network, bringing buses under public control without bringing them into public ownership. Liverpool is following suit.

Manchester has been the driver of much of this devolution. George Osborne was eager to hand (Labour-controlled) Manchester more powers than other places because it was the only council that came to him with good ideas. Listening to mayors on what they want is probably a good place to start when it comes to devolving powers.

One regular demand from many mayors is more power on rail. But Whitehall seems to be determined to stop mayors getting these powers. The Department for Transport is creating a formal “Right to Request” process, allowing established mayoral combined authorities to ask for control over specific rail services, stations or infrastructure in their regions. That sounds promising, but a right to request is not a right to receive. It preserves the old hierarchy: mayors may ask, but Whitehall decides.

The guidance makes clear that the Department for Transport still sees devolution as a fallback behind Great British Railways delivering services itself and undefined “partnerships” between Whitehall and mayors. The Secretary of State remains judge and jury. The most likely outcome is partnerships that are barely worth the paper they are written on.

Burnham should change the presumption. Established mayors should have a right to control local rail services, station management, fares integration and service specification unless the Department for Transport can publish a clear reason why doing so would damage the national network. GBR should have a duty to co-operate with democratically elected mayor’s ambitions.

That does not mean mayors should control every train. But mayors should have a clear route to control over the services that shape their own urban economies: stopping patterns, train paths, station upgrades, fares integration and local service priorities. Mayors should also have more power over what is built. Burnham has already suggested land value capture as a means for funding public transport. This power could be given to mayors at the same time with reforming Transport and Works Act to allow mayors to drive their own projects without constantly requiring approval from the centre. Transport devolution should not depend on whether Whitehall feels generous.

Push mayors further than they want to go

One reason mayors have been popular is that they occupy a politically useful position. They have enough money and power to enact visible change, but they have very limited tax-raising powers. That means they can take credit for delivery while blaming national government when there is not enough money. This is not a mature model of devolution.

Ultimately, mayoral power will always be constrained if Whitehall is writing the cheque. He who pays the piper calls the tune, or at least demands thousands of pages of documents explaining how the money has been spent. Britain cannot have serious devolution if mayors remain mostly grant managers.

It is not clear mayors are desperate to receive tax powers. Some seem quite happy with the current equilibrium. They get a platform, a budget, a mandate and someone else to blame. But Greater Manchester has shown that getting ahead of other mayoralties and asking for more powers works out well in the end.

Burnham should push mayors further than some of them want to go and make them responsible for raising money. The tourist tax the current government has introduced is a useful start, but it is meagre. Mayors should have more ability to raise and retain local revenues.

The most important reform would be to let mayoral authorities retain more of the tax growth they help create. If a mayor builds homes, improves transport, expands the labour market and attracts jobs, most of the resulting uplift in business rates, stamp duty, income tax and employer National Insurance should remain in the city region to fund the next round of infrastructure.

At the moment, a mayor can make brave pro-growth decisions while the Treasury captures much of the fiscal upside. That is a bad deal for local leaders and for taxpayers across the country. It encourages begging for more money from London, rather than going for growth.

Regions should be rewarded when their decisions expand the local tax base and punished when they don’t. A Burnham government should give mayoral authorities more retained revenue and more responsibility for the consequences of their choices.

That would make mayors more powerful, but also more accountable. If they want to block homes, delay infrastructure and refuse growth, they should have to live with the fiscal consequences. If they build, they should benefit. Manchester provides some ideas about how they can do that.

Put customers back on the high street

Manchester city centre is thriving. But this is a pretty unusual success story.

The rise of the supermarket, then the retail park, and finally internet shopping has delivered enormous benefits for consumers. Overall, these have been hugely positive developments. But many high streets are struggling to cope. In places such as Newport, Blackpool and Bradford, vacancy rates can be double what they are in London, Cambridge or Manchester.

The surest way to improve a high street is for the surrounding area to become richer. But that is easier said than done. The other option, which can also help with the getting richer bit, is to put more people within walking distance of the town centre.

Manchester city centre works because lots of people live there and nearby. Density in the centre of urban areas means any business has a much larger pool of regular customers within walking distance. That daily custom keeps the cafes, pubs, grocers, pharmacies, restaurants and shops alive. Once they are there, they are there for everyone, including those who live further away who now actually want to visit. Greater Manchester has built dozens of skyscrapers and added more than 120,000 people within a 15-minute walk of the city centre between 2001 and 2023. Most places obviously cannot copy that exactly. Blackpool Tower will probably remain Blackpool’s tallest building for some time yet. But the principle scales down.

A couple of thousand extra residents in and around a town centre can make a real difference. Flats above shops, four storey apartment blocks, mansion blocks, redeveloped surface car parks and housing on underused brownfield sites would all help create the stable customer base that high streets need.

This is a much better high-street policy than tax breaks for specific kinds of business where much of the benefit will likely flow to landlords. Building homes near high streets increases the number of customers, improves local services, brings in more council tax, and is likely to be fiscally positive in the long run.

Keir Starmer talked a big game about a ‘brownfield passport’ that would have made all of this much easier. He did not deliver, though policies that would achieve that were consulted on. Burnham needs to deliver where Starmer did not.

Crossrail Britain’s big cities

Crossrail in London has proved to be an enormous success. The basic idea was simple: two existing commuter railway lines that terminated on opposite sides of the city centre were joined together by a new railway in the middle. Instead of ending at the edge of the centre, trains now pass through it. This enables people using the commuter railways to get into the centre proper and more importantly allows more trains to run, as they are not bottlenecked by needing platform space to stop and turn round in a built up city centre.

The famous version is in London. But Manchester did a smaller and cheaper version first.

Manchester’s rail network is centred on two main stations: Victoria to the north of the city centre, and Piccadilly to the south. Until 2017 there was no rail link between them and even now part of the link between them is so crowded it creates a capacity problem. Many trains terminated at these stations (and lots still do at Picadilly), which meant there was not room for all the commuter lines into them to run regular services.

Metrolink alleviated this problem. The Bury line into Victoria and the Altrincham line into Piccadilly were joined together by tram track through Manchester city centre. This enabled more frequent service on those lines and freed up capacity into Piccadilly and Victoria for other trains.

As Metrolink expanded, it also added the South Manchester line, built on the remains of an old railway that had been shut in part because there was no room for a regular service into Piccadilly. The lesson is not just “trams are good”, though trams are often good. Throughrunning and crossrailing in particular can provide huge amounts of additional capacity on existing railways for much smaller investments than are required for totally brand new systems.

Many British cities have rail networks that have city centre bottlenecks. In some, lines run into terminal stations, passengers have to change awkwardly, and capacity is limited because trains have nowhere useful to go once they reach the centre. Crossrailing solves this by turning disconnected commuter railways into metro-style networks. Glasgow, Manchester and London present the most obvious opportunities here. In others, several lines converge onto short stretches of city-centre track, creating severe congestion.. Relief tunnels or city centre street running trams could massively increase capacity in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and many other cities.

This can be achieved through short city centre tram routes as in Manchester, or through tunnels like in London. Creating a rolling programme of cheap Crossrails is something that all cities could benefit from, but will initially need national co-ordination.

Manchester can be a model

Manchester is not perfect. Growth has been uneven. The city centre has done far better than many outer boroughs. The average person still earns less than the national average. Planning remains far too restrictive in many affluent commuter areas.

But Manchester is still one of the only serious growth stories Britain has produced in recent decades. A hollowed-out post-industrial city centre with only a few hundred residents became a place of flats, bars, offices, hotels, cranes, students, visitors, employers and people. That did not happen by accident.

It happened because serious people spent decades building institutions, welcoming investment, allowing development, improving transport, and making the centre of the city a place where more people could live, work and spend money.

A Burnham government is right to focus on giving power back to local government and should pursue a radical version of this, giving them both real power and the real responsibility that comes with tax raising powers. If national government allows local government to keep the upside of good decisions (and suffer the consequences of bad ones) this could be a major change in how British politics functions. If local government uses that power to put people back on the high street, crossrail Britain’s big cities and take back control of transport, this is an agenda that could actually drive growth.

Britain may invest less of its income (GDP) in new infrastructure than its peers but that is driven by a lack of private sector investment. Put simply, British businesses aren’t buying new machinery and equipment as much as their international counterparts. When it comes to public investment, our investment levels aren’t actually out of whack with our peers.

In fact, when it comes to public investment in transport infrastructure – roads, railways, and trams – Britain outspends its international counterparts. Investing a bigger share of GDP and spending more capita than our peers on average.

But Britain’s above-average investment in transport does not result in above-average outcomes. For example, France has 28 tram systems, over 7,300 miles of motorway, and over 1,700 miles of high-speed rail, compared to just 7 tram systems, 2,300 miles of motorway, and 68 miles of high speed railway in the UK, despite our economies being a similar size.

The problem is that when we spend on infrastructure we get a lot less per pound than our peers.

Our study analysed data from 345 infrastructure projects across the globe. We controlled for things like project size, tunnelling share, station and junction counts, urban or rural location, population density, construction duration, and the technology used. We compare a British rural motorway to a French rural motorway; a London metro to a Paris metro; a UK nuclear plant to a Korean one of similar size, and so on and so forth.

Our analysis found that British infrastructure projects had a 65% cost premium compared to our peers. In other words, to get what £1 buys you in places like France and Germany, Britain has to spend £1.65.

And no, it isn’t all just HS2. Even without HS2, we still have a 79% rail premium and a 58% overall cost premium.

And when you adjust our spending (UK: £308 per head) to take account of the cost premium, we go from outspending our peers (Peers: £231 per head) to spending a decent chunk less (UK adjusted for cost premium: £190 per head).

Or put differently, if Britain’s cost-premium over European peers was eliminated, our £21bn of annual investment (average 2015-2023) in transport infrastructure would secure 65% more infrastructure per pound spent. Over the course of a five year Parliament, Britain would, in effect, have £41.5bn more of actual transport infrastructure for the amount it already spends. Merely halving Britain’s cost premium – British projects would still cost 32.5% more — would still unlock an additional £15.7bn worth of infrastructure over five years.

What could £41.5bn buy?

We could fix major rail bottlenecks like the Castlefield Corridor in Manchester and the Selhurst junction in Croydon. It’d also allow us to build trams in not just Leeds (West Yorkshire), but also Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Coventry, Plymouth, and Southampton–Portsmouth. We could commit to electrifying 190 miles of railway each year. And revive a bunch of cancelled road schemes like dualling the A1, the A120 Braintree–A12, A303, A358, the A27 Arundel Bypass, dualling the Acle Straight and building a long overdue Third Menai Crossing. And that’s just some of the things you could do. We have a full list below and a map which picks out some key projects.

Britain, readers of this newsletter will know, isn’t good at building stuff. But if we can fix it, then this is the prize. Major transport upgrades completed across the country, the sort of projects that can absolutely transform places for the better, in just five years (and without spending an additional penny in tax).

How did we get to having a 65% cost premium and how do we get rid of it? You can read the full Britain Remade x Centre for British Progress paper Building More for Less: A cost-free path to European levels of investment here.

Matt Chorley (host): “Are you advocating the culling of ponies?”

Marian Spain (CEO, Natural England): “Absolutely not...”

Matt Chorley: “Would the outcome of what is being proposed [by Natural England] going to lead to a reduction in ponies on Dartmoor?”

Marian Spain: “It could”

Dartmoor’s semi-wild hill ponies were facing a cull, which could reduce pony numbers by 90%. This is almost certainly not going to happen now, every major political party leader has made clear: killing hundreds of ponies is simply not on.

The threat to Dartmoor’s semi-wild ponies comes from Natural England, the nature regulator, who look set to impose tougher livestock caps on farmers qualifying for stewardship payments.

Upland farming (what happens on Dartmoor) isn’t economical and farmers are reliant on subsidies. The land is marginal (so cash crops can’t be grown) and farmers rear livestock (mostly sheep) for meat. Sheep, viewers of Clarkson’s Farm will know, are not the route to large profits. In fact, even with subsidies upland farmers earn a pittance. In 2020, they earned on average £22,000 a year. This is less than the National Living Wage (at a 35 hour working week) and about two-thirds of the median UK income.

Upland farmers on Dartmoor are paid for their environmental stewardship of the site. However, most agree that Dartmoor’s biodiversity has got worse, not better since the subsidies came in. The culprit is likely overgrazing from livestock. Natural England has a legal duty to protect and enhance the biodiversity of sites like Dartmoor, so is set to make continued receipt of the funds conditional on large reductions in livestock numbers (a 56 to 89% fall). So, why is this a threat to Dartmoor’s semi-wild ponies?

It appears that Dartmoor’s semi-wild ponies will be included in the livestock count. Ponies, unlike sheep, can’t be slaughtered and sold for food (Findus ‘Beef Lasagne’ anyone?). The inevitable result will be farmers choosing to cull their ponies to save their sheep. And given the reductions discussed, it could mean 90% of semi-wild ponies on Dartmoor will be killed.

This blog isn’t really about Dartmoor’s hill ponies. I am not a farmer or ecologist, and have no special expertise to speak on whether livestock numbers should (or shouldn’t) be cut. I am however becoming an expert in Natural England’s ‘rebuttals’.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about another of Natural England’s positions, that the £700m spent on fish protection at Hinkley Point C isn’t sufficient and that EDF must provide additional compensation, in the form of a large saltmarsh if they are to obtain their water discharge license, without which the plant cannot legally operate. In response to the Telegraph article which broke the story, Natural England published a rebuttal.

The rebuttals are worth reading for what they reveal about the British administrative state. The decisions made by Natural England, a quango tasked with protecting England’s natural environment, can have massive consequences – from blocking 100,000 homes to delaying a power station capable of supplying 7% of the country’s electricity – yet the organisation is extremely reluctant to be held accountable for the predictable consequences of their actions.

In the case of Hinkley Point C, they wrote the following:

“Natural England is not demanding a salt marsh to be created.”

…

“Natural England does not “sign off” nuclear power stations. Our statutory role is to provide independent scientific advice to the relevant competent authorities.”

…

“Natural England has not required design changes to the power station. Our role is to advise on the effectiveness of mitigation already agreed in the 2013 DCO.”

Put simply, don’t blame us, we’re just doing our jobs – advising on what is and isn’t compliant with environmental law – if a nuclear power station is delayed then that’s the fault of the developer for not proposing sufficient mitigations.

Or take their response to criticism they insisted on a £100m plus bat-shed for HS2:

“Natural England has not required HS2 Ltd to build the reported structure, or any other structure, nor advised on the design or costs.

“Natural England was consulted by HS2 on whether the proposal designed to mitigate the impact of the railway on rare and protected bats was sufficient to comply with environmental law - we advised that it was.

“The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by its own ecologists in the vicinity of Sheephouse Wood.

…

“HS2 has an obligation throughout the whole route to abide by legislation that exists to protect nature.

“It is for HS2 Ltd to make choices, consider risks and factor in costs when deciding how to comply with environmental law - that could be by choosing a route which avoids species and sites protected for nature or by investing in mitigations to limit the harm when the route passes through sensitive sites.”

Natural England never ordered HS2 to build a £100m bat-shed. They merely told them that to comply with environmental law that they needed to mitigate the impact on bats and that the bat tunnel was sufficient to meet that requirement. The developer was free to comply by alternative means – for example, radically changing the route of the railway (after it had been chosen) or designing other effective mitigations.

The problem is the former option would be extremely costly (or at least, not compatible with key aspects of the scheme i.e. speed) and the latter do not seem to exist. As Dan Tomlinson MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury pointed out on Twitter, HS2 considered 17 (!) separate mitigations over a ten-year period, which involved extensive consultations with key stakeholders. Only the bat-shed was sufficient to comply with Natural England’s advice that ‘no bat death is acceptable’.

Natural England never explicitly demanded that HS2 build a bat-shed, but the inevitable consequence of their advice is HS2 spending over £100m building a bat tunnel to save a small number of bats. Notice a pattern?

Or take their response to the media’s coverage of the threat to Dartmoor’s hill ponies.

“Natural England has not recommended a cull of Dartmoor ponies. We do not have the power to order a cull, and we have not advised one.”

…

“Our role is to advise farmers who wish to enter the publicly funded schemes available for grazing regimes. These government schemes have been designed to restore nature - some areas will require less grazing, some more”

…

“Decisions about which animals are grazed on Dartmoor commons rest with individual landowners and commoners, not with Natural England. Our role is to provide evidence-based advice on how to protect and restore the habitats that are legally designated for protection.

…

“We are aware of concerns that including ponies in livestock unit calculations could lead to some land managers favouring more commercially profitable cattle or sheep.

“Including ponies in calculations of grazing animals means that ponies will be properly recognised within agri-environment payment schemes.”

To the untrained eye, Natural England’s blog appears to be a strong rebuttal to the claims in the Times (and other papers) that they are demanding a cull. Yet, taken with the other blogs, the obfuscation becomes clear. Yes, Natural England does not explicitly demand £100m bat-sheds, delays to Hinkley Point C, or pony culls, but the result of its advice is that bat tunnels, salt marshes, and pony culls are the rational choice of the people Natural England regulates.

It is like arguing that capping rents does not reduce the supply of rental properties because landlords are under no obligation to sell their properties, and could continue to let out their properties at far below market rate.

***

Who deserves the real blame?

Natural England is a strange organisation. It does not see itself as a normal regulator. Regulators in Britain have a growth duty. Natural England believes, or at least has believed, that the growth duty does not apply to many of its actions. Their job isn’t to weigh up whether a requirement is proportionate or not, but to enforce legal protections for nature. They see themselves less like Ofgem and more like the police. When, for instance, Natural England designates an ex-industrial site as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, the fact the designation might jeopardise the creation of a new town does not factor into the calculation.

It is a problem the writer Benedict Springbett describes as the lexical fallacy: “Such-and-such a value is widely agreed as being a Good Thing – protecting bats, saving human life, safety, and so forth. It is so widely accepted as being a Good Thing that its Goodness takes on a life of its own, and people end up reasoning in such a way that the Good Thing ends up overruling all other competing moral values.”

This way of thinking is effectively hardcoded into our legal system via various environmental laws. Natural England is essentially the living and breathing avatar of the Lexical Fallacy. This is what leads it so often to making unreasonable and, clearly disproportionate, requests. In fact, its requests are so disproportionate (e.g. £700m on fish protection) that defenders of the status quo go to great lengths to argue that they have not, in fact, requested them. The problem is… they have.

It is likely that in many cases, Natural England has more leeway to be proportionate than it claims. Many environmental lawyers and ecologists believe that changes in guidance – a steer from politicians – could lead them to act more proportionately.

Yet it is unlikely this would solve all of the problems. Natural England will probably still make decisions that seem incomprehensible. The underlying legislation probably does tie their hands and prevent them from taking into account large economic benefits.

In that sense, Natural England’s resistance to accountability isn’t entirely unjustified. A more proportionate Natural England – “On second thoughts, £700m on fish is more than enough” – might make decisions that get reversed by the courts.

We are left in a scenario that is deeply frustrating. There is effectively no individual decisionmaker who can be held accountable when Britain’s nature protections lead to disproportionate outcomes. If nothing else, it is bad for democracy. Our elected officials have outsourced core parts of their job to a body that by its very nature isn’t set up to represent the electorate’s desires. This can’t go on.

The evidence suggests a more balanced conclusion. Greater Manchester is not Britain’s top-performing city region. Bristol, and particularly Edinburgh, have consistently outperformed it in recent decades. However, the broader claim that Greater Manchester has not outperformed most other British cities on a per capita basis is probably wrong, and tends to rest on an overly narrow reading of the data. Taking the evidence as a whole, Greater Manchester is one of the stronger performers, though the data is messy. If Greater Manchester’s population growth is allowed to count in its favour, as it should be, then its status as one of the strongest city-region performers after Edinburgh and Bristol becomes much clearer.2

The data also makes it clear that Greater Manchester’s growth has been focused on the centre of the conurbation. But that is a feature of the model, not a bug. Criticising Greater Manchester’s growth model on the basis that growth has been concentrated in and around the City of Manchester misunderstands both the region’s recent history and the economics of agglomeration.

Greater Manchester’s per capita performance is pretty good

There are many different ways to measure the relative success of regional economies. What matters for present purposes is growth relative to similar economies. Greater Manchester has been richer than Liverpool for some time. Greater Manchester has been poorer than Oxfordshire for some time.

But if Greater Manchester is doing relatively well, its living standards should be pulling further clear of places like Liverpool and catching up with places like Oxfordshire. The important thing to look at then is not ‘how rich is Greater Manchester compared to other places’ but how fast it is growing compared to other city regions.

Overall, the data suggests that Greater Manchester has probably grown faster per person than most other British city regions, though Bristol and especially Edinburgh have performed much more strongly.

GDP per capita is the economic output per head of the region. Greater Manchester performs strongly, though Liverpool, starting from a much lower base, Bristol, and especially Edinburgh have outperformed Greater Manchester by this metric.

GVA per capita is the value generated by producers in an area, calculated as output minus intermediate inputs, divided by the local population. It is similar to GDP but while GDP includes product taxes (mostly VAT in the UK) but does not include product subsidies, GVA is the other way round. Greater Manchester again does well, with Bristol performing slightly better and Edinburgh again by far the strongest performer.

Gross Disposable Household Income per capita is the amount of money households have available to spend or save after taxes, social contributions, and benefits are accounted for, divided by the population. It is useful because it captures how much income actually reaches households, rather than just how much output is produced in an area. On this metric, Greater Manchester does worse than most other cities.

So which figure is right? One possible explanation is that Greater Manchester’s output figures increasingly reflect people who work in or visit the city region but do not live there. That would boost GDP and GVA relative to resident household income. However, the available long-run data is not good enough to prove this.

If someone lives in Preston or Macclesfield but works in Deansgate, the GDP and GVA they produce at work will count towards Greater Manchester’s figures. However, it will not add much to Greater Manchester’s gross household income figures, as these are calculated based on income received by residents and allocated to where people live.

Unfortunately, there is not a good way to tell how commuting or tourism has changed across Britain’s major cities in recent decades. The 2011 census counted commuters into and out of major cities, but this was the first time it had done so. The 2021 census was conducted during Covid, so it was decided that these figures would not be useful to collect. There are data on railway station users and congestion, but these do not reveal whether the journeys are people coming into the city for work and leisure, going out for work and leisure, or simply moving within the city region. For present purposes, that is not useful enough.

Greater Manchester improving its position relative to other cities at attracting commuters and visitors is therefore a possible explanation for its GDP and GVA figures looking better than its household disposable income figures. But there is no strong evidence either way.

Tax and benefits

Another possible explanation is tax and benefits. For GVA and GDP figures, if someone earns income that is then taxed and spent on benefits elsewhere, that activity is counted where the output is generated, that is, where the worker works. However, for household disposable income figures, benefit income is counted where the benefit recipient lives.

A place becoming more successful economically will therefore have some of its success obscured in the household income figures by the progressive tax and benefits system. As people increase their incomes, they receive fewer benefits and pay more tax. Their household income therefore rises more slowly than the area’s GDP.

The DWP publishes detailed figures on benefit spending by local authority area going back to 2002. For Scotland, these figures are not comparable over time, as more benefits have been devolved to Scotland since then. But for England and Wales, it is possible to compare different cities’ growth in household incomes since 2002 both with and without benefits. HMRC also has tax data by local authority, but only back to 2010. I have therefore included two graphs: one that adjusts for benefit spending back to 2002, and one that adjusts for taxation and benefit spending back to 2010.

As these adjustments show, Greater Manchester performs much better once tax and benefits are accounted for. As should be expected by now, Greater Manchester is still behind Bristol. However, it also remains behind several other cities. Greater Manchester is in the middle of the pack, but importantly for present purposes it outperforms several of its most directly comparable city regions, including Liverpool, the West Midlands, and West Yorkshire.

Data problems

So far, the evidence suggests that commuting and tourism might explain some of the discrepancy between Greater Manchester’s GVA and GDP figures and its GDHI figures, but there is no strong evidence either way. Tax and benefits likely explain a significant part of the difference, but not all of it. Looking at how the data is constructed does not provide an obvious answer for where the rest of the difference comes from. (I discuss this in more detail in the footnotes.)3

However, there is no obvious reason to think that the GVA figure is clearly better constructed than the GDHI figure, or vice versa. The reasonable conclusion is that Greater Manchester’s per capita performance depends partly on which measure is given the most weight.

On the output measures, Greater Manchester looks like one of the strongest performers after Edinburgh and Bristol. On household income, it looks more middle of the pack, though still ahead of many comparable large northern and Midlands city regions. Reasonable people can disagree about which measure deserves more weight, but it is hard to sustain the claim that Greater Manchester has not performed relatively well.

Quantity has a quality of its own

So far, this piece has focused on Greater Manchester’s per capita performance. But this is not the only relevant measure of success. Successful cities do not just grow the incomes of people who are already there. They bring new people in and make people who are from there want to stay.

When comparing independent countries, looking mainly at per capita figures makes sense. Countries have very different immigration policies and national birth rates will do more to explain population growth than economic success or failure. But for cities within the same country, with the same immigration policy and broadly similar birth rates, more successful places should be expected to attract and retain more people.

It is therefore also worth looking at overall growth rates without adjusting for population.

In GDP terms, a familiar pattern emerges: Greater Manchester performs very well but is outperformed by Edinburgh and Bristol.

As before, household income, even excluding benefits, is less favourable to Greater Manchester. But Greater Manchester still performs well.

The regions containing Oxford and Cambridge and Nottingham overtake Greater Manchester, but Greater Manchester still performs better than all of the other cities in the north and Midlands. Taking out benefits, Manchester does even better. Due to devolution, Scottish cities cannot be compared on this metric.

Adding in an adjustment for taxation and comparing back to 2010 shows a similar story, with Greater Manchester performing well but southern cities outperforming it.

This data gives greater confidence that Greater Manchester has been a strongly performing economy in recent decades, albeit not as strong as Edinburgh or Bristol. By some metrics, Oxford and Cambridge outperform Greater Manchester and the region containing drawing essentially level by one metric. However, there can be reasonably high confidence that Greater Manchester is the best-performing city region in the north and Midlands of England, and on some metrics it is even outperforming the regions containing Oxford and Cambridge.

Greater Manchester’s growth is in the city centre. Economics and history show this is the right strategy.

It is possible to see where Greater Manchester’s growth is happening. On a clear day, it can even be seen from 33 miles away in Liverpool with a decent phone camera.

It is also clear in the data. As recently as 2005 there was just one building over 100 metres tall in Greater Manchester and only 4 in 2017. There will soon be 30.

It shows up in the economic data too. The City of Manchester’s household disposable income has grown far faster than other parts of Greater Manchester.

Housing delivery tells the same story. Greater Manchester as a whole is, like all English city regions, far short of its housing targets.

The City of Manchester, though, is building a huge amount. All of the other major city cores have a substantial amount of work to do to meet their housing targets. The City of Manchester does not.

Greater Manchester’s leaders have made a conscious decision to build in the centre of the region. This becomes even more apparent when looking more precisely at where housing has been built within Greater Manchester. The City of Manchester is an odd shape, long and thin through the centre and south of the Greater Manchester region. The city centre is roughly where the red circle is.

Forty-five per cent of the City of Manchester’s population increase since 2001 has occurred within a 15-minute walk of the city centre. Including parts of Salford and Trafford within a 15-minute walk of the city centre, the population increased by over 120,000 between 2001 and 2023. This accounts for 23% of Greater Manchester’s population increase occurring on just 2% of its land mass.

Greater Manchester’s leaders are clearly encouraging building in the city centre. This is occasionally criticised for prioritising the City of Manchester over the rest of Greater Manchester and leaving other parts of the region behind. This criticism misunderstands both recent Greater Manchester history and recent global economic history.

On local history, as recently as 2015 the City of Manchester had the lowest household incomes of any of the Greater Manchester boroughs. It used to be far behind the other nine. It is still only eighth out of ten, ahead of only Oldham and Rochdale. People in Stockport have household disposable incomes 31% higher per head than people in the City of Manchester, and in Trafford the figure is over 50% higher. Focusing growth on one of the poorest parts of the conurbation can hardly be called leaving everywhere else behind.

This criticism often highlights the fact that the City of Manchester’s GDP is higher than that of the surrounding boroughs. But that fails to take into account the fact that many people across Greater Manchester commute into the centre for work. Salford, a borough that contains parts of the city centre also has higher GDP than household income, as does Trafford which is adjacent to the City Centre and contains a very large industrial estate.

From Josh Bailey on Twitter

Those who argue that towns like Wigan and Oldham have done less well than central Manchester have something of a point. They have not grown as fast as the city centre. But what they often do not have is a credible alternative growth model. Economic growth is not something politicians can simply assign to different parts of a region or country. It needs a mechanism. The plan Greater Manchester has followed, under Andy Burnham’s leadership and long before, has worked.

It is also a plan that goes with the flow of economic development in the developed world since the 1990s. Rich country economies have shifted away from a world in which the richest places were driven mainly by large amounts of physical capital: factories, machinery, and heavy infrastructure. Increasingly, growth has come from ideas, software, design, finance, professional services, management know-how, and other intangible assets.

These intangible assets behave differently from physical ones and need different things to succeed. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Britain’s great cities, including London, emptied out, with the cutting edge of the economy moving to small-town and out-of-town industrial and engineering parks. In recent the decades the cutting edge of the economy has been moving back to city centres, especially in London, Edinburgh, Bristol and the centre of Greater Manchester.

This is because intangible assets are often scalable, spill over between firms, and become more valuable when combined with other ideas and skills. That makes proximity between firms and between people much more important. A factory can often be placed on cheap land outside town and still work perfectly well. A cluster of software engineers, investors, lawyers, designers, founders, accountants, researchers, and clients works best when people can meet, change jobs, copy ideas, form firms, and learn from each other quickly.

Better roads and better public transport can help by making a wider labour market function more like one place. But the simplest and most powerful way to achieve this is still to allow lots of people to live and work close together. This is why the centres of big cities have made a comeback across the developed world. Greater Manchester’s strategy of building lots of homes in and around the centre of the conurbation is not a weird fixation of its leaders. It is going with the grain of the global economy. And it has worked.

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.

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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.