The UK’s planning system is one of the world’s most restrictive. Planning authorities arbitrarily review evidence and make hands-off judgements about proposals. Outcomes depend on locally varying criteria and multiple stages of consent which provide opportunities for objectors and can precipitate lengthy negotiations, delays or even a rejection decision. The upcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill will not be enough to tackle it. To really deal with the problem the Government should look into a new philosophy from across the ocean – the abundance agenda.
Obstacles to economic growth are lamented in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Despite different governance structures, both countries suffer from high compliance costs for housing and infrastructure projects and great potential for objections on procedural, technical or environmental grounds.
Developers of transport, energy infrastructure and housing in both countries face an array of precautionary measures enacted in the last half century to promote the public good, facilitate consultation and protect workers, consumers, residents and the environment from harm.
Regulatory compliance like this has caused delays and cost overruns for nationally significant infrastructure in both countries. New railways, HS2 in Britain and California High-Speed Rail, have being truncated, downgraded and delayed.
Local councillors can disregard the advice of their planning professionals and veto proposals even when consistent with local plans. Both small and big infrastructure projects are subject to such problems, increasing risks for promoters and reducing successful outcomes.
The technical, environmental and legal advisers formulating projects therefore try to anticipate and pre-empt all possible setbacks and any potential for procedural challenge or delay. This raises costs and encourages over-specified solutions. Familiar examples are the over £100 million Sheephouse Wood bat protection structure on HS2 and the Lower Thames Crossing with preparation costs of £1.2 billion before construction has started.
These excessive administrative burdens have costs for promoters and undermine public confidence in government’s ability to act decisively and get things done.
Confronting this spectre of stagnation is the abundance agenda, proposed reforms focusing on collective needs and outcomes rather than processes. It advocates streamlining procedures so that regulatory authorities support necessary projects rather than retarding them.
These ideas have developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Solutions put less emphasis on protecting specific assets and more on strategic assessment. Facilitating development should raise productivity in the public and private sectors and promote economic mobility and income redistribution.
American commentators’ Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book is a topical expression of the movement.
Abundance devotees note that procedures and restrictions empower concentrated interests like existing homeowners and other change-resistant groups at the expense of all those who would benefit from expanded infrastructure. The state’s impaired capacity to implement large projects should therefore be restored by simpler processes and less scope for obstruction. This, it is argued, is not deregulation or an abandonment of environmental values, but overdue recognition that greater prosperity and wellbeing are possible while safeguarding what is important.
Some European administrations are regarded as more rules-based and developer-friendly, with wider powers to gather information and commission impact studies. They generally have less recourse to legal review, more flexibility in offsetting environmental harm and incentives for local communities to benefit from proposals. A more consensual system could alter the planners’ role of adjudicating between the conflicting interests of promoters and objectors to something more akin to that of elsewhere in Europe, offering more dialogue and information sharing between the decision-makers and the promoters.
In the United States the abundance agenda has been touted as a potential rallying point for a resurgence of the Democratic Party’s fortunes. It is not yet clear whether the rank and file are listening, and this will bear fruit. UK advocates of abundance reforms, on the other hand, are less partisan, perhaps reflecting cross-party interest in restoring economic growth. Some have a more market oriented perspective and would not welcome the ‘progressive’ label of many Democrats, but a broad-based approach may be better suited to taking forward proposals regardless of the party in power.
Klein and Thompson’s book coincides with the UK’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill progressing through Parliament, and the Bill’s drafters have been taking note. The legislation is intended to move towards strategic area assessment of projects to shift responsibility for identifying impacts and mitigation from developers to the state. But it still needs to go further.
Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) handling should be streamlined, with limits to the scope for legal challenges to development consent orders and National Policy Statements (NPSs). Environmental delivery plans for developments should set out the features likely to be harmed, the conservation measures to be taken and the levy payable by developers to cover conservation costs.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the scope of the legislation has apparently been curtailed in order to hasten its passage. It was recently revealed that a second Bill to accelerate major projects and limit judicial reviews may be on the cards, and rightly. This issue is critical for growth, and with actors across the political spectrum pressing for progress, the government’s motto seems to be, ‘if at first you don’t completely succeed, try again.’
Andrew Gibbons is a former UK government economist. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Bright Blue.