The highest-leverage fix for British stagnation costs the Treasury nothing. It's the planning system - a machine built so that almost anything can be stopped, and so almost nothing gets built.
Crossbencher · 19 July 2026
The objectors are right about a great deal. Communities have a legitimate interest in what gets built around them. Green space, once concreted, doesn't come back. Property rights mean something, and a country that lets any developer impose any scheme on any neighbourhood in the name of growth has swapped one tyranny for another. "Just build" can bulldoze the real, the loved and the irreplaceable. A system with no brake at all would be its own kind of failure. None of that is in dispute.
What is in dispute is the setting of the default. Over decades, Britain has assembled something close to a veto economy: a planning and consenting system where the presumption runs to no, and almost any interested party can object, appeal, delay and litigate a project into the ground. Housing. The electricity grid. Lab space. Reservoirs. Transport. Data centres. The physical stock a modern economy runs on is each gated at the same point, and the gate opens grudgingly if at all. The result is a country that finds it easier to stop things than to make them - and has quietly forgotten that making them was ever the point.
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