How to get Britain building

Britain, it seems, can no longer build things, but that doesn’t mean it cannot do things. We know we cannot build things, because we have commissioned reviews, published white papers, consulted experts, and appointed ministers to confirm, in unparalleled and intricate detail, precisely why we cannot build things. Building things is no longer the British state’s raison d’être — telling the increasingly depressed public why building things is permanently, expensively, and constitutionally impossible is.

The Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, has revealed, to the shock and surprise of no one, that a revised projection of the costs of HS2 could now be upwards of £100 billion, with the railway line not opening until 2039. Its first phase was supposed to be open by this coming Christmas.

The reason why this happened, and continues to happen to infrastructure projects throughout the country, is due to the same endemic problem that besets much of modern Britain: bureaucratic and judicial overreach. I wrote in these pages last week on how this overreach prohibits any meaningful amelioration of our immigration woes. The same is true with our infrastructure issues.

HS2 was litigated against so relentlessly, by so many parties who raised so many objections, covering everything from complaints that the lorries going to sites are so heavy that they could somehow damage the foundations of nearby houses, to the infamous £100 million price tag to protect some bats. The extent of such objections, over the course of many years, cannot be seen to constitute anything but the deliberate sabotage of critical national infrastructure.

Now, in a plot twist to rival those of Britain’s greatest writers, the Government appears to agree. A policy paper published by His Majesty’s Treasury last week is proposing two important reforms to this body of procedure. 

The first would allow the Energy Secretary to designate specific infrastructure and energy projects as being of “Critical National Importance”, subject to consent from the House of Commons. If the House were to agree, this designation would give projects the same protections as afforded by primary legislation, meaning they should be shielded from judicial reviews on everything aside from human rights grounds.

The second reform would apply to all major infrastructure projects, creating a fixed “challenge window” after which no new judicial reviews can be brought, and any issues not raised during this window would be permanently foreclosed. 

Does the Brit dare to dream of an accountable Government and a national infrastructural renewal?

What this really means is that Britain could build things again, if its Parliament chooses to. If this policy paper were to be properly enacted, it would shift the blame for delayed or failed infrastructure projects directly on to Parliament itself, rather than the unaccountable rhizomatic corpus of civil service bureaucracy. 

Does the Brit dare to dream of an accountable Government and a national infrastructural renewal? As always, there is cause to be sceptical. 

There is a real danger that this policy paper becomes little more than that. As I wrote above, Britain is very good at talking about doing — or not doing — things, and much less good at taking any work off paper. Unless this policy proposal is taken with the public attention it deserves and delivered at pace, it will likely never become real.

There also is the problem that which projects are to be designated as of Critical National Importance will be political decisions. Under a Labour Government, this would likely mean that with energy infrastructure, for example, common sense and efficiency would be subordinated to ideological preference, especially with zealots like Ed Miliband being a minister for the eternal nonsense that is Net Zero. 

Labour has recently redirected a large amount of its energy focus on nuclear, rather than other renewables. Wylfa and Sizewell C should be the first two projects fast-tracked through this process. If they are not, this reform will have demonstrated it is too political to be feasibly revolutionary. 

Another concern regards the implementation of such a policy. The proposal is admirably clear in that the mechanism to enable such curtailing of judicial reviews would be “subject to detailed design and the passage of underpinning legislation”. The history of British infrastructure policy is littered with proposals that appeared sensible when first proposed, but that were strangled in the drafting process. 

None of these are reasons to oppose the proposals, but rather caution against optimism. Tangible achievements are a rare breed under a Labour Government at the best of times, and we are not in the best of times. Britain’s economic stagnation is entirely the result of our own self-limiting inability to build things. If legislated competently and quickly, and if it were applied without deference to ideology (big ifs, indeed), these reforms could represent the most significant steps towards changing out stagnant economic fortunes in generations. We must now will them into being.