As part of its plans to streamline the planning process for much-needed infrastructure, the government has confirmed that it intends to give people a discount on their energy costs if they have new power pylons or other energy infrastructure built near their property. Outlining the plan, the housing and planning minister, Alex Norris, said that the discount could amount to £250 a year – around 12 per cent of the average household’s energy bill – for those living within 500 metres of new or upgraded structures.
‘If you’re making that sacrifice of having some of the infrastructure in your community, you should get some of the money back,’ he said. Insisting that communities ‘need to share the benefits’ of the country’s move towards clean energy, he went on: ‘We think that’s a fair balance… people who are making that commitment to the country themselves, well, they should be rewarded for that.’
Well, yes, but let’s have a think about it. At the risk of being selfishly Nimbyist, I have to say that £250 a year – or £2,500 over ten years, as it was presented – would not do much to sweeten the pill if the house I had chosen for its unobstructed rural views suddenly acquired a line of 150-foot-high pylons marching across the near horizon. I grant that there are some infrastructure projects – a very few – that could be said to enhance the landscape. Some of the Eiffel bridges come to mind, and my out-and-out favourite, Sir Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct in central southern France. But let’s say that the £250 is the government’s opening bargaining position and that a few in-person protests blocking access to the chosen site might edge up the rebate a bit.
A natural question might rather be – why stop there? How long might it be before payment for proximity, as we could call it, becomes a wider political issue? What is it, after all, that makes pylons and other power infrastructure such a problem that it requires restive locals to be bought off, while a host of other – to some equally or still more needed – investments carry no such premium?
Let’s start with the third runway for Heathrow Airport. Living in south west London, I am already under what seem a myriad of Heathrow flight paths, which only seem to multiply and extend their hours at the very times that you want your windows open, and the late evenings and early mornings are light. If the government is prepared to pay a price for ‘communities’ who welcome new power pylons, how about a price for the increased noise nuisance of even more flights taking off and landing at Heathrow?
Come on, ministers – if you don’t want to splash the cash, how about an annual allowance in kind – a couple of free return air tickets for those whose quiet evenings are polluted by the aircraft that will be using the third runway? There could even be a special category for us, say, Flyover Club Class, with preferential boarding. Come to think of it, once the principle has been granted, how about some back pay for all the years of ever-more-frequent flying? Surely, if female shop-floor workers at Asda can make a case for equal pay with mostly male warehouse workers going back decades, there is a historic case for those bothered by the nearby airport?
What else do people not like having built near them? How about those euphemistically named ‘recycling facilities’, otherwise known as ‘the tip’? I am quite a fan of the one at Battersea, with its multiple pits for different sorts of rubbish and the delightful gents – no ladies for some reason – who guide you to a parking slot and advise you on what goes where. You leave with the satisfaction of having both got rid of surplus stuff and done your bit for the environment. But I wouldn’t choose to live near one.
Nor do a lot of other people. Indeed, some of the early ‘green’ protests in Russia were about the siting of new rubbish tips, and they can hardly be called popular in any country. So why not try a backhander? Sorry, I should have said a ‘reward’ for accepting the pain for a shared gain. A new recycling facility is surely as necessary to the common weal as new clean power infrastructure. If local councils, which usually commission such facilities, do not want to give an actual cash discount on our council tax, how about a consideration equivalent to ten free rubbish collections a year? Or how about a free Christmas tree, delivered and collected at that time of year?
A new prison, a new bail hostel, a new migrant hotel, the Bibby Stockholm barge (remember that?). What sort of amenity is there where the principle, set out by the minister, ‘If you’re making the sacrifice of having some of the infrastructure in your community, you should get some of the money back,’ would not apply?
Which makes me wonder whether the government ever really considered the implications of what it was proposing – essentially paying people to put up with some nuisances and not others. Because surely, if you get paid even a pittance for not protesting about a particular sort of unwelcome but needed development – in this case, pylons or, presumably, power plants – it is hard to see why other similarly unwelcome but needed developments are not compensated too.
It is equally hard to see how this disparity, with its perceived unfairness to those facing no less hateful developments within a 500-metre radius of their homes, will not end up in court. I look forward to all the new class-action lawsuits that are going to clog up the judicial system in the near future, as barristers argue to-and-fro about whether pylons, say, are unique in the strength of opposition they inspire versus the communal benefit they confer, or whether this is a characteristic that many other new developments share.
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