Britain Remade’s Report on Construction Costs
The group Britain Remade dropped a report criticizing Britain for its high infrastructure construction costs three days ago. I recommend everyone read Sam Dumitriu and Ben Hopkinson’s post on the subject. Sam and Ben constructed their own database. Their metro tunneling costs mostly (but not exclusively) come from our database but include more detail such as the construction method used; in addition, they have a list of tram projects, another list of highway projects, and a section about rail electrification. Over the last three days, this report has generated a huge amount of discussion on Twitter about this, with appearances in mainstream media. People have asked me for my take, so here it is. It’s a good report, and the recommendations are solid, but I think it would benefit from looking at historical costs in both the US and UK. In particular, while the report is good, the way it’s portrayed in the media misses a lot.
What’s in the report
Sam and Ben’s post talks about different issues, affecting different aspects of the UK, all leading to high costs:
NIMBYism
The report brings up examples of NIMBYs slowing down construction and making it more expensive, and quotes Brooks-Liscow on American highway cost growth in the 1960s and 70s. This is what has been quoted in the media the most: Financial Times call it the “NIMBY tax,” and the Telegraph spends more time on this than on the other issues detailed below.
The NIMBYs have both legal and political power. The legal power comes from American-style growth in red tape; the Telegraph article brings up that the planning application for a highway tunnel under the Thames Estuary is 63,000 pages long and has so far cost 250 million £ in planning preparations alone (the entire scheme is 9 billion £ for 23 km of which only 4.3 are in tunnel). The political power is less mentioned in the report, but remains important as well – High Speed 2 has a lot of gratuitous tunneling due to the political power of the people living along the route in the Home Counties.
Start-and-stop construction
British rail electrification costs are noticeably higher than Continental European ones. The report points out that construction is not contiguous but is rather done in starts and stops, leading to worse outcomes:
Lack of standardization
Sam and Ben bring up the point Bent Flyvbjerg makes about modularization and standardization. This is the least-developed point in the report, to the point that I’m not sure this is a real problem in the United Kingdom. It is a serious problem in the United States, but while both American and British costs of infrastructure construction are very high, not every American problem is present in the UK – for example, none of the British consultants we’ve spoken to has ever complained about labor in the UK, even though enoguh of them are ideologically hostile to unions that they’d mention it if it were as bad as in the US.
What’s not in the report?
There are some gaps in the analysis, which I think compromise its quality. The analysis itself is correct and mentions serious problems, but would benefit from including more things, I believe.
Historical costs
The construction costs as presented are a snapshot in time: in the 21st century, British (and Canadian, and American) costs have been very high compared with Continental Europe. There are no trends over time, all of which point to some additional issues. In contrast, I urge people to go to my post from the beginning of the year and follow links. The biggest missing numbers are from London in the 1960s and 70s: the Victoria and Jubilee lines were not at all atypically expensive for European subway tunnels at the time – at the time, metro construction costs in London, Italian cities, and German cities were about the same. Since then, Germany has inched up slightly, Italy has gone down due to the anti-corruption laws passed in the 1990s, and the United Kingdom has nearly quadrupled its construction costs over the Jubilee, which was already noticeably higher than the Victoria.
The upshot is that whatever happened that made Britain incapable of building happened between the 1970s and the 1990s. The construction cost increase since the 1990s has been real but small: the Jubilee line extension, built 1993-9, cost 218.7 million £/km, or 387 million £/km in 2022 prices; the Northern line extension, built 2015-21, cost 375 million £/km, or 431 million £/km in 2022 prices. The Jubilee extension is only 80% underground, but has four Thames crossings; overall, I think it and the Northern extension are of similar complexity. It’s a real increase over those 22 years; but the previous 20 years, since the original Jubilee line (built 1971-9), saw an increase to 387 million £/km from 117 million £/km.
The issue of soft costs
Britain has a soft costs crisis. Marco Chitti points out how design costs that amount to 5-10% of the hard costs in Italy (and France, and Spain) are a much larger proportion of the overall budget in English-speaking countries, with some recent projects clocking in at 50%. In the American discourse, this is mocked as “consultants supervising consultants.” Every time something is outsourced, there’s additional friction in contracting – and the extent of outsourcing to private consultants is rapidly growing in the Anglosphere.
On Twitter, some people were asking if construction costs are also high in other Anglo countries, like Australia and New Zealand; the answer is that they are, but their cost growth is more recent, as if they used to be good but then learned bad practices from the metropole. In Canada, we have enough cost history to say that this was the case with some certainty: as costs in Toronto crept up in the 1990s, the TTC switched to design-build, supposed inspired by the Madrid experience – but Spain does not use design-build and sticks to traditional design-bid-build; subsequently, Toronto’s costs exploded, going, in 2022 prices, from C$305 million/km for the Sheppard line to C$1.2 billion/km for the Ontario Line. Every cost increase, Canada responds with further privatization; the Ontario Line is a PPP. And this is seen the most clearly in the soft cost multiplier, and in the rise in complaints among civil servants, contractors, and consultants about contracting red tape.
Britain Remade’s political recommendations
Britain Remade seems anchored not in London but in secondary cities, judging by the infrastructure projects it talks most about. One of its political recommendations is,
Britain is one of the most centralised countries in the world. Too often, Westminster prioritises investments in long-distance intercity rail such as HS2 or the Northern Powerhouse Rail when they would be better off focusing on cutting down commuting times. Local leaders understand local priorities better than national politicians who spend most of their time in Westminster. If we really devolved power and gave mayors real powers over spending, we’d get the right sort of transport more often.
Britain Remade is campaigning for better local transport. We want to take power from Westminster and give it to local leaders who know better. But, we also want to make sure transport investment stretches further. That’s why we are calling for the government to copy what other countries do to bring costs down, deliver projects on time, and build more.
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/building_better_local_transport
Devolution to the Metropolitan counties – those covering Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle – has been on the agenda in the UK for some time now. This reform is intended to give regions more power over spending, inspired by the success of devolution to London, where Transport for London has good operating practices and plenty of in-house capacity. More internationally-minded Brits (that is, to say, European-minded – there’s little learning from elsewhere except when consultants treat Singapore and Hong Kong as mirrors of their own bad ideas) will even point out the extensive regional empowerment in the Nordic countries: Swedish counties have a lot of spending power, and it’s possible to get all stakeholders in the room together in a county.
And yet, the United States is highly decentralized too, and has extreme construction costs. Conversely, Britain knew how to build infrastructure in the 1960s and 70s, under a centralized administrative state. Devolution to the Metropolitan counties will likely lead to good results in general, but not in infrastructure construction costs.
The media discourse
The report raises some interesting points. The start-and-stop nature of British electrification is a serious problem. To this, I’ll add that in Denmark, electrification costs are higher than in peer Northern European countries because its project, while more continuous, suffered from political football and was canceled and then uncanceled.
Unfortunately, all media discussion I can see, in the mainstream as well as on Twitter, misses the point. There’s too much focus on NIMBYism, for one. Britain is not the United States. In the United States, the sequence is that first of all the system empowered NIMBYs politically and legally starting in the 1960s and 70s, and only then did it privatize the state. In the United Kingdom, this is reversed: the growth in NIMBY empowerment is recent, with rapid expansion of the expected length of an environmental impact statement, and with multiplication of conflicting regulations – for example, there are equity rules requiring serving poor and not just rich neighborhoods, but at the same time, there must be a business case, and the value of time in the British benefit-cost analysis rules is proportional to rider income. This explosion in red tape is clearly increasing cost, but the costs were very high even before it happened.
Then, there are the usual incurious ideas from the Twitter reply gallery, including some people with serious followings: Britain must have stronger property rights (no it doesn’t, and neither does the US; look at Japan instead), or it’s related to a general cost disease (British health care costs are normal), or what about Hong Kong (it’s even more expensive).
Pedestrian Observations 
Interesting article!
Disagree on the NIMBY thing being a significant cost driver for HS2. The CPRE who are the most NIMBY of NIMBYs suggested that HS2 should have been built up the M1 and for £20bn – with the other change being to 4 track Coventry to Birmingham New Street. So if the NIMBYs had been listened to then HS2 would actually have been reasonably good value.
I had a look at the satellite map and actually even within London it looks very reasonable. You go from Euston to West Hampstead – where you would have your “old oak common” station and that would link to Thameslink, the North London Line the Chiltern Line, the Metropolitan Line and the Jubilee Line which is actually significantly better connected than Old Oak Common.
Then you follow the midland mainline north which also parallels the M1. The only challenge is the need to change the Mill Hill Broadway station car park.
Then I guess if you want access to Heathrow you do the West London Orbital link from West Hampstead.
The real fundamental issue is that the Department of Transport is full of complete morons.
Certainly in terms of road costs they appear to have increased substantially since ~1990. The M40 extension build in ~1990 was about ~10% after adjusting for inflation of the cost of some of the work they are doing on the A303.
Owerbuilding seems to be one factor in high cost, at least on HS2. For example, Colne viaduct, which is 3.4 km long 10m high bridge over flat terain and lake.
To save costs, part of that bridge could be earthwork embankment. Other part over the lake is using complicated V shape structure, where less elaborate structure would be cheaper.
I do not know reasons for this architectural decisions, but it seems that it could be build easier
In a similar vein there is also an 880m bridge over a 4m wide river at Aylesbury on basically flat land.
Although I don’t know the details of the river at Aylesbury, with high speed trains “basically flat” doesn’t cut it. The question isn’t how wide the river is but how high the drop is from either edge of that 880m stretch to the river. Everyone knows HSR needs to be straight, but even more important is that it has to be very, very (VERY) flat. Horizontal curve radius on HS2 (designed for 400kph) is 7,000m but vertical curve radius is 56,000m (not a typo, 56km). This means that over 880m the track can drop down and then come back up 864mm (again, not a typo, just a bit more than the height of the desk you are likely sitting at). This would be 220m of convex curve down, dropping 432mm, then 220m of concave curve down, dropping another 432mm before coming back to level, then reversing to come back up. Since I am guessing the river banks at Aylesbury is more than 1m below surrounding terrain, some kind of structure is required.
Where there may be overbuilding is 1) the decision to build for 400kph when most trains seem to have a limit of 360kph and train lines that can run at 350kph have operationally choses to limit speed to around 300kph instead. 2) If a full bridge was used here, instead of as Michal Formanek notes an embankment with a short bridge just over the river. This is usually a result of either environmental impact reports (“An embankment would destroy x square meters of temporary wetlands when the river floods its banks every 17 years…”) or NIMBYism (“An embankment would be like a Berlin Wall cutting across the river valley, only a signature bridge reflecting the values of Aylesbury…”).
I’d much rather have an embankment with a few tunnels underneath, rather than a giant concrete bridge.
Yeah I am sure the decision to build for 400km/h is the issue – if they’d built for 300km/h the land would be flat enough.
https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=51.820277%7E-0.858829&lvl=14.9&style=s is a link to the area in question.
someone needs to do an analysis of what is a good speed. While you can go 600km/h, since wind resistance goes up with square of speed, it seems like the best compromise is around 300km/h expected speed, 320km/h design top speed (which allows for going faster if needed for a late train to catch up – the Swiss model). However I suspect someone can put in a good analysis backed by actual train performance numbers to tell us what the compromise is. If your distance is far enough that 600km/h would make a difference, flying is probably more energy efficient (less wind resistance at altitude and you are at altitude for a while). This deserves a complex paper though, probably a good phd subject.
Someone somewhere already did and super computers somewhere knows about it. The complicated shroud on the front of trains isn’t there because it would look way kewl, it’s there to optimize …lots of things. Some countries even have whole agencies/department dedicated to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Committee_for_Aeronautics
@Henry, I dont think we need a supercomputer! The answer is 300-320km/h.
You don’t need ridiculous bridges on flat land at that speed and the curve radius is OK.
“if they’d built for 300km/h the land would be flat enough”
“The answer is 300-320km/h. You don’t need ridiculous bridges on flat land at that speed and the curve radius is OK”
@Matthew Hutton
Actually at 300kph it still isn’t flat enough. 300kph is very fast, and vertical curve radii are still very large. For 300kph at the same vertical acceleration the preferred vertical curve would be 32,500m (again, not a typo, 32.5km). Instead of 864mm elevation distance down-up in 880m you can now cover 1,488mm down and then up again. If you went with an absolute bare minimum vertical radius of 16,275m (which means passengers experience more up and down force along the ride) you can get up to a whopping 3,000mm of vertical change over 880m and back again. Just poking around Google maps terrain layer it looks like the River Thame ‘valley’ is ~5 to 10m below the surrounding terrain, so you will need a structure here for any level HSR.
Actual vertical distance would be less because my quick calculations are ignoring Euler spirals in and out of the curves (maybe not necessary for curves this shallow, just as slope transitions of 0.1% don’t require vertical curves at all) and ignoring non-curved sections between curves (which are absolutely necessary to smooth out forces. Two such segments between three curves would take up 300-500m of the 880m, leaving less distance to curve up or down, partially offset by sloping up or down during that stretch).
@Onux, you obviously need a structure, the question is whether the structure needs to be 800m long. If you need to raise or lower the railway by 2-3m why not build a cutting?
If the “valley” that the river runs in is 800m wide, then you need an 800m structure to keep the track flat across it. If the river cut a path 80m wide you would need an 80m structure, if it were 400m a 400m structure etc.
A cutting doesn’t help because the curve and slope in the track of the cutting is subject to the same constraints. You don’t “need” to drop or raise the railway 2-3m, my calculations to that number were to show that in 800m you can’t get around building a structure across the river while staying flat enough. To eliminate the bridge by dropping ~5m you need 2000m of cutting, which would be more expensive than the 800m viaduct when you account for all of the retaining walls and drainage piping. Except you can’t drop all the way to the river level because if it floods in a heavy rain you would lose use of the track, so you still end up with 800m of some kind of structure plus the cost of the cuttings.
Fair point.
“Everyone knows HSR needs to be straight, but even more important is that it has to be very, very (VERY) flat.”
Is this right? Alon has frequently pointed out that HSR gradients can be higher than regular all-access railways. The Cologne-Frankfurt line has 3.5% grades, for instance. Vertical curve radius is a slightly different issue, of course, but France has managed to build its TGV network largely without tunnels by resorting to relatively steep gradients.
The issue is vertical curvature. That limits you to a ridiculous degree at 400km/h.
@df1982
You are confusing slope (aka level, whether or not something changes in relation to gravity) and curvature (aka flat, whether or not something changes in relation to a straight line). As some examples, a wall is flat but not level, while a floor is both (unless your carpenter was poor). A ploughed field might be level (one corner at the same elevation as the other) but with furrows it is definitely not flat.
Both are important for rail. Track is usually limited to 1-2% slope due to adhesion limitations of steel on steel; you note how Alon has identified HSR handling 3-4% slope due to greater power (think an Olympic sprinter running uphill versus a pensioner). It’s the opposite for curvature. Greater speed means greater centrifugal force on a curve (how you are “thrown” to the side on a sharp turn in a car or bicycle). Everyone knows that HSR needs very gentle turns because of this, with curve radii of kilometers. But humans handle horizontal force better than vertical, which is why vertical curves (change from level to a slope or vice versa) require radii of tens of kilometers – otherwise at HSR speeds people would be thrown to the floor at the bottom of a curve or go weightless and hit the ceiling at the top.
The case Matthew Hutton brought up was of generally flat terrain going down to a river bank then back up again. In this case of changing elevation then coming back (mostly level, but not flat) the limiting factor is the curvature, how fast you can deviate from flat. If the question were of changing elevation in one direction (mostly flat, but not level) then the greater concern is slope, and over 880m you could change ~3-10m of elevation, depending on speed and how loose your standards are (but at speeds >300kph you can still only reach 1-2% slope before having to start curving the other way; again HSR lines need to be VERY flat).
How in holy hell does soft costs on any major construction project end up at 50% of the total? Are the consultants’ computers made of solid gold?
50% of the hard costs, so 33% of the total.
And it’s not just consulting fees but also things like insurance and contingencies. The UK and the US share a love of tacking on large contingencies on the budget to pretend to fight cost overruns.
In the Anglosphere it appears that political heat comes more from cost overruns than absolute costs. Budget something for $1b and it ends up costing $2b, you’ll be murdered in the media. Budget the exact same project for $4b and it ends up costing $3b, you’ll be celebrated for your astute project management. So theres a major incentive to over-inflating the budgets on projects, which creates a vicious cycle, where every project is inflated over its predecessor, and contractors know they can max out the funding envelope without jeopardising the project.
Reagan’s attack on the Miami Metro Rail was about its absolute costs, comparing its cost per rider with the cost of a car; Cato and Reason have stuck with this metric of cost per rider for a while. Criticism of military overspending in the US likewise centers absolute costs: $600 toilet seats, $1.4 trillion for the F-35, etc. The contingency paranoia is not based on any real political constraint; it’s just something political and civil service elites made up and won’t come down from.
OK, but Reagan was 40 years ago, and Cato/Reason have little purchase beyond loony libertarian circles. In terms of mass media coverage, it’s a lot easier to portray a project with cost overruns as a sign that things have gone wrong than it is to establish that the initial cost estimate was itself over-inflated (which requires detailed comparative studies of the type you carry out), and so this is the issue that TV and press tend to run with.
Certainly all of the people opposed to HS2 were well aware that it was particularly expensive.
And certainly the CPRE in particular were aware specifically that the French were able to build high speed rail much cheaper.
Fundamentally lots of the serious opponents to HS2 have second homes in France. So frankly it’d be a bit weird if they weren’t aware that the French can build high speed rail cheaper. I am sure the French elite who they will mix with will have enjoyed trolling their British neighbours about how expensive HS2 is – just like they will have taken the piss out of the British about Brexit.
And yeah if South Korea was the country building high speed rail cheaper the British establishment might not be aware, but they certainly are aware about Europe.
The issue with HS2 costs is partly NIMBYs in the Home Counties, but also partly overbuilt stations. And the latter part isn’t something that familiarity with France can help with, because Paris has some truly massive station approaches; the TGVs are ridiculously inefficient when it comes to egress capacity, but that doesn’t matter because Gare de Lyon has 22 surface tracks and not much Transilien traffic (nearly all regional trains in that direction are on the RER D). This is really a place where the only place to learn from is Asia, and this is much harder for Europeans (see also corona).
If HS2 had followed the CPRE proposal, i.e. the NIMBYs in the Home Counties your out of town station would be at West Hampstead with connections to the Jubilee and Metropolitan lines, Thameslink, the Chiltern line and the Overground. After West Hampstead you’d likely tunnel to Paddington as that links you to the Elizabeth Line, Circle Line and Bakerloo Line.
And at Paddington station costs wouldn’t be as high as as I have shown before you can add 11 platforms within the existing footprint. Now sure those platforms would need extending from 250m to 400m, but that wouldn’t have the crazy cost blowouts.
At West Hampstead maybe you’d land up with an underground station below the existing three stations to connect them together. But as it’s a wealthy area the local elite would also insist the station buildings were in keeping. That means suburban simplicity, which to be fair wouldn’t be very cheap, but it also wouldn’t be ridiculous either.
You’d also lose all your ridiculous London tunnelling as you’d be on the surface from West Hampstead as there’s clearly space the whole way out. Additionally as West Hampstead is wealthy that makes it basically impossible for poorer areas to insist on unnecessary tunnelling as happened in Ealing.
Cato/Reason have little purchase beyond loony libertarian circles.
Yet they get cited all the time. And have a cozy congenial relationship with the rest of the right wing.
When you hire the architects and engineers full time for six months to design the project, then keep them on staff (maybe part time or maybe not all of them) for nine to twenty-four months while you pay a different group of engineers, scientists, lawyers and others full time to prepare and get approved the environmental report (which these days often includes not just ecological impacts but economic or social factors like traffic studies, housing impact, etc.) then you bring the first group back on full time for another six months to redesign parts of the project based on the changes recommended/required by the environmental report. Then, in addition to keeping a few architects/engineers on full time for the remaining five years of the project (normal for construction management of projects this size), you also keep a few environmental engineers, urban planners, etc. on staff for five more years to monitor the application of the environmental report.
Time is money, and employing more people for the same amount of time or the same number of people longer can rapidly inflate costs.
You might have to give the staff not doing much work golden handcuffs too which adds to cost as that is boring.
This is why we need more standardization. Stations should all be the same modules, maybe configured different if you want to trade the end the main entrance is on, but essentially the same. Make them different with paint or other things hung on the wall. Likewise, bridges can be a lot cheaper if you just install the standard bridge, but if you insist on a sculpture you will pay a lot more for the same function.
Bridges are a good place to put in extra engineering since elevated rail is so useful (cheaper than underground and no dealing with everything crossing at ground level). House builders know a few rules (a 2x whatever will span so far, and some standard rules) thus making most houses no matter how different they appear actually very modular and thus cheap (there are two standard wall heights, if you want something else you pay extra to get all parts custom cut). I don’t know the equivalent in concrete bridge terms, but someone does – or at least should.
Stations and rail should be ordered by the purchasing manager not an engineer (though that manager should have some background in engineering). The only engineering should be a geological engineer who examines the soil on each support column to ensure it will hold. It is a lot of work to get there, but once done every city in the world can copy and paste with no need to hire consultants to do design. (You will want a consultant to find the best route but that is someone like Jarret Walker, and he will teach your staff to do the next line)
You may want an architect on staff to handle details, but since so much is standard it is just one and it’s doesn’t talk long to do the design.
@Henry Miller
Standardization is always good, but doesn’t really help the issue I am talking about. The first six months of architect/engineer work is normal for a large project, not everything can be standardized and something like a rail route has to be custom and requires work to design and engineer. The problem is keeping all of that staff on payroll (plus design managers, plus contractor project managers, etc.) while a lengthy environmental report is prepared and approved (with its own staff being paid the whole time). Even if you use a totally standard viaduct design and switch to a totally standard bridge when the environmental report says the impact of digging all of the viaduct columns is too great, the time taken up costs money (note, its the same if you start with the bridge and switch to the viaduct because of visual impacts of the bridge tower).
“The only engineering should be a geological engineer who examines the soil” This is overly simplistic and a recipe for disaster. Structural and electrical engineering calculations have to be done for safety (plumbing and HVAC have to be done for effectiveness) and every fast/efficient project in the world does them. You can simplify some with standardization, but a building in an earthquake zone will have different structural needs than one in a tornado zone (same for earthquake zone on bedrock vs soil, etc.) A building in a warm climate needs more AC which means different size electrical circuits.
For sure environmental reviews do need to account for is it worth redoing for a small issue. The Environmental impact statement was envisioned to be ~10 pages, we need to reevaluate what parts of them are worth doing at all (many parts are court mandated, but congress can say no to those). And if it is worth doing what parts should be split out to a separate review.
Alon keeps saying that the real costs of expensive projects is in large part the stations though.
@Henry, I think thats for rapid transport. Theres no way thats true for high speed rail.
To be fair there are only 4 stops in stage one. Euston, Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street.
Euston certainly will need custom architecture to fit in with the existing station. I guess the others could be more standardised though.
Wow, New Labour really brought the Thatcherite electrification program to a screeching halt. Thank goodness Cameron defeated Brown to get things started again so that the One-Nation Tories could kick it back into high gear post Brexit.
Another fact is political gutlessness. Why make a decision when we can have another round of consultations with yet more tweaks to make it more palatable. For example the average height of the lower thames road road crossing has sunk 5 metres in the planning process. To reduce noise and visual impact has meant many more miles of cuttings and therefore rising costs. The same problem on HS2 it’s not just extra tunnels. One person joked you wont be able to see the countryside between London and Birmingham, you’ll be in cuttings all the way there..
I don’t think it’s just gutlessness. Olaf Scholz is plenty gutless; in Germany this is seen in underbuilding infrastructure, but not in having high per-km costs.
the extent of outsourcing to private consultants is rapidly growing in the Anglosphere.
Because the 12th Commandment is “Government is evil. Private industry does it better”.
“consultants supervising consultants.”
That’s a feature not a bug. It’s more work for upper middle class white collar workers. NIMBYs love it because if you don’t spew out reams of documents they can sue – more white collar work !! !! – that you didn’t produce the reports. Gives them time to complain about how much blue collar workers cost.
Thanks for reading and sharing. Your work was a huge inspiration to do this.
A few thoughts:
On localism: The way I see it is that reducing costs will be an enabler of devolution (e.g. unlocking financing options that don’t require central government involvement) rather than devolution as a driver of cost reductions. (Though I suspect localism will enable more predictability and less stop-start).
On the NIMBYism focus: This work is very much an initial foray into the topic and we plan to follow-up on a range of factors. But, we decided to emphasise the NIMBY aspect because of the breath-taking Lower Thames Crossing case and because it complements our prior campaigning on the planning system making it harder/more expensive to build green sources of energy.
On causes: We deliberately were light on explanations to let the data speak for itself. The historical cost point is really interesting and something we’ll touch on later.
Would be keen to chat potential causes and further research.
Isn’t there sort of an inherent tension in opposing NIMBYism while also advocating for localism/devolution–which by shrinking overall decision-making polities, gives NIMBYs proportionally more influence? I mean to say, local leaders may understand local priorities better than metropole elites, but local priorities tend to be dominated by the kind of local notables who are doing well under current arrangements and resist attempts to change them.
Does your group have a vision for how this tension can be resolved, or a reason to believe it won’t be an issue? (For context, I’ve not read the report nor do I live in the UK, so I acknowledge that I may be operating from faulty assumptions…)
The challenge if you ignore the local notables is that mostly they genuinely know the area well so can add positive value.
And the 19th century railways and canals etc had to deal with local notables which largely they managed successfully. They struggled in the richest areas just like today a bit – but thats certainly not a recent change.
Devolution to the Met counties means giving those counties more power at the expense of the municipalities below them, so on net it moves the decisionmaking power upward.
Who are the people who are considered NIMBYs with regards to the lower thames crossing?