Now, as is often the case, the government is keen to announce policies that don’t actually require any money. The prime minister announced one such policy in his conference speech - allowing councils to build new council houses on unused public land.

Instinctively it seems like a good policy. We don’t like the idea of councils wasting land, and if you want to increase council housing stock specifically, it does cut down on the expensive bit of buying people out of properties or land that currently has to happen. It’s also hard for critics to instantly decry because unlike empty homes, there aren’t readily available figures for how many homes this could actually result in.

So let’s try to figure it out.

Firstly, we need to know exactly how much land councils currently have. Councils are major landowners in the UK, owning 526,000 hectares of land in England alone. However, most of this land is firmly in use. Council housing, schools, offices, highways, allotments and parkland all take up space.

The main way to figure out what any given council actually owns and therefore what could conceivably count as unused public land is through council asset registers. Since 2015, councils are all supposed to publish this asset register, though the level of detail varies wildly, making national comparisons tricky. So let’s take one council in particular as a case study to figure out how much unused public land there actually is.

Manchester city council seems like as good a council as any to check. Not only because it is the home of our new Prime Minister but also because the city council hasn’t been through many significant boundary changes and so we can compare the asset register over time.

Going through the City Council’s asset register and matching it to land registry boundaries we can see that Manchester City Council currently owns around 3,900 hectares (ha) of land - or around a third of the city in total. This also does not include council housing - which is all redacted on the register. Cross referencing sites that were apparently unused, with the Land Registry resulted in around 166 sites. Clicking around those sites on Google Street View shows a bunch of sites that look like this.

Most people wouldn’t mourn these sites if they turned into new housing.

The problem is, that there’s just not that many of these sites, and none of them are especially large. If you put these 166 sites on a map it looks something like this.

After checking some of the larger sites and downgrading them because the boundaries were obviously parks and only a tiny amount of the site could really be considered unused, the total shaded area is just 117 hectares, just 3.4% of the council land that Manchester city council publicly owns, and likely far less when council housing is included. To put that into perspective, look at the same map but this time with all the unredacted council land currently in use.

So how many homes could Manchester actually build?

Assuming that any site under 0.25 hectares probably won’t work for development and that only 70% of each of the remaining sites will work for development due to access issues, flooding or contamination and that only 80% of the remaining sites will become housing rather than access roads and open space that leaves us with 63 hectares to actually build on.

Assuming then that the densities of all the inner city sites is 100 homes per hectare (for reference that looks like an obviously urban development, which still has some mid-rise buildings and green space.)

This (above) is from a helpful CPRE report that has pictures of different densities per hectares and that all the suburban areas are more like 45 homes per hectare - similar to Poundbury phase 1 and 2, then you are left with 4,500 new homes, mostly in the inner city. This is a pretty good number - similar to Manchester’s greatest ever year of housebuilding. But this is a one time fix. Councils don’t tend to pick up much unpurposed land year on year and there are over 20,000 households on the Council housing waiting list in Manchester. Building all of those homes could cover just under a quarter of the council housing waiting list.

If Burnham actually wants the biggest council housebuilding programme since the war and a boom in housebuilding more generally then he will need to go beyond the free and easy policy fixes and seriously reform the planning system to enable developers to build more easily on all land, rather than just the scraps.

1. This is unlikely to make a large difference to wholesale gas prices in the UK. Gas prices are set on the global market and a single gas field, Jackdaw, will not produce enough to move the dial. In fact, Jackdaw at peak will increase total domestic gas production by just 6%.

2. Some of the pessimism on bill impacts is overblown. Gas isn’t oil. It is internationally tradable, but gas supplied via pipelines is typically far cheaper than gas supplied via LNG terminals. Gas prices are set at the margin and cheaper gas displaces the most expensive gas from the merit order.

3. There are resilience benefits too. Gas imports can be disrupted. Bad weather or military action could mean that tankers destined for Britain are diverted or delayed. On a cold winter’s day, people are unlikely to turn their boilers down or meaningfully cut their power use. In such a scenario, Britain will be forced to bid at far higher than normal prices to get enough LNG in. The more domestic gas production there is, the less fiercely we need to bid for LNG. This will also lower bills at the margin.

4. The Net Zero case for restricting domestic fossil fuel extraction never made much sense. The only way blocking domestic fossil fuel production is likely to reduce emissions is by raising wholesale prices, which in turn incentives households and businesses to cut back. To the extent that oil and gas prices are set on the global market, domestic restrictions will have a negligible effect. To the extent that domestic fossil fuel production restrictions increase prices, domestic restrictions reduce emissions at an extremely high cost relative to other approaches.

5. There are high costs to restricting domestic fossil fuel production. Taxes on North Sea Oil and Gas generate £4.4bn each year. And while the North Sea is a declining basin, it still employs over 100,000 people. Blocking projects like Jackdaw is likely to accelerate the loss of jobs in the North Sea. This isn’t just bad from a human point of view – there are unlikely to be similarly high-paying domestic jobs available for individuals affected – it also makes the Net Zero transition harder. Efforts are underway to make it easier for workers to switch to offshore renewable projects, however at the current pace of job loss many skills will be lost in the interim.

6. North Sea tax revenues are a source of energy security. They act as an automatic stabiliser. When energy prices spike, North Sea assets generate more revenue for the Exchequer which can then be spent on protecting the most vulnerable billpayers.

7. As are North Sea exports. When gas prices increase, Britain has to pay more to import the same amount of gas. All things equal, a rise in imports increases the supply of pounds internationally and therefore lowers the pound’s value. As a result, our remaining pounds buy less, contributing to wider inflationary pressures. The more gas and oil we export (or the more imports we displace) the more the pound in your pocket keeps its value.

8. There are negative geopolitical consequences to reduced British gas supply. At the margin, British gas displaces more expensive foreign gas. Regrettably, democracies like Norway and the US are not the only suppliers of gas. Higher gas prices create a windfall for belligerent dictators like Vladimir Putin. Likewise, the price impacts of high diesel prices has allowed Putin to persuade the US to lift some sanctions.

9. British gas extraction has relatively low emissions. Not all gas wells are equal, some meet far higher standards of emission control. Some wells flare or leak methane at far greater levels. Regulations in Britain are among the world’s toughest. Jackdaw will emit roughly a tenth of imported LNG. It is plausible that Jackdaw lowers overall emissions, even if gas prices fall to the extent that more gas overall is burnt.

10. If the aim is to discourage gas use, then carbon taxes are a better alternative. Unlike domestic restrictions, carbon taxes reduce the incentive to use oil and gas without generating large windfalls for fossil-fuel supplying dictatorships. They also generate revenues that can be used to shield poorer households from the cost of expensive energy. Some greens rule out carbon taxes on the grounds they’re politically toxic, yet what’s really politically toxic is high fossil-fuel costs which is the only way in which domestic fossil-fuel restrictions ‘work’.

11. If we are unwilling to make gas more expensive via taxes, then our best bet to cut emissions is making the alternatives cheaper. Green campaigners should focus less on blocking domestic fossil fuel extraction and more on removing the barriers to building new sources of clean power. I’d suggest JustStopOil rebrand to JustImplementFingleton, but I suspect they’d be a net-negative for the cause.

12. Almost all of these arguments apply to oil fields like Rosebank and future exploration. There is a strange ‘centrist’ position of pro-Jackdaw (gas) and anti-Rosebank (oil). It does not add up. While Rosebank is unlikely to generate direct savings for British consumers, it will generate jobs, tax revenue, and improve our balance of payments.

Britain is building a grid for a world where electricity demand, pardon the pun, surges. The problem is every forecast of rising electricity use has turned out to be wrong. High electricity prices have created a massive incentive to cut back. Consumers have switched to energy efficient appliances, while heavy industry is in painful decline. Demand for energy-saving electric technologies such as heat pumps and EVs has been weaker than hoped for. Since 2000, electricity use has fallen by 16%. When you control for population growth, it is even more stark. Since 2000, Britain had the largest per-capita drop in electricity consumption of any OECD nation.

In many markets, a fall in demand leads to lower prices, but electricity markets do not work like other markets, at least not in the short-term. Every electricity bill is a bundle of variable and fixed costs. Less demand may mean using less gas (and in turn, not having to buy from the most expensive sources), but fixed costs like the grid remain the same. The overall bill may fall, but the price per watt increases. As Britain moves away from fossil fuels and switches to a mostly renewable system, fixed costs will make up a bigger and bigger share of the bill.

Think of the electricity market like a fast food restaurant. The owner has paid rent on a new premises and bought a state-of-the-art deep-fat fryer. Potatoes are cheap, but the cost of a portion of chips reflects not just the price of labour and raw ingredients, but also the need to cover the upfront cost of the premises and equipment. The more customers buying fries the more diluted the upfront costs become. Busy restaurants can sometimes afford to charge less.

A relatively small fall in consumption can have big implications for cost. One study from Boston Consulting Group estimated that the 11% fall in electricity demand since 2015 is responsible for almost two-fifths of the increase in system costs. System costs are now so high that – assuming demand stays the same – bills are forecast to slightly increase in 2030 even if the wholesale price of electricity collapses.

This isn’t a new insight for markets like energy. In fact, Britain’s grid was built under it. As energy historian Arthur Downing notes, the Central Electricity Board (CEB) had a clear plan from day one: “drive down prices, drive up consumption, spread the fixed costs and build infrastructure to drive down prices.” In other words, the opposite of current policy. The CEB and its post-war successor, the Central Electricity Generating Board, were, in Downing’s words, ‘load-hungry utilities’. And the hunt for ‘load’, or demand spread evenly across the day/year, delivered large benefits for consumers. Between the 50s and 70s, electricity demand grew fourfold while prices fell by more than a fifth in real terms.

Gas, Downing notes, took an even more extreme approach actively bundling gas and gas equipment.

“In the 1890s gas utilities realised they could never compete with electricity for lighting in upper- and middle-class homes, and so went after other types of load. The industry worked with equipment manufacturers to sell gas-fired cookers and heaters to affluent homes. At the other end of the market, gas utilities focused on selling working-class households a package of Welsbach gas-mantle lights and a prepayment meter. Gas utilities also pioneered financing models in which equipment, connection and commodity costs were bundled into a single unit rate.”

Rediscovering this insight is arguably more important now than ever before as we try to shift to clean homegrown power. System costs are growing.

Wind and solar are, in many ways, fantastic technologies, but integrating them onto the grid is expensive. Most of our wind resource, particularly offshore wind, is in Scotland and the North while most demand is in the South East. As it stands, Britain’s grid isn’t up to the task of moving power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed. Renewables also require a degree of overbuilding to meet demand when it isn’t very sunny or windy. The end result is that wind farms are increasingly being paid to switch off (while gas plants are being paid to fire up at extremely short notice). While nuclear has its own problems: it struggles to compete with clean renewables when it’s windy and sunny, and dirty gas when it isn’t. The big upfront costs of nuclear construction are shifted onto billpayers as a fixed cost as a result.

How data centres can help dilute system costs

In the past, Britain’s grid builders cut costs by growing a diversity of demand. While adding to peak demand necessitates greater build out, demand outside of peak times effectively dilutes fixed costs. One modern-day equivalent is air conditioning. AC is useful when it is hot and sunny, or put differently, when there’s little demand for heating and plenty of solar generation. That’s one of the reasons why Britain Remade (and others) have argued that rules restricting AC uptake should be removed.

Another way to dilute system costs is to add consistent reliable demand to the grid. Data centres do this better than any other plausible source of new power demand. They consume electricity at a relatively consistent rate. Unlike factories that operate in shifts, demand doesn’t dip at weekends or overnight.

Most industrial demand benefits from targeted support. Heavy industry typically qualifies for the British Industry Supercharger relief, which exempts them from many of the policy costs on an energy bill. This relief is itself funded by higher charges on every other bill. There’s a strong case for this approach – after all, we want to avoid losing even more heavy power customers. Yet the Supercharge relief doesn’t apply to data centres. In other words, when data centres pay for power, they’re covering a fair greater share of fixed system costs than other big customers.

What’s the prize? Energy analyst Robert Boswall estimates that hitting the 6GW UK Compute Roadmap target would save consumers around £2bn each year.

Data centres can do even more

An annual saving of £2bn is welcome, but at just £69 per household it won’t change the fundamental fact that Britain’s electricity bills are among the developed world’s highest. Dilution, however, isn’t the only (or the biggest) opportunity for data centres to cut bills for the rest of us.

Britain’s energy intensive businesses are struggling due to high prices. Politicians may speak about reindustrialisation, but the painful reality is that Britain is deindustrialising at an unprecedented rate. Since 2021, Britain has lost a third of its energy-intensive businesses. Cement, chemicals, and ceramics have all seen dramatic declines. Household names like Denby have been forced into administration.

High power prices matter far less for data centres. This isn’t because energy isn’t a large chunk of the cost of a data centre – it is. Epoch AI estimates that energy represents 7% of the total cost of building and operating a 1GW data centre. Their figure is based on the US, where electricity is far cheaper. At UK prices, electricity rises to about a fifth of the all-in cost. Data centres aren’t quite as electricity-hungry as aluminium smelting (30–40% of costs) or chlorine production (around half of costs), but that still puts them on a par with electric arc furnace steelmaking .

Where data centres differ from other energy-intensive businesses is in the value they gain from each megawatt hour. Most of that value is generated from highly-sophisticated chips and the ideas of super-smart engineers.

AI inference is extremely useful and businesses are willing to pay a lot for it. Anthropic has generated £25Bn in revenue so far this year. SemiAnalysis, an AI research firm, estimates that API inference can generate around $100bn per 1GW data centre. Even at the UK’s ultra-high electricity costs, power is just 3% of revenue.

There’s another way of thinking about it. At $100bn per GW per year, OpenAI could buy Hinkley Point C, which when finished will be the most expensive nuclear power station in history, at full price and it would take just 68 days to pay it off.

The problem for firms like Anthropic and OpenAI isn’t high power prices – though they don’t help – it is the massive waits for access to the grid. Microsoft recently pulled out of plans to build a £2bn data centre, the UK’s largest, in Essex after learning its grid connection has been delayed to the 2030s. Speed is everything.

Britain’s grid operates on a first-come, first-served basis. There are few fees attached to entering and progressing through the grid queue. When a business gets to the front, they only have to pay a fraction of the full costs of connection – while things like the cost of upstream reinforcement go onto household bills. Access to the grid is extremely valuable – projects cannot proceed without it – but businesses are charged only a tiny fraction of what it is worth.

Businesses respond to incentives. When valuable resources are under-priced, demand swiftly outstrips supply. The end result is access to the grid is allocated on the basis of willingness to queue, not willingness to pay. Waits for grid connections can be upwards of 10 years. Many applications in the grid queue are speculative. They are not serious projects, but rather a safe bet that a place near the front will be valuable to someone else. A data centre that could generate billions in revenue ends up stuck waiting behind applications for projects that may never be built.

The Government’s solution is to police the queue better. And move to a system of first-ready, first-served. It’s what I call the ‘soup nazi’ solution. In one episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, there’s an extremely popular soup restaurant. Queues are long but move fast because customers who get to the front without deciding their order are told “no soup for you” and made to leave.

This is an improvement on the status quo, but not much. Something extremely valuable is still given away for next-to-nothing. There is no real priortisation based on who values a fast connection the most. A better approach would let the most valuable projects pay to jump the queue. In essence, AI data centres should be able to buy a Thorpe Park style fast-pass.

To connect the grid queue will be expensive. It will require bigger substations, transformers, and new high voltage lines. That’s currently paid by network charges that go on every single household bill, even though some benefit from it far more than others.

A better approach would copy the approach Britain has taken to the electromagnetic spectrum. In the year 2000, Britain ditched its historic approach of allocating the electromagnetic spectrum by ‘beauty contests’ (bureaucrats reviewing applications) and instead decided to auction off the 3G bands to whoever would pay the most. It raised £22.5bn (equivalent to 2.5% of GDP).

Auctioning off grid connections could be just as lucrative. The option to skip the queue by just a few years would be extremely valuable to some firms. Boswall, who advocates this approach, estimates that developers would willingly pay £1.3m per MW per year of accelerated access. If that is the case, then accelerating 3GW by 3 years would be worth £12bn. This is a conservative estimate: Boswall’s figures come from established operators like Vantage, and frontier AI firms racing for compute would likely pay more.

There is currently 50GW of data centre capacity within the grid queue. Money raised from auctions could go to taking some network charges off household bills. This wouldn’t just save money, it would also make it much more attractive for consumers to switch to green electrotech like heat pumps and EVs.

Bring your own power

There is another way to use the high value data centre developers place on access to the grid to benefit us all: get them to build their own power.

Instead of waiting for grid connections, developers could build on-site (or nearby) generation then connect it directly. In the short term, gas is likely to be the best option. In the US, data centres have placed orders for 75GW of behind-the-meter generation capacity. For context, that’s more than double Britain’s entire gas fleet. About a quarter of the new generation in the US is on-site behind-the-meter power for data centres. The US has similar, though not as extreme, grid connection problems.

The big challenge is making all that power clean. Most of the power added behind-the-meter is gas. Without access to the grid, there is a premium on reliability. Gas meets that requirement. Nuclear does too, but takes far longer to build. Some tech companies (including Microsoft) are paying to restart and extend the operating life of existing nuclear plants. Renewables are more challenging. Solar and wind may be quick to build, but they are relatively land-hungry and have low load-factors (they only run when it’s sunny or windy). Without access to the grid for stability, they are unlikely to be a solution behind-the-meter. There is a risk that in the short-term meeting the demand for data centres raises emissions.

With the right policies, however, data centres could still be useful in the rollout of clean power. One option would be to allow data centres to connect to the grid flexibly. In other words, they could get a grid connection ahead of schedule provided they agree to switch off (or use their own power) near peak times. This matters because much of the delay in getting a grid connection is less about day-to-day use, but dealing with extreme peaks. One study looking at the US’s largest regional grid, PJM, found that it was possible to add 13GW of new load without major new grid capacity upgrades provided that the new load is flexible for an extremely small (0.25%) share of its uptime. In other words, when demand is close to peak they must be ready to switch off. Flexible connections do exist, but they tend to be set up for generators and batteries. They also typically require about ten to twenty times more curtailment than the US study.

Britain may be moving towards a ‘clean’ grid, but gas will play an important role for a long time. Our aging gas fleet will need to be replaced at some point. One option would be to allow data centres to use gas as a bridge to clean power. In five to ten years, data centres could transition to on-site small modular nuclear reactors or use power-purchase agreements to buy the same equivalent power from renewables. In the US, there are already deals being struck between tech companies like Google and Amazon and SMR-builders like X-Energy and Kairos.

Finding the right model for this will be challenging, but data-centres need power and are willing to pay a lot for it. We can get a lot built if we let them.

The problem is there is a growing backlash against data centres. The Green Party have called for a moratorium on new data centres. Some MPs on Labour’s left have signed an Early Day Motion calling for the same. They think it is a votewinner and they’re inspired by what’s happening over the pond. In the States, there is a large backlash against the construction of AI data centres. Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, two politicians who have been influential to Zack Polanski’s brand of eco-socialism, have put forward legislation for a national moratorium on AI data centres. It isn’t just the left at it either, Republican congressional candidates are increasingly joining the calls for a halt to AI data centre construction. Polls suggest it is a vote winner.

More than anything else, the Green Party’s push for a data centre moratorium is about water.

It makes sense. When they launched their campaign, 70% of England was in drought and thousands of households were left without water. Whatever the contribution of data centres, there clearly is a problem, particularly as our summers get hotter. Failing to build a single large reservoir in the last 30 years, in retrospect, not a great idea.

The Greens refer to the ‘fact’ that a hyper-scale data centre can use 1.5 million liters of water per day, the same as 10,000 households. Ironically, they source this claim in their PR to an article with the headline “How are Data Centres Shifting to Zero-Water Cooling Tech?” In another PR, they link to a document from Global Action Plan (GAP hereafter), which makes a similar claim this time sourcing the claim to an article titled – and I’m not making this up – ‘Overestimating AI’s water footprint’. This is weird for two reasons. First, there is no direct claim that large scale data centres use 1.5 million litres per day. Second, the author David Mytton explicitly warns against environmentalists “adopt[ing] the highest possible value”. He points out that a Meta data centre is six times more water efficient than the average US data centre (see chart below). And in Europe, Microsoft’s data centres are more efficient still (0.1 L/kWh).


Part of the problem is not all data centres are cooled in the same way. There are essentially three ways to cool a data centre. There is evaporative cooling, where warm water is exposed to the air in a cooling tower. Some evaporates, while the rest is recirculated. This is the most water-hungry method. Closed-loop cooling reuses the same water/coolant again and again to carry heat away from the servers. This method can use very little new water. And then there’s air-cooling, which uses fans and cool air to keep temperatures low. This can be more energy intensive than other methods, but uses essentially no water. Though it may not be as cool as it once was, Britain’s cool climate is well-suited to air cooling. Reporting on data centre water usage is patchy, but a survey from TechUK found more than half used waterless cooling methods. This is a self-selecting sample, but it still highlights that it is a mistake to assume all data centres use the most water-hungry methods.

It is worth digging deeper into the GAP paper. Polanski has said that his work on data centres was “largely” informed by conversations with Global Action Plan; while a Green Party press release was built around GAP’s FOI work, quoted its campaign manager and cited both of its data-centre reports.

This matters because the ‘1.5 million litres per day’ stat is far from the only, or biggest, issue with the paper.

“The East of England could face water shortages of around a third of the region’s water usage by 2050 - just one hyperscale data centre would be responsible for 8% of this.”

According to the paper, a single data centre proposed in a Cambridgeshire village will be responsible for 8% of the East of England’s 800 million litre shortfall in 2050. That’s a lot, or at least it would be, if they got their maths right.

“A hyperscale data centre has been planned in the Cambridgeshire village of Sutton-in-the-Isle, which will be scaled up to 330MW at full build-out. Based on capacity and the estimated water usage of other hyperscale data centres, an estimate for the water usage of this site could be up to 250 million litres annually.

“The East of England faces projected water shortages of 800 million litres per day by 2050, around a third of the region’s water usage. Just one hyperscale data centre at full capacity would be responsible for approximately 8% of this – equivalent to almost 5,000 households, more than the population of the three villages it is closest to combined.”

Did you spot the problem? 250 million litres a year is only 0.685 million litres a day. That’s not 8% of 800 million, it is 0.086%. The GAP paper is out by a factor of almost 100.

“Combined industrial, residential and digital infrastructure demand could produce a public water supply shortfall of around five billion litres per day by 2055 - more than one-third of current daily usage.”

This isn’t as egregious as the prior error, but in many ways, it is the most important. It implies that data centres are a big driver of coming water shortages, but that just isn’t the case. At the moment, data centres are responsible for just 0.2% of non-household water use. Of course, there are plans to build a lot more. The Government’s Compute Roadmap estimates that Britain will need 6GW of AI-capable data-centre capacity by 2030. Let’s assume these data centres are run constantly at full capacity. Let’s also assume they use the most water-intensive cooling methods and every kilowatt hour uses 1.5 litres on site. This implies that the extra 4GW worth of data centres on the grid would use 144 million litres per day, or 2.9% of the looming 5 billion litre shortfall.

Even if we make the most water-hungry assumptions, new data centres are still dwarfed by other factors. The biggest driver of the water shortfall (2.6 billion litres per day) are legal requirements to reduce the amount of water companies take out rivers, streams and groundwater in order to protect the environment. Population growth, the need for greater drought resilience, and the impact of climate change are responsible for the other 2 billion or so liters shortfall.

Use more realistic assumptions about water use and data centres become nothing more than a rounding error. Microsoft’s global fleet uses 0.27 litres of water per kilowatt hour. They are more water-efficient still in Europe where the average is just 0.03 litres per kilowatt. If we assume that data centres are merely as hungry as the average Microsoft data centre globally, then meeting the 2030 6GW target would use an extra 26 million litres per day, or about half a percent of the 5 billion litre shortfall.

And that assumes existing performance isn’t improved upon. In reality, as concerns about water grow (and data centres demand is strongest in the most water-stressed regions) more and more data centres will be built to use little-to-no water on site. Whether or not we build data centres will have essentially no impact on England’s 5 billion litre per day shortfall. Whether or not we build reservoirs will.

“Global AI-related water withdrawals could reach 4.2–6.6 billion m³ per year by 2027. This is higher than the household usage of the whole of the UK.”

This isn’t untrue per se, but it is deeply misleading. The problem is GAP conflates two separate terms that, in fact, have very different meanings. Most of AI’s global water withdrawals will be offsite. Data centres are energy-intensive. Most forms of power generation globally require cooling systems that withdraw lots of water, but that’s not the same as use (or consumption).

Think of a nuclear power station like Hinkley Point C. It is cooled using water from the Severn Estuary. There’s a big pipe where water comes in from the Severn, cools the steam, and then is returned to the Severn. Hinkley Point C will withdraw up to 11.6 billion litres of seawater a day for cooling — an enormous number — but almost all of that water is then returned to the estuary. So Hinkley has very high withdrawals, but very low consumption: the water is effectively on loan.

This is the case with data centres too. For example, one Finnish data centre is cooled by pumping seawater from the Gulf of Finland through heat exchangers, before then returning it to the sea after mixing it with colder incoming water. Most of that water (like 99%) is returned to the sea, only a small fraction evaporates.

The fair comparison is global AI water use (consumption) and British household water use. It presents a completely different picture. Last year, British households used around 3.6 trillion litres of water, AI data centres by contrast are estimated to use between 380 and 600 billion litres of water annually by 2027.

“The UK’s largest proposed data centre could consume over 50 times the volume of water estimated by the operator when electricity generation is properly accounted for.”

There is a further complication. Most of the discussion so far has focused on data centres on-site water use, but this isn’t the only way data centres use water.

Even air-cooled data centres, which use little-to-no water onsite for cooling, still make demands on water resources indirectly. This is because data centres require power and generating power often, but not always, involves water.

Most, but not all, ways to generate electricity involve producing heat to create steam in order to spin a turbine. To keep the process going that steam needs to be cooled back into water. Some generators use air-cooling, but most use water in some way.

GAP estimates that for every litre used on site for cooling, three litres, on average, are used offsite for power generation. In some cases, the ratio can be far more extreme. Particularly, when AI data centres use air-cooling or one of the other more water-efficient methods of cooling. In one case, they identified a project with a 50 times ratio, though I’ve not been able to reproduce this from publicly available data.

I’m sceptical that we should be as worried about water consumption offsite as we are about consumption onsite.

First, different sources of power make different demands on water. Gas tends to make the biggest demands on water. Nuclear, at least when it is cooled like Hinkley and Sizewell C, withdraws a lot of water but returns almost all of it. Wind and solar use very little at all. Most estimates of offsite water usage typically assume Britain will keep its current energy mix, but that’s unlikely. Over the last decade or so, Britain’s grid has moved away from fossil fuel generation towards renewables. Under the Government’s Clean Power policy, just 5% of Britain’s electricity is expected to come from water-hungry gas by 2030.

Second, while we tend to speak of England’s 5 billion litre national shortfall, what we should really care about is local impacts. In parts of England, most notably Kent, households are already experiencing temporary losses of water. In places like Cambridge and London, where many hyperscalers plan to build, water (or a lack of it) is already acting as a constraint on development. However, power is often generated far from where it is used. This, to be clear, is a problem, but not for water supply. England may struggle to transport water from the wettest parts to the driest parts of the country, but transporting power is much easier.

The wrong focus

It is widely assumed that using AI is an extremely water-intensive activity. It isn’t. People often fail to grasp just how efficient data centres are. A 100MW single data centre can handle 2,000,000 AI prompts at once. Even if a data centre uses water-hungry evaporative cooling, each individual prompt uses less than a ml of water. Almost any other activity uses far more water. Many everyday activities use far more. Making a cup of tea, including its off-site water footprint, uses roughly 7,000 prompts’ worth of water. Eat a beef burger and that rises to around 140,000 prompts’ worth. The challenge with data centres isn’t that AI is a particularly water-hungry activity, but that data centres concentrate a massive amount of activity in a single location. Sometimes that can create problems for water supply, though no more than the challenges created by any major industrial activity. The solution, however, isn’t to pass up investments that generate jobs and tax revenue (not to mention useful services for businesses and households), it is to build to meet demand.

The Thames Valley hosts more data centres than anywhere else in Britain. It is also in need of water. In 2006, Thames Water proposed building a £1bn reservoir in Abingdon to supply an extra 350 million litres every day. The project faced intense opposition and has undergone multiple redesigns as a result. It is now pencilled to be built in nearby White Horse and will only supply 270 million litres per day. The price tag has gone up too from £1bn to over £5.7bn. In November, Thames Water will submit their planning application for permission to build it. If it faces no further hurdles, construction might start in 2029. 37 years after Britain last completed a reservoir.

The driver of Britain’s water shortages isn’t data centres, it is a 30 year failure to build the reservoirs we need to meet demand.

Still voters should expect a better standard from political parties seeking to, at some point, run the country. Particularly when said political parties have made data centres a key campaigning issue. Whatever that standard ought to be, the Green Party’s campaign to (temporarily) ban data centre construction falls far below it.

Has the Government decided data centres are ‘critical infrastructure’ and what does that mean anyway?

In a viral video, Green Party leader Zack Polanski PPC, a man who places more demands on data centres than most, claims that the Government has classified data centres as ‘critical infrastructure’, which gives them priority access to water over households, public services, and food production in droughts.

This simply isn’t true. While data centres were classed as ‘Critical National Infrastructure’ (CNI hereafter), it is just not the case that in an emergency, whether that’s a power outage or drought, the data centre that serves you TikToks and creepy AI-generated menus will go to the front of the queue for electricity and water.

The Green Party describes CNI as a ‘blanket designation’, but this is extremely misleading. CNI is a special category for infrastructure where disruption, whether man-made or natural, could threaten national security or essential services. Few would dispute that energy infrastructure fits that description, but this does not mean a few solar panels on the roof of an Amazon warehouse are treated the same as Sizewell B nuclear power station, which powers roughly 2.5 million homes.

Some data centres quite clearly fit that description too. If a data centre housing NHS patient data went down, the impact could be catastrophic. This isn’t a hypothetical. When a ransomware attack meant hospitals in the South East lost access to patient data, thousands of appointments were cancelled and patients were forced to wait longer for vital blood tests. One person is believed to have died due to not receiving their blood test results in time.

Only data centres that are vital to the running of essential services (e.g. the NHS) can be prioritised in the event the National Energy Systems Operator uses rolling blackouts to deal with a particularly bad supply crunch. In practice, few, if any, data centres would get priority access for the simple reason that almost all data centres have on-site backups such as diesel generators or batteries. And if your data centre is critical to running of the NHS, banking system, or air-traffic control, it would be strange not to have a backup.

Get your terms right

At best, Polanski is conflating two similar sounding things into a single term ‘critical infrastructure’. There’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), which is about resilience and protecting the things we all rely on (even if we don’t realise quite how much), and Critical National Priority (or CNP), which is a planning designation. CNP does not apply to data centres, though the Government is considering changing that. At the moment, it applies to low-carbon energy sources. It does not mean every wind, solar, or nuclear project will be automatically approved. Rather, it means the need for new clean power will be given much stronger weight in planning decisions.

And to add to the confusion, Polanski appears to be conflating CNI and CNP with another reform. As of 2026, some data centres can now opt into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime. This is a planning regime for big nationally-important projects like airports, major roads, and big power stations (e.g. a solar farm capable of powering around 350,000 homes at full capacity). The idea for the NSIP system is to speed up decision making on applications that are extremely complex (one solar farm’s planning application was a million words long) and controversial (where local and national interest) come into conflict. The system’s record for actually getting stuff built is mixed – there is clear evidence that solar and wind developers were shrinking their projects down to sneak under the previous 50MW threshold because the added paperwork burden of the NSIP process doesn’t appeal to them.

There is no similar fixed threshold for data centres, rather when certain promoters think the NSIP route is more appropriate for their project, they can ask the Secretary of State to make a special direction. If the Secretary of State thinks that’s inappropriate, they can refuse. And locals still get to have their say in the NSIP process, it is just that the final decision sits with the Secretary of State.

This might seem pedantic, but it matters. Polanski’s video paints a picture that is completely inaccurate. There is no prospect that in a crisis water and power meant for households will be diverted to AI data centres. This is straightforward scaremongering.

–

This isn’t the only problem with the Green Party’s push to block data centre construction. Keep an eye out for my next post where I’ll look at recent claims that data centres’ cooling needs will drink England dry.

For the last three years, Hackney’s missed its housing target by almost half. And to be fair, Hackney is far from the worst London borough for housebuilding.

But Hackney is under new leadership. The Greens were elected on a pledge to “make building new council homes a core priority, using council-owned land and every available delivery route to increase supply of safe homes residents can actually afford.” So will the East London borough’s new Green administration do anything to change this? The initial signs aren’t promising.

Britain Remade’s past trips to planning hearings in Hackney have been educational, if not especially encouraging. So when Gareth Rowswell, a Britain Remade supporter and Hackney resident, recently attended a planning committee meeting in the borough, we were keen to hear what he made of it. His experience did little to give us confidence that Hackney’s housing shortage would be addressed anytime soon.

After spending just over half an hour on plans to erect a community sauna at The Castle Climbing Centre in Stoke Newington (they approved it), the committee moved on to what turned out to be a more contentious issue.

Lovell House is a 1960s council-owned tower block. A while back, one of its one-bedroom ground-floor flats was converted into a meeting space for the residents’ association. Hackney hasn’t been affordable for a while, but since the conversion the borough’s housing shortage has worsened. Monthly rents on a one-bed average just under two-thousand pounds and there’s currently a three-year minimum wait for a one bedroom council flat. Understandably, Hackney’s council wants to convert the meeting space back into a flat. Hackney’s planning officers are in favour. There’s just one problem: Hackney’s councillors.

x=

You might think that few things could be more straightforward than returning a one-bedroom flat to its original use (in a wholly residential block). You would be wrong. In Hackney, the loss of ‘social community infrastructure’ (i.e. this meeting room) can only be permitted in special circumstances.

Either the existing space is replaced with an equal (or better) space, or the existing community space is deemed to be redundant. To prove the latter, the applicant must jump through a number of hoops, including spending a year marketing the space for community use through a commercial landlord to show it was surplus to requirements. Hackney understandably decided to use the former route.

Hackney’s plan was to move the resident’s meetings to a space already used for other residents’ associations meetings just a four minute walk away.

So far, so good, but Hackney’s councillors were unconvinced. For the next hour and a half of the committee meeting, they raised a number of objections. These included that the council’s room booking system is ‘quite difficult to use’ and that the space is used for other tenant groups for whom there wasn’t an impact assessment.

In fact, the 128 page application covered both issues in detail, finding that there was sufficient capacity at the alternate meeting space and that the booking system in fact worked fine.

So were the councillors satisfied? In short, no. At first, they narrowly voted against the application (4 for, 5 against). However, they did offer a lifeline, ultimately deferring the decision until the applicant (Hackney Council) provides evidence on similar conversions, whether or not a four minute walk is a reasonable distance for the elderly, and even more information on how the transition ‘would impact existing users’.

Within Hackney Council’s planning application there is a Statement of Community Involvement, which cites work that stretches back to 2024. In other words, it will take at least two years simply to return a one-bedroom flat back to the council’s housing stock, that is, if they approve it.

Let that sink in. Hackney councillors elected on a pledge to “make building new council homes a core priority, using council-owned land and every available delivery route” failed to approve the council’s own application to convert a ‘community flat’ back into a one-bedroom flat (as it has been for most of its existence) on the grounds that its 128 page planning application, produced over two years, contained insufficient information at a time when there is a three-year waitlist in for a one-bedroom council flat in Hackney.

There is an extremely strong case for building more homes near train stations. It is not just the green option, because it takes cars off the road, cutting air pollution and carbon emissions as a result. It is also the option that boosts economic activity, allowing more people to access the job markets that have the best opportunities for them.

The new NPPF sets minimum densities of between 35 and 45 dwellings per hectare within walking distance of well-connected train stations, roughly the density of semi-detached housing at the lower end and terraced housing at the upper end. Crucially, this applies outside existing settlements, and provided certain criteria are met (more on that later), on land with Green Belt protection.

In theory, if you were to build out all of the sites that this policy applied to, we could see half a million, if not far more, homes built.

The big question with the NPPF is how much will it actually move the dial on building homes near stations? What we have is a ‘default yes.’ This means that when you put in a planning application, you are more likely to be successful than in the past. However, it’s still not certain, and councils can use other means to prevent housing from being built. Often, planning committees attempt to block developments that national planning policy tells them to approve. The homes only get built when the developer gets the lawyers involved and mounts an appeal. It is likely to take a while before these policies really lead to change on the ground.

Is the ‘Train Belt’ viable

Sometimes councils don’t intend to block housing, but end up making it unviable by making strong demands on developers to provide things like infrastructure and affordable housing. As a result, projects that would otherwise go ahead become loss-making. This is a big problem nationwide. Construction costs have risen at a time when house prices are either flat or falling. This means many projects that may have been viable five years ago are now unviable.

One of the most radical pro-viability measures within the Government’s draft NPPF would have allowed smaller developers (building sites with fewer than 50 homes) to pay cash in lieu of providing affordable housing. Unfortunately, this was scrapped after intense lobbying from the social housing sector.

High affordable housing requirements within the Government’s ‘Golden Rules’ are likely to dash any hopes of a ‘Train Belt’ building boom. Major developments on the Green Belt remain subject to ‘Golden Rules’, which require developers to provide an extremely high share of new homes at below-market prices. In most cases, this will be a 15 percentage point higher affordable share (subject to a 50% cap) than what would typically be required locally. A 300-home development will typically be forced to provide between 110 and 150 homes at a discount.

In general, the Golden Rules may not be a large blocker given Green Belt land values are typically far lower. However, for station developments in particular it could push many into unviability. If a major development near a station risks overwhelming local infrastructure, councils might quite reasonably insist developers fund capacity-enhancing station upgrades such as longer platforms or wider pedestrian bridges. Each demand in isolation might be achievable, but combined could wipe out any potential developer profit. And without the prospect of profit, developers don’t build.

Automatic or default?

The ‘default yes’ for sustainable development within settlements (i.e. towns/cities) and for homes near well-connected stations outside settlements will get more homes built, but there’s substantial uncertainty as to how many. Part of the issue is the lack of certainty. Our planning system is discretionary. Ultimately, each decision will involve planners weighing the benefits of development against a range of harms from conservation to traffic impact. The new NPPF tells planners to give greater weight to those benefits, but it is still far from guaranteed that a new development will get the green light.

International experience suggests pro-development reforms have bigger effects in systems that are more rules-based and place less weight on the judgment of any individual planner. In New Zealand, Labour under Jacinda Ardern put in place really strong rules that effectively meant medium-density housing (4-6 storeys) near a busy transport link got an automatic (not default) yes. That cuts through a lot of the bureaucracy. At the moment, it is not unusual to see planning applications for relatively modest developments, say a block of 10 to 12 flats, that stretch longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace. New Zealand’s policy led to a large building boom. Construction employment surged, house building surged, and rents fell. One study estimates that rents in the cities where the policy applied were 30% lower than they otherwise would have been.

The really radical reform

There is more to the new National Planning Policy Framework than the ‘Train Belt’ policy.

One of the most surprising and radical moves in the draft NPPF was the idea of making it much easier for people to get planning permission to build in their back gardens and in the space above their buildings.

The policy explicitly supports converting space above shops, building on or above redundant service yards and car parks, adding mansard roofs, filling gaps in rooflines, putting taller buildings on corner plots, building upwards on existing homes and commercial buildings, and creating entirely new homes within existing residential plots and gardens.

This policy on using land better could be transformative. In California, they passed a law allowing people to build small homes (known as accessory dwelling units, or ADUs) in their backyards. In just five years, more than 100,000 ADUs were built as a result of this measure. In LA, one third of all new homes built are now ADUs.

In Ireland, a similar reform creating what they call Seomraí has recently been approved. The think tank Progress Ireland estimate their reform could create 350,000 homes.

It is unclear whether Britain (where gardens are typically smaller) will be able to boost housing by as much as California (or Ireland hopes) but a policy supporting granny flats could be very big indeed.

More likely to move the dial on supply is the support for upward extensions. Create Streets estimate that if just 10% of the 4.7 million pre-1919 homes in England added mansard floors, it would create close to a million new bedrooms. Create Streets also found that a pro-mansard policy in one East London neighbourhood led to 300 additional bedrooms. A policy permitting considerate upward extensions, in some cases allowing homes to double in height, to address overcrowding among Haredi Jewish families in South Tottenham, saw extremely high levels of take-up (roughly 60% of all homes that could be extended were).

This is a controversial policy. More than any other policy, it is likely to mean building near where people live. When Labour attempted a similar policy under John Prescott’s tenure, it saw massive pushback and was dubbed ‘garden grabbing’. It was swiftly reversed by the Conservative-led Coalition in 2010. However, the benefits are large and the need for housing has never been greater. Policies that in the past have been dropped for being too radical must now be on the table if we’re to improve affordability. That’s why it is extremely welcome that Labour have kept it in the final NPPF published yesterday.

In fact, the new version improves on the draft in three key ways.

First, clumsy wording about development fitting within ‘the overall street scene’ has been relaxed after warnings from Britain Remade among others that it would function as an effective veto on taller buildings.

Second, the Government has also made the rules for garden development more flexible. While the default remains that development should not occupy more than twice the footprint of the existing buildings and should leave at least half of the previously undeveloped part of the plot unbuilt, these are no longer absolute limits: larger developments can be approved where they can be accommodated without harming the character of the area, taking account of infrastructure and whether the location is sustainable.

Third, the final policy has also been broadened to make clear that it supports extensions that create additional floorspace, not just schemes that create additional homes. This could be a lifeline for families that have outgrown their existing home but have space to extend to create new bedrooms.

The Government clearly intended to highlight the ‘Train Belt’ policy. It was the lead item in their press release. In theory, it is the most pro-development change in the planning system in a very long time. Yet, it is likely to disappoint in practice as extreme affordable housing demands threaten viability. By contrast, the less-hyped (in fact, not mentioned at all in the Government PR) policy on extending existing properties could play the biggest role in bringing Labour closer (but unlikely close enough) to their 1.5 million home target.

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.