The Holyport Studio Rejection is a Microcosm of British Planning
and why the Planning and Infrastructure Bill must be protected from the anti-growth lobby
Earlier this week, the Government declined a planning appeal for a new film studio at Holyport, near Maidenhead1.
The reason for turning down the application hinged mainly on the fact that the site is part of the Green Belt, and that it was the Government’s opinion that there was ‘no unmet need’, that could justify the development.
As a result, £260 million of investment in what would have been one of the largest studio sites in the UK has been passed up. A need that was good enough for private investors to risk hundreds of millions of their pounds, is not real enough for the Government. And this project is just a fraction of the size of one down the road in Marlow.
Just last year, the planning application for the £750m studio there was rejected by Buckinghamshire Council2. In a glimmer of hope, a final decision is yet to be made as the application is now passing through an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate. If there is a world in which the Government believes the smaller studio isn’t needed because it tends to approve the far larger one that is pending, I doubt we are in it. I shall hold my breath for the final report in July.
In isolation, these planning decisions might seem silly but forgivable, but when viewed through a wider lens of the entire government approach to the media industry, it’s negligence. With one hand, the government is blocking new studio space for the industry that could bring down production costs and increase competition, and with the other, it is actively increasing subsidies and tax cuts for TV and film production3. Such is the generosity of the rebates, that Jurassic World Dominion, received £89m from the UK government on their total spend of £452m4.
Please don’t invest your money in the industry, let us just give you a load of free money from taxes instead.
Through its control of the planning system, the Government now effectively controls studio supply, and through the liberal use of tax policy, they control studio demand. And this is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government control of markets.
In 2013, the Daily Mail emblazoned ‘Red Ed’ across its front page, in the expectation that Ed Miliband would take on an interventionist approach to the economy and bring about soviet style market planning5. Few would have guessed when he lost the election, that ten years on, many of his pledges would end up being policy anyway.
As a result of the energy price cap, introduced in 2019 by the Conservatives, two thirds of households are now on standard tariffs6, the price of which is set by the Government. The Government also entirely controls electricity supply, by getting the final say on whether to build new power stations or transmission infrastructure, which they more than often tend to block. The largest energy project under construction is the Sizewell C nuclear power station, which will be the most expensive in the world per MW when it opens. And despite the Government’s ambition for windfarms, two of the largest development proposals have been pulled by developers Vattenfall, and Orsted, citing market conditions and economic unviability.
Today, the UK has the most expensive electricity in the Western world7.
Our water might not be the most expensive in Europe, but that trade off comes with annual water rationing and hosepipe bans, and record sewage overflows into English waterways last year8. After decades of dithering, the Government has finally decided to proceed with two, desperately needed, reservoirs, decades on from the last one being completed in 19929. Amusingly, the Abingdon reservoir, first proposed in 2006, repeatedly blocked and delayed over arguments that it is ‘not needed’, and re-proposed yet again in 2023 in a revised design that would make it the second-largest reservoir in the country, is not mentioned in the press release. Dear reader, it is needed.
Even buses are now under de-facto national planning. The £2, now £3, bus fare cap effectively sets the prices for bus journeys nationally, even when services are otherwise completely privately run. And the rail industry, which the government is nationalising, might appear to have been under private control until now, but the government has set timetables, standards, and prices for the vast majority of rail journeys ever since privatisation. Don’t expect a huge transformation when GB Rail finally shows up at a station near you.
I shan’t touch too much on housing, but the government has absolute control on whether new homes are built or not, it attempts to control market prices via endless affordability support mechanisms, and it spends tens of billions each year on housing benefit, temporary accommodation, and asylum. Despite this, the most common approach to supporting new home buyers over the past decade was not to build homes for them, but to artificially inflate prices further with demand-driven policies like ‘help-to-buy’. And since last summer, what little construction rate there was, has collapsed10.
This list of Government market interventions is particularly pertinent right now for two reasons. Firstly, because critical national utilities (which are privately owned, but highly directed by government control) are stretched to their breaking point. The largest water utility in Europe, Thames, has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse for months now, yet the regulators are hitting them with new financial penalties on an almost monthly basis, which doesn’t help the company’s viability, doesn’t support the company to remediate its infrastructure, or make it a attractive to a new buyer (as we saw just this week).
On energy, we know the economy is at breaking point too. Having the most expensive electricity in the world is not conducive to supporting heavy industries like steel (which the government is now actively subsidising and nationalising as well), and UK electricity production is low enough that we are now net importers (using interconnectors) from each of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. A rogue power wanting to cut an undersea cable might plunge us into blackouts. Building new energy and water infrastructure, and doing so at pace, is imperative.
The second reason is that the Government is currently progressing its Infrastructure and Planning Bill through Parliament. Planning is overwhelmingly the biggest blocker for economic growth. Shortages of water and electricity infrastructure, lab space for innovation, housing for both young professionals and families, and yes, even studio space, are the result of local and national government planning decisions that don’t allow the market to build more when it wants to (even if without public money). The bill was originally intended to sweep away rafts of red tape and regulation to make it easier to build critical infrastructure, but the strength of the NIMBY lobby has resulted in swathes of potential amendments that could make building harder than ever before.
The incentives and powers that are embedded across the planning system (as with so many other parts of the UK) are incredibly badly designed. Arcane rules and regulations are used to block developments on technicalities. If the government wants to block a development such as a studio for environmental reasons or to not displease locals, it has the right to do so, but it shouldn’t be able to hide behind an arbitrary measure of ‘need’. Likewise, when HS2 was forced to spend £100m on a tunnel over the railway to protect bats from an ancient forest nearby, despite an adjacent incinerator plant, just imagine what kind of world-class bat sanctuary could have been built with that £100m instead.
Development and growth can go hand in hand with environmental preservation, but the current system allows those who oppose development to weaponise the planning system against any and all development, by using even the most fleeting unproven environmental concern. For many infrastructure projects, the easiest way to see them cancelled is to make them more expensive and complicated to build. NIMBYs have realised that planning and environmental regulations as they exist today serve that purpose far better than they do preserving and enhancing nature.
The bill as laid before Parliament (though nowhere near as ambitious as I would like it to be) had found a sweet spot of enabling new infrastructure and development, whilst enhancing and preserving the natural environment, and also giving locals a stake in the benefits that development brings. Amendments that push UK planning even further into the legal quagmire of endless environmental challenge should be strongly resisted.
With so much Government control over the economy today, growth is a Government choice, as is stagnation. I encourage you to lobby your MP to make the right one.