Will Labour actually get Britain building again?

What Labour’s planning reforms need

The Labour party has been on a journey. Just a few years ago, they were sharing punchy ads attacking the Government’s so-called Developer‘s Charter. Today, their leader is a self-identified YIMBY who has made ‘getting Britain building again’ one of his five missions for government.

There is a strong logic to Labour’s conversion to the cause of planning reform.  While only some of Labour’s big plans for government are directly reliant on making it easier to build stuff, clean power by 2030 being the main one, all of Labour’s plans are, at least, indirectly tied up with planning reform. 

By blocking the construction of new homes, grid connections, factories, film studios, wind turbines, solar farms, nuclear power stations, data centres, laboratories, rail links, and roads our planning system hammers economic growth at every turn. And without economic growth, everything else gets much harder.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not the first to propose radical reform of the planning system. Thatcher tried twice (and both times got defeated by her back benchers.) New Labour actually brought in our current planning system for national infrastructure as an attempt to make it easier to build new runways and nuclear power stations. In 2012, then-PM David Cameron told Conservative Party Conference that on planning his Government needed to “beat off this suffocating bureaucracy once and for all.” And then there was Boris’s ill-fated “Build. Build. Build.” push for planning reform.

Yet, Labour’s recent push is different. Plenty of politicians have spoken about the need to reform the planning system before an election. But never before, at least not in Britain, has an opposition party made planning reform such a key part of their message in an election campaign. There’s an important reason for this. When Sunak gave in to the backbench rebellion on housing targets, it created an opportunity for Labour. 

Planning reform is a controversial topic, but it’s also a source of credibility on what is traditionally a weakness for Labour: the economy. Crucially, given the tough fiscal environment, unlike the plan to spend £15bn a year on the green transition, planning reform doesn’t cost the exchequer anything.

If the polls are right (or at least, not massively wrong), Labour will enter office with a large majority and a genuine mandate to change the planning system. Political capital gets spent fast and a controversial, but necessary, push to fix planning is the sort of thing you need to have ready from day one. Otherwise, the moment will pass.

So, does Labour have an ‘oven-ready’ plan to get Britain building again that matches their rhetoric? I’ve recently been combing through all of Labour’s pre-manifesto announcements on planning reform and my assessment is not yet. 

Labour’s full plans for reforming the planning system are too big a topic for a single post so I’m breaking it into two.

Part one covers where Labour’s plans on planning reform for infrastructure fall short and the steps they must take to deliver clean power by 2030. Part two will look at housing and whether they can build 1.5m homes over the next parliament.

Will they make it easier to build critical infrastructure?

There are some good, and dare I say long overdue, proposals. For instance, it really is only internal Tory politics that’s kept onshore wind out of the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project regime. It is a source of national embarrassment that Ukraine has managed to build more onshore wind turbines than us since Russia invaded. Lifting the de facto ban in full and treating low-cost onshore wind like all other major infrastructure is the right thing to do.

Yet, there’s also quite a few cases where Labour have called for things that the Government is basically doing already.

It may have attracted relatively little media attention, much to the frustration of ministers, but the Conservatives in government do actually have a programme of infrastructure reform. Could it move faster? Probably. Could it be more radical? Certainly. But, most of the non-controversial but necessary stuff is being done. The low-hanging fruits of infrastructure planning reform are slowly being picked.

Take National Policy Statements (NPSs), the documents that set out in depth the government’s policy on major infrastructure. NPSs are designed to make our planning system more predictable, resolve questions around need, and navigate trade-offs. In theory, they’re meant to be updated every five years to account for the fact that government policy changes over time, but that has not happened. The failure to update them in a timely fashion has made getting planning permission more uncertain, more bureaucratic, and more open to legal challenge. So, Labour have pledged to update them within six months of winning a general election.

Labour can legitimately bash the Government for letting them get so out of date, but the NPSs (mostly – we’re still waiting on nuclear) have now been updated and adopted by Parliament. In fact, the new NPSs contain a powerful new tool. By designating low carbon infrastructure as a ‘Critical National Priority’, new NPSs will, top infrastructure lawyers assure me, make it much harder to refuse permission for new solar, offshore wind, and nuclear capacity.

One possibility is that Labour wants to update the NPSs in order to add even more ‘Critical National Priority’ style tools, but they’ve not set out what they are yet. 

Likewise, Labour have pledged to tackle the problem of infrastructure projects with planning permission getting delayed by legal challenges by publishing clearer guidance on what’s expected of developers when it comes to consulting. This is clearly needed and indeed I called for it in Powerbook, but again, the government has already pledged to do the same. Ditto for Labour’s proposals on community benefits and increasing capacity in the planning system.

There is simply no way to get to a zero carbon grid by 2035, let alone 2030, without deep reform of the planning system. At the moment, it can take as long as 13 years to deliver a new offshore wind farm. Not because building at sea is particularly fraught, it is usually done in two years, but because of delays at every stage of the planning process.

It is not enough to return our planning system’s performance to 2013 levels when just one-fifth of projects were delayed and developers only had to prepare 600 or so documents to get planning permission. Unless Labour go further and target blockages at every stage of the process, their clean power plan will fail. And it’s not just about going faster, they also need to ensure the system says ‘yes’ more. A quick ‘no’ isn’t better than a ‘slow’ yes.

So what do Labour need to put in their manifesto to really get Britain building?

To win planning permission to build Britain’s first nuclear power station since 1995, EDF produced a 31,401 page environmental impact assessment (EIAs). That’s 25 times longer than War and Peace. When they went through the process again for Sizewell C, the count went up by another 13,000 pages. It’s not just nuclear that’s crushed under the weight of environmental paperwork either, 10,000 page EIAs are commonplace for offshore wind.

Protections for nature are vital, but it's under the current system that Britain has become one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. A better approach is possible. One that creates more money for nature restoration without throwing up barriers to low-carbon infrastructure. After all, climate change is the number one threat to biodiversity.

Labour could look to the EU’s policy of renewable acceleration areas. Under this approach, the government takes an active role identifying sites where deploying renewables is unlikely to harm biodiversity. Renewable projects in these zones are exempt from the usual requirement to carry out extensive environmental surveying, dramatically speeding up the process for getting permission. Labour could go even further and apply this approach to all forms of low-carbon infrastructure. 

To reverse the decline in biodiversity, they could require that projects purchase off-the-shelf nature recovery solutions from a government approved list. This approach is already being tried for offshore wind only, but there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be applied across all forms of infrastructure.

Another problem to tackle is over-consultation. Consultation can help pre-empt community objections and improve design. But you can have too much of a good thing. In theory, only a single short consultation is required but developers do more in fear that their consultations will be found to be inadequate and challenged in the courts.

Why not take a leaf out of France’s book and create a British equivalent of the Commission nationale du débat public, essentially a public body that sets extremely clear guidance on what is and isn’t needed for adequate consultation? The approach should be ‘consult well, consult once’.

And this might go against Keir Starmer’s instincts as a lawyer, but it might be time to make it harder to take the government to court in planning disputes. Take the A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. It’s a vital road connecting Milton Keynes and Cambridge with strong local backing, but construction was delayed for over a year because of an unsuccessful legal challenge. Planning permission to re-open Manston Airport was granted four years ago, but the project has been stuck in legal limbo until last week. Even when legal challenges fail, they still end up causing massive delays.

One problem is that under the Aarhus treaty, environmental litigants benefit from a cost protection cap. This means that unsuccessful claimants' legal damages are capped at £10k, even if they cost a developer (or the taxpayer) millions due to delays and legal costs. Raising the cap or restricting the protection to only cases that barristers believe to have a high chance of success should deter people from using judicial review as a delaying tactic.

And it’s not just airports and roads that get challenged either. A wind farm off the coast of Suffolk was delayed by a year after planning permission was granted due to an unsuccessful legal challenge. Let that sink in, legal challenges on environmental grounds are actually making it harder to tackle our biggest environmental problem.

The situation has become so bad that many developers price a year of delays into their construction plans.

And when legal challenges succeed, the costs can be enormous. Essentially forcing developers to begin the process all over again. Rachel Reeves rightly emphasises the importance of certainty and stability for attracting investment again and again. Nowhere is that more true than here. If there’s a plausible risk of successful legal challenge forcing developers back to square one, then it has a chilling effect on what projects come forward.

As a result, infrastructure planning applications cover every potential ground for legal challenge no matter how unlikely. That’s why you end up with situations like the Lower Thames Crossing where more than £300m has been spent on producing a 359,866 page long planning application. By the way, that’s more than it costs Norway to build both the world’s longest and the world’s deepest road tunnels.

One solution would be to reduce the stakes of a judicial review. Losing a legal challenge on one small aspect shouldn’t send a project back to the drawing board. Rather, permissions should stay granted conditional on resolving that specific problem. This would get spades in the ground faster and discourage the use of legal challenges as a delaying tactic.

Labour needs to get this right.

It has been almost thirty years since Britain built a nuclear power station. More than thirty years since we last built a reservoir. As a country, we are living off the legacy of infrastructure investments made decades ago. This isn’t sustainable. To become energy secure, hit net zero, clean up our rivers, and spread growth to all parts of our country, we will need to build more in the next five years than we have ever done before. If we don’t change our planning system, then simply put, we will fail. Bills will go up, emissions won’t go down fast enough, and the economy will stagnate.

Britain desperately needs to get building again. Whoever wins the election must get this right.