Infrastructure, planning and the command of time

Abstract

AcknowledgementsWe are grateful for the helpful advice of the editor and two anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this paper. Infrastructure, planning and the command of time AbstractGovernments in many countries have sought to accelerate the time taken to make decisions on major infrastructure projects, citing problems of 'delay'. Despite this, rarely has the time variable been given careful empirical or conceptual attention in decisionmaking generally, or in infrastructure decision-making specifically. This paper addresses this deficit by analysing decision-making on two categories of major infrastructure in the UK -transport and electricity generation -seeking both to generate better evidence of the changes to decision times in recent decades, and to generate insights from treating time as resource and tracking its (re)allocation. We find that reforms introduced since 2008 have done relatively little to alter overall decision times, but that there are marked and revealing changes to the allocation of time between decision-making stages. While public planning processes have their time frames tightly regulated, aspects led by developers (e.g. pre-application discussion) are not; arranging finance can have a bigger effect on project time frames, and central government retains much flexibility to manage the flow of time. Speed-up reforms are also sectorally uneven in their reach. This indicates how arguments for time discipline falter in the face of infrastructure projects that remain profoundly politicised.

Do local economic interests matter when regulating nationally significant infrastructure? The case of renewable energy infrastructure projects

“… Marshall and Cowell (2016) argue that the concern about the length of time that planning regulation of major infrastructure has taken in the past is not substantiated by historic data and they see the ‘reforms’, whose stated aim was to streamline and speed up the regulation of such projects, as an ideological response. They argue that the main impact has been to compress the period of public hearings, with potential implications for the ability of different interests to be heard.…”

A ‘delivery-democracy dilemma’? Mapping and explaining policy change for public engagement with energy infrastructure

“…Such basic continuity belies significant changes. The Planning Act 2008 included steps to 'speed up' the consenting regimes for major electricity generation and grid lines, fixing in statute and regulation the time allowed for key stages of the process, but also requiring preapplication consultation (Lee et al 2012;Marshall and Cowell 2016). Initial arrangements in which consents were determined by an independent 'Infrastructure Planning Commission' (IPC) were revoked in 2011, to return consenting powers to central government Ministers.…”

“…The large number of changes captured in Tables 3, 4 and 5 constitute Certainly, theorists interested in how neo-liberal ideologies foster depoliticisation could find material to support their positions. Echoing Moini (2011), we see steps to remove key issues like 'need' from openpublic contestation while reserving significant decision-making flexibility for commercial actors, with such closure serving the creation of a more certain investment environment (Legacy 2016;Marshall and Cowell 2016). Energy infrastructure decision-making seems to echo wider trends in UK land use planning, in which neo-liberal thinking informs the view that planning (and thereby the apertures for public engagement it contains)must be streamlined, contained, and de-risked (Tait and Inch 2016).…”

“…Moves to accelerate consenting processes for nuclear power have 'worked' in part because of the scope to exploit sites that are 'nuclear oases', with significant local economic and social ties to the industry (Blowers and Leroy 1995). Whatever the economic and engineering fallibilities of nuclear energy, or the particular public perceptions of risk that the technology engenders, the development consent for Hinkley C was attained within the statutory schedule (Marshall and Cowell 2016) and conflicting perspectives on 'need' have struggled to gain political traction. The same can be said for gas-fired power stations, for which 34,000MW had been installed between 1988 and 2014, vastly exceeding any other technology.…”

“…Most decisions that are subject to appeals are normally determined by inspectors (independent, public officials), but when appeals are 'recovered' inspectors take the role of issuing recommendations to central government Ministers, who ultimately decide.5 Although there are differences in the political party of Ministers issuing these speeches and documents, because the 2010-2015 coalition government saw energy policy controlled by a combination of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, there is little sign that the justifications used varied markedly along party political lines, except for on-shore wind.6 Concerns about the 'dash for gas' in the 1990s, including the effects on coal privatisation, led to periods of moratoria and tighter conditionality on the consenting of gas-fired power stations(Marshall and Cowell 2016).7 With fracking the Conservative Party's 2017 general election manifesto did propose bringing fracking within the centralised, fast-track NSIPs regime, but this foundered in the wake of the Conservative's failure to secure an outright majority, in a political context in which most other parties are critics of fracking.…”