ICE believes that delivering the infrastructure vital to maintaining and improving our quality of life must always be a priority for government.
This is dependent upon securing a planning system which can approve major infrastructure project fairly efficiently and expertly. Planning is therefore an important issue for the whole of the civil engineering industry.
The Planning Act 2008 establishes the IPC (Infrastructure Planning Commission) which will consider proposals put to it by developers. National policy statements, which will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, will integrate environmental, social and economic objectives and provide clarity on the need for infrastructure.
Planning can take a long time, and these delays can be expensive and cause uncertainties.
Some examples of how long it can take to gain approval for some big projects are shown below:
- Heathrow Terminal 5: The process took seven years and involved 37 different applications under various consent regimes
- Thameslink 2000: The process took eight years and involved 30 different consents under four different acts of parliament
- Belverdere Energy from Waste facility: The first application for this facility was submitted in 1992. Approval was finally granted in 2006.
- Expansion of Southampton Docks: The application for expansion took four years before the Minister for Transport rejected the plans in 2004.
That is why the ICE thinks the IPC is so important, and that the new system is long overdue and must be implemented without delay. Failure to do so would result in years of delay during which the UK would struggle to deliver overdue and essential national infrastructure projects.