Larry Elliott tells us that:
Britain has a cost of living crisis. It also has a housing crisis and an energy crisis. Weeks without rain in southern England mean there is a looming drought crisis. The NHS is only one serious Covid-19 outbreak away from crunch point.
These crises are all distinct and special in their own way but they also have a common theme: a failure to invest stretching back decades. An obsession with efficiency has meant infrastructure has been run into the ground rather than upgraded. Cost-cutting has been given a higher priority than capacity building.
Well, yeeees, but why?
Or take water. Since 1990 the population of the UK has risen by about 10 million to 67 million but not a single new reservoir has been built in the past three decades.
Water companies say they face widespread opposition in building new reservoir facilities, despite a recognition they will be increasingly needed under drier conditions as a result of climate change.
Thames Water has spent more than a decade attempting to construct a £1 billion reservoir to serve more than eight million people in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. The plans were first rejected by the government in 2011 and have been the subject of local opposition.
There are plans for a handful of new reservoirs across the country, but only one - the £100 million Havant Thicket project, near Portsmouth - actually has planning permission.
That is, we can’t build new - and energy efficient - houses because the planning system won’t let us build houses. We can’t go fracking for cheap (er) energy because the planning system won’t allow us to. We can’t build new reservoirs because the planning system won’t allow it.
Another stab with the same point is that the planning process - even if planning is finally granted - makes building or doing anything more expensive. Humans do less of things that are more expensive. Or, more formally, the planning process changes the cost benefit analysis of squeezing more out of the extant or building anew. Thus, if we wish to have more investment, more new things built, we need to lower that cost of that planning process.
Or, as we’ve been known to remark, many things would be cured by blowing up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Proper blow up. Kablooie.