Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.
Why can’t we build anything in Britain?
I gave what I think are some of the answers at an event in Leeds last month, exploring why it is that that great city is the largest in Western Europe without light rail or a metro, a ridiculous state of affairs which holds it back.
The usual explanation for Leeds’ plight is Whitehall.
First, that it imposes gold-plated regulations, making building far too expensive and not allowing local areas to raise their own money, apply their own standards or take their own decisions on consenting. That criticism is fair, true and helps explain why Britain only has eight light rail systems against France’s 30-odd.
Second, that Whitehall is biased against everywhere outside south-east England, spends all the money in that one little corner, and controls the flow of the cash it does dole out in a way which makes it impossible to plan. That criticism is partly true, but doesn’t fully explain why Manchester and Sheffield and Nottingham and the West Midlands, all outside south east England, have got new tram systems in the last 20-30 years while Leeds hasn’t.
You’re never allowed to say the other part of the problem, though I did at that meeting: the local politicians in Leeds are useless, every bit as bad as Whitehall, probably worse.
In February 2022, when I was No10 transport adviser, we gave Tracy Brabin’s West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) £200 million to start work on the tram. Four years later, and with at least £120 million spent, they have almost literally nothing to show for it. They haven’t decided where it’s going to run, beyond ten route options on two broad route corridors. There isn’t so much as an outline business case. They can’t even say whether it’s going to be a tram or a guided bus! For context, in 2004 the entire first phase of Nottingham’s tram system was actually built for £200m, £360m in 2026 prices.
How have Brabin and her A-team spent their time?
Well, they’ve done “over 5000 surveys covering bats, birds and badgers.” And they’ve held no fewer than four public consultations. This year, there will be two more: a “regulation 18 consultation” for a development framework; and a “further consultation” on the same subject “in late summer.”
Only then, also at the “end of summer 2026,” will they submit the “strategic outline case” (SOC), which they describe “as establishing the ‘why’ by defining the problem, the strategic need” (which you’d hope they’d have managed already in four years and tens of millions spent.) The SOC isn’t even the outline business case; there’s still no date for that. Once the OBC happens, then consultations seven and eight (on the routes chosen) will get under way. Then it’s the later stage business case, then the Transport and Works Act order, and then you’re finally at the races.
Mayor Brabin has claimed that there will be “spades in the ground” by 2028, which seems unlikely given all the exciting consultations ahead – but she quietly admits that said spades will only be for “preparatory works” and will “not involve laying tracks.” The date for services to actually start running has been put back to the end of the 2030s.
As well as poor leadership, consultation has become a British curse.
Not everyone does as much as WYCA, but everyone does do far too much. It’s supposed to reconcile conflicting interests – the national interest in getting improvements built, the local and personal interests which will be impacted by the schemes. But it seldom manages this. Neither side is really honest with the other, nor satisfied with the outcome. Scheme builders are often criticised for insufficient consultation, when really, we know that no amount of consultation would ever make any difference; the only thing opponents will settle for is the scheme’s abandonment. Opponents sense that scheme builders are going through the motions and have made up their minds from the beginning. And for sure, the country needs infrastructure. Consultations are not and should not be referendums, though tweaks are often made.
At WYCA, as elsewhere, endless consultations have become substitutes for the exercise of old-fashioned political skill and sense. The wood is being missed for the trees. In Leeds, the route options WYCA has chosen for the new system are overwhelmingly on busy roads – guaranteeing the same sort of massive political backlash from motorists and kerbside businesses which scuppered the city’s last attempt at a transit network, ten years ago. And the main route corridor WYCA has chosen, from Leeds to Bradford, is already served by a closely parallel railway, meaning that while the new system will improve connectivity on this corridor, it will not transform it. All this is a recipe for failure.
One of the reasons Manchester’s and Nottingham’s tram schemes actually happened, unlike those in Leeds at about the same time, was that their first phases largely took over underused railway lines, with street running only in the city centre. That made them much less disruptive to motorists and easier politically. (To be fair, Leeds and West Yorkshire don’t have as many underused railways as Manchester, but they do have some. And once Manchester’s tram programme had built momentum and political credibility, later stages involved more street running.)
When I led the team which delivered the protected bike lanes in London, we couldn’t avoid putting them on roads or annoying motorists, of course, but we tried as far as possible to design for the politics, choosing roads without kerbside businesses, parking or bus routes, which we knew would be the main objections. The main east-west bike route through central London manages that about 95 per cent of the way.
At the same time, we didn’t try to pretend that there were no losers, or that we could consult everyone into happiness. We made a political case, saying that the scheme was a good thing, it would increase the roads’ people-carrying capacity (not the same thing as their vehicle-carrying capacity), it would save lives, it should happen, and motorists spending extra time in traffic along the route was a price worth paying. So while it was pretty controversial, it wasn’t cripplingly controversial, and it got done. (We consulted, too, because we had to legally, but only for 12 weeks, and that wasn’t why it happened.)
Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, Britain’s consultation mania is descending into its final stage, that of total farce. Pressure groups and activists are using AI to submit vastly more objections than in the past. And government is using AI to analyse and respond to them! The machines are talking to the machines. God knows whether any human is actually reading any of the tens of thousands of pages created, if anyone ever did read them in the first place.
So one of the many things a new reforming government must do is tighten the legal requirements on consultation, expanded over the years by the courts. General principles could include that you should only have to consult on a scheme once, not at every stage of its development; that no consultation, except on the most complex scheme, should last more than three months; and that only those directly affected by a scheme (still often quite a large group) can respond.
And if you really don’t like something, there’s always that great big consultation we call elections.