Even Ryan Reynolds Couldn't Fight Britain's Blob

It’s worth pausing to think about this fantastic number. At 300 pages each, that would be equivalent to about 1,200 books, which is considerably more than the average reader gets through in a lifetime (and what a life that would be, if this was your only reading matter). The documents comprise 94.5 million words in total, according to the campaign group Britain Remade, which collated the numbers. That’s 107 times the complete works of Shakespeare, or War and Peace multiplied by about 160. There are many ways to slice this, as UK newspapers had fun doing when the figures were released. If printed, it would weigh 1,620 kilograms, or three polar bears, Britain Remade calculated. Reading at 200 words a minute, it would take a planning inspector 328 days working 24/7 to scrutinize every document. Pity him or her.

The new Labour government of Keir Starmer has pledged to shake up the planning system and get Britain building again, with a target of adding 1.5 million homes over the life of this parliament or 300,000 a year — since upped to 370,000. That’s a rate of construction that the UK hasn’t achieved in five decades or more.

The government’s ambitions confront a market where just about everything is heading in the wrong direction. Housing supply will fall to 160,000 in the year through March, according to a forecast by property broker Savills. Planning approvals dropped to a near-decade low in the second quarter, data from the Home Builders Federation and researcher Glenigan showed this month.

The government ended a consultation on its proposed overhaul of national planning guidelines on Sept. 24. Much of what Labour plans to do will help, including reimposing mandatory housing targets, leaning on local authorities to fulfill their mandates and building on lower-quality parts of the green belt (buffer zones that are designed to prevent urban sprawl). Skepticism over whether all of this will be enough to get the government anywhere close to its supply goals looks justified, though. In grappling with the complex web of interlocking factors that affect construction supply, perhaps we overlook the elephant (or polar bear) in the room.

The drop in planning approvals has been attributed partly to the erosion of local government capacity after years of austerity under previous Conservative governments. Labour has said it will hire 300 more planning officers to help loosen the logjam, but this is less than a 10th of the total who left the public sector in the decade after 2010. The more salient question is whether the right long-term solution is really to recruit more people to work in what already appears to be an out-of-control bureaucracy — rather than reducing the amount they have to do.

If the system is “insane” to begin with (the word used by Britain Remade founder Sam Richards to describe the size of the Lower Thames Crossing application), then giving it more resources to work more quickly isn’t necessarily going to help. To be sure, the £9 billion ($12 billion) project is one of national importance — the biggest investment in the UK’s road network in a generation — and needs to be considered carefully. But there’s more than enough to suggest that something is out of kilter here. The planning application alone has cost close to £300 million. That’s more than twice as much as it cost Norway to build (not just plan) the world’s longest road tunnel.

The Thames project isn’t an outlier but rather the most visible example of a syndrome that permeates building in Britain. It has even ensnared Hollywood heavyweights. Ryan Reynolds, the star of Deadpool, and fellow actor Rob McElhenney have railed against the frustrations of the planning system in their attempts to expand the capacity of Wrexham AFC’s stadium after buying the Welsh football club in 2020. “I think the thick buttress of bureaucracy is the biggest f***ing problem,” Reynolds told entertainment news site Collider earlier this year. McElhenney said he had found it a lot harder to build in in the UK than “almost anywhere else in the world.”

This is very much a factor in the housing market. In a revealing article in the Financial Times last week, an elected representative in the southwestern county of Wiltshire described looking at a planning application for 20 houses done in 1980: three typed pages, on the back of which had been written “condition discharged” and a date. Applications now cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to prepare and can run to hundreds of pages, he told the newspaper.

The former Conservative minister Michael Gove once irritated the civil service by referring to it as “The Blob” (from a schlocky 1950s sci-fi film), by which he meant its habit of frustrating the will of elected politicians. The metaphor would be much better applied to Britain’s planning system, which is closer to the original blob in the sense of an impersonal and malignant presence that only gets bigger. The tendency of bureaucracies to enlarge themselves was enshrined in Parkinson’s law back in the 1950s. The move from paper to electronic documents has surely amplified this dynamic by making the production of extra words more or less costless.

This isn’t an argument to shred all regulations. We’ve already seen where such initiatives can lead, with the Grenfell Tower fire. Local democratic controls, safety rules and environmental considerations are important. But there are tradeoffs here, and the sclerosis and eye-watering costs of UK construction suggest the balance is askew.

Labour has rejected more fundamental reform, such as the move to a zonal planning system; a year or two of missed targets may cause it to rethink. If even Deadpool struggles with Britain’s planning blob, the case for radical change should be clear.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Matthew Brooker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business and infrastructure. Formerly, he was an editor for Bloomberg News and the South China Morning Post.