Jeremy's Blog 26th July 2024: How Much There Is To Do
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 25th July 2024
We have to wish the new government well. It faces such a scale and range of challenges on all sides as an increasingly risky and changing world meets an economy lacking growth for half a generation. A common theme from water to defence is that we have preferred to have benefits cheaply without providing for the future. That approach has now run its course on many fronts as the need to invest, repair and adapt becomes pressing.
Perhaps the starkest recent signal of the challenges has been for defence with the new Chief of the General Staff advising that we have three years to prepare for war:
“We probably do have just enough time … to prepare, act and assure the re-establishment of credible armed forces to support a strategy of deterrence”.
Since the Berlin Wall fell, we have taken money from defence to increase spending on health and welfare, spending that is now locked in when money is now needed for defence, whether the army, air defences or laid-up carriers.
For water, the political pressure and so regulation has been to keep bills down with the need for infrastructure only now knocking on our doors as Cambridge and elsewhere run short.
Over the last two or three years we may just have begun to face the scale of what is needed to respond to advancing climate change. The costs of effective mitigation would reduce the costs of adapting to and living with unchecked change. The simplest figure for that is the need to more than quadruple our non-fossil fuel power generation by 2050. Nearer still, the government aims to have excluded carbon from electricity by 2030 – at least a doubling of renewables in a little over 5 years away.
Again, the history has been for regulation to keep bills down, rather than investing which now has to be done at massive scale, needing far more than roof top solar. Once generated, that power must then be taken across the country to where it will be used.
The new government aims to double onshore wind, triple solar generation and quadruple offshore wind (see today's announcement for the Crown Estate) to meet its 2030 commitment. However, the energy consultancy, Cornwall Insight, has shown how far current plans and deployment rates are adrift from that goal, only taking wind and solar from 34 per cent to 44 per cent of electricity by 2030. The scale of that shortfall drives the current impetus for permissions and then serious change to improve connections and procedures.
Using the previous government's policies and after planning inquiries earlier in the year, a wave of permissions for solar farms is already coming through – both larger and in the green belt. A green light has been given to onshore wind in England. It has to be expected that these are only a foretaste of what can achieve the targets. Many of the decisions have turned on available connections – showing where value lies now – and we expect reform to the whole process of getting connections.
Those goals for renewables, alongside those for housing and infrastructure, are all for the short life of this Parliament, a bare five years in which process and resistance will combine to create delay and cost. In its coming Planning and Infrastructure Bill the government must look long and hard at judicial review, so often used to protect a status quo that entrenches relative decline.
Farming too needs the green light for the infrastructure needed to deliver the essential productivity improvement, to adapt to manage the extremes and risks of climate change and to thrive in the competition for land use. A key factor in that will be enabling good farmers to have access to the land they will farm well.
Changing to face the future well is a challenge, not least with the great pressures on all sides and the limited capacity of government. Responding badly has far worse consequences. Protecting today's comfort may not only fail those lacking comfort but can pave the road for longer run decline.