The Chancellor’s new growth proposals

The Chancellor’s new growth proposals have been heavily leaked. They are worth serious consideration. They contain some useful strategies, but a lot of wishful thinking too. Yet that does not make them infeasible. For instance:

• Removing barriers to a third runway at Heathrow.

However much the government try to liberalise the planning controls on major infrastructure projects (see below), it’s likely that no third runway at Heathrow — in a built-up area of a city — would get built and into operation for ten or fifteen years. 

Only about 20% of Heathrow passengers interline there, so if the aim is to grow the airport as a hub (which would bring only small benefit to the UK as a whole), a new runway would be excessive. 

If the aim is to bring business and freight to or through Heathrow, there is a much quicker solution. End British Airways’ ‘grandfather’ rights to run low-capacity and holiday flights from Heathrow, and move them and everyone else’s leisure flights to Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Southend.

• Transforming Cambridge into Britain’s Silicon Valley by building hundreds of thousands of new homes, as well as swathes of new research and science parks.

Nice for Cambridge residents, at least, although they will no doubt resist the further congestion of an already congested city. And the UK’s permissive regulatory system makes it more attractive than EU locations. But with electricity prices among the highest in Europe, innovators may think twice about locating their power-hungry AI technology there.

• Giving the go ahead to an east-west rail link between Cambridge and Oxford.

There has already been years of discussion about this, and years of wrangling about the proposed routes. Again, even with planning easements on infrastructure projects, it is likely to be years before anything happens.

• Building tens of thousands of new homes near commuter train stations.

Good. That’s an ASI policy. Of course, local authorities will complain that it will overload local services (water, sewers, roads, schools, healthcare etc), so you need to be prepared to improve (or let others improve) those services where necessary and scale back other grounds for objection.

• Backing calls to regenerate the area around Old Trafford, the Manchester United stadium, as well as unlocking land for housebuilding around the region’s transport hubs.

Urban regeneration schemes quickly become captured by bureaucracies, often bureaucracies that oppose each others’ plans. That can actually stymie or delay people’s existing upgrade plans, just as the redevelopment of Stratford was delayed by the heavy hand of the Olympic planners. Best to make the process bottom-up rather than top down, simply by freeing people to do pretty much what they think will work for the locality, rather than what planners dream of.

• Putting pressure on the Environment Agency and Planning Inspectorate to rapidly adopt a more pro-growth mindset in their work, after forcing out the boss of the Competition and Markets Authority.

The new CMA boss believes that UK businesses have to be more environmentally active, so it is optimistic to expect too much pressure on the EA from that source. But the problem does not need ‘pressure’ on the EA. It needs a complete rewrite of EA objectives and powers, and that of other bureaucracies whose processes delay not just development but necessary environmental interventions by land holders. It also needs a rewrite of the rules on ‘consultations’, which again can block changes for years. And on court procedures which are cynically used by objectors to block change.

Reeves will say that "without growth we cannot cut hospital waiting lists or put more police on the streets … cannot meet our climate goals or … improve the lives of working people.”

You could, of course, by focusing the police on genuine crimes instead of allowing them the easier route of pursuing ’non-crime’ incidents and suchlike; by opening up NHS provision to competition; by making the climate goals realistic and affordable; and by cutting back bureaucracies and getting unnecessary regulation out of people’s lives. 

Indeed, all of that (and there’s more where that came from) would not just restore growth, it would turbocharge it.