The 14-mile Thames crossing delayed by 66 miles of paperwork
On Monday, there were plenty of congratulatory pats on the back as the Silvertown Tunnel welcomed London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) vehicles along its short route under the Thames. But, for a moment, set aside the Teslas, e-Transit vans, and even the bus carrying bicycles speeding through the new 0.8 mile tunnel between Newham and the Greenwich Peninsula. Consider this: the last time a brand new crossing of the capital's river in east London was celebrated by personal vehicle owners, the Ford Model T was still months away from being launched. It was 1908, and the Rotherhithe Tunnel had just opened.
It wasn't until nearly 60 years later, in 1967, that an additional parallel tunnel was opened at the Blackwall crossing (a Victorian-era project still in use today). Even then, the new eastern tunnel was quickly deemed inadequate, with traffic tailbacks soon crippling the area.
It shouldn't have been this difficult to cross the Thames, surely. Yet, nearly 60 years after the Blackwall debacle, you would have been forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the painfully slow progress in developing critical infrastructure. Further downstream, another classic Thames controversy made headlines last month when plans for the £9 billion Lower Thames Crossing – potentially Britain's largest road-building project – were finally given formal Government approval.
A relief route east of the Dartford Crossings was first mentioned in Parliament a staggering 36 years ago, as part of a 'Roads for Prosperity' white paper. In 2011, it was recognised by the Conservative government as a 'top 40 priority project' in its National Infrastructure Plan. The first public consultation was held 12 years ago.
And yet here we are. The latest estimate from National Highways suggests the Lower Thames Crossing won't open to traffic until 2032. If so-called priority projects take 21 years to materialise, it's no wonder no one's holding their breath.
'The Lower Thames Crossing is such a powerful symbol of how seriously wrong the system is,' says Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at campaign organisation Britain Remade. 'A billion pounds has already been spent on this project before a single spade has got into the ground. The planning application alone cost more than Norway spent on actually building the longest road tunnel in the world. It's bonkers.'
Yes, there are some obvious engineering issues crossing over or under the Thames, not least that once you get out towards the estuary it's relatively wide. The project's two tunnels, which will go between the villages of Chalk, in Kent, and East Tilbury, in Essex, are designed to be 2.4 miles long, making them the longest road tunnels in Britain. But it has been the continued lack of joined-up strategy, combined with colossal paperwork, red tape, and endless judicial, environmental and planning reviews, that has effectively scuppered any prospect of anything getting built quickly.
The Silvertown Tunnel is another classic example of what happens when governments get stuck in a directionless mire. It had been clear since at least the 1980s that London needed more river crossings – especially in the east – yet it wasn't until the mid-1990s that a route was finally safeguarded across the Thames from the Greenwich Peninsula to Silvertown (in other words, prioritised above other proposed developments).
An actual tunnel cropped up in the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's transport strategy in 2001, and in Transport for London's Thames Gateway River Crossings strategy published a few years later, the suggestion was that it would directly follow the opening of a new 'Thames Gateway Bridge' between Beckton and Thamesmead. Imagine – two new river crossings!
You might also be thinking: 'What Thames Gateway Bridge?' And you'd be right. It was cancelled in 2008 by then Mayor of London Boris Johnson – too expensive, too environmentally damaging, too unpopular locally. This was after the project had first been proposed back in the 1970s, in a previous guise as the 'East London River Crossing'.
Not that Johnson was averse to expensive Thames crossings. Under his mayoralty, Transport for London drew up proposals for 'a bridge or tunnel' at Gallions Reach and another between Rainham and Belvedere, both of which were eventually ditched by Johnson's successor, Sadiq Khan, who concentrated on the Silvertown Tunnel. (Johnson was also a big fan of the Garden Bridge project, a proposal for a pedestrian crossing between Waterloo and Blackfriars, whose price eventually spiralled out of control.)
The Silvertown Tunnel was finally designated a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) and given the go-ahead by the Department of Transport in 2018.
That wasn't the end of the story, though. It took another 18 months to award the contract to the Riverlinx consortium to design, build, finance, and maintain the tunnel – and construction didn't begin until spring 2021. When you considered it, it had taken a ridiculous 30 years to properly connect Silvertown with Greenwich, and four years of construction didn't sound so bad.
That is, until you remember that other countries were building tunnels at least 10 times the length for a fraction of Silvertown's £2.2 billion price tag.
The Lower Thames Crossing, meanwhile, still has a number of hoops to jump through despite receiving planning permission last month. Ominously, Matt Palmer, National Highways executive director for the Lower Thames Crossing, has said that while they are 'shovel ready' with their delivery partners to build one of the UK's most important infrastructure projects, the decision still only allows them to 'work with the Government on funding and start the detailed planning.'
All of which begs the question: what more detailed planning could they possibly need to do with government? Britain Remade did the maths – if you put all the pages of the interminable documents involved in this project end to end, they would stretch 66 miles, five times longer than the road itself.
National Highways declined to comment on specifics, but Dumitriu is certain there'll be more legal challenges to the planning approval decision, which will end up going to the High Court, and possibly the Court of Appeal.
'The Lower Thames Crossing has had eight separate consultations, and one of the things we're calling for is looking at whether all these legal requirements are appropriate,' he says. 'Part of the reason you end up with a 360,000-page planning application is because there is so much legal risk you end up having to gold plate every aspect of the project.
'Yes, we should look at what the environmental impact is,' he says. 'Yes, we should consider what locals think. But we also have to fundamentally accept that there is a trade off here in terms of getting growth back up in the UK for the long term. All this gold plating has speed and cost implications; this was once a £4 billion project which is now more like £10 billion – and as we heard just this month, the Government doesn't have a huge amount of cash to splash.'
Which is why there's still an element of frustration that Labour's much-heralded Planning and Infrastructure Bill – a critical piece of legislation aimed at easing major projects through – is now stuck in red tape itself, as the Bill shuttles between committee stages, report stages, House of Lords approval, and eventually, maybe, Royal Assent.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – the department sponsoring the Bill – was asked when there might be a puff of white smoke from Whitehall. A spokesperson simply replied that the planning reforms needed to become law 'as quickly as possible.'
The builders agree – and are just as impatient. Last week, senior executives from 13 UK Tier 1 contractors penned an open letter to MPs urging them 'to grasp the scale of this opportunity and support the Planning and Infrastructure Bill without diminishing its ambition.'
And it's this ambition that actually excites bodies such as the National Infrastructure Commission. Many of the recommendations in its National Infrastructure Assessment of 2023 have made it into the Bill.
'Everybody, I think, would argue that one of the big constraints in this country is consistent policy and strategy,' says its chair Sir John Armitt.
'If you take the Lower Thames Crossing decision, it's very good news. This, to my mind, is a relatively straightforward piece of transport infrastructure which is of critical national importance – and that was recognised some 15 years ago. So it's taken a long time.'
But why so long?
'Well, we pointed out to the government three years ago that the planning process has severely deteriorated since 2010,' he says. 'Back then, you could get an NSIP through in just over two years. Now it's over four on average, with some – like the Lower Thames Crossing – taking even longer. At the same time, the number of judicial reviews on NSIPs has gone up from 10 per cent to 56 per cent.'
Britain Remade say there are 1,800 pages on newts in the Lower Thames Crossing planning document. It's this kind of red tape, combined with legitimate local concerns, which makes multiple legal challenges and consultations inevitable. (Even existing crossings have been put out of action by officialdom. The 138-year-old Hammersmith Bridge was closed six years ago following the discovery of cracks, but its future remains in limbo amid wrangling between three tiers of government – central, city and local.)
'The whole process has to be reviewed,' agrees Armitt. 'One of the reasons it takes so long and costs so much is because of the environmental challenges and assessments that have to be made, the mitigations that have to be made and the sheer amount of statutory authorities who have to be consulted.
'There should be the ability, for example, to look at a more strategic, spatial area where a developer can put forward money to compensate communities on a broader environmental basis. That's potentially a very significant step forward.'
That's why the Environmental Delivery Plan and Nature Restoration Fund has been prepared alongside the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and will be operational for developers to use shortly after Royal Assent.
Yet the Government does concede that streamlining the NSIP regime still has some way to go. Housing and planning minister Matthew Pennycook says that during the Bill's first and second readings in Parliament, several MPs called for further consideration of how long pre-application periods are taking for infrastructure projects, due to the way statutory procedures are being applied.
'This is an issue to which the Deputy Prime Minister and I have already given a significant amount of thought,' he says, 'and I commit to giving further consideration to the case for using the Bill to address statutory requirements that would appear to be no longer driving good outcomes. I can assure those honorary Members that the Government will not hesitate to act boldly if there is a compelling case for reform in this area.'
Acting boldly, many would argue, would mean addressing those statutory requirements now. After all, aren't the experiences of the Silvertown Tunnel and the Lower Thames Crossing compelling cases for reform?
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