The planning system makes it impossible to save the planet

We tend to think we’d rather like to save the planet. Polar bears are cuddly, d’ye see? Well, from a distance they are at least. Therefore we’d probably like to do something about this:

A plan to create a clean electricity system by 2030 promised by Labour before the election is “immensely challenging” but still “credible” if ministers take urgent action to fix Britain’s sluggish planning system, the energy system operator has said.

Britain could become a net exporter of green electricity by the end of the decade at no extra costs to the energy system under the plans and bills may even fall if ministers make the right policy changes, according to the operator.

We do tend to doubt the second part of those conclusions. Using more expensive power sources is unlikely to bring power bills down. But the first part, sure, we agree. The planning system does not allow us to build anything in anything less than geological timescales. Therefore, if we desire to do anything in less than those geological timescales we’ve got to change the planning system.

However, if we were to change the system only for socially approved green projects we’d be missing that opportunity to make the country hugely, vastly, better.

For that planning system bans the building of houses that Britons want to live in. That traditional des res with front and back garden is illegal given the enforcement of the minimum 30 dwellings to a hectare idea. The planning system also bans the building of houses where Britons want to live. That’s the whole point of the Green Belt nonsense, that the haute bourgoisie don’t get their views of rolling green acres interrupted by a crib or two for the proles.

The planning system costs of £300 million just on lawyers for a tunnel under the Thames. That’s good for m’learned enemies and an impertience and impoverishment imposed upon the rest of us.

The planning system prevents anyone building lab space around Cambridge, where the beating heart of the nation’s pharma research pumps away…..and on and on.

We’ve a planning system that prevents anyone from doing anything useful that is. It stems from that nationalisation of the use of land incorporated in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. As ever, nationalisation has made things expensive, bureaucratic and in short supply. Thus that’s the thing we need to change.

Blow up the TCPA - proper blow up, kablooie. No, don’t replace it, just erase it, bang.

That way we can have houses and tunnels and labs and factories and jobs and a thriving economy and just, in general, be a better country - as well as, if we must, save the cuddly polar bears.

Tim Worstall