«Once again, the behaviour of our institutions and the incomprehensibility of our bureaucracy is an absolute gift»
The bureaucratic snafus are very welcome because they are “an absolute gift” to incumbents, which are the main constituency of Reform UK.
«for populists.»
Actually not a gift because here Reform UK have a conflict of choices:
* Their constituency is made of those incumbents who benefit hugely from bureaucratic gridlock for new infrastructure as they already own the best places.
* At the same time their constituency want to pay lower taxes on the profits from their rentierism so they are keen to see lower spending on bat infrastructure.
In an ideal world for Reform UK voters the new bypass road would not be built at all, so properties already well served by good connections would become even pricier, and government spending would be lower; second best would be (the current policy) to ensure that building new infrastructure would be so costly and slow that a lot less of it would be built; but Reform UK seem to be arguing that new infrastructure should be built just more cheaply.
It is the same conflict of choices with immigration: the constituency of Reform UK is made of people who benefit hugely from high volumes of immigration as they are incumbents who want higher prices and rents for their properties and the lowest possible cost of hired help, but at the same time they get annoyed when they see foreigners trespassing around who behave impertinently as if they had a right to do as they please in England.
Here the best option for Reform UK is to advocate for more immigration (more income from tenants, cheaper plumbers, cleaners, etc.) but also severe restrictions on immigrants, for example curfew after work hours and limiting them to specific immigrant-only areas (polish, romanian, nigerian, brazilian, ukrainian ghettos) outside work hours, and a legal indenture to ensure their docility. :-)
Feels like some of these issues would be mitigated by having clearer standards around how roads are built. I.e a rule where major roads should have nature tunnels of a certain spec every X miles. Designs meeting the spec should be rubber stamped by planners without needing review by the relevant quango. Yes, it will add costs, but imagine the certainty and time reduction it would bring would outweigh that.
As an aside, I travel a lot in Germany and am often amazed at how standardised things like road junctions and train stations are. They seem to pick a design and mostly run with it. Something to learn from perhaps.
Exactly - the fewer decisions you have to make in these situations, and the fewer people need to be involve in making them, the better. It's sort of related to the HS2 piece as well, or our recent nuclear plants - we seem to be really bad at adopting cookie-cutter approaches or following designs that are well-established elsewhere.
So much of what is embedded into all types of oversight bureaucracy chokes innovation and narrows the focus in most of the public realm reducing it to compliance and operating to set expectations. Developed to solve utterly reasonable issues the organisations morph into sclerotic and inflexible burden…. It’s seems that process is inevitable as the initial role, the good intent and function is suffocated by the act of becoming a bureaucracy.
«Developed to solve utterly reasonable issues the organisations morph into sclerotic and inflexible burden…. It’s seems that process is inevitable as the initial role, the good intent and function is suffocated by the act of becoming a bureaucracy.»
If that situation is allowed to persist that is because it makes money for powerful interest groups (usually incumbents), or does not hurt them.
Consider the opposite case of a dynamic, efficient bureaucracy, the Competition and Markets Authority: after the big business oligopolists complained to New Labour that it was too dynamic and efficient Starmer made a speech promptly promising to them to sort that out and very quickly sacked its head, replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, and then sacked 100 of the staff, to ensure that it would not be quite as dynamic as previously, but would become duly sclerotic.
I suspect incompetence has more to do with the outcome than the wishes of vested interests, which are just opportunistic. Greed always seeks the gaps to exploit. No idea about the CMA but there are a lot of sclerotic TLAs that the government puts in oversight roles that are just useless and stifle the sectors.
“If that situation is allowed to persist that is because it makes money for powerful interest groups (usually incumbents), or does not hurt them.”
«I suspect incompetence has more to do with the outcome than the wishes of vested interests»
But even if it arose spontaneously that "incompetence" is not getting fixed even if it does cause trouble to some people; why are those people unable to get it fixed? Why are the the incompetent also let be by their superiors? Are their superiors incompetent too, all the way up to the top?
That seems to be extremely unlikely given that when incompetence is allowed to fester strangely enough in most cases it is incumbents and in particular NIMBYs who benefit most; if festering incompetence were purely spontaneous then in different cases it would damage different interest groups or benefit different interest groups.
But incompetence as a rule manifests in the inability to do new things well or at all, in reduction in the ability to increase supply of something (like housing), which benefits those who already own the existing supply.
Again in the recent case of the CMA *competence* was promptly and brutally fixed by the government because it was annoying some long-term vested interests.
«which are just opportunistic.»
Incumbents have worked in the long term in this country to protect their advantages (they even had a party just for them, one that has been in government more than any other), and in particular NIMBYs have many local organizations that can fight new supply in their areas for several years.
I think this is it: it starts from really good intentions, but somehow the implementation becomes incredibly legalistic and adversarial, instead of starting from a place of 'how do we get this done?'
I think it’s as simple as the job becomes the bureaucracy- and is run by people who are not actually experienced in their field - usually to the dismay of the professional staff who are experts in their field. You can see this in so many areas
Great piece. But if Reform are going to get in next election, aren't Natural England doomed already? Even if they switched now, changed tack and did all the things you suggest, won't Reform can them anyway?
Maybe, but I think there's a host of other institutions who should be looking at this and wondering urgently how they avoid making themselves into the next public villain on the chopping block. Like I should probably write more about this specifically, but it's sort of uncanny how bad their public-facing comms has been. It's an agency whose number one priority should be clear communication with stakeholders.
It's not about speed, though. It's about power. Who gets to make a decision? In this case (although I am far from an expert) it reads like Natural England have an effective veto on the project. I'm not sure anybody thought that was the case when it was set up.
«Once again, the behaviour of our institutions and the incomprehensibility of our bureaucracy is an absolute gift»
The bureaucratic snafus are very welcome because they are “an absolute gift” to incumbents, which are the main constituency of Reform UK.
«for populists.»
Actually not a gift because here Reform UK have a conflict of choices:
* Their constituency is made of those incumbents who benefit hugely from bureaucratic gridlock for new infrastructure as they already own the best places.
* At the same time their constituency want to pay lower taxes on the profits from their rentierism so they are keen to see lower spending on bat infrastructure.
In an ideal world for Reform UK voters the new bypass road would not be built at all, so properties already well served by good connections would become even pricier, and government spending would be lower; second best would be (the current policy) to ensure that building new infrastructure would be so costly and slow that a lot less of it would be built; but Reform UK seem to be arguing that new infrastructure should be built just more cheaply.
It is the same conflict of choices with immigration: the constituency of Reform UK is made of people who benefit hugely from high volumes of immigration as they are incumbents who want higher prices and rents for their properties and the lowest possible cost of hired help, but at the same time they get annoyed when they see foreigners trespassing around who behave impertinently as if they had a right to do as they please in England.
Here the best option for Reform UK is to advocate for more immigration (more income from tenants, cheaper plumbers, cleaners, etc.) but also severe restrictions on immigrants, for example curfew after work hours and limiting them to specific immigrant-only areas (polish, romanian, nigerian, brazilian, ukrainian ghettos) outside work hours, and a legal indenture to ensure their docility. :-)
Feels like some of these issues would be mitigated by having clearer standards around how roads are built. I.e a rule where major roads should have nature tunnels of a certain spec every X miles. Designs meeting the spec should be rubber stamped by planners without needing review by the relevant quango. Yes, it will add costs, but imagine the certainty and time reduction it would bring would outweigh that.
As an aside, I travel a lot in Germany and am often amazed at how standardised things like road junctions and train stations are. They seem to pick a design and mostly run with it. Something to learn from perhaps.
Exactly - the fewer decisions you have to make in these situations, and the fewer people need to be involve in making them, the better. It's sort of related to the HS2 piece as well, or our recent nuclear plants - we seem to be really bad at adopting cookie-cutter approaches or following designs that are well-established elsewhere.
*Clearly* the bats are guided by the quiet bat people. Obviously!
So much of what is embedded into all types of oversight bureaucracy chokes innovation and narrows the focus in most of the public realm reducing it to compliance and operating to set expectations. Developed to solve utterly reasonable issues the organisations morph into sclerotic and inflexible burden…. It’s seems that process is inevitable as the initial role, the good intent and function is suffocated by the act of becoming a bureaucracy.
«Developed to solve utterly reasonable issues the organisations morph into sclerotic and inflexible burden…. It’s seems that process is inevitable as the initial role, the good intent and function is suffocated by the act of becoming a bureaucracy.»
If that situation is allowed to persist that is because it makes money for powerful interest groups (usually incumbents), or does not hurt them.
Consider the opposite case of a dynamic, efficient bureaucracy, the Competition and Markets Authority: after the big business oligopolists complained to New Labour that it was too dynamic and efficient Starmer made a speech promptly promising to them to sort that out and very quickly sacked its head, replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, and then sacked 100 of the staff, to ensure that it would not be quite as dynamic as previously, but would become duly sclerotic.
Incumbency is the greatest english virtue!
I suspect incompetence has more to do with the outcome than the wishes of vested interests, which are just opportunistic. Greed always seeks the gaps to exploit. No idea about the CMA but there are a lot of sclerotic TLAs that the government puts in oversight roles that are just useless and stifle the sectors.
“If that situation is allowed to persist that is because it makes money for powerful interest groups (usually incumbents), or does not hurt them.”
«I suspect incompetence has more to do with the outcome than the wishes of vested interests»
But even if it arose spontaneously that "incompetence" is not getting fixed even if it does cause trouble to some people; why are those people unable to get it fixed? Why are the the incompetent also let be by their superiors? Are their superiors incompetent too, all the way up to the top?
That seems to be extremely unlikely given that when incompetence is allowed to fester strangely enough in most cases it is incumbents and in particular NIMBYs who benefit most; if festering incompetence were purely spontaneous then in different cases it would damage different interest groups or benefit different interest groups.
But incompetence as a rule manifests in the inability to do new things well or at all, in reduction in the ability to increase supply of something (like housing), which benefits those who already own the existing supply.
Again in the recent case of the CMA *competence* was promptly and brutally fixed by the government because it was annoying some long-term vested interests.
«which are just opportunistic.»
Incumbents have worked in the long term in this country to protect their advantages (they even had a party just for them, one that has been in government more than any other), and in particular NIMBYs have many local organizations that can fight new supply in their areas for several years.
I think this is it: it starts from really good intentions, but somehow the implementation becomes incredibly legalistic and adversarial, instead of starting from a place of 'how do we get this done?'
I think it’s as simple as the job becomes the bureaucracy- and is run by people who are not actually experienced in their field - usually to the dismay of the professional staff who are experts in their field. You can see this in so many areas
Great piece. But if Reform are going to get in next election, aren't Natural England doomed already? Even if they switched now, changed tack and did all the things you suggest, won't Reform can them anyway?
Maybe, but I think there's a host of other institutions who should be looking at this and wondering urgently how they avoid making themselves into the next public villain on the chopping block. Like I should probably write more about this specifically, but it's sort of uncanny how bad their public-facing comms has been. It's an agency whose number one priority should be clear communication with stakeholders.
Such a good and nuanced piece. The key message to me is about speed - whatever decisions are made on planning rows we need them to happen faster.
It's not about speed, though. It's about power. Who gets to make a decision? In this case (although I am far from an expert) it reads like Natural England have an effective veto on the project. I'm not sure anybody thought that was the case when it was set up.
«it reads like Natural England have an effective veto on the project»
Not just Natural England. The more hurdles and vetoes in new stuff that expands supply the more incumbents and NIMBYs benefit.
If the UK hands power to Reform, you’ll have much more pressing issues, I think. Good luck.