“The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighborhood to its centre,” is how Charles Dickens described the coming of the railroads to north London.

“Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood,” Dickens wrote of the railroad driven through Camden Town to connect London with Birmingham.

“In short, the yet unfinished railroad was in progress; and from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement” he wrote in “Dombey and Son”, published between 1846 and 1848, at the height of the country’s railway building mania.

The railway is now part of the West Coast Main Line, Britain’s busiest long-distance passenger route, connecting the capital with Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Dickens was ambivalent about the social and economic changes wrought by the railways but there is no doubt they ushered in the modern world and today are extolled as a more climate-friendly alternative to highway transport.

Britain’s railroads would never have been built, however, if their promoters had had to deal with the country’s modern planning bureaucracy, which has left the country with a chronic shortage of housing and mostly paralyzed the development of infrastructure.

Lancashire County Council’s decision on Monday to reject an application to drill and hydraulic fracture up to four wells at a site in the borough of Fylde on the grounds of "noise" and "visual impact" is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the country’s planning control system.

The planning application has already been reviewed by council officials against almost 50 different planning policy documents and criteria set by local councils, health and safety authorities, national government and the European Union.

It has been tested for compliance with everything from national energy policy and core planning principles to local policies on nature reserves and development in countryside areas.

But in the end elected local councillors voted to reject the application against the advice of their own planning officers, who recommended it should be accepted subject to stringent conditions on traffic movements, control of noise, dust, landscaping, ecology and other matters designed to protect local residents and the environment.

The decision will almost certainly be appealed on the grounds of unreasonableness and end up being reviewed by an independent planning inspector, national government ministers and ultimately the courts.

Councillors responded to a mix of community concerns about disruption and a strong campaign by outside environmentalists opposed to hydraulic fracturing in particular and the production of fossil fuels in general.

BYZANTINE BUREAUCRACY

Britain’s planning system is a byzantine hybrid of national policies implemented by elected local councils subject to review by a national planning inspectorate, ministers and the courts, which ensures it is neither democratic nor efficient, and decisions are subject to endless and costly delays.

In one view, the county council’s decision is a welcome demonstration of localism and democracy in action: communities successfully opposing drilling for natural gas in their area.

The problem is that energy production is a national as well as local concern and the energy has to be produced somewhere.

There are 496,000 separate household spaces in Lancashire of which 412,000 (83 percent) rely exclusively on gas central heating, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics.

In Fylde, the borough in which gas company Cuadrilla applied to drill wells, more than 81 percent of households rely on gas to heat their homes, slightly higher than the average for England and Wales.

Gas became the most popular home-heating fuel in Britain following the discovery of extensive reserves in the North Sea during the 1960s and 1970s, replacing dirty coal and expensive electricity.

But the North Sea fields are depleting, leaving the country increasingly reliant on imported gas from the Middle East and perhaps, in future, North America.

Even if gas is to be imported via giant LNG carriers, it must arrive at giant regasification terminals and be sent via underground pipelines, all of which must be built in some local authority somewhere.

There is a legitimate debate over how much gas can be produced from onshore plays like Lancashire’s Bowland shale.

Most estimates suggest the amount of gas in place is vast though the quantity that might be technically and economically recoverable is far smaller.

Without drilling and fracturing a series of test wells, however, the extent of the resource will never be known.

Britain’s planning system has become hostage to an anti-development bias stymieing everything from house building and new roads and railways to mineral resources and wind farms.

Lancashire’s attempt to block shale development, despite all the proposed safe guards negotiated by the county’s own planning officials, suggests local factors are being given too much weight in decision-making.

There is a clear sense that elected councillors would not have approved the drilling application under any circumstances, no matter what safeguards were negotiated.

No community is enthusiastic about the development of new homes or industrial sites in its area but national and local prosperity depends on houses and industries being located somewhere.

If Camden council was asked to review the construction of the London to Birmingham railway under today’s planning rules it would almost certainly reject the project as too disruptive for local residents in an increasingly genteel area.

But then the country would not have a fast rail link between London, the north of England and Scotland. Lancashire residents use that section of rail track every time they travel to London by train.

The same local hostility to house-building explains why the country has a chronic shortage of homes and some of the most expensive accommodation in the world despite there not being any real shortage of land.

When the Lancashire decision is taken to appeal, there is little doubt planning inspectors, ministers and the courts will probably reverse the decision on the grounds it was “unreasonable”, something which the council’s own lawyers warned, but only after more delay and expense.

Lancashire’s decision to reject fracking despite all the assurances which were given about noise, traffic and other impacts stands as a magnificent symbol of the dysfunction in Britain’s planning system.

Source: www.reuters.com

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