NIMBYism - The UK's biggest threat

Image of London (St Paul's Cathedral), courtesy of Shuttershock

(LONON, UK) - When you think of a country's economy, what do you think of first? People at work, maybe products being made? Yes, while people working is obviously essential for an economy to function, you have to ask why they're able to do that. It’s the bus they took to work, driving on that dedicated bus lane, the pavement they’ve walked along, towards a great towering block in which their office is situated. That’s what really makes the economy tick along. The issue is the UK seems to be overcome by NIMBYism, an ideological disease that seems to be infecting everything from railway developments to housing to airports.

Yes, you can argue that newbuilds are notoriously bad quality, but that has nothing to do with planning permission itself, building standards are a completely separate issue and one that should be tackled along with addressing our acute lack of a will to build quite literally anything. You can say that leaseholds should be banned, and I really do think they should, but those houses should still be built, just not sold in the same way. While I understand that this is all incredibly cliché, especially among people who don’t own a home (and that will go for the vast majority of younger people), it’s something that needs to be said. No one should have to wait 10 years to get off a waiting list for a council flat, or spend millions to get a flat in Central London.

I’ve been to areas a short walk away from the centre of London where single-story corner shops still exist, mixed-use developments being at best an afterthought and at worst outright rejected for being “out of character for the area”. While the number of homeless people keeps on rising and people’s incomes are squeezed, rents aren’t coming down. We need to let supply meet demand by liberalising our entire planning system, and I think the work of the Priced Out campaign addresses a lot of these issues. While I’m the only person I know in favour of the entire plan surrounding The London Studios, I couldn't hear more about how awful rents are getting and how many people family members know that are of a decent age and don’t even have a permanent roof over their heads.

It's not like we’ve run out of space, either. If you go down to Newham you can still see crumbling old factories that haven't been touched in about 60 years, if you go to Hackney you can see rows upon rows of single-story shops side-by-side, some of them closed. While I’ve mainly used London as an example, as the housing crisis is particularly acute in the capital, this goes for the entire country. People shouldn't have to wait 15-20 years to save up for a deposit on a decent income, many can’t even afford to save up at all and the recent announcement that we’re in a recession shows that, despite us already having less income per head than before the pandemic and being on a downwards trajectory in that regard.

And that’s only housing. The story is just as bad with other infrastructure. HS2? Over-budget (thank you tunneling NIMBYs), cut back and choked to a point where it both can’t expand or connect to HS1. Crossrail 2 looks forever away, or like it'll never actually be built in the first place. Proportionally, more than 3x as much of our rail is left without electrification than India. The only major economy with less HSR than us is probably America, but even the car-centric States are set to catch up with us in the coming years. It’s no wonder that a 1938 stock train (yes, 1938!) was still operational just 3 years ago, or that there still aren't concrete plans to replace the over 50 year old 1972 stock trains on the London Underground (Bakerloo Line, to be specific). Now, you might ask why all of this has been allowed to happen.

Historically, for rail, the lines were only allowed to run under streets as people didn’t want railways to be running under their homes. These days, people apparently can’t stand the sight of a train running through an otherwise empty field and need it to all be encased in tunnels, or they’ll start burrowing tunnels and protesting against projects that we need to decarbonise our economy and, ultimately, grow it. Often, they’ll say ‘oh, I want it to be built, just not here’. With an anti-building culture like this, and everyone wanting to shift developments away from where they live, how do we expect our rail tickets to get cheaper, or our journey times to get quicker? There’s only so many trains you can run so quickly on a 100 year old track that starts melting when it gets a bit warm, and the alternative just leads to that same field being paved over. What do you gain, realistically, from stopping train tracks from being laid down?

You can say the same for renewable power generation. It wasn’t all that long ago when Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were debating on who was the best at stopping wind turbines and solar panels from being built, who hate them the most because some people think they’re a little ugly. There are people defending life-expired, grungy, dilapidated estates, abandoned buildings and so on on valuable land because they’re part of the ‘history of the area’ or something along those lines. Well, if you want to be able to live in that area, you’re going to have to knock it down and build some flats there! Britain has so much economic potential that is stored away, untapped, by those who think that their neighbour’s shed being green will ruin their lives.

The brownfield sites we have, the education institutions we’ve created as well as greenfield sites protected by the nonsensically strict greenbelt, instead put to environmentally sustainable work such as, I don’t know, shoveling 15,000L down the gullet of a cow for every kilo of beef it'll make, are almost made to be built on. The Town and Country Planning Association themselves admitted over 20 years ago that change was needed, yet here we are. It hurts to see it all wasted away to please someone who bought/whose parents or grandparents bought their houses in tuppences and shillings. Those who suffer most are younger people in society and those in poverty, ultimately.

Heathrow's third runway is still caught up in planning hell despite the airport being at 98% capacity. By 2030, not only will it be full, but Gatwick, London City and Luton airports will all be too. Every year we push back on expanding our airports, and this goes for infrastructure more generally, we hold back more and more economic potential, potential that’ll be lost to time. There’s nothing I hate more than seeing politicians and laymen choose to make us poorer and poorer, we can't afford to not build and make this recent recession not only a minor blip but the norm with an ever-increasing population and 4% inflation, mind you, meaning per capita we’re really not on a good trajectory.

In a nation where we don't even have a proper register of who owns what land, we need to start being serious about growing the economy in our now truly dire straits. We need to build more of almost everything, we need to tax land that isn’t being used to make sure it is being used to its fullest and make our cities both denser and greener. That’s the only way we can succeed as a nation going forward. The choice is either YIMBYism or a combination of higher taxes, more hours and lower incomes. It’s build or die for the British economy.