The start of my brief political career coincided with some big battles over road building. In 1992, work started on the M3 extension through Twyford Down in Hampshire. The decision to gouge a cutting through this beautiful landscape, rather than invest £75 million in a tunnel, caused widespread outrage.
The public mood turned against road building and this, helped by a big protest movement and the European Commission, saved Oxleas Wood in Greenwich, one of the last areas of ancient woodland in London. It had been threatened by the proposed East London Crossing. Jackie Kay wrote a lovely poem for children about the campaign to save Oxleas Wood: “They are trying to build a motorway/ through this ancient mystery,/ this ancient wise wood.”
I was standing for the European Parliament in London South East when local campaigners won the battle to save Oxleas Wood. Around 30 years later, I paid an enjoyable visit to Woodlands Farm, a wonderful amenity on the edge of London. It was moving to recall how, but for the long campaign against the proposed road, I would not have been standing in rather miraculous countryside, but in the middle of a six lane motorway.
I guess the authors of a new report from Labour Together would be less positive about a community farm or the survival of a scruffy patch of ancient woodland. For them, building roads and runways with as little delay as possible is good. Blocks on British progress, measured in tarmac and concrete, are bad.
The report, Getting Britain off the ground, proposes ways to speed up planning permission for a third runway at Heathrow, but its recommendations are designed to apply “to an array of infrastructure projects… dramatically speeding up the building process”.
In a previous blog I criticised those on the left who parrot Tufton Street’s line that weakening the planning system is the key to building more. What is needed, I argued, is more planning, not less, “a strong planning system to deliver a better future for the country”.
This report’s take on planning is certainly pretty muscular. In its foreword, Dan Tomlinson MP argues for “a stronger, more confident state… a government that sees its job as delivery”. I like that, and his confidence that we can build faster: “Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But with urgency, confidence and purpose.”
The problem is that the assumptions underlying the report would lead to reckless, careless and damaging development: that the man or woman in Whitehall knows best; that elected governments should not be constrained by law or regulation; that climate change is an afterthought; that the destruction of nature and landscapes can always be offset; that consent is unnecessary and caution is for wimps.
Justifications are flawed
The report’s justifications for airport expansion are deeply flawed. There is no consideration of the country’s skills and materials shortage, just an apparent assumption that Heathrow should be first in the queue. The proposal is for a short runway, to avoid having to move the M25, but the calculation of economic benefits appears to be based on the long runway previously proposed. The report claims that fares will come down, but ignores the likely surcharge on fares to pay for the third runway.
Perhaps the report’s strongest economic argument is not that a third runway would benefit the real economy, but that rushing it through would be good vibes: it would bring “immediate benefits for OBR and Bank of England forecasts, and therefore the government’s fiscal headroom ahead of the next election”.
The authors do not seriously address climate objections. They take as read that making it easier to fly to Leeds, Manchester and other places easily reachable by train is a good thing. The cost of additional carbon emissions and local air pollution is put at £1.9 billion, which they regard as okay as the cost would be outweighed by the (putative) economic benefits. But the £1.9 billion calculation is based on the Airport Commission’s 2014 calculation. There was a significant reassessment of the valuation of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 and recent research suggests that even the 2021 figures are a massive underestimate.
Democracy matters
Heathrow is described as a “symbolic example”. The report is really about “how the state could move more quickly to get Britain building”. They build fast in Istanbul, Beijing and Denver, why not in the UK?
The report’s answer is that a host of regulatory and democratic constraints slow things down. Environmental assessments foster “a culture of risk aversion”. Judicial review gets in the way. Even National Policy Statements, which are designed to set the terms for development and are generally, as in the case of the Airports National Policy Statement, pro-development, cause problems.
To get round these constraints, the report proposes that the government’s parliamentary majority should be used to push through development permissions, “with environmental offsets and consultation settled afterwards”. A public bill would give ministers the power to approve any development project. Community benefit payments should be linked to planning permissions (bungs for development consent). The cap on costs for losing litigants in a judicial review should be raised, even though this would breach the Aarhus Convention (the report’s authors are unconcerned about this).
All in all, the argument is that the government wants to build and nothing should be allowed to get in the way. But the UK is not China, however much some might yearn for China’s planning regime. As the political scientist Colin Crouch says in Post-Democracy, “democracy needs institutions to protect it that are not themselves democratic, but have mandates given to them by democratic governments”. He goes on to describe “the tendency of the alt-right to break with formal rules and, in particular, to demonstrate impatience with intermediary institutions that check the exercise of democratically elected power”.
A Labour government should keep its impatience with “intermediary institutions” in check. It wants to get building and it has a mandate to speed up planning. Fair enough. But it should not seek to sweep away all restrictions. If it did, it would quickly lose public consent. And, as the loss of Twyford Down and the saving of Oxleas Wood show, governments do not always know best.
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