Thread by @MichaelDnes1

After the revival of this old thread on UK infrastructure, I realise that I never followed through on my promise: to explain what might speed it up.

Grab a spade, and come with me. 🧵

(thanks to @Sam_Dumitriu and @DavidHenigUK for reminding me)

https://twitter.com/MichaelDnes1/status/1630578526293204993

TLDR on the last thread: the system isn’t slowing down because it’s failing – it’s slowing down because people are responding rationally to the incentives they face.

The money shot was this chart – 5.5 years of process you must do _before_ you can start building a road in the UK

This isn’t just for building huge things. In my field of highways, I’ve seen it applied to roundabouts and sliproads.

A plan to lengthen this roundabout by 15 metres has been stuck in planning since 2014

And for me, that leaves an uncomfortable question about how infrastructure works in a democratic society.

Because if you can’t start building something within the five years of a parliament, it’s impossible to vote for results.

That's really serious, esp for climate change.

You might think that the builders are just slow. That’s not the problem. The UK’s civil engineers are globally respected, and well-planned work can be done fast.

Engineers can deliver. The team building this road did it in half the usual time.

Instead, the delays come _before_ the spades get in the ground.

You must:
- decide whether to do anything at all. Big strategic questions before...
- making a detailed design. Tens of thousands of pages of paperwork preparing for….
- a planning inquiry. Complex procedure

This process can seem endless.

And it often looks bizarre too. Check the press and you can find a high-speed rail station held up because of the impact on the availability of snooker tables. Or housing refused permission because its effect on non-existent bats.

You'd expect delays to be about real things, like diggers and concrete and earth. Instead, its about ideas, that only exist on paper and in the mind. Surely, those should be the easiest problem to fix?

Infrastructure development seems trapped under a weightless weight.

As always, there’s a reason.

When the planning system is left to its own devices, it strives for perfection - delivering the desired project for the absolute minimum of impacts. Even if it means going slowly.

Logical in a way, as those impacts can be huge.

But in practice, that approach spawns problems.

There's a lot of angles to the idea of getting things 'right' (one project has to worry about impacts on prehistoric cow-prints). Perfecting them all is tough.

It creates space for mischief

And always time is running out.

It didn't always used to be this way.

People think of WW2 as a war of logistics and production. But it was also a war of infrastructure.

It's an instructive contrast.

From 1939 to 1945, British engineers built the equivalent of 9,000 miles of road, in the form of new runways.

To put that figure in context, the UK today has 2,300 miles of motorway.
historicengland.org.uk/research/resul…

Engineers do not philosophise in wartime. With an overriding sense of purpose, they job becomes simple. Not ‘how do we build the best runway’, but ‘how fast can we built it’.

At peak, this delivered a new runway every 3 days, plus a million support buildings.

And it’s still true – in 2022 Ukrainian authorities built a 20km railway in six months.

railjournal.com/passenger/main…

Building things is simple. What’s hard is building them legally.

We’ve let our planning system degrade to the point at which it has stopped being about how to build something; and made the vast majority of the work about how _not_ to build it.

I would argue that should change.

Specifically, I’m very aware that governments frequently promise infrastructure at elections. In 2019, it was levelling up; in 2024 it could be green energy.

In the planning system a democratic mandate counts for nothing. That feels uncomfortable.

So how about we imagine changing planning law, so governments have special powers to switch off existing planning requirements in order to deliver manifesto commitments. What would that do?

Let’s focus on the easiest case: a government promise of much greener energy.

This hypothetical government has said we need green power in large quantities, in many places. The requirement is not perfect sites, but viable ones. So the ‘if’ and ‘where’ questions that dominate early development become much simpler

Detailed design is something you would compress.

This mandate needs copy-paste designs that you can build again and again, like those wartime runways.

And, on the scale of a planetary crisis, it doesn’t matter whether you move the grid connection 50 metres north

As for the planning inquiry: those runways didn't have any.

Instead, a team from the air ministry would arrive, select the site, calculate the compensation to the landowners on a standard formula, and send in the workmen.

That process took days, not years.

BUT WAIT – surely it’s not that easy?

You’d expect a technocrat like me to say ‘actually, no, because…’

But arguably, it _is_ that easy. Because what you’re trying to do _is_ simple. We just made it hard.

The reason we got here was because we didn’t really believe what we were building was urgent or at risk – we felt we had time to make it better. So we made systems that slow things down and search for perfection.

That’s reasonable 90% of the time. Maybe 100% in my highways world

But for the emergency cases, democracy should be able to prioritise. If a government is elected promising urgent action, it should have the tools at hand to bypass the processes designed to slow it down.

If we can create something that trumps the page-after-page of THOU SHALT NOTs that make up the planning system, little work is left.

Just basic design; land acquisition; and the simple task of placing brick atop brick, or blade atop turbine.

Saving the planet; housing families; spreading prosperity; defeating tyranny – from time to time society finds these goals to be right, and urgent, and worthy of pursuit without diversion.

Our laws could reflect that.

Building is simple. Let’s make it simple again.