From personal experience of fire protection regulation, as an example, it seems the issue is not the lack of regulation but the lack of consequences for those who breach them. It was universally known prior to Grenfell, that combustible materials were being used in high rise buildings. These were being manipulated and presented as “fire safe”. The directors of organisations such as Celotex and Kingspan knew exactly what they were doing, but get away with it. Otherwise, the UK is hopelessly over regulated. I’ve just returned from 2 weeks in Denmark where they have built a complete underground metro system in Copenhagen within 25 years and are building an undersea tunnel to link to northern Germany. We can’t build a railway line between Birmingham and London.
Yes, the missing link in the ‘abundance’ trade-off between over- or under- regulation seems to be accountability. Not just in the formal sense of who shall be held accountable by the public, but also the moral sense of how project leaders hold *themselves* accountable for the consequences of their designs and actions.
Much anti-regulation rhetoric is in bad faith, but so is a lot of Nimbyism, where regulations are used as convenient tools to block development. How do we make acting in bad faith unacceptable in the public realm? Transparency and accountability are part of the answer, but this needs to be accompanied by public trust, and it’s hard to see how that’s going to he rebuilt. So, back round in circles we go.
Totally agree, and where I see a difference with some European countries is the preparedness of leaders to behave more ethically and/or for the state to take action (e.g. Sarkozy being jailed for fraud - unthinkable in the UK)
Grenfell cladding would not have been allowed under Rebuilding of London Act 1666. Regulation a few pages long and allowed building of the largest city on earth.
The regulation that may have killed most of the Grenfell victims was British Gas refusing to turn off the gas to the area in case it caused an explosion elsewhere and they would have been charged with Corporate Manslaughter. When gas finally turned off the fire died down swiftly. I recall this in the week of Norman Tebbits death when the victims at Brighton were only saved because the Fire Fighters agreed that the explosion was a "kitchen gas explosion" as it was a bomb they could not legally enter until bomb squad had cleared area. God Bless them. (Did not happen unfortunately at Manchester Arena)
Seriously, what killed people at Grenfell was the speed with which the fire spread because the insulation was combustible plastic foam, and the smoke it produces when burning contains cyanide.
I hold a somewhat pessimistic-optimistic view: I don’t believe it’s possible to create a truly efficient, long-term model of “just right” regulation. Instead, we seem destined to cycle between waves of regulation and deregulation. Even the best regulatory initiatives—such as the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon—tend, over time, to degenerate into “Yes, Minister”-style bureaucracies. These institutions often become entangled in internal politics and captured by competing external interests, eventually losing sight of their founding mission.
From my experience living in Poland after 1989, the most meaningful social and economic progress occurred during a brief period: between the radical dismantling of socialist-era regulations, and before EU accession and imposition of EU-driven rules. Initially, we rebuilt the economy (at considerable social cost what was - IMHO - unavoidable). But later, we significantly enhanced our quality of life thanks to EU rules.
But now, two or three decades later, we are entering a new phase. The rising costs of maintaining EU-level quality-of-life standards are becoming increasingly apparent. For instance, while the goal of addressing climate change is more or less broadly supported, the specific structure of the EU’s climate policy—uniform and “one-size-fits-all”—tends to reflect the priorities and capabilities of wealthier Western societies, making it far less sustainable for less affluent countries like Poland.
Growing public frustration and the rise of far-right parties may soon trigger a wave of radical deregulation, seen as a correction to policies now viewed as costly and misaligned with their original purpose.
One additional comment: The EU has provided Poland with substantial funding for investments in hard infrastructure. However, Poland was able to sped this money and build eg. a nationwide highway network over the past 20 years largely because the government enacted special legislation that allowed it to bypass much of the bureaucratic red tape and, if necessary, forcibly nationalize private land for public investment projects.
A similar approach is now being used for the construction of the new big central airport—again, through a special law that enables the government to compel the sale of private land and property if deemed necessary. By contrast, in sectors where no such legal shortcuts exist, progress is often slow, entangled in red tape, and riddled with inefficiencies.
What may be particularly interesting for UK readers is that these special laws—used to accelerate the construction of highways or airports—tend to enjoy broad public support across the political spectrum. Voters from both the left and the right often back such measures because they associate them with economic growth and national progress.
This reflects a cultural difference between Eastern and Western Europe: in the East, there is still a strong belief that “progress” is inseparable from physical development—building infrastructure, expanding capacity, and increasing visible signs of prosperity. As a result, people are often willing to accept limitations on individual rights or property in the name of country advancement.
In fairness Poland has a population density less than half of that of the UK as a whole, and between a third and a quarter of that of England. Major infrastructure projects simply have a much greater physical impact in Britain than in Poland..
In Poland, the share of the rural population is nearly three times higher than in the UK, and the population is much more evenly distributed across the country. There are no megacities like London; instead, 40% of the electorate lives in rural areas another 30% in small and medium size cites, which means that building a railroad requires passing through many populated constituencies
That's true to a point, but even if you take out the British cities that have about the population of Greater Warsaw or more (Greater London, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, and West Yorkshire), you still end up with a greater population density than Poland - particularly in south east England. This isn't an argument against infrastructure development, just a likely reason as to why it is harder to build a consensus for such developments.
Frankly, I don’t think population density is ultimately that important. My main point was more about cultural differences and how people perceive symbols of progress. In Poland, people are likely more willing to support a politician who promises to build something, even if it means damaging parts of a green belt or nationalizing private land. History probably plays a role in this too—large-scale land nationalization has been common in Poland since 1945, and there are no major landowning classes left to strongly oppose it.
In general, I sometimes get the feeling that Poland—and perhaps other parts of Eastern Europe—are in a somewhat similar position to eg France in the 1970s. Probably due to a historical time lag and a still significant deficit in hard infrastructure, these countries often approach development more like the French presidents in 1960s or 1970s who launched national projects such as the TGV or nuclear power plants. It feels closer to that era of state-driven progress than to the current discourse among many Western politicians, which often revolves around post-growth models.
I think you might find the BBC article I've linked below on HS2 interesting, and from your perspective possibly depressing. It also gives reasons why it is easier to execute such projects in France and China. For me the key quote comes from a chartered surveyor involved with HS2
"There has always been a fundamental problem in this country with the cost of building anything," the surveyor says, "because we live on a small, highly populated, property-owning, democratic island."
I think you make a mistake there. People is less densely populated areas tend to be rather more interested to keep the land their families lived on ‘as it always was’. On the other side, densely populated nations like e.g. the Netherlands are willing to take expensive measures to not unnecessarily worsen the impact of construction work. See the 7km ‘Green Heart of Holland’ tunnel in the high speed line from Schiphol Airport to Rotterdam. And then marvel at the way how an attempt to do something similar with HS2 here in the UK fell victim to incompetence, corruption and NIMBYism.
“So what is the right amount of regulation, and why?”
Really enjoyed the piece. My personal view is that this is the wrong question, and that actually the big problem on all sides is we think in terms of projects and regulations and not systems and incentives.
The bat tunnel isn’t an inevitable consequence of current regulations, it’s a symptom of dysfunctional behaviour around those regulations, and that behaviour is ultimately determined by the prevailing culture. If you deleted all regulations tomorrow, that culture would find some other tool to achieve the same outcome. And ultimately that culture has arisen because at every level we prioritise a kind of adversarial, risk-avoidant literalism over things we know work in modern complex businesses like empowered teams, strong ownership, initiative with a clear set of values, etc.
You see this in the piece I wrote the other week about the local road that can’t be fixed because nobody owns it. There’s no law or rule preventing it from being fixed, the council just refuse to take ownership because they have no incentive to do so and indeed would likely be punished in some way for taking on that ‘risk’. It’s so ingrained that even the concept of taking it on is alien. The same applies for the bat tunnel - nobody gets fired for ticking the box and writing off £120m, but do something else?! Oof, steady on old chap.
Excellent reasoning! Come and take a look at some local roads elsewhere in the country. If you have a chance invite a few foreign nationals and explain why they see what they see. Or why they have to hold on to their seats despite the low speed.
Good column! There was a book published maybe a quarter century ago called The Death of Common Sense, by Philip Howard. I don't know what's become of him or it, but it was to the same effect as Abundance. And once again, I don't remember if he proferred any cure.
Great review of this, Sam. In keeping with your point about trade-offs, although I think the balance in the English-speaking world is probably too much against development, it feels sometimes like a very grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side way of looking at things. We complain about the impact of environmental regulations a lot. But at the same time, across the western world they have generally worked in substantially improving air and water quality since they were introduced decades ago. There is also a quality-of-life value to biodiversity that is hard to quantify - my day feels a lot better when I can go for a walk and see an animal that's not a rat or pigeon.
I think, however, that rather than being a matter just of deregulation, this is about governments working more to encourage optimal land use policy. Gentle density for residential and commercial buildings - in the English-speaking world, towns and cities are often much less dense than they could be - higher-capacity transport options per space used, and so on. I agree that it might be hard culturally to manage what Japan has done. But I'm always in awe of how they can combine relatively affordable urban living and comprehensive transport, and a wide range of independent businesses, with pristine natural landscapes.
One thing that would have to be done here is overcoming an Anglo aversion to apartment living. But I think that can be done, in the spirit of Henry Ford's adage that if he asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses. That, again, is a matter of sometimes taking one step back on the ease of construction to take two steps forward on having nice, but dense, urban living.
I agree. As a district councillor who is on the receiving end of both NIMBY and YIMBY complaints, one thing that strikes me is how poorly and inefficiently we use land when new housing is permitted. I know that the market in the south of England wants more large detached housing. But if people can't afford anything, they will be grateful for a good quality apartment!
I'm constantly arguing with those who say that building more apartments will change the character of the area... What do they think carpeting all the fields with detached housing is going to do?
I find the abundance argument as presented here, like quite a lot of mainstream commentary these days, to be weirdly reductionist. It doesn't seem to recognise that over the last century there've been major shifts in the relationships between state, society and private capital in Western countries: from the emergence of modern welfare states after WW2, to the state increasingly seeing itself as an enabler of private profit during the neoliberal period, to whatever this era is that we're in now, which will probably end in a different configuration.
At the risk of being reductionist myself, it seems pretty clear that the complexity of modern state regulation is a product of the neoliberal era - the unrestrained drive for private profit by those who are already affluent creates a lot of mess, then public pressure obliges a government to "do something" about the mess, which it tries to do without blunting that drive for profit.
The result is a lot of complex regulation which has significant local effects, but is frequently ineffective where it really matters. Or if it does seem to be effective - we haven't had a financial crisis since 2008 - then there's ceaseless pressure from owners and managers of capital to water it down.
The water companies in the UK are a good example. They haven't built enough reservoirs because it's more profitable not to, full stop, and no-one has made them. Nothing to do with bats or newts. Ofwat no doubt produces reams of policy documents, industry guidance and the like, but it has been largely ineffective in compelling the privatised water companies to do things that society needs them to do.
Creating a new regulator will not address the problem, unless there's a fundamental change in the way that government views private profits in the water industry. Given that most private investors are hooked on Microsoft-style returns, which the water industry can't deliver without screwing us customers into the ground, that means public ownership. Public ownership would produce its own problems, but they will be different problems (and possibly cheaper to overcome, simply because the state has a lower cost of capital).
Hard agree with your point on the mess created by unrestrained drive for private profit. Bouncing between private profit and regulation/ public ownership has worn thin. I guess we're seeking another Third Way.
There is a lot of good work on how to get more abundant housing without forcing development on unwilling locals - street votes, opt in or opt out rezoning, estate regeneration, permitting extra floors in houses etc.
I wouldn't say it was necessarily a solved problem but there are some obvious routes to improving things where we don't have to worry about an overmighty state disregarding the population.
Infrastructure is more complicated but personally willing to bite the bullet and say environmental impact regulation is too constraining (although the planning bill does have some changes that might improve things). Building more stuff sometimes does just require turning a field into a house or a railway line. I find it annoying that the fixation is on houses and infrastructure when farming uses 10x as much land as both. We're making ourselves poorer to "protect the environment" but the industry that actually has by far the largest impact on the amount of land is just ignored.
There is a reason why farming takes up a lot of land. As Tim Lang points out in Feeding Britain, we would be wise to reduce our dependence on food imports for environmental and sustainability reasons as well as food security.
Being a Netherlands national who has lived and worked in England for 35 years, I found a good number of interesting ways of explaining differences between these nations in dealing with large projects. Why were the
main railway connections in NL and to a great extent in B expanded to four tracks and a number of new high-speed lines, with some amazing civil engineering thrown in (check out e.g. Antwerp Central station) as well as a dedicated freight line, in the time that the UK managed to finally start HS2 and now stops again. So that the useful long distance line is now being curtailed to a high speed local railway. Similarly the electrification of the Great Western Main Line. The only recent rail connection in the UK (London area, of course) that has attracted admiration abroad is Crossrail, now called Elizabeth Line. It connects the right areas, is fast and all the advanced kit works. Well done!
Why is it that, much to the amazement of foreign expertise, nothing ever seems to go fast when public interest is touched? The article gives some good answers but to me it’s the typical Anglo-Saxon ‘adversarial’ part when setting up greater than ‘left’ or ‘right’ works. No acceptance of seeking an acceptable mid-way but obstruction to the very end. Here in Somerset we are now going to build a bypass to relieve the ridiculous traffic situation in the village of Banwell near Weston-S-M. The first complaints about the situation there go back to 1928; a decade after WWI. The English way on a local scale! Well done, Sam.
Peter, the UK planning system sounds very french as it seems to have evolved into a means to stop anything happening. the average time take for any new construction project in France to overcome regulatory resistance is 5 years but in Germany it is only 3. something wrong there!
Yep; France used to be quite a bit quicker in the 1980’s at the start of the LGV network, but the fun of ‘adversarial’ political behaviour seems to have found its way into national politics over there as well. I wonder if the immigrant issues and the way national governments to this day appear unable to explain the positive sides of it to their voters, besides leaving lying opponents the freedom to take their messages into society, is what’s done the damage.
Too true Peter. Underlying all the failures of government over the last forty years in France is the slow but constant decline in the courage to demonstrate authority and to use the power of the state to further the interests of the people.....and not just the elite. "it is forbidden to forbid" was the mantra of the '68 rebellion and that illustrates the state the country's in. Danny the Red of the Sorbonne revolution and Odeon Theater fame has been around in politics all these years as he and his ilk have built consciously the present disaster.
Sam's example of planning regulation touches on a much wider problem. In order to avoid legal challenges, and to avoid being held responsible for the adverse consequences of their decisions, organisations are taking refuge in increasingly detailed processes and regulations, with the bureaucracies to implement them. Then if something goes wrong those held accountable can always claim they followed the correct procedures. Of course in several areas there needs to be regulation and the adoption of best practice, but we do seem to be in a position where process has taken the place of judgement.
Pamela Dow, formerly of the Cabinet Office, has an interesting take on this in the New Statesman in relation to the growth of 'HR'.
You touch on the lack of a satisfactory theory of regulation. That's a big ask for a comment on a blogpost, but here are some thoughts, which shouldn’t be particularly lefty-righty polarising.
Governments accept risks beyond the capacity of private persons: in ancient times appeasing the gods and regulating irrigation; for thousands of years, security and law enforcement; with the onset of industrialisation, education and the regulation of markets; of late, human life-cycle (child-support, healthcare, invalidity benefits, superannuation) and business-cycle (deficit financing, unemployment benefit).
It is unreasonable to place these risks upon private persons who cannot bear them. By the same token, there are reasonable questions about the level of income transfer and whether public services best come from by public or regulated provision, with the answers varying by culture, demography and technology.
Governments are subject to regulatory capture, by their workers (local government and nationalised industries) and by the interests they purport to represent (campaigning charities, local house-owners), or regulate (education and healthcare providers, utilities). So let us be thoughtful. Hippocrates coined “first do no harm” about medical intervention; it isn’t “certainty that the state is a force for bad…impermeable to evidence or reason” to apply the precept more widely.
I appreciate that this doesn't engage with "abundance", where what else to say but that I live in hope.
In the uk theres also the nature of the sheer amount of different agencies and bodies that each act as their own veto point often with overlapping mandates. E.g. for a new factory the, local planning authorities, the environmental agency, natural england, the hse, dcos to a department, the neso, water companies and more. All can effectively kill a project at minimal notice.
A merger of some of these with similar functions and expertise e.g. the EA and HSE. As well as a government platform to provide a common application coordinating between utilities and regulators, could at least make things easier to navigate. Finding out major blockers sooner into investments, lowering wasted effort and risk, and avoid meaningless interagency chaos.
I've become increasingly convinced that we need a shift in focus from trying to prevent anything bad ever happening to allowing the exercise of more judgement and autonomy in the public sector with proper accountability when regulations are flouted (removing public servants or owners of polluting utilities from jobs, potentially personally fining them at levels that would be an actual deterrent etc). The reality is that we have all the choking process that prevents things getting done and when things do eventually come out the other side they are so convoluted outcomes are usually bad anyway! I accept this doesn't affect eg local planning reform but I think I am convinced this will just take a generational handing over of political power to a group without all of their incentives bound up in the hoarding of already existing asset wealth.
I don't think that there are any lessons to be learned from the Democrat's narcississm. The party is away with the fairies and the legal, regulatory and constitutional arrangements in the UK are very different. Let alone thevpolitics.
Very interesting, Sam, but doesn't stand up very well when your eyes drift back from over the Atlantic and head south to Europe. The amalgamated centres, left and right, have effectively ground most governmental systems, and much of the economy, to a halt and the less than extreme right who are unrestrained by existential left-wing cultural dogma, aka Giorgio Meloni, Merz and, some time in the future, Retailleau are putting things back on track. They are following but not imitating some of the better trends emanating from both East and West. They will change Europe for the better.
As a born Netherlander I wonder what would have been left of that country after the severe flooding on the 31st of January 1953 if NIMBY’s of various persuasions had a chance to stop the necessary flood control works to stop another such spring tide, high river levels and a North-Wester storm, wrecking 175.000 hectares to flood, causing 1835 dead and 20.000 cattle to drown in one night. No adversarial politics there; the measures taken to avoid something like that happening again lasted until the largest moving object in the world, the floodgates at Hoek van Holland, were put in service.
An Englishman in London in 1953, dealing with the Dutch government about financing everything, had to take a deep breath when as amount of 2.25 billion guilders was quite casually mentioned. Further questions followed: what does your minister of finance say? Answer: he signed the laws with his colleague of Traffic and Water Management. What about the political parties? We do not expect votes against acceptance of these laws.
How come that during as good as during every storm in the UK large sections of the country disappear into the North Sea?
From personal experience of fire protection regulation, as an example, it seems the issue is not the lack of regulation but the lack of consequences for those who breach them. It was universally known prior to Grenfell, that combustible materials were being used in high rise buildings. These were being manipulated and presented as “fire safe”. The directors of organisations such as Celotex and Kingspan knew exactly what they were doing, but get away with it. Otherwise, the UK is hopelessly over regulated. I’ve just returned from 2 weeks in Denmark where they have built a complete underground metro system in Copenhagen within 25 years and are building an undersea tunnel to link to northern Germany. We can’t build a railway line between Birmingham and London.
Yes, the missing link in the ‘abundance’ trade-off between over- or under- regulation seems to be accountability. Not just in the formal sense of who shall be held accountable by the public, but also the moral sense of how project leaders hold *themselves* accountable for the consequences of their designs and actions.
Much anti-regulation rhetoric is in bad faith, but so is a lot of Nimbyism, where regulations are used as convenient tools to block development. How do we make acting in bad faith unacceptable in the public realm? Transparency and accountability are part of the answer, but this needs to be accompanied by public trust, and it’s hard to see how that’s going to he rebuilt. So, back round in circles we go.
Totally agree, and where I see a difference with some European countries is the preparedness of leaders to behave more ethically and/or for the state to take action (e.g. Sarkozy being jailed for fraud - unthinkable in the UK)
Grenfell cladding would not have been allowed under Rebuilding of London Act 1666. Regulation a few pages long and allowed building of the largest city on earth.
The regulation that may have killed most of the Grenfell victims was British Gas refusing to turn off the gas to the area in case it caused an explosion elsewhere and they would have been charged with Corporate Manslaughter. When gas finally turned off the fire died down swiftly. I recall this in the week of Norman Tebbits death when the victims at Brighton were only saved because the Fire Fighters agreed that the explosion was a "kitchen gas explosion" as it was a bomb they could not legally enter until bomb squad had cleared area. God Bless them. (Did not happen unfortunately at Manchester Arena)
Seriously, what killed people at Grenfell was the speed with which the fire spread because the insulation was combustible plastic foam, and the smoke it produces when burning contains cyanide.
I hold a somewhat pessimistic-optimistic view: I don’t believe it’s possible to create a truly efficient, long-term model of “just right” regulation. Instead, we seem destined to cycle between waves of regulation and deregulation. Even the best regulatory initiatives—such as the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon—tend, over time, to degenerate into “Yes, Minister”-style bureaucracies. These institutions often become entangled in internal politics and captured by competing external interests, eventually losing sight of their founding mission.
From my experience living in Poland after 1989, the most meaningful social and economic progress occurred during a brief period: between the radical dismantling of socialist-era regulations, and before EU accession and imposition of EU-driven rules. Initially, we rebuilt the economy (at considerable social cost what was - IMHO - unavoidable). But later, we significantly enhanced our quality of life thanks to EU rules.
But now, two or three decades later, we are entering a new phase. The rising costs of maintaining EU-level quality-of-life standards are becoming increasingly apparent. For instance, while the goal of addressing climate change is more or less broadly supported, the specific structure of the EU’s climate policy—uniform and “one-size-fits-all”—tends to reflect the priorities and capabilities of wealthier Western societies, making it far less sustainable for less affluent countries like Poland.
Growing public frustration and the rise of far-right parties may soon trigger a wave of radical deregulation, seen as a correction to policies now viewed as costly and misaligned with their original purpose.
One additional comment: The EU has provided Poland with substantial funding for investments in hard infrastructure. However, Poland was able to sped this money and build eg. a nationwide highway network over the past 20 years largely because the government enacted special legislation that allowed it to bypass much of the bureaucratic red tape and, if necessary, forcibly nationalize private land for public investment projects.
A similar approach is now being used for the construction of the new big central airport—again, through a special law that enables the government to compel the sale of private land and property if deemed necessary. By contrast, in sectors where no such legal shortcuts exist, progress is often slow, entangled in red tape, and riddled with inefficiencies.
What may be particularly interesting for UK readers is that these special laws—used to accelerate the construction of highways or airports—tend to enjoy broad public support across the political spectrum. Voters from both the left and the right often back such measures because they associate them with economic growth and national progress.
This reflects a cultural difference between Eastern and Western Europe: in the East, there is still a strong belief that “progress” is inseparable from physical development—building infrastructure, expanding capacity, and increasing visible signs of prosperity. As a result, people are often willing to accept limitations on individual rights or property in the name of country advancement.
In fairness Poland has a population density less than half of that of the UK as a whole, and between a third and a quarter of that of England. Major infrastructure projects simply have a much greater physical impact in Britain than in Poland..
In Poland, the share of the rural population is nearly three times higher than in the UK, and the population is much more evenly distributed across the country. There are no megacities like London; instead, 40% of the electorate lives in rural areas another 30% in small and medium size cites, which means that building a railroad requires passing through many populated constituencies
That's true to a point, but even if you take out the British cities that have about the population of Greater Warsaw or more (Greater London, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, and West Yorkshire), you still end up with a greater population density than Poland - particularly in south east England. This isn't an argument against infrastructure development, just a likely reason as to why it is harder to build a consensus for such developments.
Frankly, I don’t think population density is ultimately that important. My main point was more about cultural differences and how people perceive symbols of progress. In Poland, people are likely more willing to support a politician who promises to build something, even if it means damaging parts of a green belt or nationalizing private land. History probably plays a role in this too—large-scale land nationalization has been common in Poland since 1945, and there are no major landowning classes left to strongly oppose it.
In general, I sometimes get the feeling that Poland—and perhaps other parts of Eastern Europe—are in a somewhat similar position to eg France in the 1970s. Probably due to a historical time lag and a still significant deficit in hard infrastructure, these countries often approach development more like the French presidents in 1960s or 1970s who launched national projects such as the TGV or nuclear power plants. It feels closer to that era of state-driven progress than to the current discourse among many Western politicians, which often revolves around post-growth models.
I think you might find the BBC article I've linked below on HS2 interesting, and from your perspective possibly depressing. It also gives reasons why it is easier to execute such projects in France and China. For me the key quote comes from a chartered surveyor involved with HS2
"There has always been a fundamental problem in this country with the cost of building anything," the surveyor says, "because we live on a small, highly populated, property-owning, democratic island."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2l8kq52y8o
I think you make a mistake there. People is less densely populated areas tend to be rather more interested to keep the land their families lived on ‘as it always was’. On the other side, densely populated nations like e.g. the Netherlands are willing to take expensive measures to not unnecessarily worsen the impact of construction work. See the 7km ‘Green Heart of Holland’ tunnel in the high speed line from Schiphol Airport to Rotterdam. And then marvel at the way how an attempt to do something similar with HS2 here in the UK fell victim to incompetence, corruption and NIMBYism.
“So what is the right amount of regulation, and why?”
Really enjoyed the piece. My personal view is that this is the wrong question, and that actually the big problem on all sides is we think in terms of projects and regulations and not systems and incentives.
The bat tunnel isn’t an inevitable consequence of current regulations, it’s a symptom of dysfunctional behaviour around those regulations, and that behaviour is ultimately determined by the prevailing culture. If you deleted all regulations tomorrow, that culture would find some other tool to achieve the same outcome. And ultimately that culture has arisen because at every level we prioritise a kind of adversarial, risk-avoidant literalism over things we know work in modern complex businesses like empowered teams, strong ownership, initiative with a clear set of values, etc.
You see this in the piece I wrote the other week about the local road that can’t be fixed because nobody owns it. There’s no law or rule preventing it from being fixed, the council just refuse to take ownership because they have no incentive to do so and indeed would likely be punished in some way for taking on that ‘risk’. It’s so ingrained that even the concept of taking it on is alien. The same applies for the bat tunnel - nobody gets fired for ticking the box and writing off £120m, but do something else?! Oof, steady on old chap.
Excellent reasoning! Come and take a look at some local roads elsewhere in the country. If you have a chance invite a few foreign nationals and explain why they see what they see. Or why they have to hold on to their seats despite the low speed.
Good column! There was a book published maybe a quarter century ago called The Death of Common Sense, by Philip Howard. I don't know what's become of him or it, but it was to the same effect as Abundance. And once again, I don't remember if he proferred any cure.
Great review of this, Sam. In keeping with your point about trade-offs, although I think the balance in the English-speaking world is probably too much against development, it feels sometimes like a very grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side way of looking at things. We complain about the impact of environmental regulations a lot. But at the same time, across the western world they have generally worked in substantially improving air and water quality since they were introduced decades ago. There is also a quality-of-life value to biodiversity that is hard to quantify - my day feels a lot better when I can go for a walk and see an animal that's not a rat or pigeon.
I think, however, that rather than being a matter just of deregulation, this is about governments working more to encourage optimal land use policy. Gentle density for residential and commercial buildings - in the English-speaking world, towns and cities are often much less dense than they could be - higher-capacity transport options per space used, and so on. I agree that it might be hard culturally to manage what Japan has done. But I'm always in awe of how they can combine relatively affordable urban living and comprehensive transport, and a wide range of independent businesses, with pristine natural landscapes.
One thing that would have to be done here is overcoming an Anglo aversion to apartment living. But I think that can be done, in the spirit of Henry Ford's adage that if he asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses. That, again, is a matter of sometimes taking one step back on the ease of construction to take two steps forward on having nice, but dense, urban living.
I agree. As a district councillor who is on the receiving end of both NIMBY and YIMBY complaints, one thing that strikes me is how poorly and inefficiently we use land when new housing is permitted. I know that the market in the south of England wants more large detached housing. But if people can't afford anything, they will be grateful for a good quality apartment!
I'm constantly arguing with those who say that building more apartments will change the character of the area... What do they think carpeting all the fields with detached housing is going to do?
I find the abundance argument as presented here, like quite a lot of mainstream commentary these days, to be weirdly reductionist. It doesn't seem to recognise that over the last century there've been major shifts in the relationships between state, society and private capital in Western countries: from the emergence of modern welfare states after WW2, to the state increasingly seeing itself as an enabler of private profit during the neoliberal period, to whatever this era is that we're in now, which will probably end in a different configuration.
At the risk of being reductionist myself, it seems pretty clear that the complexity of modern state regulation is a product of the neoliberal era - the unrestrained drive for private profit by those who are already affluent creates a lot of mess, then public pressure obliges a government to "do something" about the mess, which it tries to do without blunting that drive for profit.
The result is a lot of complex regulation which has significant local effects, but is frequently ineffective where it really matters. Or if it does seem to be effective - we haven't had a financial crisis since 2008 - then there's ceaseless pressure from owners and managers of capital to water it down.
The water companies in the UK are a good example. They haven't built enough reservoirs because it's more profitable not to, full stop, and no-one has made them. Nothing to do with bats or newts. Ofwat no doubt produces reams of policy documents, industry guidance and the like, but it has been largely ineffective in compelling the privatised water companies to do things that society needs them to do.
Creating a new regulator will not address the problem, unless there's a fundamental change in the way that government views private profits in the water industry. Given that most private investors are hooked on Microsoft-style returns, which the water industry can't deliver without screwing us customers into the ground, that means public ownership. Public ownership would produce its own problems, but they will be different problems (and possibly cheaper to overcome, simply because the state has a lower cost of capital).
Hard agree with your point on the mess created by unrestrained drive for private profit. Bouncing between private profit and regulation/ public ownership has worn thin. I guess we're seeking another Third Way.
There is a lot of good work on how to get more abundant housing without forcing development on unwilling locals - street votes, opt in or opt out rezoning, estate regeneration, permitting extra floors in houses etc.
I wouldn't say it was necessarily a solved problem but there are some obvious routes to improving things where we don't have to worry about an overmighty state disregarding the population.
This has a good summary of most of them :
https://britishprogress.org/articles/the-rules-of-the-game-using-mechanism-design
Infrastructure is more complicated but personally willing to bite the bullet and say environmental impact regulation is too constraining (although the planning bill does have some changes that might improve things). Building more stuff sometimes does just require turning a field into a house or a railway line. I find it annoying that the fixation is on houses and infrastructure when farming uses 10x as much land as both. We're making ourselves poorer to "protect the environment" but the industry that actually has by far the largest impact on the amount of land is just ignored.
There is a reason why farming takes up a lot of land. As Tim Lang points out in Feeding Britain, we would be wise to reduce our dependence on food imports for environmental and sustainability reasons as well as food security.
Being a Netherlands national who has lived and worked in England for 35 years, I found a good number of interesting ways of explaining differences between these nations in dealing with large projects. Why were the
main railway connections in NL and to a great extent in B expanded to four tracks and a number of new high-speed lines, with some amazing civil engineering thrown in (check out e.g. Antwerp Central station) as well as a dedicated freight line, in the time that the UK managed to finally start HS2 and now stops again. So that the useful long distance line is now being curtailed to a high speed local railway. Similarly the electrification of the Great Western Main Line. The only recent rail connection in the UK (London area, of course) that has attracted admiration abroad is Crossrail, now called Elizabeth Line. It connects the right areas, is fast and all the advanced kit works. Well done!
Why is it that, much to the amazement of foreign expertise, nothing ever seems to go fast when public interest is touched? The article gives some good answers but to me it’s the typical Anglo-Saxon ‘adversarial’ part when setting up greater than ‘left’ or ‘right’ works. No acceptance of seeking an acceptable mid-way but obstruction to the very end. Here in Somerset we are now going to build a bypass to relieve the ridiculous traffic situation in the village of Banwell near Weston-S-M. The first complaints about the situation there go back to 1928; a decade after WWI. The English way on a local scale! Well done, Sam.
Peter, the UK planning system sounds very french as it seems to have evolved into a means to stop anything happening. the average time take for any new construction project in France to overcome regulatory resistance is 5 years but in Germany it is only 3. something wrong there!
Yep; France used to be quite a bit quicker in the 1980’s at the start of the LGV network, but the fun of ‘adversarial’ political behaviour seems to have found its way into national politics over there as well. I wonder if the immigrant issues and the way national governments to this day appear unable to explain the positive sides of it to their voters, besides leaving lying opponents the freedom to take their messages into society, is what’s done the damage.
Too true Peter. Underlying all the failures of government over the last forty years in France is the slow but constant decline in the courage to demonstrate authority and to use the power of the state to further the interests of the people.....and not just the elite. "it is forbidden to forbid" was the mantra of the '68 rebellion and that illustrates the state the country's in. Danny the Red of the Sorbonne revolution and Odeon Theater fame has been around in politics all these years as he and his ilk have built consciously the present disaster.
Sam's example of planning regulation touches on a much wider problem. In order to avoid legal challenges, and to avoid being held responsible for the adverse consequences of their decisions, organisations are taking refuge in increasingly detailed processes and regulations, with the bureaucracies to implement them. Then if something goes wrong those held accountable can always claim they followed the correct procedures. Of course in several areas there needs to be regulation and the adoption of best practice, but we do seem to be in a position where process has taken the place of judgement.
Pamela Dow, formerly of the Cabinet Office, has an interesting take on this in the New Statesman in relation to the growth of 'HR'.
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2024/11/hr-britain-how-human-resources-captured-the-nation
You touch on the lack of a satisfactory theory of regulation. That's a big ask for a comment on a blogpost, but here are some thoughts, which shouldn’t be particularly lefty-righty polarising.
Governments accept risks beyond the capacity of private persons: in ancient times appeasing the gods and regulating irrigation; for thousands of years, security and law enforcement; with the onset of industrialisation, education and the regulation of markets; of late, human life-cycle (child-support, healthcare, invalidity benefits, superannuation) and business-cycle (deficit financing, unemployment benefit).
It is unreasonable to place these risks upon private persons who cannot bear them. By the same token, there are reasonable questions about the level of income transfer and whether public services best come from by public or regulated provision, with the answers varying by culture, demography and technology.
Governments are subject to regulatory capture, by their workers (local government and nationalised industries) and by the interests they purport to represent (campaigning charities, local house-owners), or regulate (education and healthcare providers, utilities). So let us be thoughtful. Hippocrates coined “first do no harm” about medical intervention; it isn’t “certainty that the state is a force for bad…impermeable to evidence or reason” to apply the precept more widely.
I appreciate that this doesn't engage with "abundance", where what else to say but that I live in hope.
In the uk theres also the nature of the sheer amount of different agencies and bodies that each act as their own veto point often with overlapping mandates. E.g. for a new factory the, local planning authorities, the environmental agency, natural england, the hse, dcos to a department, the neso, water companies and more. All can effectively kill a project at minimal notice.
A merger of some of these with similar functions and expertise e.g. the EA and HSE. As well as a government platform to provide a common application coordinating between utilities and regulators, could at least make things easier to navigate. Finding out major blockers sooner into investments, lowering wasted effort and risk, and avoid meaningless interagency chaos.
I've become increasingly convinced that we need a shift in focus from trying to prevent anything bad ever happening to allowing the exercise of more judgement and autonomy in the public sector with proper accountability when regulations are flouted (removing public servants or owners of polluting utilities from jobs, potentially personally fining them at levels that would be an actual deterrent etc). The reality is that we have all the choking process that prevents things getting done and when things do eventually come out the other side they are so convoluted outcomes are usually bad anyway! I accept this doesn't affect eg local planning reform but I think I am convinced this will just take a generational handing over of political power to a group without all of their incentives bound up in the hoarding of already existing asset wealth.
Sounds like we need another book Sam!
I don't think that there are any lessons to be learned from the Democrat's narcississm. The party is away with the fairies and the legal, regulatory and constitutional arrangements in the UK are very different. Let alone thevpolitics.
Very interesting, Sam, but doesn't stand up very well when your eyes drift back from over the Atlantic and head south to Europe. The amalgamated centres, left and right, have effectively ground most governmental systems, and much of the economy, to a halt and the less than extreme right who are unrestrained by existential left-wing cultural dogma, aka Giorgio Meloni, Merz and, some time in the future, Retailleau are putting things back on track. They are following but not imitating some of the better trends emanating from both East and West. They will change Europe for the better.
Thanks Stuart! Hope is what we’re desperately short of yet badly need.
As a born Netherlander I wonder what would have been left of that country after the severe flooding on the 31st of January 1953 if NIMBY’s of various persuasions had a chance to stop the necessary flood control works to stop another such spring tide, high river levels and a North-Wester storm, wrecking 175.000 hectares to flood, causing 1835 dead and 20.000 cattle to drown in one night. No adversarial politics there; the measures taken to avoid something like that happening again lasted until the largest moving object in the world, the floodgates at Hoek van Holland, were put in service.
An Englishman in London in 1953, dealing with the Dutch government about financing everything, had to take a deep breath when as amount of 2.25 billion guilders was quite casually mentioned. Further questions followed: what does your minister of finance say? Answer: he signed the laws with his colleague of Traffic and Water Management. What about the political parties? We do not expect votes against acceptance of these laws.
How come that during as good as during every storm in the UK large sections of the country disappear into the North Sea?