A think tank report has called on ministers to overcome the º£½ÇÊÓƵ's infrastructure "inertia" by overhauling the planning system to stimulate growth. The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) suggests that streamlining the consent process, clarifying ambiguous laws, and revising policy documents are key to enhancing the nation's capacity to build infrastructure effectively.
The report, entitled 'Accelerating Infrastructure: How to get Britain Building More, Faster', authored by Dr Samuel Hughes, the head of housing and co-author of the 'Foundations' essay on Britain's stagnation, posits that certain reforms could be enacted swiftly, as reported by .
Dr Hughes contends that expediting infrastructure development is a critical challenge for the º£½ÇÊÓƵ, particularly when compared to past centuries or other European countries today.
This comes in the wake of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer spotlighting the East Anglia Two offshore wind farm project during his address at Monday's investment summit, which faced delays due to judicial review.
Among Hughes' proposals are measures such as speeding up planning by amending statutory guidance, refreshing national policy statements, enabling government departments to make definitive decisions, reconsidering or exiting the Aarhus Convention that grants public access to environmental information, and altering the regulations surrounding judicial reviews.
He remarked: "Britain seems to take its terrible record of infrastructure delivery as an unalterable fact, like the weather. This is profoundly mistaken."
"In our relatively recent history, Britain was the best country in the world at infrastructure delivery and we could be so again."
He further noted: "Many of the solutions we outline do not require legislative change and all could be adopted by the current government tomorrow."
"Giving focus and clarity to the infrastructure planning process won't fix all our infrastructure problems but it is an essential first step."
Planning lawyer Isabella Tafur, authoring the report's foreword, highlighted: "The Lower Thames Crossing has now spent 15 years in planning and has cost more than £300m, more than it cost Norway to actually build the Laerdal Tunnel, the world's longest subsea road tunnel."
"The reopening of Manston Airport has been pushed back by four years of legal challenges, yielding nothing except cost and delay. Encouragingly, there is growing political will to change this."
