Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Britain’s crippling lack of infrastructure

Voters want benefits but not the costs

England is in the grip of its most widespread drought in 20 years. Water companies are implementing hosepipe bans. Half the country’s potato crop is expected to fail. Photographs of reservoirs show them drained, dry banks open to the sky. Another heatwave is here, bringing little prospect of imminent relief.

Britain hasn’t built a reservoir since 1991. The population has grown. Hot weather has become more frequent. Water use has become more strained. The barriers to actually doing something about it remain in place. Take Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West. As late as March, she was doing the media rounds vigorously opposing the construction of a new reservoir in Abingdon; it would be unsightly, the population projections might be wrong, she said. Something needed to be done for ‘our water supply’. Just not this. Her efforts to block it even extended to securing a parliamentary debate.

The end result of this vetocracy is stasis

The most powerful force in British politics is the veto. Britain is a country carefully constructed on a system of checks and balances. Wherever there is a need for economic development, a need for housing, a need for infrastructure, and a risk that this need might overcome local objections in the service of the national interest, there is a check: planning laws; and a balance in the form of judicial review. The end result of this vetocracy is stasis.

People wield these vetoes in the happy expectation that the government will bail them out if they are ever in danger of facing the consequences of their own actions, trucking in bottled water to meet their demand. The Abingdon reservoir’s construction is meant to meet a potential supply shortfall in 2040 of 1.1 billion litres a day. Local residents would instead prefer ‘the transfer of water from other parts of the country’.

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