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I mean that literally. The Turweston Green Bridge is a structure that you will almost certainly never have heard of1, but which is one of the minor engineering marvels that scatter the HS2 route. 18m high; spanning a 52m gap; and an amazing 99m wide, its official photographs don’t do it justice. Here’s one of mine – to give you an idea of scale, the little orange dots I’ve ringed are people.

It’s a hugely impressive structure. Three times the width of a motorway, designed to hold a landscape in the sky for a century at least, while the railway zooms underneath at 250mph. Seen in person it gives that sense of how tiny each one of us is, but how when we work together and apply our minds we share the strength of giants.

But it also poses a question. Why on earth is it there?

This is not a bridge from anything to anything. On one side, Turweston is a village of 211 people. On the other side is are two old houses and an airfield popular with the Silverstone crowd. A friend who lives locally says it’s a nice spot for a run. But not something you would spend tens of millions2 building a bridge to preserve.

And this is no mere green bridge. If you want to see standard practice, take a look at this one recently finished over the A3 near Wisley to connect two high-value bits of heathland. That is about 10m wide, and cost £3.7m. Turweston is nearly ten times wider, rests on 1.8km of steel girders, and carries 2,700 m³ of earth.

There is one thing it doesn’t have though: any protected species or environmental sites to justify its existence. According to HS2’s typology this is a ‘type 4’ green bridge – one which has nothing to do with bats, landscapes, habitats or wildlife. The official definition of this category is gloriously opaque:

Type 4 – Other types of green bridge with site-specific functionality.

This brings to mind Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge - a fictional encyclopedia where one volume records ‘items included in this classification’. And as far as you dig, you won’t get much more clarity from official documents - not least because this bridge is the only type 4 bridge that there is.

The real explanation might have had something to do with one of the 211 inhabitants of Turweston, who happened to be a close relation of a back-in-the-day-significant cabinet minister. And as I tried to work out how to unpack this story, I wondered if the way to tell it was as another version of the bat tunnel – a crazy piece of infrastructure built at huge expense because of (in this case) political arm-twisting.

A no-bat tunnel

But the more I thought, the more I thought this framing just goes for the cheap click, and misses something much more important. And to explain why I have to return to the story of the bat tunnel.

When we talk about the bat tunnel, there’s an assumption on the part of many people that it is something that shouldn’t have happened - £120m worth of concrete to protect a small colony of Bechstein’s bats. And the framing of this as an error makes a kind of sense – even HS2 and Natural England have been trying to blame one another rather than defend the result.

But now let’s add Turweston to the mix. A structure that is a) as absurd as the bat tunnel but also b) absolutely nothing to do with nature protection. Or indeed any obligations at all. There is no manual we can blame; no policy that can be shown to have forced the matter. It just happened – and happened with the same results as the infamous bat tunnel – as an answer to a totally different problem. So why do we end up in the same place?

The path of least resistance

The question I started asked myself was this: what if these results aren’t an error? What if, instead, this repeated tendency to over-engineer is actually the solution to failings elsewhere in the system?

Every infrastructure project involves choices. Where does a railway go? How fast? Where will it stop? What is it capable of doing? Which drawbacks can be mitigated and how? Making these choices involves processes, decisions and ultimately lead to the physical piece of infrastructure you can kick with a boot.

You can handle these choices in lot of different ways, using different approaches. In the case of the Turweston green bridge, you could take the risk that your senior colleague will flounce out of the cabinet and declare their opposition to HS2. But the option they went with instead was to build a great big bridge to reduce the local environmental impacts and mitigate the impact on the local community.

If you look at the development of HS2, you see that happening a lot. Infamously, the process of choosing a route through the Chilterns turned into a process of choosing a route underneath them, as no amount of digging was more offputting than the idea of facing down angry locals. It was easier to build a £120m bat tunnel than to have a fight with Natural England about how much bat protection is too much.

It’s hardly original to say that HS2 would have cost less if the designers had been more willing to push back against all these asks. But as I turn over Turweston Green Bridge in my mind, I find myself seeing the same question from a new angle.

If we see this as a matter of choices between different pathways, the preference for heavy engineering and big structures isn’t just about building things – it’s about building things instead of doing something harder, and following the pathway of least resistance. It is not just that those conversations are hard; it is that the engineering is easy.

In the shadow of engineering

‘Easy’ is a bit of a loaded word here. ‘Powerful’ might be a more respectful way of putting it; but I think it lacks the sense that, as far as policymakers are concerned, handing a problem to the engineers is remarkably close to solving it.

Engineering is a science of solutions; in the rest of the policy world problems are a source of status and power. Put the two next to each other, and the engineers’ ability to answer problems appears close to magical.

A policy fight over bat protection could take years, achieve little, and have answers undone in a moment. But for an engineer, once the parameters are established you proceed to find what sorts of solutions can work. In this case, if you erect 500 concrete rings, string them together with mesh, and make sure the bats can’t fly in, the problem is solved.

This isn’t to say engineering is without its quirks. The Turweston Green Bridge is an excellent example of this. Engineers were content to see the bridge go from 10m to 99m, provided someone would pay the bills. But they were adamant that it could not be 100m – because if it was it would no longer be a bridge but a tunnel. And tunnels come with a whole host of extra requirements, which they would not accept.

But most of the time, building something gets you from a problem to a solution when policy officials like me would only have been going around in circles.

Problems of success

Of course, today’s solution frequently have tomorrow’s problems nestled inside of them. In the case of HS2, all that extra engineering to solve issues that eluded the policymakers (local buy in; design requirements; cabinet politics; regulatory escalation) ended up as a pile of expensive new bits of construction. And, when the bill was totted up, the calculator caught fire. The result of this is that we won’t be having two thirds of the railway that was originally planned, and should count ourselves lucky if it gets into central London.

Other categories of infrastructure have similar problems. Nuclear power is full of uncertainties, which have resulted in the nuclear regulator constantly adding more and more requirements onto new projects – even for well-known reactor types and where the radiation exposure avoided is about the same as that from eating a banana. Each worry is fixed with another bit of engineering. As a result, we are building the most expensive nuclear power station in the history of the world.

Economists talk of a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox: the more efficiently we can use something, the more we end up using it overall.3 Here, we have an answer to complex questions that is often much more effective than other pathways. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see it used more and more. And that’s a problem if the ultimate result is to make the underlying projects so engineering-heavy that they become totally unaffordable.

The path of most assistance

All of this makes much more intuitive sense when you’re standing on the embankment of what will be HS2, staring up at a bridge so huge it seems to have got lost from the set of Star Wars, and realising that this exists to answer to a minor bit of personnel management in a long-departed government.

Fifty years ago we got structures like this because the engineers went a bit mad; nowadays we get them because the engineers are saving the policymakers, the strategists, the regulators, the stakeholder managers and the politicians from problems that they can’t solve for themselves.4

It doesn’t need to be this way. If civil engineers have become the inadvertent solvers of infrastructure’s difficult questions, policymakers need to start solutionising as well. Civil engineers have centuries of knowledge to help them, but policy officials govern so many intangibles that the engineers treat as unalterable. Let’s imagine a world where policy officials get as solution-minded as their engineering counterparts. I’ll call it the Path of Most Assistance.

That involves a change in mindset: but imagine a nature regulator that tries to balance impacts on one project with bigger gains elsewhere. Or a nuclear safety regulator that sees its job as making safe nuclear happen, rather than debating whether nuclear should be there in the first place. Experts start thinking like problem solvers, not people who know which page of the policy document to follow.

That may sound far-fetched, but it’s a reasonable description of how infrastructure used to work in the UK. Indeed, in nuclear energy, this was the kind of regime that gave the UK such a head-start that it had produced two thirds of all the civil nuclear power in the world by the late 60s.

We have the Turweston Green Bridge because the civil engineers had a ready answer to a complex problem. The way to win our infrastructure back is to create the policy engineers who can provide answers that come without the same price tag.

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PS – my great thanks to the team hosting me at section C23. I don’t know if getting all philosophical like this repays or betrays their hospitality; but the one thing I am very sure of is that they have taken the failings of the rest of the system and done their best to fix it. None of the team there made this problem or picked this answer, but they are possibly the only people with nothing to be ashamed of in the wider tangle.

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Small tunnel update: thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about the launch. Quite aside from ticking ‘appearing on PM’ off my bucket list we’ve managed to turn government’s position from ‘there are no plans for such a tunnel’ to ‘we encourage Trans-Pennine Connect to engage with the relevant mayors’. Those who have dwelt in officialdom know how big a distance there is between those words – and it speaks very well of somebody’s open-mindedness.

So instead of doing the hard work myself this week, let me point to Neil Garratt’s fantastic Outer London Access Times tool, which debuted a few weeks ago. Neil is London Assembly Member for Croydon, and is one of the most thoughtful elected politicians I’m aware of. Recently he’s been the first I’ve seen getting seriously into claude-coding data visualisations to unpack the issues he cares about.

Neil’s tool exists to answer a very simple question – where in London can you get to from a particular point, especially in outer London. You can pick any of London’s neighbourhood centres and get a beautiful map showing how long it will take to get to any of the city’s 35000 postcodes

This is interesting. But you only need to refract it slightly to make it into heresy. Because transport policy in London isn’t really about 35,000 points in London. It’s written, for reasons that can be both justified and contested, around making the centre work well. And if you compare the access times of the West End with a random spot on London’s edge, you understand how that gives you two very different views of whether London’s transport ‘works’.

And Neil has added some extra layers that will incense the right-thinking more. A layer showing the contrast between public transport journeys and car journey times – which removes any mystery of why everyone in outer London tends to have a car. And also layers showing the impacts of a) big transport upgrades like the planned DLR extension to Thamesmead and b) the introduction of e-bikes onto the road network. Take a guess as to which one does more for journey times, even in Thamesmead.

Not agreeing to disagree

I don’t think you get any points for originality in 2026 for saying that established bureaucracies face an existential threat from AI’s ability to advise decision-makers. The whole of the civil service is designed to perform the same function as an LLM – taking a lot of complex information ad digesting it into actionable advice. LLMs just do it in minutes rather than months.1

But Neil’s tool made me reflect there’s another facet to this. There are some situations where there are multiple reasonable points of view, but where one of them is the ‘official’ line and is backed up by the machinery of accredited analysis, policy documents and so on. Those other viewpoints looked nowhere near as respectable.

Now, it’s much easier to create a convincingly evidenced viewpoint together that does not match that official position. Indeed, after decades of investing in open data, the UK may be one of the places it’s easiest to do this. And in the future, TfL might not be able to pick its exam questions the way that it has. Indeed, it may be answerable to someone like Neil, who understands better than top management what the underlying mission of the organisation should be.2

And what a London assembly-member can do, any individual policy official can do too. Whereas before they were empowered as a small part of a big analytical engine; now each one of them can sit down and work out their own answers. That’s great news for good policy; but it’s absolutely fatal for a policy-making model built out of big pyramids of management approval.

Babies vs bathwater

Consensus makes life easier for everyone; but in a world where heresy is only a few credits away, I suspect it’s something we won’t be able to sustain. But before we celebrate the blooming of a thousand flowers, remember that there’s a difference between opinions and actions.

When you look at a policy or a project, you aren’t just looking at people or equipment or cement – you’re looking at the results of humans agreeing to common action. That’s much easier in situations where people have fewer opinions.

That’s a wicked choice sometimes: to build an HS2 you needed to have relatively little discussion of whether it was a wise idea; to build it well you needed a lot more circumspection. Action and wisdom pull in opposite directions.

So if (as I suspect) we are headed to a world where more opinions come naturally, the real hard work will be with the sheepdogs who can get all these original thinkers to go the same direction. For a hundred-and-something years, we have entrusted to expert bureaucrats who we expect to make a ‘consensus’. When other expertise is so plentiful, this feels like a job that only a politician can do.

Maybe, in more ways than one, the future belongs to Neil.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Story and his ideas of ‘social science abundance’ for prompting some of the thinking behind this. At some point, I hope he’ll find the time to write it up as convincingly as he’s shared it with me.

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About a year ago I created a company called Future Works. We’ve been operating under the radar to try to solve a mystery, and revive an old project. Back in my DfT days, one of my teams was working on a project to connect Manchester and Sheffield. TLDR: we’re bringing it back, using a set of engineering techniques that seem able to radically cut the costs. We’re going to build it longer, so it can go under the National Park from side to side. And we’re going to bring back the parallel railway at the same time, because it has a massive synergy.

I’ve spent all week outlining the plan. See www.transpennineconnect.com for lots of details. But for this substack, where we’re a little deeper into the philosophy of infrastructure, I’d like to talk about something else. Not why it makes sense to build a tunnel; but why on earth am I and my compadres so mad as to try and make it happen ourselves?

Atonement

Quite a few people have asked me over the week why I’m doing this, on a personal level. I answer ‘guilt’.

From 2015-20, I was the person responsible for creating the next road investment strategy. We were the first people to have five years to write the next plan, and one of the obligations that came with that was that no problem was too big for now. We created six ‘strategic studies’ that were meant to do at least something to reshape the national map.

I wanted us to have a project on our options list as ambitious as Crossrail, and so we started looking into the Trans-Pennine Tunnel. Links from Manchester to Sheffield are properly terrible. Most big-city pairs have a dual carriageway or motorway link. This pair has two pre-Victorian turnpikes, one of which is infamous for periodically falling down a hill. But in between them is the Peak District National Park, which is not the kind of place you go a-road-building. A tunnel fixes both problems at once, and lets you tear up the surface road and hand the Park back to nature.

Obviously, government didn’t proceed. The benefits were good1; but the cost was just too high.

But deep in the foundations of that decision was a mistake, for which I am at least partly responsible. What I’m doing now is fixing it.

Boring decisions

We’d always assumed that the way we dug the tunnel was a tunnel boring machine (TBM). This is the standard UK approach – basically a 50ft-tall drill that drives its way through the earth using the power of 5-6 skyscrapers. It’s a good method for most of the UK, and when we brought in French tunnelling engineers to be expert consultants on our early trans-Pennine thinking, they didn’t even entertain the idea of another approach. We concluded this was a non-question. All our engineering and modelling work was structured accordingly.

It was maybe 18 months later that I started to see we’d missed something. One criticism of the tunnel plan was that they were unrealistically long2, so I looked for something of equivalent length. I came across Norway, where the Lærdal Tunnel was the longest road tunnel in the world, and therefore a good example to cite. But then one day I idly converted the prices from Norwegian Kroner into UK prices, and did a double take. It had cost under £100m.3

Norwegian tunnelling turned out to be cheap. Extremely cheap. The fact that is most commonly known about Norwegian tunnels is that the Lærdal cost less to build than we have spent on the environmental statement for the Lower Thames Crossing. That’s true. But there’s an even more shocking one.

At the time, we were just finishing upgrading the A14 in Cambridgeshire – a 21-mile long project adding a lane to an important dual carriageway that ended up costing £1.5bn. We were extremely proud of the project, and rated it a massive success. At the same time, the Norwegians were working on a project called the Ryfast. It was a new dual carriageway, similar scale, and cost around half as much per mile. It was also 300 metres under the sea.

And now the divergence is absurd. The M25/A12 junction upgrade adds a (quite complicated) two-lane sliproad to an important M25 junction for £180m. In contrast on the Faroe Islands they were digging two five-mile long tunnels between different islands for £100m and £130m.4 They even threw in the world’s first undersea roundabout.

They use these methods to connect islands with 300 people together, and consider this to be common sense. So why were we struggling to use it to connect an area with 50x more inhabitants than the Faroes?

Don’t be boring

What I now know is that the Norwegians use a different engineering technique: a mixture of drill and blast, together with a wider tunnelling philosophy called the New Austrian Tunnelling Method.

• This does away with the big boring machine, and instead uses a team of expert tunnellers who use a mixture of dynamite and construction plant to clear the rock away.

• Rather than building a big concrete ring a foot thick to hold up the earth, they use the natural strength of the rock to hold up the roof, aided with steel bolts and a sprayed concrete mix.

This method can’t work in soft ground, ruling out most of the UK. But it can work in hard rock, like the Pennines. And the resulting cost per mile was about 90% less than we were expecting on our project.

You’d imagine that having identified the opportunity, the next steps of the story would go something like this: I would say ‘they make cheap tunnels here, let’s find out more’, we’d investigate, learn, adapt and implement. After all, these tunnels have been built, for prices that we can audit and account for. This is not theory, and facts should quickly resolve any disputes.

What actually happened was that I shared what I knew with my project lead. I asked them to find out more, and they said they would. And they didn’t. Three or four times. What I should have done as the person in charge was to hold them for account to that, but I had other priorities.

I also tried to flag it up with the wider project governance. Deciding to be a little devious, I thought this would work best if it was a challenge from Transport for the North, who notionally co-led the project, rather than me. I teed up the right person, put the information in his hands. And after mentioning it in one meeting, he never returned to the question.

Later, it dawned on me why there was so little interest in taking action. If you are able to find a 10% cost saving in a project, you are everyone’s best friend. But if you find a 90% cost saving, you are everyone’s worst nightmare – because you’ve implied that everyone else is a fool, and the system they are part of is inept.

Back then, I had faith in the system, so I waited patiently for evidence and facts to win out. I did not do what I should have done, which was to shout and yell and make a lot of hullabaloo to insist that we dig into this until we could explain clearly what was impossible about it. Perhaps I would have been quietly told not to fuss – clearly there had to be a reason we weren’t already doing this But at least then I would have tried, and wouldn’t have been as accountable for the consequences.

Instead in 2020 the project went to the big investment board, and came back without a tick. Not a no, because you couldn’t say ‘no’ to a business case like that without giving yourself awkward questions on a bunch of rail projects. But the kind of ‘not yet’ that could easily be read as ‘don’t come back’. A year later, after I’d left roads, the whole thing was shut down.

Redemption

I might have lacked skill; but I have never lacked stubbornness. Four years later, I wasn’t a civil servant any more. And given that this still bothered me, I decided I would lay this question to rest myself. I picked up the phone to a company called Norconsult, who were the consultancy behind many of these tunnels.

It turns out that the answer to the question ‘why don’t we do this like the Norwegians’ was ‘because you didn’t pick up the phone’. After an hour’s conversation, I understood drill and blast; I understood the link with geology; and I understood that their cost-per-mile figures were business-as-usual, not freaks of particular projects. I learned they had exported the technique to Iceland, to the Faroes and to Sweden – where they were building an underground version of the M25 around Stockholm. And as I read more on the history of Norwegian tunnelling afterwards, I learned why they hadn’t used a TBM in decades.

Then I began filling in my own pieces of the puzzle. I could see how the project geology would be on our side. The British Geological Survey confirmed the ground conditions; Norconsult sent me photos of a tunnel under construction right now through comparable rock using their methods.5

And I could take all the other work from the old study, and revise it in light of what I now knew. It was obvious at once that these cost reductions meant we had something vanishingly rare – a megaproject that would be able to pay back its own costs. The UK hasn’t had one of those in a very long time.

There’s a whole separate post to be written about how this rewrites the life story of a major project. The short version is that the development of a major project is wrapped around internal games that government unconsciously chooses to play, and we aren’t obliged to follow that path. This means we avoid things like the forced-rethink of the Leeds Tram, and we capture opportunities (like restoring a rail line to better-manage construction waste) that the state can’t see. And, because I’ve laboured under those rules for too long, that’s immediately visible.

Not to mention that the business case, which looked solid when the cost was in the range of £10bn, looks world-changing when you’ve brought the costs down to Norwegian levels.

Freedom

So – we can build the tunnel now, right? Right?

No. All I have is fate standing there, clapping and laughing at me. You’ve found out that this project has the potential to be great value. Wonderful. You probably should have done it right when you could then, because this project isn’t getting a second chance.

If I had any illusions about that, they were quickly dispelled when I called a few old DfT friends to say what I’d found. It was all very polite, but totally unbelieving: this cannot be true. It is too far from what we know. Offering them photographs of the delivered projects that disagreed did not change any minds. How could an institution as big as a government department miss something as big as this?6

Well, I was in the room when we missed it. I know how many seconds it took.

So if anything was going to happen with this fact, people outside of central government will need to be the ones making it happen. The numbers make it possible; the missing piece is the machine to do the hard yards.

So say hello to Future Works – me, and a few likeminded people, who think this is worth trying. And, over the months ahead, will start assembling the necessary machinery to make this real. In twenty years of infrastructure, I haven’t seen an opportunity like this – either for the people who make it or for the nation as a whole. If you let that pass – twice – you will spend the rest of your life in the shadow of what you never did.

So wish us luck: we’ve got a mountain to move.

Thanks for reading to the end – if you want to hear me unpack more, I should be on YIMBY pod from Monday telling a little bit more; and we’ll be unpacking our ideas more over the summer. We love to do this with friends, so if you’d like us to write for/talk with you, please do get in touch. And if you are a financier who would like to transform the north whilst getting a commercial return, now would be the perfect moment to chat.

It’s not the outcome you would have imagined two years ago, when Keir Starmer’s government came to power promising to build and build. We were told there would be 150 nationally significant infrastructure projects signed off by 2029. But if those infrastructure targets were ever going to be hit, it wasn’t here.

Roads to nowhere

It has been a tough decade for roads spending. In 2015, when we first moved to five-year planning, we planned to start around one road scheme a month. Only 11 years later, when the latest five-year plan (RIS3) came out, we were down to one a year. With the DIP cuts1, that’s now down to three starts over the entire five-year period.

If you put together the RIS3 funding data with the funding information in the Defence Investment Plan, the results aren’t subtle. Since I left the team in 2020, we’ve seen investment drop by 85% in nominal terms, and more like 90% in real. That’s an extraordinary decline for a decade

With the DIP cuts, spending is down to about £330m in the lowest year, which would (once accounting for inflation) make this the lowest level of spending on road upgrades since postwar austerity.2

Bridges to despair

The cuts to road schemes might be thought of as a matter of resources and priorities. But Hammersmith Bridge is a more elemental failure.

The symbolism of it is too on-the-nose: a bridge in the middle of one of the richest cities in the world that cannot be repaired. No one would take the responsibility – not the responsible council; not London’s mayor; not the DfT. All of them said it was terrible, and someone else should sort it out.

It was so galling that last year government announced a £1bn fund for fixing failing structures, with the subtext that this, at last, will fix Hammersmith Bridge. But, in a twist that would have made Kafka proud, Hammersmith and Fulham council have decided not to apply for enough money to fully fix the bridge – just enough to keep it from collapse and not enough to allow vehicles to drive over again.

Cycling twitter has been cock-a-hoop at the thought of cars being punished; but serious people will see nothing good in five bus routes being permanently knocked out, an entire London neighbourhood losing its access to the tube, and Putney High Street now permanently required to take twice as much traffic.

This was a bridge that had survived the Blitz and IRA bombing campaigns. Now, we have to assume, the thing that did for it in the end was our own ineptitude. It is beyond us to replace it with anything new, the way the Victorians did. It is beyond us to repair it. And it is also seemingly beyond us to feel sufficient shame for our elected leaders to knock heads together and insist on a solution.

Everything is not fine

Whenever I post about the decline of the road network, I say ‘don’t blame the government’. Today is no exception - these declines have happened under five prime ministers of different hues and spirits. Even if individual decisions aren’t helping, if you focus on political decisions you are letting the real culprits off.

What we are seeing here is much more the result of institutional dysfunction. When Hammersmith Bridge needed replacing in Victorian times, there was a strong civic institution – the Metropolitan Board of Works – which used a special Act of Parliament to take over the old bridge from its owner.

Today, the MBW’s successor is the Mayor of London. He is happy leaving the Borough authorities to sort out Hammersmith Bridge, whilst simultaneously lobbying for the funding required for a new DLR crossing at Thamesmead. Parliament, which once put its power behind the MWB to create clear responsibilities, now sits on the sidelines.

There was no Ministry of Transport until 1919; no London Transport until 1933. These should make a problem like this far easier to solve, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.3 Likewise, the collapse in road investment has come about in the decade after we established National Highways as a powerful arms-length body intended to preserve the health of our network for the long term.

And all of that is an echo of other crises of infrastructure. A navy down to six destroyers. A water system that can’t clean water. A power system that is the most expensive in Europe. A railway that takes two decades to go nowhere. A capital city that has lost the ability to make houses.

This is not a problem of one bridge, or one policy decision, or one trade-off – it is the result of something much deeper. It is a failure of the connection between things. None of these problems gets fixed in isolation – it requires a leader with vision; the team that can make it into reality; the institutions that can forge consensus and channel power. Not so long ago, we could master that; but now it no longer coheres.

Happy endings

Hammersmith Bridge is the location of the last scene in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven. If you haven’t seen it, it is a dark television series where characters go through an increasingly grim storyline, but periodically break off to lip-sync renditions of sappy 1930s ballads. The point being to show the painful gap between the romance of songs and the reality of life.

The climax comes when Bob Hoskins’ lead character being hanged for a murder he didn’t commit. His lover goes to Hammersmith Bridge to throw herself into the water. But then, at this deep low, Potter pulls the rug from under us. Without explanation, Hoskins reappears, they embrace, and before the series finishes with a dance on the the bridge, Hoskins turns to the camera with a twinkle in his eye and says

“We couldn’t have gone through all that without a happy ending.”

We could use a happy ending here, couldn’t we?

Stay tuned…

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There are plenty of people who can offer you a take on what Burnhamism means for politics, and how a coming leadership contest will play out. But you don’t come to this substack for that sort of analysis. Instead, let’s talk about how this accelerates one of the most important trends in UK transport policy.

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That guy does transport

The biggest thing to happen to transport in recent years has arguably been the creation of combined authorities and their mayors. Since being created in the late 2010s, these have become visible champions of their areas. And now, nearly a decade later, we are seeing the results of this, and it’s overwhelmingly a matter of transport.

This isn’t coincidence. The mayoral model was devised around Manchester, when Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein were driving forward major local growth. Transport was one of their biggest problems, and the bus deregulation of the 1980s was held to be major cause. So the big legal power that this new generation of mayors got was to bring in bus franchising.

Since then we have seen an upsurge of new ideas for improving transport in cities and areas with mayors. The biggest example is Manchester’s Bee Network, but it ranges from Glider buses in Liverpool to proposals to reopen old railway lines in Sunderland to bus rapid transport from Nottingham to Derby to autonomous pods in tunnels in Cambridge. Manchester kept the bus fare subsidies that London cancelled. South Yorkshire propped up an airport; Teesside bought one outright.

Not every decision in there is necessarily wise; but every single one of them is local. And as a result, we are seeing a lot more ideas lining up looking for funding, with a big local champion with a much bigger stake in showing results. Ben Hopkinson, an expert on tram schemes, has pointed out this political dynamic is a key reason why France has 28 tram schemes, including one in a town smaller than Yeovil.

That’s in part because transport has political rewards in this world. Last year the Good Growth Foundation put out this survey result, which was immensely revealing: people do not rate locally elected mayors as being able to achieve much for growth. But they think transport can do this, and the mayors run transport. So mayors have a real incentive to make transport run better.

Andy Burnham was the one who cracked this first – while people might ask how much credit he deserves for Manchesterism, the transport plan very much came together on his watch. You could spend a long time on what that plan did and didn’t do, but the key fact for our purposes is that the man who pulled together a new approach to transport is now in charge in Westminster.

Successor states

But that’s only half the story. To understand what’s happening we need to go down to London, where the Department for Transport is on fire.

The past ten years have been a grim decade for DfT. You have seen HS2 collapse and fail. You will have seen less of how the pandemic wrecked the finances of the railway and cut the business case out from the big rail projects; how the roads programme gave up on building anything new. Once there was a pipeline of good things to do; but since 2020 this has effectively collapsed.

This meant that all these creative mayors are the only ones with new ideas to pursue. Rather than competing with central organisations, they are mostly filling a transport vacuum. This was already intuited before the 2024 general election, and the new government handed over most of the development and delivery cash to the established mayors. It already seemed that all of the pipeline of new ideas was going to be mayorally-driven.

Old enemies

This seemed to be working up until late 2025. Then it became clear that while DfT might fall easily; Treasury is another matter.

This became visible around the Leeds Tram. In theory, this was a shoe-in: not only was it a totemic northern project on which a Labour mayor had wagered her political future; it also had the Chancellor as a local MP and a big booster. You can make a decent case against the tram if you wish, but there was a very clear sense that this had the kind of overwhelming support that needed to be respected by Whitehall funders.

As you know, it didn’t work out that way. Instead, Treasury’s infrastructure arm NISTA pushed the project back saying it needs a grand strategic rethink. Only when that was done, and several more years had passed, would anyone in the centre will even think of providing money. This has been interpreted as nothing short of systemic betrayal. More significantly, it is a demonstration that any amount of local autonomy will still be run by Treasury’s rules.

So the changes mayors have been able to deliver have tended to focus on everyday activities like running buses, which fit within their discretionary budgets. But the bigger investments, in which so much hope is being invested, are not materialising. As a result, West Yorkshire has a branded ‘Weaver Network’ coming soon, but remains the largest city in Western Europe without a tram.

This merges with a much older criticism of Whitehall’s investment system, that it works against the north and that its obsession with measurable returns is used as a way to push funds towards the areas that are already doing well. Andy Burnham has not been shy in becoming the spokesman for that cause.

The rebel takes the throne?

This looked set to be a long-term shift in the politics of infrastructure. But put an ex-mayor in No.10, and the dynamic changes. Instead of those powerful Treasury officials being the people closest to No.10, they are now the people whom the prime minister-to-be sees as the greatest culprits. And the rest of the country is watching for change: a Burnham government that can’t unlock something like the Leeds tram has arguably failed to deliver a core promise.

Previously, I had expected a gentle, miserly equilibrium as Treasury fought off claims for extra funds. Instead, we are heading for a world where regional asks may have more opportunity than ever to ask for rules to be waived or outcomes prioritised over process.

But don’t get too carried away. You might have said the same of the 2024 Labour team as well: intent is one thing, delivery is harder. There is a lot more to advancing a programme than pointing decisively and insisting that it is time for change.

If you want to see how far this will get, I would suggest watching three particular questions:

1. Skill level – the treasury approach to investment is very ingrained, and cannot be overcome casually. If you turn up to fix the problem in the final committee, you will lose. Good people are needed to plan and prepare to win these internal fights.

2. Money – under the current ruleset, there isn’t any. Changing the rules is high-stakes.

3. Time – even with every red light turned green, construction projects take time to assemble. In transport, it’s very rare to get spades in the ground within five years, never mind three. Big changes, like bus franchising, are unlikely to be implemented before a 2029 general election. Equally, though, it does seem strange to be writing off three years with a 100+ majority just because the rulebook you inherited says it must be so.

We will know how well they’ve done in a few years. If we see people actually building things, that implies success. If we see mayors standing in front of repainted buses, we know otherwise.

And I would particularly watch the rail system. The process of turning Network Rail into GBR has taken so long that the rise of the mayoral system had not even got started when the reform process began. That means we have a railway that is built for maximum central control operating alongside a lot of powerful mayors who want local changes for local goals. There are good reasons GBR is centralised, but this is set to be a real clash of viewpoints.

What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow

I thought that this was going to be a shift over a decade or two; it turns out it might be a lot faster. And to many of us in the years ahead, this will be a matter of whether one institution or another is in the ascendent. Before we get all tribal, let’s all just take a step back and remember how we got here.

Andy Burnham has built a trust with the people of Manchester that the wider Labour party didn’t manage to secure with the rest of the country. That has put him on track for No.10; but it didn’t happen by accident. A recurring theme of coverage has been the extent to which voters felt he had made a meaningful difference to their lives, and was making a sincere effort to turn things around.

Transport was a big part of that. A coat of paint on a bus is more than just a dab of colour; a bus network with someone in charge and where the tickets work and where your bus ticket is one of the few things in your life getting cheaper – that is what good politics used to be able to deliver. It shouldn’t surprise us that people would like to feel that vibe more often.

So here’s to Mayormaxxing. Whatever your politics, we’re nearly all in favour of the idea that government should be able to do something; and that inertia is not our friend. After decades of the centre being in charge, it’s time for the rest of the country to set things in motion.

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I chickened out: I have many friends who worked on HS2, and on balance I thought they might have felt sad if it looked like I was calling for them to be shot. But the question remains – given HS2 has gone so very wrong, who do we blame and what should we do about it?

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And, after Tuesday’s HS2 report launch, I’d say we’re no closer to answering it. We do at least know how much the project costs (£87-102bn), when it will open (2036-9 to West London; 2040-43 for Euston), and how much money we have effectively set on fire (£50bn net welfare loss).1 But what we don’t know is who is to blame. And without wanting to make an extra enemy, I’d say Heidi Alexander’s speech was a sign we’re not going to find out.

It was the other guy

If you put together the new Lovegrove Report with the Stewart Report last year, there’s a message coming out of all the reports and post mortems on HS2 that a key reason things went wrong was political pressure. And in Parliament, Alexander went straight for the Tory jugular.

“If this seems like an obscene increase in time and costs, it is because it is. If it seems that I am angry, it is because I am. I am angry on behalf of taxpayers and affected communities who have been swindled by the failures of successive Conservative Governments”

“To translate: it was a massively over-specced folly, with the prospect of the fastest trains anywhere in the world tickling the fancy of Conservative Ministers.”

“I do question where the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (ex-Tory transport minister and shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden), is today. This is not the first time that he has run scared from an oral statement, and I can only assume that it is because he is embarrassed by his party’s abject record on transport.”

I hold no brief for Tory ex-ministers – I’ve known good ones driven by a passion for public service and bad ones driven around in the biggest ministerial cars they can wheedle. But I think that making this political is a serious misdiagnosis of the problem.

To be clear, there’s no doubt that HS2 was shaped by political pressure. The civil service consensus on the merits of high speed rail was spelled out in the highly-respected 2006 Eddington Report, which could be summarised as ‘whatever you do, don’t build a high speed railway’. In 2009, Labour minister Andrew Adonis announced we should build a high speed railway from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and maybe beyond.

There were a lot of decisions made after this point, under Tory leadership, which don’t look good in hindsight; and many of these had a political element to them. So there is a basis in seeing the problem as anchored in ministerial decisions.2

But in saying that we set up an unspoken implication – if the bad politicians made everything go wrong, everyone else was just an unlucky victim. Thank goodness that the bad people are gone, and only the good people are left.

You can see the attraction of that – for the ministers responsible today; for the civil servants whose career is mid-flight. But it also means we don’t ask ourself the most important questions of all about what went wrong with HS2.

Scapegoat of State

The complaint about the role of politics is that it made certain decisions – particularly the ones that were needed to reduce the costs and scope – impossible to make. For example there’s a consensus that speed made the whole project much costlier3, but you supposedly couldn’t drop the speed because the politicians wouldn’t let you.

It’s certainly true that officials felt there were things they couldn’t do. The trouble is that, if you talk to the politicians, they felt exactly the same way. I remember talking to someone who was very influential in the Department during a crucial design period, when it was becoming clear that achieving the proposed speed was going to require huge amounts of unexpected ground stabilisation. They said that it felt like they had no choice either. You couldn’t be responsible for ‘not-so-high-speed-2’.

So if you really want to chase this back to its source, the real problem is that HS2 was presented to the world as a simple, clear and very coherent vision: a very good train like the kind you get in France or Japan, to link our biggest cities together. Departing from this was a huge risk for everyone - politician or official. I would not describe this as politics; and I wouldn’t really describe it as strategy either – almost one of those Terry Pratchett situations where the story has a life of its own, and is making all the humans dance to its beat.

Original sin

So should we say it’s all the fault of Andrew Adonis for forcing that narrative dance upon us? If you’re going to blame it on politics, maybe; but I would disagree with that too.

In 2009, it wasn’t unreasonable for a politician to propose a new high speed railway. We’d just finished building HS1, which is half the length of HS2 phase 1, and which had been delivered on time and on budget. The vibe in the department (after years of worries about cost and schedule overruns) was that HS1 showed we knew how to build this stuff. Adonis himself has mentioned more than once the inspiration of past major infrastructure programmes like the motorway network, and my read is that he wanted to do something for the railways that would have a similar impact.4 That is the kind of leadership we generally blame politicians for not providing.

As it turns out, Adonis did make a serious mistake. But it wasn’t in thinking there was a case for building a high speed railway5. It was in assuming the DfT could deliver what he asked.

The word no one said

In saying this I need to be clear – I do not accuse the people sent to build HS2 of being personally incompetent. I know a huge number of good people in DfT and HS2 ltd who gave their whole effort to making the project work. These people have been more betrayed than anyone by the course of events.

But I would not be so generous to the system they were part of. It’s essential to remember that HS2 has failed because of more than a decade of great effort on the part of the system it was entrusted to; and in other countries this process works. It could not fail on that scale because of a few bad apples - you need a tree that grows season after season of cursed fruit.

The real question for why HS2 went wrong is why the word ‘stop’ was never said. We now know this is a project where costs were unknown, schedule ungoverned, the delivery board had lost control and where the BCR was 0.3-0.4.6 DfT deployed many tools that are supposed to pick these things up.

But they didn’t. Even when it was their explicit responsibility. One of the quiet evidence drops around this week’s announcement was a set of four Accounting Officer statements around the decision to proceed with HS2 construction. The Permanent Secretary of the Department produces these when they need to confirm that an idea meets the standards expected of public spending, and is an opportunity to challenge ministers where there are doubts about this. Ministers are then entitled to overrule them should the reason to proceed be a political one. Each time the Permanent Secretary’s assessment is the same – we are still within the bounds of acceptable action.7

Or take the infamous benefit cost ratio - the number that DfT bases so much of its thinking around. A decade of hard calculation was put into this, and in these notes there are various assessments that swear the value for money could be justified. I remember in 2010 they went so far as to redefine the value of time in order to boost the numbers. Yet the latest accounting officer summary shows these numbers were so wildly out that you could reasonably call them worse than useless.

Nor is this just a series of errors just before the decision to invest. This is built on top of ten years of work in DfT to set up and manage the arrangements for building HS2, when the Department knew that everything was not plain sailing. Take this paragraph:

This might sound like the kind of action people would take in 2022 or 2020 when project costs were a source of deep concern. It is actually from 2010, when HS2 was initiated. They were concerned then that the price of high speed rail in the UK was roughly double the European average. The neighbouring paragraph reassures readers that even a 5-10% reduction could save up to £1.5bn. Unfortunately, after a decade and a half of study and action by civil servants, the result has been a 400% cost increase. Had the original report put a figure on that outcome, it could have saved us all a nasty shock.

The problems were known. What is startling is that the methods applied to address it didn’t work; and didn’t really change either.8 There was a constant expectation that one more round of analysis, or one more effort to improve programme management, or one more rewrite of a terms of reference would fix it. And, when a decade of this clearly hadn’t worked, the top people still waved it through.

If this sounds harsh, please remember - this is something I have been complicit in. Some of what I say here is a criticism of a whole class of public service, in which I used to number. My space was highways, but if government infrastructure teams can’t govern these enormous risks properly, you eventually hit the stage where the rest of the world has to ask ‘what is the point of you?’ And, more pointedly, ‘is there any alternative to these people?’

We’re all looking for the person who did this

Does this mean DfT is asking itself searching questions about whether it is fit for purpose? Well, nobody wants that.

The newly published Lovegrove Review was designed to take forward the questions from the Stewart Review that were of particular relevance for HS2 Ltd (the government company set up to build the railway) and at DfT. And its conclusion is that HS2 Ltd really let the civil servants down.

There are recommendations for DfT – they needed more skills, they needed to understand risk. The job of the person responsible for overseeing HS2 within DfT was too big, and couldn’t be done properly.9 But the elephants in the room go unrecognised: why was it that, after a decade of effort and analysis, ministers were advised to push ahead with a broken project on flawed data? Where were the warnings? How had problems been fixed? Who was writing plan B, as opposed to xeroxing plan A and changing the names?

This is a conspiracy of powerlessness: civil servants of different departments agreeing that their job is not to deliver success or warn of imminent failure, but to ensure the highest professional standards of aimless drift.

A once in a generation mistake

In another corner of the civil service, they are talking about revising the Civil Service code – the document that is meant to drive the behaviour of the profession. A frequent criticism of the current one is that it encourages timid, passive behaviour, and there is an appetite all the way up to the new Cabinet Secretary to change that. Re:State published a good paper on this earlier in the month, that suggested new values that civil servants should be expected to display. Ownership; excellence; courage; openness.

I think the HS2 debacle shows civil servants working on infrastructure need some of those missing values. Courage is essential – the simplest error on HS2 was the inability to speak about what everyone already knew. Ownership is the thing that means you fix problems, rather than imagine someone else will be your saviour. Excellence may be a stretch here, but let’s start by expecting that efforts should lead to measurably better results; and if it doesn’t it is openness that will allow those problems to be managed rather than buried.10

This will probably be the last time anyone is invited to ask big questions about what went wrong on HS2. But it shouldn’t be. On a purely practical note, DfT is sponsoring Northern Powerhouse Rail, East West Rail and the Lower Thames Crossing, whose combined value is over £60bn, and none of which has passed the point of no return. These are excellent projects, and they deserve to be known as something better than a national embarrassment.

Either the civil service works out how to support infrastructure, or we’ll see more grand projects fall over in an expensive and avoidable way. We need to get to a place where ministers, setting visions for their departments, can rely on delivery without having to check. There are still a lot of lessons to learn from HS2, and we’ve got powerful reasons to keep studying.

Because the biggest mistake we can make on HS2 is to do the same thing twice.

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Twitter had other ideas. For most of the long weekend, I watched YIMBYs and the chair of Natural England sparring about fish protection at Hinkley Point C. The centre of which was a Telegraph article claiming Natural England wouldn’t let the plant start operating until huge new saltmarshes, deeply unwanted by locals, were in place. And, as this could take 8 years to complete, that could mean up to four years’ delay on the plant opening.

My shed stayed unpainted as I tried to reconstruct what was behind this. Because the deeper I went, the more I realised this wasn’t a story about fish.

Be prepared for a most depressing happy ending.

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Fish lives matter

Let’s start with the basics. Hinkley Point C is Britain’s first nuclear plant since the 1990s, and has turned into one of the most expensive in the world. One of the most contentious points is a £700m system that has been installed to stop fish getting sucked into the plant’s water intake pipe; of which £50m is for a system known as an acoustic fish deterrent – an AFD in planning documents and a ‘fish disco’ in the newspapers.

The public debate has largely been about how many fish can reasonably be killed during the operation of the power plant. The ideal answer would obviously be zero, but this is easier said than done when most of these fish are microscopically small. And there is a reasonable debate about how much difference the £700m package makes, especially considering no other power station in the world has such a system.1 That is especially true for the £50m AFD.

But the law requires all possible steps to be taken to prevent harm to protected species, and Natural England and its sea-based counterpart the Marine Management Organisation exists to enforce that law. If it takes £700m of kit to do that, then the project would need to get £700m more expensive. The whole system was included in the development consent order for the plant, with the instruction that the cooling system for the plant could not be switched on unless the system was in place.

All lives matter

So how did we get from here to government-mandated flooding of 900 acres (about 1.3 square miles) of countryside?

Most of the debate on the AFD has been about whether it saves enough fish to justify the cost. But that’s a red herring here.2 The issue isn’t dead fish; it’s dead people.

‘Acoustic fish deterrent’ sounds very high tech, but it’s basically a set of 288 underwater loudspeakers, placed underneath the water intakes to play sounds that will scare the fish away. The technology is already used in the fishing and underwater construction industries to keep dolphins, seals and so on at a distance. But those use-cases are temporary, or see the equipment hauled to the surface on a regular basis - meaning maintenance isn’t an issue.

At Hinkley Point C, they have to be permanent – which means maintenance needs to be done underwater. And because the tidal range of the Bristol Channel is about 10m, the intakes have to be a long way out to sea in order to get a constant water supply. There was no system in the world that had been built for that particular set of circumstances. And in hindsight, they really should have paused on that point. Instead, in 2013 the authorities assumed it was going to be a solvable problem and stuck the AFD into the mandatory planning obligations, meaning it had to be in place for the plant to become operational.

In 2016, the engineers from EDF came back with bad news. It turned out that designing an AFD for this particular location was much, much harder than they had thought, and that maintenance in particular was going to be near-impossible. You had to wire these speakers to heavy duty power systems, which could only be maintained by divers. Those divers would need to work 72 days a year to maintain everything – and there weren’t 72 days’ worth of suitable conditions. Even if they could, they would need to work with near zero visibility, next to operating intakes, with only 30-60 minute windows in which they could work.

Diving is dangerous: not everyone who goes down comes back up. EDF has tolerated a lot in the construction of Hinkley Point C – hence the price tag – but this was the one planning condition that they were firm they could no longer satisfy. This was too dangerous, and they could not do it.3

Fields don’t matter

Saying ‘we don’t want to kill our workers’ isn’t enough of an excuse in the planning system, so in order to make up for the loss of the deterrent, EDF had to come up with a mitigation plan.

If you were wondering why people are arguing about flooding 900 acres of farmland, this is why. This is what the rulebook for these situations expects: what damage you can’t avoid you must mitigate if at all possible. If you are now sucking more fish into your intakes than originally planned, you must make it up elsewhere. Creating new saltmarsh habitats for the fish gives them more space to breed, and helps bring the numbers back up. So EDF began looking for land it could compulsorily purchase and inundate.

Flooding 1.3 square miles of the local area went down about as well as could be expected – even the local Wildlife Trust was furious.4 But this is what would be required to avoid the twin threats to fish and human life. And, with this much clean power and investment capital at stake, no one was going to take the risk of not doing anything.

The unhappiest happy ending

The lines of the debate seemed set. Position one: environmental regulators requiring the absolute minimum disruption to fish; position two: a power company that said it couldn’t in all conscience install a system that would kill people; position three: locals who couldn’t understand why the system was determined to drown their land.

But then, in 2025, there was a twist. Someone invented a better fish disco.

Specifically, one that used ultrasound, reducing the power requirements to a level that works from battery power. That means it the speakers don’t need wires and can be picked up by underwater robots rather than divers. No more risk of death.

And EDF was delighted. When it became clear that this was a possibility, EDF rushed out a programme to prototype and tested it at the site. They even invited the Chair of Natural England to come down and tag some of the fish for the monitoring, and he happily obliged. When the results came back showing it was fully effective, EDF unveiled the new system to the press. They said they’d now be happy to bring back the deterrent, and that the saltmarsh plans could be scrapped.

What a triumph! There was only one small problem.

The new system has to be signed off by the environmental authorities. And the new system should be signed off, with a mixture of relief and jubilation. But, according to the Telegraph’s story, someone in Natural England didn’t get the memo. Because they’re quoted as saying that the ultrasound’s effect on scaring away some of the fish species has yet to be proven. And until it is proven to work for every type of protected fish, EDF still needs to flood all that land.

The Salmon of Doubt

This is hardly the outcome you’d choose. If we’d known this kind of deterrent was possible in 2013, it would have been the option the planning inspectors required. But invent it ten years into the project’s development, such that it represents a change, and the regulatory system assumes you are up to no good.

This is obviously daft. When an organisation, locked into a big environmental conundrum like this, researches ground-breaking new technology to provide a way out, it should be a cause for celebration.

I reckon that Natural England’s senior management understand this all too well.5 It’s no coincidence that the Chair of Natural England was helping with the fish tagging in person – he clearly wants to be seen to help resolve this problem. But frustratingly, thanks to the way the story has been reported, his organisation looks obstinate and uncaring. Natural England has the double problem as well that it can’t actually approve the AFD: the final decision belongs to the Marine Management Organisation, who actually sign off the new AFD as working.6

The management put out a rapid blog to set out their position when the Telegraph story landed, with the recurring theme that they really did want to support this project, that they were very impressed by the AFD data so far, and they were only doing what the law obliged them to do. And, for what it’s worth, I think this was sincere.7

But I also think that there’s something they can’t say, but know in their hearts: that the law is making them do things that are extremely hard to defend. We would expect Natural England to be jubilant that the fish disco is going ahead; instead, it is hardwired to demand that 900 acres are flooded until 100% of its demands are met. Once again, the thing that is protecting all the wonders of nature is a system as narrow-minded and relentless as the paperclip AI.

Add to that a culture under which every concession secured must be held and never surrendered. I have now read a fair number of Natural England documents, where they profess to be compelled to act by the law and the science. But if that means setting policy about what ‘must’ be done in such a way that it puts distant workers at risk of death or floods hundreds of acres from afar, I would suggest something more than law and science is needed.

At the bank holiday weekend, there should have been no fight.8 At this point, every serious person wants to see the plant up and running. EDF and the environmentalists have agreed that the fish disco will happen. The only thing standing in the way of exhausted agreement are the badly-designed laws that force Natural England to take indefensible positions, and rob them of the instinct to soften their stance when common sense demands it.

Personally, I wouldn’t shout at the leaders of Natural England for this; because all they will say is the law gives them no choice. But I’d cut the strings above their hands, and tell them they can’t say they are puppets any more. Because if we want a durable system for protecting nature, we need to see humans in charge.

We YIMBYs have our favourite stories. The bat tunnel; the fish disco; and the tunnel that has spent a quarter of a billion on planning applications without breaking ground. What if I told you that the last of these – the application for the Lower Thames Crossing – never needed to happen in the first place?

To be clear – this is not something my old colleagues on the roads programme1 could have seen in advance. But government has made a quiet announcement about the future of the Crossing which has inadvertently put us in a position where the whole messy and ridiculously expensive process could have been avoided altogether…

Accountants and wizards

The convention in England2 is that major river crossings have tolls on them. There’s a history behind this that can wait for another day – for now, focus on the fact that a river crossing with a dependable income stream is a very useful thing to many people. If you’re a traveller, you can use the crossing. If you’re a government, it grows the economy. And – importantly – if you’re a pension fund or insurer it creates a steady stream of income that you can use to provide steady payouts to your policyholders.

That means a clever government official can summon a bridge for free: by getting private investors to pay the costs and repay them from the toll revenue. Better still, international accounting rules mean that, provided at least half the costs are paid by users, it doesn’t sit on government’s balance sheet.

And in the 1980s they cracked how to do it.3 The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (the bridge part of the Dartford Crossing) was the first to attempt this, and it was a huge success. It got the green light to build in 1988, it was open by 1991, and it was paid off in full by 2003.4 One of the reasons it was so cheap was because it was an early example of a modern large-scale cable-stayed bridge; and the reason this technique was used was because the private consortium handled the design and took the risk on a new approach. The result was the first bridge across the eastern Thames since Tower Bridge, and it cost £120m.5

A tunnel too far

Unsurprisingly, government has wanted the same deal every major crossing since.6 From the outset the assumption for the Lower Thames Crossing was that we’d do the same trick – get the tunnel to pay for itself. And, if the bridge next door could repay its costs in 12 years, you’d be mad not to.

Small problem: since the late 80s the price of construction has gone up by quite a lot more than the willingness of people to pay tolls. And the Lower Thames Crossing is not a small project – more than 20 miles of road with eight lanes under the Thames itself, and a lot bigger than that bridge. Indeed, while the QE2 used clever techniques to cut the costs, LTC is locked into a fairly expensive engineering technique because rules around protected environmental sites meant the team assumed it had to be a tunnel.7

I mentioned that this approach relied in part on a set of international accounting rules. As long as half the project can be paid for by its users, it doesn’t appear on government’s books. As far as Treasury is concerned, it’s mostly free money – and they’re usually willing to make up the difference if necessary. But once you’re over the 50% line, suddenly government’s most powerful ministry realises just how much they’re on the hook for spending.

And then a really bad cycle kicks in. Treasury tells the project team to get it back the right side of the line. The team goes away and finds savings. But in the meantime cost inflation has pushed the price up even more. The projected toll income hasn’t kept pace. So the Treasury demands more savings. It’s easy for a project to get into a doom loop.

Plus, the bigger it is the less tolerant the big lenders will be. It’s easy to invest in something that will pay itself off in a decade or two; but as costs have risen the attraction to private investors becomes less and less. Which means government has to keep offering a better deal.

The Lower Thames Crossing has been in this place for a while. In February it was made official, when the DfT Permanent Secretary had to write a formal note to justify the policy as value for money. Before then there are some obvious tells: the biggest being when all the surface roads - £3bn worth - were split out from the tunnel project and paid for directly by government to keep the tunnel element under the 50% test.

But it seems even this isn’t enough – because now we’re going to play the big card.

Off we go to Parliament

There is one trick that you could do to make the project more commercially valuable. Up until now, every major road crossing has been a concession. That means that the toll operator controls the road for a defined period of time or until a given amount of revenue is recovered, then hands it back to government. But if you let someone own the road forever, that’s worth more.

So last year DfT let it be known that it was looking at a different model for the LTC: a Regulated Asset Base (RAB) model. This is how gas, water, electricity, etc is owned – so not necessarily shocking, but not something used in roads before. That would mean whoever builds the Lower Thames Crossing will own it permanently (together with the existing Dartford Crossing, which is to be transferred with it).

That will get you more revenue, but it gives you one rather obvious problem. You’re about to hand over the busiest road in the UK, on which millions of people rely. And whoever owns that road is going to want to change the prices at some point. Trouble is, they’ve got something close to a monopoly power, and can set the price a lot higher than what it currently is. If you want to know how badly this can go, take a look at ferry prices to get a car onto the Isle of Wight, which can now be £300/trip at peak holiday season.

But you can’t just say government will set the prices. If you’re a business looking to invest billions in order to get returns over decades, you can’t leave your farebox to the whim of ministers either. Without greater surety, you can’t invest; and the Crossing never gets built in the first place.

Before you panic, this is a problem with a well-established answer – appoint a neutral party to set a ‘reasonable’ price. And in gas, water, electricity and so on that job is done by independent regulators like OFWAT, OFGEM and so on.

However we have a problem for roads – because the Office of Rail and Road doesn’t do that job. It doesn’t have the relevant legal powers. And I would know, because in 2014/15 I wrote the legislation that got them into the roads business.

So if you’re going to need to change the powers of the ORR, that absolutely requires new legislation. Which has one extremely ironic consequence…

Crossing the same stream twice

This isn’t the first time a crossing of the Thames here has required legislation. Because the QE2 bridge – that ultra-successful PFI – also had its own act of Parliament.

That Act covered off how the bridge was to be paid for. But at the same time it also gave the bridge full planning permission. Because Parliament can do that.

So that £279m-and-counting, 400,000 page, 10-year struggle to get a planning application through? It turns out we could just have written it into a government bill, and skipped most of the process. This is how many words it takes:

And that’s … quite a lot less than a quarter of a billion pounds worth of work.8

So the most notorious example of UK planning bloat turns out to have been completely unnecessary.

Captain Hindsight to the Rescue

It’s too late for this to be a useful insight: one of the government’s biggest planning achievements was actually granting planning permission to the Lower Thames Crossing in 2025. It’s more one of those realisations that send all good civil servants mad towards the end.

You may well take away the thought that we should be using Parliament to fix these problems a little more often. A few people are chasing the same thought right now: the Centre for British Progress and Labour Together did a good paper on doing this at Heathrow for example. I want to write more about this in the future, as there’s a lost story about how we tried to speed up planning in the 80s and early 90s that centres on this method – but that’s for another day.

But there is a more direct lesson worth taking from Lower Thames Crossing: that we don’t take the challenges of construction seriously. There’s a parallel version of the story of the Crossing, when people sat down just before serious development started in the early 2010s, and recognised they were about to start the most expensive road project in the history of the country. They looked hard at the path ahead, and asked up front for the tools that could deliver maximum progress at minimum risk. In that world, we’d have had the legislation in place by the mid/late-2010s, construction underway before 2020, and you’d be driving on it by now.9

Instead, people saw this as another piece of engineering, and once the policy decision to do it was reached all the policy officials went on to more interesting questions. They left the project team to build this thing by themselves; just like we left HS2 and many others to get on with doing … whatever it is non-policy people do.

We’ve never been short of opinions to give to project teams. But we seldom give them access to the full toolkit the state has at its disposal. If we do, we never give them the leadership to use those tools to maximum effect. There’s a tragedy about the contrast between the sophistication of the engineering techniques being deployed in a project like this, and the policy officials like me turning up as whimsical amateurs to guide it through its greatest trials.

As it stands, the lesson officials will be taking is ‘dream smaller’. Which is never the right answer.

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But I was wrong. In December, the project was put back by years, so it couldn’t open until the late 2030s. At Easter we learnt more – that the government’s infrastructure acceleration unit NISTA had said the business case wasn’t ready enough. Not only did they want another 2-3 years of assessments, but they even wanted to see a first-principles test of why the project couldn’t just be a bus instead.1

The question a lot of people seem to be asking is ‘how can this happen?’ In a government elected on a promise to build fast, and with every intention of building this very specific project, how is this slipping away?

Well, I can help with that. Because this project is far from alone – allow me to introduce you to the world of limbostructure. And let’s start by chasing a helicopter.

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South of the border

There are some projects which local people just know we ought to build. If you’re in the North East, the go-to example is the A1 from Newcastle to Edinburgh. A road that is an eight-lane motorway in John Major’s old constituency unravels into a single-carriageway road with a poor safety record once you get north of Morpeth.

So in 2014, government promised action. David Cameron descended by chopper, like the Angel of the South East, and announced that government would bring forward 13 miles of dualling – enough to link together all the existing dualled section into a continuous modern highway. Not enough to get to Edinburgh, but a big start; and welcomed even by his critics. It would, he promised, be in construction by 2020.

Don’t go up there looking for it, though – because in 2026 not only is the scheme not built; it’s been cancelled.

That should surprise you, because every single Prime Minister between Cameron and Starmer has said this thing should be built. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both promised to dual it. Boris said dual more of it, and even rebranded Highways England as National Highways with a mind to take it over the border. When Dominic Cummings wrote about attracting misfits and weirdos, he wanted them specifically to supersize this project. If you look to the right of the photo above you will see Anne-Marie Trevelyan. She made her political career calling for the dualling of this stretch of road and ended up as Transport Secretary, determined to make it start.2 Even Keir Starmer got in on the act in 2023, when he said the lack of progress was “a metaphor for how the country has been run over the last 13 years.” Unfortunately, that took on a double meaning after the election, when his transport secretary cancelled the project altogether.

But there’s another reason for this being a surprise: the project had secured planning permission back in 2021. It wasn’t being blocked by process, or by legal challenges. In legal terms, this was shovel-ready. The Secretary of State just needed to send a letter, which they are supposed to do within three months. Instead, it took more than three years; and only landed two weeks after the general election had been called.

The reason for this was a mystery to outsiders, until the real problem was revealed by a leak last year. Just as all those politicians were promising action, Treasury officials had secretly cancelled the scheme in 2021. The project team was stood down, leaving just a webpage and a skeleton crew. There was no money; which means ministers were unable to sign a letter unbinding the shovels. And when Labour came to power, the choice was not carry on vs cancel, but should government spend half a billion extra here at the same time as it was reviewing winter fuel payments.

Starmer and Sunak and Truss and Johnson were all promising something that deep government had decided it didn’t want to build. And deep government won.

The room where it (doesn’t) happen

I call this limbostructure: projects that government has promised to deliver, but are not really progressing. There’s a lot of it about. National Highways is just finishing off the A63 Castle Street – a project promised in 2002. The new Road Investment Strategy promises to start only five new projects between now and 2031, of which two3 began development under the Brown government. On paper, the typical start-to-finish on a complex infrastructure project should be about ten years; in practice it’s edging closer to 25. The Leeds tram itself is on its third pass, despite having secured full planning powers in 1994.

Surely, I hear you thinking, five prime ministers are enough to break through this kind of deadlock? Clearly not. A PM’s endorsement is a shining, wonderful thing. But it bears very little relationship to the practical business of advancing a project day-by-day. This grey, dull process is of no interest to the wider world – and is therefore entirely beyond (or should that be below) politics.

This is a process of drafting business cases, project documents, consultation exercises, options sifting, extra consultations, redesigns, appraisals, risk meetings, funding boards and so, so much more. It’s a battle of snores between project teams, trying to deliver the project entrusted to them, and external forces that have no great interest in seeing them succeed, but absolutely do not want them causing wider trouble. And both sides categorise politicians primarily as a risk.

The crucial thing about limbostructure is that both sides have an incentive to delay, and therefore give the other side a licence to do so. Project teams want to de-risk, and don’t want to be held to hard deadlines for fear of errors under pressure. The centre would much rather throw in an extra bit of process than deal with the consequences of unwise action. And both sides would be much happier if the tricky bits of the promise vanished into the mists of time.

Sometimes we call it Treasury Brain; sometimes we call it consultationitis; sometimes we call it “allowing time for more effective programme sequencing”. What it always means is putting off for tomorrow what was promised for yesterday.

When this reaches a Prime Minister, or even a junior minister, it’s too late to do anything about it. They might give a frosty glance to whoever is holding things up,4 but they’re hardly about to recalculate the benefit-cost ratio. Provided the concern is anchored in a technical consideration, it can’t easily be challenged and politicians aren’t given the option of overruling it.

Mountains no barrier

But let me give you hope: because it is possible to escape limbo. Remember how the A1 dualling was cancelled because it was a costly road project in the north of England with poor value for money? Well, let me introduce you to the A66 – a road project in the north of England that is poor value for money and costs three times as much as the A1 scheme. And which starts construction later this year, having survived the same conditions.

It’s one of the most inspiring bits of infrastructure the country is building. A lot of people have missed this scheme amidst all the general gloom, but we haven’t had a new lane of road or railway track from one side of the Pennines to the other since the 1970s. It was first promised in 1946; and now we’ve got there. It will improve journeys as far afield as Glasgow, Belfast and Dover. And on the poor value for money, the DfT’s official position is lets go!

I suspect this sounds a lot closer to the approach many of my readers would like to see for infrastructure. What do you think made the difference?

Well, it’s not the number of Prime Ministerial endorsements – that’s about the same.5 But it was a lot more street smart than the A1.

By way of background, government promises to dual a lot of long roads, and normally, that promise falls through. For example, in 2014 there was a promise to dual the A303, starting with the Stonehenge Tunnel. The project was split into seven segments, and as soon as one fell over on its own, the house of cards collapsed. Dualling the A66 was promised on a similar basis in the 2000s, and eight segments ended up being cut down to a single three-mile bypass.

But this time, something different happened. Here, the project was set up as a single, coherent plan that demanded that every gap in the dual carriageway between the M6 and the A1(M) should be filled to create a coherent route.

And behind it was a very bloodyminded official, who wanted this project to happen and was playing to win. So for all of the years of early development, when people began saying ‘oh, it’s a bit big; perhaps we should split it up’, he shut them down hard. There was no point to crossing half a mountain range, he pointed out. Either were here to do the full job, or we should shut the whole project down as a waste of money. And nobody felt bold enough to call for that.

This sounds like it’s a trivial debating point, but it was decisive. Because as the project filled out, that little extra sense of purpose meant the whole system began to work harmoniously. That purpose was baked into the business case, into the construction planning and the stakeholder engagement. When Treasury wanted cuts, they skipped over this project because they saw it as delivering a national-level benefit that they considered important. When the fact the project was poor value for money could no longer be ignored, the Accounting Officer could sign it off saying that the strategic benefits more than made up for the shortfall in calculated value.

The project stopped being a problem, and became a testbed to work in new, more efficient ways. It even became the posterchild for the government’s Project Speed for accelerating infrastructure.6

So don’t let anyone tell you that the Green Book makes it impossible to approve a multi-billion-pound northern project, in a fiscal crunch, with a BCR of under one. In fact, the friction within the system was so small, that one individual was enough to counter it.

Yes means yes

I choose to remember this story as an inspiration. But maybe the accurate assessment is that one individual, making one well-timed point, is worth more than the power of five prime ministers.

To state the obvious, that’s not an accountable system. Especially since those individuals, making their powerful choices, are rarely aligned to deliver like the person driving forward the A66.

So in Leeds, I think politicians need to ask themselves a question: are we building a tram or not? If the answer is ‘not sure’, then the current system serves them very well – it gives PhD-length periods for philosophical reflection. But if there is a consensus that Leeds shouldn’t be the largest city in western Europe without a light rail system, and that this is indeed holding back the economy of West Yorkshire, someone needs to get to those well-buried discussions and make clear that yes means yes.

If you want an incentive, try this: the Leeds Tram is priced at £2.5bn. The first attempt at a tram, in the 1990s and early 2000s, was cancelled as too expensive for costing only £390m – about £700m in today’s money. If the council had been allowed to borrow the cost and paid 7% interest on the loans every year, they’d have saved a billion pounds compared to the current plan.

Or, to switch back to roads, DfT’s last accounts write off the cost of eight limbostructure projects that the government cancelled after the election – worth a total of £472m. Given there’s at least one more large project yet to be added to the tally, this will end up being more than half a billion pounds spent delivering absolutely nothing.7

Limbostructure doesn’t build political legitimacy; it doesn’t help the country and it really isn’t cheap. But even one person in the right place at the right time can keep a project out of it. The question for us as citizens is how to make sure the right person is there when it counts.

Last budget was high political theatre, with everyone watching to see how government would find the money to live within the OBR’s constraints. That meant that most people were looking at important questions around key tax rates, thresholds and new duties.

But for a transport nerd like me, there was a piece of news that struck me as much, much more dangerous, which almost broke a government once, and which seemed to go almost unremarked upon. And in today’s Spring Statement government has doubled down: so it looks like we’re going to find out.

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Flammable liquids

What is the measure? Very, very quietly, Rachel Reeves mentioned in November that the rate of fuel duty would be frozen until September.

That sounds like a tax giveaway, but it isn’t. Since the invasion of Ukraine, there has been a ‘temporary’ 5p cut in fuel duty. Ever since, each government has extended it for a year at every budget. Extending it until September is a very sunny way of saying the rate was about to go up 5p.

And if you dug into the Budget paperwork, you found that this was indeed true. Fuel duty would go up 1p in September; 2p in December (Merry Christmas!) and 2p in March.

To the government’s considerable credit, they not only got away with hiding this – they even got the Sun to report it as a fuel duty freeze and “a rare win for motorists”. Full marks for chutzpah.

Warning: explosive

There’s an established political wisdom about fuel duty: don’t touch it. No has one raised it in the UK since 2009 – thanks to that 5p cut it is lower in absolute terms, never mind as a percentage of income.

There are good reasons for that. The price of fuel is the single most visible one in the economy - we literally put it on illuminated signs - and keeping it low has held inflation down. Fuel costs are a part of almost every price in the economy, so cheap fuel affects business finances and growth. Also, less well known, but fuel duty is an extraordinarily regressive tax. We think of motoring as a luxury, but fuel is essential to the lives of most of the country and an unavoidable expense. For the 40% of the bottom income decile who have access to a car, 10% of disposable income goes on motoring tax (not fuel – just the tax). So keeping it down has been a good way to help voters on lower incomes feel better about life.

And if the intellectual logic wasn’t enough, political instinct could do the rest. Tony Blair’s team said the moment they were most scared of losing control was not Iraq, but the 2000 fuel protests when lorry drivers objected to how much they had to pay. In the US, the federal gas tax is the same as it was in 1991. In France, Macron tried to raise fuel taxes; and on the first day of the resulting protests two people died.

Talking this over with a colleague of mine who used to be at No.10; and with a few friends in the media, we all had the same reaction – this can’t be real, can it? With the conventional wisdom being that it is dangerous to raise fuel duty by a penny, a 5p rise seemed otherworldly.

We wondered if it was a clever accounting trick to hide some extra spending. That seemed plausible at first, but the numbers didn’t stack up. We wondered if it was the basis of a clever bit of political theatre – break the rise into pieces so you could defer one of the rises and call it a ‘freeze’ while sneaking the other two through. If so, you’d see that at the Spring Statement.

Well, we’ve had Spring Statement and now we know: they really were serious. And we’d better get ready for a bumpy ride…

Accelerants

Just looking at this problem in the abstract – a 5p rise in fuel duty – you’d think that was an ambitious reach for a government this low in the polls. If they didn’t have the stomach to force through changes on means-testing winter fuel payments, you’d expect a big rise in fuel duty to be off the cards.

This isn’t to ignore the wider context: the price of fuel is the lowest (in real terms) it has been in years. You’ll pay more in almost every western European country, and the price of fuel has actually gone down 4p since budget day. Fuel duty is about a third lower in real terms than it was in 2010 – and that’s in spite of government adopting a net zero goal in the meantime. I fear this does little to change the political fundamentals.

And the political pressure is raised by:

1. A surging populist movement. A large rise in fuel duty is a gift to Reform, especially given the dividing line over net zero. Boasting about freezing rail fares makes this starker.

2. Clumsy political timing. Starting the rises in September1 means the silly season papers will pick the question up. Adding 2p in December means you are putting pressure on family budgets at Christmastime.

3. A potential change in the Labour leadership after the May elections. If there is a change in leadership, it can drag on into the summer and up to Party Conference.

Any new Chancellor will be trapped in the middle of this process, with the rise already fixed for September and almost unstoppable for December. So whatever your plans might be, this is likely to be the issue that dominates your life and reputation.2 That’s especially true if Ed Miliband is the next Chancellor (second favourite at the time of writing), as many voters would wrongly assume the rise to be part of his wider net zero vision.

Beware sparks

So far, so Westminster. The real question will be whether that comes onto the streets. France’s gilet jaunes and the 2000 fuel protesters have already shown that disquiet over fuel prices can quickly spill over into popular action. And the arrival of social media means it is much easier for people to start a protest, publicise a protest or join in.

You may be too young to remember the 2000 protests. The core of it was that lorry drivers began to blockade the refineries, stopping the fuel getting out unless government reduce duty. It lasted about a week, but that was all it took. When petrol stations began closing nationwide, queues formed and people watched their fuel gauge dropping towards ‘empty’ there was a very real feeling of things falling apart.

That was in a time we now look back on as a golden age of growth and harmony, under a government that was relatively popular and in control of things. Now, we have doomscrolling, a -52% approval rating, a war in the middle east and flags on all the lamp-posts. Which of the two situations do you think is the more likely to breed public action?

I realise this sounds a bit alarmist. But the process of writing this made me realise just how many risks are coming together: a sluggish economy, a new government, an ill-timed tax rise, a disaffected public, and a political climate inclined to fan the flames. It doesn’t take much for this to become a lot more than a bit of tax news.3

The political wisdom is you don’t put up fuel duty. I hope for all our sakes the wisdom is wrong.

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I like a lot of this paper – in particular the early chapters are a much more perceptive assessment of how civil servants and planners actually think than many others provide. You’d expect nothing less from an author whose greatest strength is to look at problems afresh.

But consensus comes with its dangers too. Just as we all start to agree something must be done, we lose our cohesion about what that thing ought to be. And notwithstanding the intelligence with which some of the problems are identified, I find myself seeing a very old answer to the problem. And to judge by my feed, quite a few people seem inclined to embrace it.

And that matters for planning; because this definitely isn’t the first time we’ve tried to fix this system, and there’s a pattern in how we fail.

Ordering consensus

Davies’ paper suggests fixing the system by steering away from the current approach to planning towards a state-led system of corporatist planning. The idea is that if you replace an adversarial system that encourages conflict towards a system with the strong hand of a public-spirited leader, you can start resolving the points of debate efficiently and in a way that encourages everyone to pull together within the bounds of environmental and heritage obligations.

“By arranging them to work co-operatively rather than adversarially, they could be made to address more of their effort to finding solutions and less to creating problems. We can have the railways, the reservoirs, the bats and the snails, and save money into the bargain.”

It’s a noble aim; but I fear it’s a trap. Not only that, but it’s a trap that a great many of us are primed to fall into.

When we think of debates about planning, we imagine that problems emerge because something has gone wrong – a proposal hasn’t communicated its benefits, or it has been designed clumsily. A better answer wouldn’t have the same problems. Therefore the answer is to bring in smart people who know what they’re talking about, make sure that they gather the best evidence and use it in an effective way. If that isn’t happening in one corner of the system, move the focus to a new bit of process that can do the job right. And if this is manifest as disagreement, that is simple inefficiency.2

The paper gives a worked example of a freight interchange in Leicestershire that got blocked in 2024, because some site traffic might come via a local road where two lorries couldn’t pass each other without mounting the pavement; and because traffic hadn’t been modelled on a motorway junction on the approach route. The answer here, the paper suggests, would be to have experts from this Infrastructure Directorate to make sure that the scheme promoters understood these problems earlier, so they could go out and find solutions. And then, if no good solution could be found, the Directorate would confirm the project should press ahead.

It sounds logical, doesn’t it. It’s easy to believe the world would be a better place if only clever people had been there to prevent things going wrong.

But there’s a framing mistake here, and one that we’ve made more than once. This really isn’t a problem of a few unresolved questions. And every time we indulge ourselves in the idea that it is (and a bit more clever analysis or consensus building will fix it), the more we make our problems worse.

First time?

This isn’t the first time we’ve reformed planning – in particular in the late 2000s the last Labour government brought through what became the Planning Act 2008. This was legislation designed to end the interminable planning inquiries that were holding up infrastructure projects – and give the state the ability to make decisive commitments.

As it happens, I was present for a lot of this – my first job was in the team in DfT that was tasked with preparing for reform, and since then I’ve shown up in the system with the regularity of Forest Gump. I helped bring it in (in a very junior way), helped convert its principles into policy, and increasingly answered a lot of questions to the effect of ‘surely this thing can move faster’.

Because that reform was a failure. The simplest indictment is that it was created to accelerate a third runway at Heathrow and a new generation of nuclear power plants – which is the primary aim of this new reform nearly 20 years later. But equally, consider this chart showing the changes to the cost of roads projects after the system went live.3

Back in 2008, people were certain that the problem was planning inquiries being too adversarial and discursive. Back then, the centrepiece of development was a planning inquiry – originally something small, short and highly localised; but from the 1970s onwards growing into a multi-year process with argument and counter-argument, most of which was about big policy questions (Is nuclear power safe? Do we need planes?) rather than actual design. The Act effectively took the big strategic questions and set out government-sanctioned answers that planning inspectors had to take as fact. It also took all the detailed questions that had been resolved adversarially and gave measured, precise explanations of how they should be resolved.

And it worked – planning inquiries stopped taking 2-3 years and were cut back to 6 months. But then the cursed monkey’s paw twitched, and we found out that this wasn’t half as big a problem as the one we’d just made.

Because the process of reform hadn’t stopped these questions being asked. Instead, it had moved all the thinking from a public inquiry into a massive pre-application process. There was an approved way to answer every potential question – so now each of those questions needed to be answered, no matter how irrelevant they might be.

And I cannot overstate just how long this list of questions was. It’s better if I just show you: for a recent paper I decided to use a one-page graphic that just consisted of the questions being asked of infrastructure projects, and it looked like this:

This is about a third of the questions from one sub-chapter a National Policy Statement that determine how planning applications in the energy sector happen. There are six of these NPSes for energy alone. Each question sits atop a whole detailed analytical exercise. My personal favourite is the one requiring projects to assess the impact of electromagnetic forces on benthic fauna (EN3-2.8.116). Small wonder we now talk about £250m+ planning applications.

The policing of this happens on three separate levels: government statutory consultees frequently have to bless the answers and their attendant mitigations; the planning inspector marks the homework; and external challengers can zoom in from outside and drag you to court. A large share of those people have a stake in making the project fail.

So a system designed to ensure firm government leadership to unlock building turned into a huge morass of paperwork, oversight, cross-check and inaction. Some of the first projects to go through this system – such as the A38 Derby Junctions upgrade – are still waiting to start work nearly 20 years later.

You’re not fixing traffic: you are traffic

Nor was this the first time someone tried to fix the planning system. But every time we make a reform we make it the same way - more activity to fix past defects - which ends up making the overall system less effective.

In the late 1960s reforms to the planning system tried to reduce the backlash against development by organising more community engagement and public scrutiny – believing dialogue would iterate better plans and win over most critics. Instead, it led to the collapse of the country’s largest development plan and the total extinction of reservoir development.

Before that, in the 1940s we decided to govern how land should be used through the creation of protected categories of land where certain activities would be restricted. This ended up making it functionally impossible to build in 3/8ths of England.

The point is that this keeps happening - people imagine that they are fixing the system, when their belief about how the system ought to work is actually the root of the problem. And left unattended, it carries on making exactly the same difficulties. They’re not fixing the bottleneck - they are the bottleneck.

So I would be willing to wager any system that tries to empower clever planners to proactively ‘solve’ the persistent problems would end up ‘focusing’ on another page-long list of topics, including the benthic fauna.

Building again

Lest you misunderstand me, I am not arguing we can’t improve the balance between developing infrastructure and managing its downsides, especially if good people do the balancing. What I would argue is that the more complicated we make the planning process, and the more we entrust the process of balancing to the inhabitants of ivory citadels, the further away that balance gets.

In practice, making infrastructure is messy. There are consequences to building, and even with the best will in the world you cannot avoid all of them. That’s not a licence to be irresponsible; but it does mean there’s a responsibility to make the final call in order to capture the net benefits, and not to defer it to another round of questions.

We all want to believe the world would all be sorted if people would just listen to my clever answers. But the process of building infrastructure is really about reconciling people who in many cases genuinely are irreconcilable, and who no number of words will assuage. And that is not just true in dealings with the outside world – it is also true of dealings within government. For plenty of government agencies, the best thing that can happen to promote their policy agenda is not negotiation, but to see their rivals smoten and ground into the dust.

The magic in infrastructure development is not answering individual questions, but in striking the overall bargain that allows a project to proceed. The way the state got into land use was through government brokering deals that allowed railways, canals and land reforms that couldn’t be achieved solely by convincing every single person involved to agree. Which may sound coercive, but actually was the magic tool that unlocked huge amounts of public benefit.

So a clever person answering a difficult question is solving the wrong problem. Indeed, the descent from the high-delivery paradigm of the 1950s to the present day was littered with people who thought the imperfections of the system would be cured by more clever people, more processes and more detailed instructions. All of which was, in practice, drawing them towards the stalemate we enjoy today.

When I wrote my own paper on planning reform, I was drawn back to the story of when the CEGB proposed to build a nuclear power station in the middle of a National Park. One of the planning inspectors warned that building this seemed almost certain to destroy the character of the Park, and urged reconsideration. The CEGB responded by bringing in a top architect to design the plant, and top landscape architect to hide it. Did this work? Well, if you don’t know which National Park has a nuclear power station in the middle of it, I’d argue that it did. And it did so with about 50 pages of published paperwork.

So we – the thinkers – need to challenge ourselves to think less. We do not want to do a thousand questions 30% faster; we want to understand why we’re asking questions in the first place. We need to judge more if we want, with the goal of finding where an acceptable (not perfect) balance may sit. Because these questions can easily take an eternity, and they will if we drift back to thinking we’ll make everything right, if we just ask one more thing…

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My first instinct is to say that working on a building like the Palace of Westminster is hard; and you shouldn’t jump to judgment. It costs about £1.5m/wk to maintain. When German bombs flattened the Commons in 1941, the chamber didn’t reopen until 1950. The current building took 30 years to create – starting when William IV was on the throne and finishing almost half-way through the reign of Queen Victoria.

But, for all that benefit-of-the-doubt, these are hard figures to swallow. The idea that the preferred option for decanting the House of Commons is 8-10 years is remarkable – given this is about restoring a room a little larger than a tennis court. And has there seriously been discussion an option where the House of Lords has to be out for a minimum of 24 years? After three years of planning?

Maybe I’m inclined to be unkind. My background is in highways work, so I’m used to tales of construction where people have no choice but to do their jobs next to eight lanes of heavy traffic. If you have to do something hard, like sticking in a bridge or an underpass, they might give you a 10-day closure over Christmas. These projects take 2-3 years.

By contrast, Parliament is typically out of session for 40% of the year, and when MPs are around it only sits Monday to Thursday. If you include weekends, the building is unused for two days out of three; and if you move two weeks of sitting time, you could have three clear months with no one in the chamber. My old highways friends would have sold their mothers for an operating environment that kind.

What they’re not saying

You might say these timelines are absurd. After all – 10 years ago David Cameron was Prime Minister; and 33 years ago Tony Blair wasn’t yet leader of the Labour Party. These timeframes are offered as if they are facts that cannot be changed. No justification is offered; no breakdown of how we get to such enormous periods of time.

And that’s something of a theme. A lot of the public debate around the restoration programme has challenged things like improving accessibility or the creation of a visitors’ centre. These areas certainly have their issues.2 But there are two things that are arguably a lot more remarkable.

The first of these is plumbing. Or rather ‘building services’, which also includes the ventilation system, data provision and heating. Pipes and wires, basically. Remarkably, this accounts for half of all the construction costs. Stopping the building burning down is about an eighth.

Now, I’m not a buildings engineer – I’m in no position to judge whether this project needs more or less sewerage, or whether they’ve built the heating system out of solid gold. But what I will say is that it’s remarkable that the element of the project that makes up half the construction costs is mentioned only six times in the entire 128 page project report. Generally, when I spent a billion, I used to explain a little more about why it was a good idea.

The second thing here is how much of the cost of the project isn’t construction. 30-40% of the total costs are wrapped up in construction management and oversight.3 The line ‘managing the programme costs’ is running at between a fifth and a quarter of the construction costs.

Again, those costs are not zero. You obviously need to do site logistics. You would not want to see a programme like this run without a back office. But when you’re spending more on that back office than you are on fixing the building fabric (or, in some cases, twice as much), that’s something you’d expect to see cross-examined.

Silence talks

This is something of a theme in my writing: situations where the seemingly absurd is standing in plain sight, with no one feeling compelled to justify it.

The silence is clearly important; and I think it is wrong to assume it is a conspiracy. Far more likely, to my eye, is that the people overseeing the project simply don’t understand the topic. The silence is the void created while they pray that no one asks them a question they can’t answer. And, given the sheer number of topics they have to cover – in this case from Victorian sewerage to the logistics of catering – who can blame them?

I increasingly suspect that the troubles of the infrastructure sector stem from a kind of cognitive overload. If someone is asked to master too many topics, they have to make sacrifices. The higher the stakes, the more they focus on the existential risks. And within government, money and timescales are never existential – Treasury has more, and what are people really going to do if the service is later than promised - risk being remembered as the person who let Parliament burn?

But what that does is leave huge blind spots – and when we find a neglected fact or an unshiftable truth – the whole plan starts to fall apart. We saw that in HS2; I fear it’s happening in many other places. The habit of silence is not a good one.

We need to talk about the plumbing

One of the biggest psychological disjoints between people who do civil engineering and the rest of the world is how you see a ten-billion pound cost estimate. Nowadays, people in civil engineering look at the projects around them, quote numbers in the tens-of-billions and say ‘but that’s just what it costs’. And they find it strange when they get a shocked reaction from people whose views of cost are rooted in the price of a pint of milk.

We really do need to take care of Parliament. If one day it burns, a piece of my heart will die with it. But if we are going to spend ten billion maintaining it, we need the people behind the project to show why every billion is essential. If it’s going to take ten years to redecorate a room, they need to explain why.

And above all, the people responsible for projects like the restoration of Parliament need to know that explaining these points is central to the job. And that silence is not the safe option.

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It seems we will get a railway from Manchester to Birmingham after all! Which is a professional relief to me, as having previously predicted a) government would make it happen; and b) the intricacies of HS2 legislation would be the thing that forced government to make the commitment.

I foolishly put a date on it – Party Conference. In my defence, government was swearing blind that they’d set out their plan before the summer recess.

But if I’d been wise, I’d have said February was the backstop. The Independent had the secret on its front page a few weeks ago – in February a series of statutory powers associated with the Phase 2A bill expire, meaning government would a) never be able to acquire the land to finish off the route; and b) sell off the land they already had. And here we are, a few weeks ahead of that, setting out the policy position that means things don’t fall apart. If in doubt, government always finds it easier to avert a crisis than make a positive decision.

You can’t bury every mistake

In case you’re unclear, yes this is HS2 coming back - at least in the sense that it’s the HS2 rail line, as set out in the HS2 legislation. That’s because the cursed HS2, and the better-fortuned Northern Powerhouse Rail are, in places, the same thing. That’s why (strangely) the previous government cancelled HS2 to Manchester and then brought forward the legislation intended to build it

But a few crucial caveats: it’s not called HS2. It’s not being built at any measurable point in the future. No one is calling it high speed. All of which makes me feel quite pleased with this paragraph from back in August.

A commitment to NPR required the Manchester leg of HS2, in at least some form. And legal obligations forced that to happen about now, or else all bets are off

It’s reassuring that Britain’s biggest rail project in a century won’t end up a headless mess, even if it’s going to be a long time until anyone sees it being built. HS2 to Manchester might end up being the British equivalent of New York’s Second Avenue subway – decades in the promise and eventually delivered. But it’s better than the doom-loop that has been UK infrastructure policy so far this decade. And provided the legislation is set right, this opportunity will endure until it is redeemed.

You have not reached your final destination

But I wouldn’t celebrate just yet. As I said a few lines after my prediction above, there are still plenty of questions that remain unanswered.

• When will any link to the North West get made? A promise of a railway without a date may turn out to be a curse as much as a blessing.

• This line will run along the route of HS2, with literally the same engineering drawings. So … it’s going to be high speed, right? Right? Well, not necessarily – there’s been talk of technical descoping which in some cases makes sense and in others potentially bakes in big long-term cost increases.

• What does this mean for HS2 at Euston? Plans to rebuild the station must make choices about the number of platforms for HS2, which will permanently cap the capacity of the HS network. If this line is the HS2 line, it runs straight into that station.

• And what about that mega-expensive station in Manchester? Not justifiable without a London link, arguably not affordable even with one. That’s likely to be the next point of conflict.

As you can imagine, I have opinions on all of these. I might even be onto something about why that Manchester station costs so much – and potentially doesn’t need to.

And I also feel this sets out a bigger question for what was once HS2 East. Government is making an interesting commitment keeping HS2 in limbo for a period: there are old rules (‘Crichel Down’) about how long government can hold on to land that it isn’t planning to build on, which this very nearly breaks. Over in the Midlands, the same rules are about to result in a big land handback, which government (and local people) may live to regret.

Still – given we’re getting out of a situation on HS2 that was objectively the worst possible outcome for everyone concerned, this has to be celebrated. The way you climb out of a hole is one foot at a time.

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2025 was a year of surprises, and for me one of the biggest was how was how much time I’d spend writing about the environmental protection of invertebrates. Starting with jumping spiders and slowly spreading across the taxonomical tree, I’ve unpacked how environmental protection has been working in practice – or to be more precise how it’s often been stopping other things from working.

Well, I’m glad to say 2025 doesn’t end on that note. Let me share good news – one of the most high-profile species, the Lesser Whirlpool Ramshorn snail – has done something it has never done before. It has moved.

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It has taken about a decade, and the story began back in 2015. My old roads programme team had promised to do many improvements to the A47 in Norfolk, but the most demanded piece – the A47 Acle Straight – couldn’t go ahead because alongside the road you would find these particular rare snails. Which was a bad thing since six people have died on that stretch of road since that date, in accidents that an upgrade would probably have prevented. And the lack of action might have been a reason it was one of the first constituencies to turn to populism at the election.

We took on a lot of work that year, so a project with a big environmental risk was put on the ‘future’ list. But unusually for government we did have the rare wit to actually start a study on shifting the snails. So that when the next investment plan rolled around, the way would be clear. And, unlike some of these studies, I made sure no one forgot to do it.

Bad news – for five years we kept moving the snails, and the colonies died. :(

But, as of earlier this month, a new report on progress came out. And look at this!

Now, this may only look like a couple of snails in a ditch to you.1 But this is a properly big deal. These snails are extremely rare, and found in only two parts of the country. Natural England has done some seriously aggressive things to preserve them, and was not about to let anyone build a road over a recognised colony. Now we have the option of moving them to a new location. We can build that life-saving road2 and still have more rare snails. Everybody wins!

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

Nature far and wide

The controversial bit of the recent Planning and Infrastructure Bill has been part 3 – which contains the idea that developers should be able to meet their environmental obligations by contributing to something called an Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP). Rather than fixing their specific impacts, they pay for centrally-delivered improvements that deliver bigger improvements at less cost.

This snail story is a big vindication of that approach. If this snail project had been done as part of a big infrastructure project, that project would have been sitting in development hell for 10 years while we proved that the snails could be moved. We would have burned millions in project costs, and probably stopped the project.

But here, a standalone piece of environmental work has started up new colonies of the rare snails. What was an unanswerable problem for an individual project is something where national action works.

And, crucially, this has been very, very cheap. The example usually given for how an EDP works has been the HS2 bat tunnel, which cost £120m to provide dubious benefits to a small and marginal bat colony. I don’t have a figure for how much this snail study cost, but we’d normally be looking at low 100ks. One of the good things about working with biodiversity is that nature does most of the work for you. Here the sum total of the work has been some translocation, some ditch-clearance and someone coming along every once in a while to count several hundred snails.3

And the result is that we have more rare nature than we started with, and a useful infrastructure project is no longer blocked. I say again – everyone wins.

Getting started?

So we’re going to build that road now. Right? Right?

Well, probably not. Government’s road investment ambitions had fallen quite a lot since the mid-2010s, even before the change of government. It’s pretty likely that the total number of new road projects added to the programme in the whole of this decade will be smaller than the number I personally added in 72 hours during 2014.4

There is a new roads programme that is due by the end of March 2026. This is the right place to announce new projects going into development, and the A47 Acle Straight is the sort of project that gets considered. But roads are facing a real-term budget cut, prices are rising above inflation, and the challenge is more likely to be keeping existing projects going. And that means there just isn’t an obvious place for a new road project to get funding.

It’s a double-shame, and not only because we’ve now solved the conflict between nature and man; I remember we ran the numbers on this project in the late 2010s, and it came out with one of the highest value for money scores in the whole list of potential projects.5 This feels very much like what this government was thinking about when it promised to unlock infrastructure.

But even so – there will be other projects, in transport or elsewhere, and they will need to solve environmental issues like this. And with the approach that we seem to be moving towards, there are projects that were once ruled out that will become viable again.

There’s a lot of hating towards Natural England these days. But results like this are an indication of where it might have a bright future. This particular finding came out of the world of transport, but NE has the remit and the money to do the same thing on a far grander scale. There are nearly 1000 protected species out there, and helping them to thrive in new places is a win for everyone.

So here’s hoping these snails aren’t the only things on the move.

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My great thanks to transport legend Steve Gooding for passing on this report, and the A47 Alliance for making sure government didn’t forget its promise to keep looking at this

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1. What’s the plan?

Government’s plan is a 3p/mile levy on fully-electric vehicles, and a 1.5p/mile levy on plug-in-hybrids. This kicks in from April 2028, and is provisionally known as eVED (electric Vehicle Excise Duty).

The mechanics of collection are up for debate – a consultation went out on this alongside the Budget. But the intention is that drivers annually estimate their mileage for the year ahead when they pay for their vehicle excise duty (road tax). Actual usage gets checked once a year either at MOT or at a specialist check at a garage. If you underestimated your usage you pay the difference; if you overestimate you roll your surplus miles over to next year.1

And, as several news reports have pointed out, this means the tax won’t be paid by foreign motorists, but UK motorists will pay to drive abroad.

2. EVs are still a great deal, if done right

With all the talk of a new tax, perhaps the most important fact is that an EV charged on the cheapest tariff is still an insanely good option. If I say it’s 7-8p/KWh to charge up an EV on an overnight tariff, that’s the equivalent of about 20p/litre petrol. Put the government tax on, you’re still looking at 50p/litre. That’s about 60% less than petrol.

But it is more of an issue if you can’t get to that cheap charging. An ultra-rapid charger (the closest thing to ‘filling up’ as we’ve historically done) is about 80p/KWh – more expensive than petrol. The tax only reinforces that.

So at the extremes, nothing changes. It’s the middle that matters most, though - and there will be some vehicles and some charging solutions where a 3p/mile tax nudges you from being cheaper than petrol to being more expensive. As it happens, the one we used for one of our recent papers (a Volvo XC40/EC40) on a slow public charger is one of them.

3. Government really wants the money.

Motoring taxes matter to almost every western government, and have been in decline for decades as vehicles become more fuel efficient. At the start of the century it was raising 2% of GDP, nowadays it’s 0.9% and by the end of the decade it will be 0.7%. EVs have turned the long-term decline in motoring tax into a collapse.

Putting fuel duty up has proven politically expensive2, and governments largely stopped doing it – in the UK that means tax has been frozen in cash terms then cut, and has declined substantially in real terms. Treasury has wanted to fix that problem for a long time - and with current shortfalls the pressures are even stronger.

4. But they won’t get as much as they’d like

The OBR has very pointedly put the following chart in their outlook document.

The new tax will raise money, but not nearly as much as fuel duty currently does. That’s partly because vans, HGVs and others aren’t charged – and that’s a big chunk of fuel duty revenue. It’s also because this is aimed at around half the per-mile rate of fuel duty. Put together, that’s about a 70% drop in value compared to the current system. So this isn’t the end of the story about how to replace fuel duty.3

5. There’s history here

The idea of paying per-mile for road tax has been seriously discussed since the 1960s. It’s frankly weird that in a world where you pay for bread and for water out of the tap, you should have free access to the busiest roads at rush hour. But making people pay for the ‘freedom of the King’s Highway’ has been intensely controversial.

That was shown especially in the mid-2000s, when Tony Blair tried to bring in a system of national road pricing. This … didn’t go as planned. 1.7 million people signed a petition asking them to stop4, and they stopped. Local referenda on charges in Edinburgh and Manchester lost by margins of 3:1 and 4:1. Conventional wisdom is that this is a dangerously unpopular idea.

Underpinning that is an under-appreciated truth - driving is hugely important to household budgets and (arguably more importantly) to household logistics as well; and the costs fall heaviest on the poorest. When you play with motoring, you are reaching into the heart of people’s lives and it’s very easy to make them feel threatened.

But…

6. EVs changed the politics

…The politics of that old pricing battle – over a new cost levied on everyone – don’t apply here. EVs are only a minority of the fleet. One shouldn’t lean too heavily into the idea that EVs owners are all rich or a source of envy (I’ve done a lot recently about professional EV drivers in London), but most people don’t think of themselves as EV drivers either now or in the future.

As I showed in a paper last year, this has quietly rewritten the politics of motoring tax. People hate the idea of new taxes on their cars. But they’re actually quite pro the idea that everyone should pay. EVs did start paying vehicle excise duty in April, which makes this picture more complex, but the principle that everyone should contribute is deep-seated across the political spectrum.

This is an inversion of our conventional idea of motoring politics. If you wanted the most ‘pro motorist’ newspapers you’d point to the right wing ones – Telegraph, Sun, Mail. But their readers are the people who are most firmly for equal tax. Reform voters most want to see EVs paying equal tax. Even some EV drivers (like this example in the BBC pre-Budget coverage) are sanguine about ‘paying their share’.

So rather than an immediate, frightening tax, this is something distant which conventional motorists don’t want to stand up against.

7. This plan consciously avoids controversy

This isn’t that 2000s plan either, which led to such public outcry. That plan was the kind economists love – a per-mile charge adjust for time and location to incentivise people to drive when there’s more space. But the price of that precision was the source of much of the unpopularity – ‘spy in the sky’ location trackers and huge prices on the busiest roads that dominated the headlines (I remember £1.20/mile being warned).

This plan is substantially designed by witnesses5 of that fight. It is avoiding all those risks. That makes the politics easier, but it also a) sacrifices the big socio-economic wins of making the roads work better and b) forgoes the money that comes from pricing a scarce good accurately. There will be pressure from some quarters to make that happen.

But I wouldn’t expect that to happen. Government is clearly taking the challenge of winning support seriously. There is a whole-page box in the Budget document laying out all the ways that the EV sector is getting support – totalling £3.6bn according to their calculations.6 They also have a pretty clear message on the tax level – it’s half the level of fuel duty – which seems designed by people who are preparing to explain this to the public and win them over.

All of that makes me think this plan won’t fall apart on the first contact with reality.

8. …But the price of that is a very basic approach to collecting the tax

As I mentioned at the beginning, the collection method for the tax is a bit old school. Every year you provide an estimate of your mileage alongside your vehicle tax, and at the end of the year you get your odometer checked (at an MOT or at a garage) and pay any deficit.

The holes in that are obvious. People will ‘underestimate’ and pay later.7 You could slip the garage a tenner to record a different number for the tax return, thinking no one would be the wiser.8 Even law-abiding people won’t like the admin of making a special trip to report the mileage, then having a surprise bill for an extra £40.

It’s all downstream of that wish to avoid any hint of invasion of privacy – which rules out things like black boxes reporting all this information. This also makes it impractical to overlook e.g. miles driven outside the UK.

But our ideas of privacy have changed hugely since 2007 (the road pricing petition was the same year as the iPhone launched). Many of us, me included, would like our vehicles to handle all that stuff for us, and for billing to be automated and accurate. That’s even more true if you’re someone looking after a fleet of a couple of thousand vehicles.

And, crucially, the black boxes dong all this reporting are already in our cars – just reporting back to the car companies instead. I think the ‘hygiene problem’ for my generation isn’t going to be the threat of surveillance, but the faff of doing something the car should be doing for us.

There is a live consultation about how this collection works, with a lot of leading questions about ‘could technology help here’ or ‘would you like to opt in to some technology’. So I suspect this is going to get more sensible. But government wants to be seen to have been dragged, and working through voluntary arrangements only.

9. Has this been done elsewhere?

Yes. It’s already live in New Zealand, Iceland and Hawaii. And the tax has proven to be workable - it gets paid.

But Iceland and New Zealand have seen EV sales drop by almost a half in the process.9

10. The elephant in the room – EV sales

And that takes us to the really dangerous question: people have talked about what road pricing might do for drivers. But the real make-or-break question is what it does for EV sales.

The UK is already committed to an ambitious EV sales target, which nearly got missed last year. A big rescue job was done, and in January we will probably see a similar crisis. Last year the sales target was 23%, this year it’s 28%. In the first year of the new tax it jumps to 52% of all car sales. And because of the way the target works, each non-compliant car could cost the manufacturer as much as £12k.

52% was an ambitious sales target before; now many EV-friendly people worry it will be impossible. Government’s own forecasts say that the tax will push sales between now and 2028 down by 440,000 vehicles, which improves to 130,000 fewer when you factor in extra incentives to buy. Everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this is ultra-optimistic – my own worst case scenario has a much, much bigger number.

The ZEV mandate is also upstream of two other important government policies – the industrial strategy and the 7^th Carbon Budget (which rests on high levels of EV uptake10). So government can’t easily afford for this to go wrong. And, given the scale of fines, neither can the car industry.11

11. The uneven road

Government has lots of options to raise uptake. They’ve tended to throw money at new car buyers to bring down the price – notably through the plug in car grant. This was a good strategy once; but now that more mass-market EVs are coming into showrooms, the things that matter more might are likely to be things like access to cheap charging. For many households, the state of the second hand market is really important too; and others wonder about things like uncertainties around battery health.

The wrinkle with this is that DfT is really used to supporting the EV market by chucking out another billion in subsidies. It’s arguably been asleep at the switch as the big changes in public charging prices have opened up since 2022. Success here involves bits of government getting out of their safe space, and really trying to make the market work. That may be a tall order - though things like the recent moves to unlock cross-pavement charging are positive developments.

But, if government are smart, there is the potential to fight the chill. The EV market before Budget day still had deep imperfections. If this new tax (and the politics of landing it) makes government seriously tackle pre-existing problems, the new tax might actually result in some of the worst-served EV drivers actually paying less overall. And smart policies can stop the market being chilled and even push sales up.12

Coda

Thanks for reading. Most of my past year has been spent building up a coalition called Electric London, which we’d been planning to grow into a nationwide effort long before the Budget leaked. If you’re part of a company, a green group or something else that’s worried about the future of EVs, we’re building up the gang – and you’re welcome to get in touch.

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This week the government announced that it wanted ensure development next to train stations gets an automatic yes. This is a classic YIMBY cause – building on the totemic California SB 79 law allowing intense development near to the state’s train stations. And in the UK, you don’t have to work hard to convince people that housing is better near a station than in the middle of car-dependent suburbia.

But there’s one area where that won’t be happening. Not only that, but in an area where housing is fiercely resisted, with regular trains to central London.

And it’s home to a motorway that will soon be – by law – beautiful.

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When ‘yes’ means ‘no’

The government knows that it is going to be judged on its housing target. It’s playing this game on nightmare mode, but everyone in a new house is more likely to support them as a result of their efforts. They call the new announcement a ‘default yes’ for houses within 500m of a train station.1 British YIMBYs have been pretty happy about what this will do.

But there are still quite a lot of things that already ensure a default no, stronger than that new yes. One of those things is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB, aka National Landscape). Planning policy says building here should be avoided if possible – which seems reasonable enough.

The trouble is that around London Natural England is consulting on taking the AONB nearest to London – Surrey Hills – and expanding it. Which, rather awkwardly, means that there are quite a few train stations around London, in open fields, where development will shortly be made extremely difficult.

Take Woldingham for example – currently on the boundary of the AONB (dark green), soon to be fully encircled (light green). The station has a train every 30 minutes to London Victoria. The red line shows the land govt wants to unlock2, but now won’t.

Nor is it alone. I see similar stories at Oxted and Chipstead, Coulsdon, Betchworth and Ockley. In Dorking, next to the industrial estate. In Milford, next to the solar farm. I’m sure I’ve missed others.

Election, what election?

And you might think that this seems at odds with the policies of this government – given they wish to build 1.5 million homes, and do not consider green belt to be sacred.

And you would be right. Because this policy was started in 2021, under the last government.

The long-term efforts actually go back to the mid 2000s, but the formal process began a mere three prime ministers ago. You might ask whether a general election, a change of government and a substantially different set of policy objectives might prompt a rethink.

Evidently not - because they published the final plans 72 hours after the train station announcement.

The Line of Beauty

Please don’t get me wrong – there are good reasons to protect beautiful landscapes. And it would be a bit silly to argue that somewhere like Box Hill, which is in the Surrey Hills AONB, isn’t what the system is set up to look after.

But did you know that the ‘Beauty’ in ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ isn’t just an idle word. An AONB is literally founded on the idea that it exists to protect Beauty with a capital B. There are policy documents to define it, and strict controls that follow.3 Beauty is not assumed – it must be proven at a level that will pass any legal challenge.

And in this particular case, Natural England have decided this legal definition of beauty is met by … the M25.

Not many people think of the M25 as an example of outstanding natural beauty. Natural England has decided that this segment (in the light green), between junctions 5 and 6, is.

I thought you all might like to appreciate what we’re preserving as a country, so courtesy of Google Streetview, here you go.

It’s a winter shot, so it doesn’t really do it justice. In Spring, I imagine the blossom on the trees beautifully complements the bright orange of the emergency refuge area.

(You’ll notice from the map above that the AONB already contains some motorway. It actually applies to a lot of junctions 3-8, because of a historical tangle. The route of this road was set out in 1937, when the chief engineer of the Ministry of Transport chartered a plane and sketched out the route of a big road around London while he flew.4 It was a good route, because nobody lived there. The war paused construction for decades; and in 1958, the government designated the AONB, because nobody lived there. 10 years later the Ministry of Transport finally turned up to build the road5 – hey presto, motorway in AONB.)

It’s one thing to have a motorway in your AONB by accident; it’s another to actively acquire it in the name of beauty. You might ask why on earth they would do this. To understand why, you have to zoom out. Because without taking in that chunk of M25, the AONB cannot acquire a 7 sq mile area to the south.

The eye of the beholder

To make this stick, however, we’re going to have to produce a clear, evidenced justification to declare this motorway to meet the policy tests for Beauty. That’s likely to be a stumbling block, isn’t it? What with it being eight lanes of concrete.

Well, it seems Natural England found an answer. The way that Beauty is assessed in practice is that once you’re agreed somewhere is in scope to be added to an AONB, Natural England sends a consultant to go and take a look. They then write a report, and if the report recommends inclusion and no one objects loudly, the consultant’s judgment is put into law.

You can read the report here. And the answer is that we just don’t mention the motorway; and perhaps hope that it will go away. The relevant section (10a) mentions the motorway as something that has a negative impact on the area, but skips over the fact that it’s actively being brought into the AONB. The M23 gets a mention in section 10b, and is cited as the reason not to extent the AONB any further west. But the 8-lane M25 has seemingly escaped the consultant’s notice. Clearly a triumph of good highways design.

There is an oblique reference in a section marked ‘marginal areas’ that says existing transport infrastructure “may undermine perceptions of tranquillity”. Which, on balance, I would agree with.

Stealth motorway

One other question may have occurred to you. If we are reviewing the AONB’s boundary to assess Beauty, isn’t it a bit odd that we’re keeping a lot of motorway in there? Might there be a case for saying that land ceases to be beautiful once buried under as many as fourteen lanes of tarmac?

If you are asking that, you will be politely asked to leave. This is not the boundary review for you. Because the remit of the review is very clear – we are not going to talk about the motorway.

That’s right. We’re going to designate huge areas as beautiful and protected. But unlike the M25, this only goes one way. We will not be removing anything from the AONB.

I suppose like any true love, the M25 only grows more beautiful with age.

The limits of beauty

There’s an argument you shouldn’t have a motorway in an AONB. There’s also an argument that you could.

But you have to pick one. Otherwise, you end up with the Orwellian situation of designating a motorway for natural beauty, while also saying they’re unthinkable desecration. Which is what Defra and MHCLG (two ministries that share the same building in Whitehall) currently say between them.

Or, equally, you end up with a situation where one government ministry is trying to make it a ‘yes’ to building by train stations, while the other is trying to make it a ‘no’.

Fortunately, there is one person who can change this – Emma Reynolds, the Defra secretary of state. There is one last consultation on this AONB change, and in January she gets to decide whether or not to sign off Natural England’s plan.

She’s within her rights to say ‘try again’. I’d politely suggest that’s a good idea, on two very specific points

1. There should be no new AONB within 500m of train stations. Government policy is clear. ‘Yes’ should mean yes.

2. Actually review the impact of the motorway. And where land is no longer beautiful, free it up for development. Because it includes places that are half-way between Heathrow and Gatwick. Vacant fields that would make great European headquarters for international companies.

And if you want to help make that happen, you just email surreyhillsaonbboundaryreview@naturalengland.org.uk . Normally, these consultations get a few hundred respondents. More people will probably read this substack and associated social media feeds.

Let’s make the M25 ugly again.

3

This applies across roughly 7,500 square miles of England – an area larger than the whole of Yorkshire and Lancashire combined. Add the National Parks and we’re talking about 24% of England. With these additions, it will be possible to walk a 123 mile path from West Wittering beach to Dover, via the M25, and be entirely on protected land throughout, apart from two fields and two back gardens.

The received wisdom is that the public hates taxes on cars. The 2000 fuel protests saw the UK grind to a halt. When Macron tried to raise fuel duty, 300,000 people built barricades and on the first day two people died

But with EVs that breaks down. That’s because – completely by accident – EVs sidestep the fuel tax regime. That’s not out of malice – the taxman just got lazy and put big taxes on fuel. But it means the result is now unbalanced. And people get that.

And the way they get it is the opposite of what you’d think. In the UK, the assumption is that the right-wing parties are the most pro-motorist. But in the numbers we collected (and the equivalents last year), they’re the strongest for equal treatment.

That seems to be driven by age. Younger, left-wing voters tend to think EVs should pay less tax. Older, righter-wing ones think they should pay equal. Which means, unexpectedly, that the party with the greatest fundamental support for a tax on EVs (and a large one) would be Reform.

(I actually think Reform should be the most pro-EV party out there. Even with the proposed tax, going electric for many can be like knocking 80p off the price of petrol. Woke transport people hate that. And the 10m+ households are frozen out of cheap charging is a great opportunity)

It’s worth reflecting though – if we talk about ‘equal’ taxes or ‘the same’, what do we mean? There’s a lot of wiggle in there. Is it the same per mile; the same per unit of impact? The same number of £ for every vehicle, regardless of behaviour? The idea of ‘equal’ is really an appeal to ‘fair’.

When you dig into that, you find that fairness is still up to be defined. We did a deep dive into the disparity in the cost of charging an EV. You might not know, but public EV charging costs have gone up a lot since 2022. This genuinely isn’t the fault of the chargepoint operators – it’s partly Putin’s war, partly some badly-designed government regs, partly a difference in tax. There’s a bunch of minor government bureaucrats who are making it another 10p/KWh worse because the way business rates on car parks are sliced up doesn’t match their intellectual preferences.

It’s now 7-10x the price of the cheapest home charging. Sometimes more than petrol.

We explained this to people, and asked if the EV tax should be changed to reflect that. And look at what happens! There’s some support for everyone paying the same tax. The young group like it a lot more if there’s a lower tax for on expensive charging. But everyone loves the idea of fixing the disparity by actively bringing down the price.

It’s only ‘fair’. A lot about the EV world is pretty uneven or exposed when you look into it. Partly this is because it’s a new tech, and we’re still figuring out how it works best. But all that weighs against the idea of a fair, equal tax.

I can think of several places the government’s tax plan can go wrong. But the place it can go right is that an EV at 2p/mile is unbeatably good value, and adding 3p/mile doesn’t really change that. The trouble is that not everyone gets that deal.

All the levers to fix that are in government’s hands. Part of the problem is that in recent years, no one has been watching how different regulators and politicians pull them. Take Sadiq Khan this week

I hope government work out how to use the levers in the time they have. Partly because people are underestimating how much work is needed to make the existing EV market better, and now’s a good moment to get started. But also because they’re going to propose a new tax, the worst outcome is to chill the market for 2 years only to give up. And the best outcome is cheaper motoring for millions, with or without the tax.

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It’s not the first time they tried. In 2005-7 Tony Blair had a go at national road pricing. 1.7 million people signed a petition asking them to stop. So they stopped. They also tried to have local congestion charges in Manchester and Edinburgh. Those plans went to local referenda, and lost by 3:1. So they stopped those too.

London does have a congestion charge. It took them thirty years to implement. I once spoke with one of the architects of the original 1970s plan, and he said they all thought they were lucky to get away with not losing their jobs.

And if you go back to the beginning of the story, it didn’t happen in 1964, when a panel of top transport experts published the Smeed Report, saying that charging per mile would be the best way to lock in the benefits of all the new roads the country was building. Not only did that not happen, but the Prime Minister personally wrote on his briefing note ‘never again’. Smeed himself was sidelined from an expected promotion and left his road research lab. The lab lost its independence and was put under direct civil service control. Short of burning the building down, they couldn’t have been clearer.

But, for all that, the answer might be yes – yes a pay-per-mile plan might be about to work. And this is a paper I wrote last year saying why this time is different.

The Electric Window

This isn’t about the rights and wrongs of the policy.1 Just the underlying political contours.

It has proven near-impossible to impose a per-mile cost on all motorists. They push back – hard. But right now, you don’t have impose it on everyone.

At this point in time, something new is happening. The road fleet is splitting in two: petrol/diesel and electric. One pays tax; until recently the other paid none at all, and still pays no cost per mile.

And, as we tested with some polls, that doesn’t carry the same public support. People will line up to stop 50p of fuel duty turning into 51p. But they feel differently if the starting number is 0p; and the new tax is paid by other people.

Motoring tax has been unshakeable when motorists hang together. But the rise of electric motoring means that, for a 10-15 year period, they probably won’t. And this is government’s opportunity to change the tax regime in a way they previously couldn’t.

I called this ‘the electric window’ – a time when the normal rules of motoring politics get suspended. It only lasts for as long as it takes for electric vehicle owners to become a large enough political force that once again they are once again too big to rouse.

And there’s a particularly golden space within that window where there aren’t enough opponents to stop change and the people who lose out from change are so numerous that the cost of buying them off is trivial. If 5% of motorists are in electric cars, you can offer them big discounts without compromising the long-term tax revenue. Maybe even exempt them entirely. Why fuss about a few hundred million if you’re unlocking billions in long term revenue?2

It’s one thing to be told to pay a new tax. But it’s quite a different thing if you think everyone on the road is having to pay twice as much as you – because you were smart and got in early. If political opposition is your problem, this is the charmed time when you can just buy everyone off and write it off as the cost of doing business.

The real battleground

I don’t want to overstate the chances – this is a very bold ask. There are some points of detail that can absolutely wreck a new plan.

I’m particularly focused on the difference between charging at home (7-8p/KWh at best) and publicly (50-80p/KWh). That means a new per-mile charge is enough to make electric more expensive than petrol for some people.

But this is also fixable – and if government is about to nail its colours to a mast on a new tax, they have a big incentive to find answers.

If you are a car company, you care about sales. And I reckon that about half the EV sales in the country are being prevented by solvable market problems. In East London, EV are hitting limits at about 5% takeup because of a lack of charging capacity.

And I also think that the people most exposed to change have a reason to pick their fights wisely. If you assume tax for EVs will come some day, whose government do you think they’d want to design it?

So for once, the impossible might just be possible…

Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll publish some numbers that throw more light on how.

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The Guardian is warning that the Chancellor is about to unleash a tide of destruction against protected snails. According to the people interviewed, this will be a disaster, a crime against justice and science.

This is apparently due for announcement later this week. But if this is referring to what I think it is, you might have more sympathy for Rachel Reeves than you expect based on the headline.1 And along the way, let me teach you how to seize control of half a county with a sheet of A4.

From the river to the source

The reports say that 20,000 houses in Sussex are being blocked by snails. You might have an image of a beautiful woodland that will soon be torn apart by bulldozers and turned into faceless suburbs. Snails crushed under caterpillar tracks. That’s not what’s being talked about here.

Instead, it’s a story about a very specific type of snail: the little whirlpool ramshorn snail. You might remember them from my post about the Acle Straight near Great Yarmouth, where they’d put an endless hold safety improvements on a road that killed six while we worked out the mitigation. It’s an understatement to say they’re fiercely protected.

And the best place in England to find them is a protected site in the Arun Valley in Sussex.2 And – good news – there’s no plans to build anything on it. In fact, given it’s an SAC, an SPA and a Ramsar site, you’ve got a better chance of turning Stonehenge into a Little Chef.

But Natural England worry about this site. The ramshorn snail is rare, and there are obligations to look after its habitat. And they worry about the amount of water coming to the site. If it gets too dry, peatland could dry out and the snails could suffer.

So in 2021, they sent a letter to local stakeholders saying they had to take action. For one side of A4, it does a lot. It informed everyone that there might be a threat to the Arun site. They were obliged to prevent any damage. So, to make sure no damage occurred, from now on everyone wanting to build anything upstream from the snails would need to prove they weren’t going to use any additional water.

ANY additional water.

I suspect that, if asked, Natural England would be terribly apologetic. They say they are compelled by laws (EU ones which we consciously kept after Brexit) to do everything they can to protect these environmental sites. And they really do mean everything.

But it’s a bit tricky for housebuilders. Because one of the things people in houses do is drink water. Sometimes several times a day. The fancier ones have also been known to wash clothes, flush toilets and make cups of tea. And that is banned unless it is offset by cuts elsewhere.

How widely did this apply? An area of about 350 square miles.3

Here’s a map. The affected area is hashed out, and covers about half the county of West Sussex, including most of three district councils. It’s 0.7% of the total land area of England, if you’d rather think of it that way. 250-300k people live there.

That little patch of red in the middle is the site being protected.

Finding a fix

Fortunately, there are things you can do to save water. For example, the local council recommends hooking up pipes so you can run your washing machine on rainwater. You can pay farmers to farm less. Whitehall is helping by mandating that new appliances have water efficiency labels, because every little helps.

But, as things stand, no one appears to have stood up and said ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE!?! Which seems like a missed opportunity.

First and foremost, we’re trading off the protection of an environmental site against the greatest essential of life – water – for our fellow citizens. If the snails have a right to water, the people do as well.

Second, Natural England isn’t saying the site is damaged by lack of water. They’re saying that they’re _not_ sure it _isn’t_ being damaged. Before they broke half a county, it might have been a good idea to check. And if they do decide to take action, the next step should be finding sensible balances that limit the harm to the public. Not jumping straight to the option that takes over the water of half a county with a letter.

Third, there are these things called pipes. This is a bit of a lost technology in the UK – we accidentally broke reservoir construction in the 1970s – but an NGO like WaterAid can fly in some experts and show us what to do.

But lastly, and most important – this is a democracy.

No bureaucrat should imagine they have the right to unilaterally take control of the water of half a county. To limit who gets to drink.

And the system watching those bureaucrats is responsible for intervening if they try. So, full marks to the Chancellor for doing precisely that.

And to the journalists at the Guardian – if you go for a glass of water between articles saying that housebuilding is a conspiracy of private capital, remember that the water you’re drinking is only yours if Natural England decides the snails don’t need it first.

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