The Week 25 April 2025
Policy Director
Welcome back from Easter!
After a fortnight of trade news, it’s been a busy week for the Government’s growth agenda with new planning reforms introduced for major infrastructure projects.
In a bid to get Britain building, Downing Street plan to introduce measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill which will scrap the statutory role of consultees in large projects like renewable energy or rail. The Government hope this will cut the average two-year pre-consultation period by half, getting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects started more quickly and capital investment flowing into the economy, as well as bringing forward the economic benefits of new infrastructure.
This is great news. As Sam Dumitriu has pointed out, Britain used to be world-leading at building infrastructure like nuclear power, but now the only area of infrastructure we’re world-leading at is the consultations. The legal requirement for lengthy consultations of statutory bodies has swamped developers in paperwork, inflated project costs, and reduced the amount of new clean energy becoming available.
This isn’t the only part of the statutory consultee system that is under review, and a key test will be whether the Government can keep driving multiple reforms in parallel. Last month the Government announced it would review the system with a view to removing several consultees entirely, and establishing performance frameworks for others remaining parts.
Following decades of political leaders putting more and more duties into law, and creating more public bodies to enforce them, it’s interesting to see early signs this Government wants to reverse that trend.
Listen of the week...
With the Prime Minister and Chancellor both on the international stage this week, I can't recommend enough listening to John Bew on the Secrets of Statecraft podcast. As a foreign policy adviser to several Prime Ministers (and recently brought back into government to work on a new security strategy), he shares some great insights into how the Whitehall machine thinks about foreign policy, and coming into government as an outsider. Bew’s background is as an academic historian, and he compares that with the foreign policy establishment in the UK and abroad, underlining how the UK’s culture of generalist policymakers often blinds it to the benefits of deep specialist experience.