problems which don't go away

sorry sorry - travel, heat, lassitude. I am really going to try not to let this become a habit

I was talking the other week with a number of different groups of people who are working on the general issues in planning and state capacity which I refer to as “The Problem Factory”. There really does appear to be a lot of enthusiasm in YIMBY world for restructuring the planning system to make it more difficult to tie up projects in legal risk for years, and it is making me a bit worried, because I think they might be losing sight of the original vision.

What I mean by this is that NIMBYism is fundamentally a political problem, not a legal or technical one. Lots of people don’t want things to be built. Sometimes these reasons aren’t very good[1] reasons, but this is a democracy.

If you take away too many of the legal and process mechanisms but leave the fundamental lack of consensus and consent in place, I think the problem is likely to bubble straight back up as a political problem. Which means that it will arrive very directly at the door of the Secretaries of State who are currently making speeches about builders and blockers. The Problem Factory is an accountability sink, in my own terminology.

And when you dismantle the problem factory, you dismantle that accountability sink, which means that you have to face up to all of the unpleasantness which the sink was protecting you from. How brave do we think ministers are actually going to be, when asked to make decisions which will have dispersed benefits two or three election cycles in the future but create concentrated costs now?

This is only one form of political risk, by the way – in days of yore, it was not unknown for people to physically resist infrastructure construction by chaining themselves to things. And equally importantly, when it comes to making investment decisions, political risk has all of the bad characteristics which people hate about legal risk. The risk surface is still there, it’s just that there is no process for managing it now, no judge to limit the number of times questions can be relitigated and no barrier to entry.

I think this might end up being another entry in my table of “attempts to solve the problem of sclerosis which had disappointing results”. You can’t get around the need for consultation and consent.

[1] Although – the infrastructure and building industry would do well to look in the mirror once in a while. One of the big reasons why people might have a reflexive knee-jerk negative reaction to building things might be well summarised as “the past behaviour of the infrastructure and construction industries”. And one of the reasons why people are often resistant to evidence that projects are safe is “the past behaviour of the infrastructure and construction industries when it comes to lying”. Trust has to be built (and rebuilt once lost) – you can’t assume everyone else’s belief in your own good faith, any more than you can assume a can opener.