Every so often, something unexpected happens in the Westminster village which disturbs the usual run of malicious gossip and misleading polling. This happened yesterday, when the whole village began buzzing about, of all things, infrastructure planning. The cause of this was a draft ‘National Priority Infrastructure Bill’, which you can read here, an oven-ready piece of legislation aimed at drastically liberalising infrastructure planning, released by Dr Lawrence Newport of the Looking for Growth campaign.
Newport has form on attracting media attention. A young legal scholar, he sprang to national prominence in 2023 with his campaign to ban the Bully XL, an extremely violent dog that had been intentionally bred to pass through a loophole in the Dangerous Dogs Act. He has since launched a campaign for firmer policing, which he started by parking his bicycle outside Scotland Yard, waiting until it was stolen (he did not need to wait long), and then stirring up public indignation at the indifference with which the police treated the case.
Infrastructure planning might seem like an excessively technical issue for this kind of public-facing campaigning. But Newport clearly believes that is mounting interest in the area. The background here is the growing belief that some countries are going to enjoy massive economic growth over the next decade as a result of the explosive expansion of the AI sector. To do so, they will need a lot of data centres, which will in turn need a lot of additional energy production. Realistically, the only clean way to provide that energy will be nuclear. Which countries participate in this ‘Fifth Industrial Revolution’ will be determined by who can build those data centres, nuclear power stations and transmission lines quickly.
Newport’s National Priority Infrastructure Bill would create an extremely strong presumption in primary legislation in favour of granting permission to nuclear power stations, data centres and overhead lines (as well as other kinds of infrastructure added to the list by the Secretary of State). The government would not be able to change this without fresh legislation: it would become part of the law of England that nuclear power stations must be permitted except on certain protected sites or under ‘wholly exceptional circumstances’. This would essentially remove all planning obstacles to Britain participating in the AI revolution. Of course, by itself that might not be enough to ensure economic growth. But it would certainly help.
Newport’s Bill seems very bold by the standards of recent English planning policy. But in a longer historical perspective, it is not particularly permissive. When Britain’s coal power stations and steam railways were built in the nineteenth century, builders did not need planning permission at all. This generally remained true right up to 1947: you might need compulsory purchase powers from Parliament, but planning permission per se for infrastructure was not necessary, because there was more or less no planning system.
Newport’s Bill goes a long way in that direction, though it does retain some protections from the current planning system, like those for National Parks and National Landscapes. But this illustrates how norms about development change. There are Britons still alive today – lots of them, in fact – who can remember a time when Newport’s Bill would have looked moderately interventionist.
Perhaps a shift is underway at the moment. So far, Newport’s Bill has been endorsed by the Labour Growth Group(representing about a hundred Labour MPs), by Zia Yusuf, the chairman of Reform, and by Dominic Cummings. Kemi Badenoch’s team are reported to be studying it closely. Ian Hogarth, head of the influential AI Safety Institute within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, has come out in favour. A proposal that would generally make it unlawful for the government to stop a nuclear power station being built in a marginal constituency has received something approaching universal acclaim across the political spectrum. In a country which until recently banned onshore wind farms, that is a striking shift.
Newport’s Bill is a long way from becoming law. My own suspicion is that governments are ultimately unlikely to give up the power to block developments. But the enthusiastic response to the proposal suggests that our political culture is changing: it is slowly dawning on British policymakers that the country that led the original industrial revolution may be voluntarily forfeiting its chance to take part in the industrial revolution to come. Newport seems to have a good nose for what the British public wants: banning monster dogs, jailing bike thieves and permitting masses of cheap clean energy have all proven to be popular demands.
Maybe the time will soon come that the restrictionism of the post-Attlee settlement will seem as remote to us as the pre-Attlee era seemed to our parents.
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