There seem to be two reasons for cancelling a tram in Edinburgh: a devastating fire on the high street, or a couple of dog walkers on the trackbed.

The Council is now considering finally putting tracks back on the Roseburn Path, as was always intended and reaffirmed by the Edinburgh Tram (Line One) Act 2006. Its proposals go above and beyond to keep people walking, wheeling, and cycling alongside the tram. Battery-operated trams will avoid the need for overhead cables, allowing 70% of the trees to remain. Trams will run on a single track at pinch points, ensuring the maintenance of at least three metres of width along 93% of the path.

A vocal minority remains in denial, claiming any change to the path amounts to its “destruction”. The Council’s representative market research tells a very different story: more than 3 in 4 Edinburgh residents do not oppose the tram along Roseburn Path.

The Roseburn Path is the only viable option for a northern expansion of the tram network. The alternative Orchard Brae route would be nearly 80% more expensive, require delay-prone work to accommodate trams on the historic Dean Bridge, and actually mean removing cycle infrastructure in places. Of course Roseburn is the cheaper option – thanks to the original railway, the foundations are laid and the route is clear of obstacles.

Edinburgh is now one of the most productive and fastest growing cities in the UK. Investing this wealth to build out the tram network would stimulate a virtuous cycle where growth begets growth. And support for the expansion comes from a diverse multitude of lobby groups, ranging from sustainable transport campaigners to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.

Innovative local funding models across Europe have demonstrated that tramlines can be built at a fraction of the cost of the previous Edinburgh tramline, which is already generating enough revenue to cover 98% of its operating expenses. The current tram network has been a huge success, with £600 million of new investment along the route.

Trams provide capacity, smoothness, and reliability that buses simply cannot match. For investors, as was the case for the £1 billion redevelopment of St James Quarter, the physical permanence of tracks provides certainty that a reroutable bus line cannot.

Nowhere better demonstrates the superiority of trams to buses than Argonaut Books, a beloved independent bookshop at the Foot of the Walk. It normally sees a 20 to 30% rise in sales in August due to the Fringe Festival, but without tram service due to the temporary closure of Princes Street, sales have instead fallen by 5%.

And it’s not just businesses that benefit from trams. They encourage housing development along their routes and increase property values. A smoother, more reliable journey gives commuters a reason to leave their cars at home, reducing congestion, noise, and air pollution – ultimately helping our environment. Everyone would be safer from road traffic collisions, whilst CCTV and staff on the tram would deter antisocial behaviour along the path at night. The northern extension would connect Granton and the Western General Hospital to the city centre, as well as to future extensions to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the proposed reopening of the South Suburban line.

A small group of NIMBYs are trying to withhold these benefits from the people of Edinburgh. This is a travesty, and we should call it what it is: rich neighbourhoods using their wealth and influence to prevent essential public infrastructure from reaching developing areas such as Granton. Allowing them to gaslight us into thinking the Roseburn Path is anything more than a very well maintained trackbed starves Granton businesses of sales, commuters of jobs, patients of access to hospitals, tourists of access to the waterfront, and children of clean air. We make the radical proposal to put tracks on the trackbed, as there was always meant to be – the grass, trees, and path can stay.

Don’t let our councillors be distracted by the NIMBYs. Get them to support the tram extension by going to: lookingforgrowth.uk/

Calum McCutcheon is a member of LFG Edinburgh and a local advocate who previously ran a group for safe pedestrian and cycle infrastructure.

You might think you’re not qualified to be involved, but what we have seen so far is that everyone brings something valuable. LFG has planning experts, transport experts, energy experts, people with experience working in government at different levels and others building world-changing start-ups or working in the companies that have to navigate all the endless regulation and red tape. For our Chapters, what we need above all else are doers. If you’re willing to clean up a park, send an email in favour of a new housing development, organise a social event or turn up at a planning meeting, you’ll be making a tremendous difference. We also need heterodox thinkers; the same failed politics that we’ve seen decade after decade will not save us.

Some of you will have been quietly getting on with similar initiatives on your own for years already, diligently cleaning up your local area and supporting good developments where you can. In that case, LFG will act as a force multiplier to your efforts. You will be amazed how much more you can accomplish when a group of like-minded people have your back.

You might think you are too busy, and I certainly understand where you’re coming from. Everyone seems to have full and busy lives. We’re running companies or working in difficult and demanding jobs, raising families, volunteering for community events – and all the rest. But it is exactly because we are so invested in our areas that we have to be the ones to step up and effect change. Moreover, those who stand in the path of progress, the NIMBYs, are certainly making the time to get organised to campaign and influence government to make growth even harder.

If you believe growth is good, you can’t afford to sit this out. The blockers will win if you don’t show up.

Now is also the perfect time to join a movement like LFG. We find ourselves in a rare moment when a network like ours has a chance to circumvent the traditional hierarchies of power to radically change how our country works. AI, vibe coding, open data sets, and APIs and automated lobbying tools mean a few motivated individuals have capabilities that would have required a whole government department 20 years ago. They give us the ability to start campaigning and influencing at frankly frightening speeds. I have been in discussions within LFG which have literally gone from an idea in someone’s head to a fully fledged website full of information in under an hour! There is so much publicly available data which lets us shine a light on issues where the country’s hierarchies are just completely failing to do what they should be doing. The more of you that get involved, the more mass we have to spread good ideas and get things done faster.

Those are some of the reasons why LFG needs you, but let me now appeal to your own self-interest and give just one reason why you might need LFG: it will increase your personal agency. Our motto is you can just do things. In our country today, precisely because of our anaemic growth and fraying public realm, it is easy to give in to the belief that the course of your life will be shaped more by economic and social forces beyond your control than by the actions you take. But even with things being as bad as they are, there are still countless things we can do to make our own lives, our own communities, and our own country better. Taking action is the antidote to despair.

LFG can expand your life in new and unexpected ways. When I first contacted LFG about starting a Chapter, I was driven by a sense of frustration and just wanting to do something, anything, to try to make a difference. Since then, in my Chapter, we’ve organised a park clean-up, hosted drinks and dinners, shown tens of thousands of people on X that you can just clean up road signs, and campaigned to get a cancer clinic built (yep NIMBYs opposed that too). I’ve learned some (very basic by LFG standards) vibe coding skills, was so moved hearing Matt Clifford’s rousing oratory at the O2 I learned how to make B-roll video to share it with more people (if you haven’t heard the speech yet, I promise it will be the best 15 minutes you’ll spend today). Perhaps most importantly, I’ve met the most remarkable, talented, curious, funny, smart and driven people you could imagine.

One of my favourite stories of a community expressing the individual responsibility we all bear to make the world better is the Christ the King Church in San Diego. In the church grounds there is, unsurprisingly, a statue of Christ. More unusually though the statue has no hands – many years ago vandals smashed them off. Rather than reattach them, or commission a new statue, the community added a plaque at the statue’s base which simply reads: ‘I have no hands but yours’. You don’t need to be religious to get the point; if you truly care about your town, if you want your city to be a clean and pleasant place to live, if you want to see the next generation enjoy greater prosperity and opportunity than you had, you have to accept that no one else is coming to the rescue – you must act!

Our country will not magically save itself, it has no hands but yours…

To join or start an LFG chapter, email: lucy@lookingforgrowth.uk or sign up on our website

Alfie Ramshaw is a member of LFG Reading and Berkshire.

Heathrow moves more than just people, with more than a quarter of UK trade by value passing through the airport. Remarkably, it does this despite cargo flights making up less than 2% of aircraft movements. On an average flight, some £3,500 of cargo travels beneath every passenger’s seat, as a quiet reminder that airports are engines of commerce as much as gateways to pleasure.

Over my career, Heathrow has taken me directly to every continent except Australasia and Antarctica. Not once have I used public transport to get to the airport.

“Why not?”, you may ask. Over 2 million people live, like me, to the west of Heathrow in towns and cities that are well-served by Brunel’s Great Western Railway. The railway is older than the airport and, so far, no one has got round to building a rail connection to it from the westerly direction. Travelling from Reading, you can be in central London in as little as 24 minutes. To get to Heathrow, the journey takes twice as long to travel two-thirds of the distance, and requires at least one change of train. Somewhat bizarrely, there is a direct train from Reading to Gatwick.

Travelling from Heathrow, you can get to Perth, Australia, in one hop, but the same cannot be said for getting to Heathrow from anywhere to the west! It is hardly then surprising that about half of all journeys to and from the airport are by car or taxi. Driving is, by far, the easiest route for those of us coming from the west. But the roads in and around Heathrow are already heavily congested, with airport-related traffic being a significant contributor to local congestion and air pollution. A rail link to the west would take many of those cars off the road. With the prospect of increased passenger numbers as planes get bigger, and with the potential construction of a third runway, Heathrow needs better rail links, and the first capacity gap to fill is to the west.

The great news is that plans for this missing link — the Western Rail Link to Heathrow (WRLtH) — are very mature and, unlike most infrastructure projects, have received near-universal support from politicians, business groups and communities along and beyond the proposed route. Notably, MPs serving places as far away as Bath, Swindon and Merthyr Tydfil recognise the benefits of getting the link built and have publicly announced their support for the scheme. Terminal 5 was even built with two platforms that have been ready and waiting for their trains for over a decade now. All the link requires is a short new section of tunnelled track and a junction between Langley and Iver to connect these spare platforms to the Great Western Main Line.

Oh, and someone to pay for it.

Ever since the WRLtH was first proposed by the Department for Transport (DfT) in 2012, there have been arguments about who should pay for it. The crux of the debate was that Heathrow – already operating at close to full capacity despite its existing, imperfect, transport links – would not directly benefit from the link and therefore had little incentive to invest. It was argued the real economic benefit lay beyond the airport itself, in the towns and cities gaining better connection to it.

But no government ever committed to footing the entire bill, or found a mutually acceptable funding split between public and private investors. The returns are too slow for most private investors, but for a government with a decades-long time horizon this should be exactly the sort of project that the state exists to fund and build.

The funding arguments, combined with the collapse in passenger numbers during the pandemic, meant the project never quite reached the key Development Consent Order (DCO) milestone. And with Rachel Reeves’s discovery of a £22 billion fiscal “black hole”, the WRLtH was formally cancelled in 2024 along with all other unfunded transport pledges.

Now, it is hardly surprising that I’m in favour of being able to quickly and cheaply get to the airport. Self-interest does not make a business case. But, over the years, successive studies have found the regional economic case is strong, and the investment is worthwhile whether or not the third runway ever gets built at Heathrow. Network Rail assessed the benefit-cost ratio for the project to be as high as 6-to-1, placing it in DfT’s “very high value for money” category. And with a total price tag of around £1 billion, we could have built the link more than a hundred times for the same cost as HS2. When you look at it that way, it seems remarkable that governments haven’t found a way to fund it.

Heathrow is never the destination. It is the gateway. Right now, the gateway opens easily only to the east. Building the Western Rail Link would swing it open to millions of people and thousands of businesses in the western half of the UK, at a price that is a fraction of what we are spending elsewhere. It is a rare example of infrastructure that isn’t being blocked by planning, but by funding. And if we started tomorrow, it could be running by 2032. We should just build it. Support our plan to get it done. Go to lookingforgrowth.uk/kickstartbritain

Tom O’Toole is a member of LFG Reading.

What you won’t see is a road that is fit to connect two major cities in a modern, G7 economy. It’s narrow, twisty, and sections of it spend much of the year trying to subside down the nearest hillside.

Unfortunately, thanks to decades of chronic underinvestment, this is indeed the most direct road route between Manchester and Sheffield. At best, motorists face a drive of over 90 minutes to cover just 38 miles. At worst, it’s completely shut. These are the only two top-ten cities in the UK without a direct motorway or dual-carriageway connection, the biggest gap in the nation’s transport network.

Fixing this paucity of cross-Pennine connections should be a national priority. It would allow Manchester and Sheffield to operate as one economy that can access a wider pool of labour across the North, unlocking billions of pounds of growth in a region that desperately needs it

Building a big new road straight over vital natural habitats in a National Park is obviously a non-starter. But what about a road going under it? In 2015, the Department for Transport looked at the idea of a tunnel, but baulked at the price – an estimated £10bn.

That’s where Future Works, a infrastructure development startup, comes in. In July, we launched TransPennine Connect, a project to build a 14km tunnel under the Peak District for up to 90% less than the DfT estimate, restore natural habitats across the National Park, and reopen a disused cross-Pennine railway into the bargain.

How can we reduce the construction cost by such a massive margin? The DfT analysis, which I participated in as a civil servant, had a fatal flaw. It assumed the use of expensive tunnel boring machines. This is a suitable approach for the soil and soft rock found across much of the UK, especially in the south. But, the Pennines sits on hard rock, which means we can use the much cheaper ‘dig and blast’ technique – essentially a series of small, controlled explosions to clear away the rock along the proposed route. The natural strength of the rock then holds up the roof, aided by steel bolts and sprayed concrete.

This isn’t new or untried technology. It has been used to build more than a thousand tunnels in Norway, some of them much longer than our proposed route. And, it has done it for an equivalent cost of tens or hundreds of millions, rather than billions of pounds.

This is a link worth building, and worth using: a lorry driving this route rather than the M62 would save 20 litres of diesel or more. That saving protects the environment and provides the bedrock for project funding.

It also provides the opportunity to do more than just speed up traffic. If we can remove the vehicles from the surface, we can close non-essential sections of the road and return the land to nature.

And the unusual circumstances open up an opportunity that has been under discussion for 40 years – restoring the Woodhead railway line into use. In 1954 this was the most modern railway in the north, but by the 1980s it was shut. We think that the construction of a road tunnel tips the balance in favour of restoration, and have incorporated it into our project.

This is truly a win-win for the region – faster, more reliable journeys by road and rail for ordinary people, and enhanced natural habitats in some of Britain’s most beautiful places. And, we reckon that with a fair political wind it can be delivered relatively quickly, unlike other ill-fated UK infrastructure projects that we could mention.

We are in the process of speaking to local people, politicians, and potential investors for this project. The reaction so far has been extremely positive. There is an awareness that this route is desperately needed, and that there’s no time like the present to get started. Our priority now is to build support across these key stakeholder groups, and work with local communities to make sure we deliver the best possible plan for the people who will use it the most.

It’s an ambitious project, not because of the technology used, but because it offers a route to a very different Britain. One where modern infrastructure isn’t vastly expensive or non-existent. One where the needs of local communities are heard and answered, and where growth and nature can win together. One that considers new ways of delivering opportunity and growth to every region, and breaks us out of our current stagnation.

We have many LFG members to thank for their individual contributions to the work so far. If you’d like to be part of that, please get in touch – we’ve got a mountain to move.

Michael Dnes is the co-founder of Future Works, and Head of Transport Policy at Stonehaven and Public First. Previously, he worked for almost 20 years at the Department for Transport.

England pioneered architecture: Christopher Wren, Robert Adam and John Nash moulded our beautiful towns and cities. It is something we are rightly proud of and that tourists travel from across the world to visit.

Whilst we may watch the patronising Kevin McCloud on Grand Designs marvelling over another grey box in the middle of nowhere, what the people really want is a return to a Georgian heyday. Indeed, three quarters of the public name Georgian as their favourite housing style, whilst two thirds believe that modern designs suffer from a “lack of character”.

These Georgian properties have some key hallmarks that make them so distinctive: they are five to six stories tall, and include sash windows, iron railings, steps up to the house, and a stucco-frontage. It is this stylisation that is so distinctive, so reliable and thus so replicable. As the architectural historian David Lewis said, they can be “mass produced… to an extent that is true of few other styles”.

So, if this is such a simple, popular solution, why are we not using it?

The answer, like many such cases, is over-regulation.

Take sash windows, for example, the prime victim. Whilst they may encourage natural ventilation throughout the home, and offer bountiful light (supplementing anyone’s vitamin D intake), they are deemed energy inefficient. New property developers are encouraged to build homes that can keep as much heat in as possible, thus resigning its inhabitants to tiny windows to minimise escapage, and as a result often leading to black mould growing.

However, even earlier, a 1990s moral panic sought to ring the first death knoll for the sash window. The fear of children fatally defenestrating themselves led to the John Major-led government mandating that window openings on the first floor and above must be higher than 1.1 meter from the floor. Yet, such a policy, combined with energy efficiency and minimisation of building costs, results in lower ceiling heights and thus smaller windows too. This panic is disproportionate: 2 children died per year between April 2019 to May 2025 from falling out of windows (and of course there is likely to be nuance as to how and why such incidents happened). In short, our British tendency to risk-aversion has stymied us to dark, ugly houses.

What about the iconic steps up to the house, that create such a distinction from public and private space? Well, step-free access is required, so that’s a no go.

The very shape therefore of our houses is again constrained by regulation. Georgian townhouses are tall and thin. Yet, the minimum widths for stairs and corridors, combined with energy efficiency and cost saving tactics, have widened our new housing estates, leaving them to squat toad-like across the landscape.

Thus, when NIMBYs complain about the amount of land being taken up by such developments, surely the simple solution is to build denser: building up, as the Georgians did well. In fact, it is largely due to a lack of building densely in our major cities that we have urban sprawl and ‘infringements on the countryside’. London has just half the housing density of Paris – hardly ideal when we have such great demand to live in our capital, and resentment from those who opt for the long commute as a result. This densification would help to lower prices, maximise land, and protect our much beloved countryside.

Subscribe now

Yet another complaint often levelled against YIMBYs is that new properties are often not in keeping with their local area. On this, the NIMBYs may very well be correct, but only as a result of deliberate regulatory choices.

Indeed, the Government already publishes a ‘National Character Areas’ guide, which divides England into 159 distinct areas – each defined by a unique combination of landscape, biodiversity, geodiversity, history, cultural, and economic activity. Most interestingly though, is that it also includes the traditional building materials used in different areas – the key to making a building ‘fit in’ to its neighbours.

Take the north Norfolk coast: it has a distinctive brick and flint style, with pantiled roofs, whilst in Manchester you’re more likely to see a red brick, or in Cambridge the gault clay bricks used produce a distinctive yellow-grey colour. If we utilised this information, which we already have, and produced pre-approved housing styles for respective regions, we could allow compliant housing developers to build these houses without the need for local planning acceptance, which often causes massive delays.

Poundbury is often heralded as the ideal, the aspiration to aim towards, adopting this Georgian style, and gentle density, that people want to live in, Yet, that development too had to oblige with the same painful planning regulations as the rest of the country. As such they utilised loopholes, like having steps up to the front door but a side step-free access, or sash windows that only opened from the top not the bottom, to prevent the imaginary children falling out.

However, of course, these exceptions were incredibly expensive and are not replicable on a mass scale. Therefore, what we need is greater deregulation of these archaic planning laws: if someone wants bigger windows and higher ceilings, then they must accept that their energy bill may increase. Likewise, if a parent of a young child is genuinely concerned about them falling out of a window that is less than 1.1m from the ground, then they can opt for another house.

Why have we created a housing system that endeavours to cater to all and mitigate risk to the detriment of actual building taking place? Surely we are better off having more homes and more choice than a system in which there are so few homes it is too expensive to buy a property until you are in your late 30s. We want to see a nation in which homeownership is not a distant fantasy but a near aim, a return to being a “nation of homeowners”.

We should be building homes for the future, not for the current political weather. The solutions already exist; we have no excuse for not getting on with it.

Harriet Dolby is a Parliamentary Researcher in the House of Lords, former President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, and an undergraduate student at the University of Oxford

Looking for Growth do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this article. Opinions are the authors only.

Yet here I am talking about a railway that Beeching did not recommend be closed, but was closed anyway. In his report, Beeching recommended that passenger services operating between Oxford, Bletchley, and Cambridge over what has since come to be known as the Varsity Line instead be modified. The track would still remain in place, but services that had just been converted into diesel trains be retained with some small changes in service patterns. Clearly the Doctor recognised the value in connecting the UK’s historic universities directly by rail.

Too bad British Railways did not see it the same way.

The ink had hardly dried on Beeching’s Report when British Railways put the line forward for closure in December 1963, citing the fact that the service barely covered half of its costs from ticket sales. Three years later, just before football came home, the closure was confirmed. Local freight facilities immediately closed. A branch line to Buckingham was closed by the end of that year. The next year, the line between Bicester and Oxford was closed to passenger trains, and the section west of Bletchley made freight only. In 1968, the line between Bedford and Cambridge was closed, and ultimately pulled up.

A determined local campaign saved the passenger service running between Bedford and Bletchley, which has subsequently survived other closure attempts, and still runs to this day. This campaign, fought by local people who did not want to lose their local train service, probably saved the railway completely. And that is important because it is now at the centre of what could potentially be one of the most transformative infrastructure projects in the UK.

If only we would actually build it.

The East-West Rail project ultimately wants to reinstate a railway that even Dr Beeching did not think was worth losing. At its core is upgrading and building new infrastructure to run passenger train services between Oxford and Cambridge, serving places such as Milton Keynes and Bedford along the way. But the campaign to reopen it was started by somewhere not even close to the line.

In 1995, Ipswich Borough Council was concerned about the state of passenger trains operating east to west in East Anglia. Along with partner local councils, it established the East-West Rail Consortium who, in the early 2000s, started work on the business case in earnest. Over the years, more business case work was undertaken by the consortium to build the case for reopening the line. Finally, in 2011, the Department for Transport decided to adopt the scheme as a priority, and a year later confirmed the scheme as part of its strategy for rail.

Now, in a normal country, you would expect the line to be open by now, and the whole Oxford to Cambridge Arc be benefitting from the uplift in growth you would expect to see, right?

Right?

Let’s start with the good news. The first section between Oxford and Bicester was re-opened in 2016 as part of Chiltern Railways’ Evergreen Project. A regular passenger service runs along the line between Oxford and London Marylebone via the Chiltern Mainline, and at the time Chiltern Railways agreed to make “passive provision” for the rest of East-West Rail to be delivered. The service has been very well used, particularly to and from Bicester. In fact, in a unique quirk, Bicester Village is the only station in the country where announcements are made in both English and Mandarin, such is its popularity with Chinese tourists who use it to get to Bicester Village shopping centre.

After a long time in planning, the Transport and Works Act Order was granted for the Western Section – between Bletchley and Bicester – and work started in 2020. The track work was completed in 2024, and since that point, freight trains have been able to run over the route.

That’s where the good news ends. Despite being in planning for nearly thirty years, and being government policy for fifteen, the region still awaits trains.

Starting where we left off on the Western Section, despite the track being laid and even a new station at Winslow completing construction, passenger trains are still not running. The cause of this problem is frustratingly simple: Driver Only Operation. Rail unions are locked in a disagreement with the planned operator, Chiltern Railways, over the insistence that the new service be operated with only a driver on board, and without a conductor. While it is tempting to think of this as unions delaying a scheme by defending their members, they may have a point here. Many groups, such as women, feel safer using public transport with a visible official presence on board – something that a conductor provides.

Local sources say that, after over a year of impasse, agreement has been reached between the train operator and the unions on this matter, and all are working to start services between Milton Keynes and Oxford via Bletchley in December 2026. As of the time of writing, this has not been officially confirmed by the Government.

If the Western section has been a frustrating story to read, it is nothing compared to the Central Section. Designed to bridge the gap left by the removal of the railway between Bedford and Cambridge, it has become a poster child of process over outcome.

The East West Rail Company, created by the Department for Transport to deliver the plans for East West Rail developed by them, Network Rail, and the East West Rail Alliance (the current name of the East West Rail Consortium), has spent nine years and countless millions developing the designs and the case for the Central Section.

The current proposals will see fifty miles of new track constructed. This is alongside a number of station improvements and some new stations.

• Bedford. An upgraded station, including a new western entrance, intended as a new gateway providing connectivity in all directions. Once complete, up to four trains per hour would serve Bedford from the west.

• Cambridge. The plans show a new Clifton Road entrance on the eastern side with associated station and driver facilities and an Active Travel Hub, along with an extension of platforms 7 and 8, a new Platform 9, modifications and extension to the station footbridge, a new southern footbridge, and two new tracks to the west of the existing West Anglia Main Line. A realigned A1134 Long Road overbridge is also proposed.

• Tempsford (new station). To serve the planned new town, and provide an interchange with the East Coast Mainline just to the north of Sandy in Bedfordshire.

• Cambourne (new station). To serve the villages to the West of Cambridge.

• Cambridge East (new station). To serve new development to the East of Cambridge and provide a terminus station.

The proposals will also speed up journey times on the Marston Vale Line by rationalising the existing ten intermediate stations between Bedford and Bletchley to just four – at Woburn Sands, Ridgmont, Lidlington, and Stewartby. More on the latter later.

To date, there have been four consultations on the Central Section. A consultation on Route Options in 2019, the consultation on Making Meaningful Connections in 2021, a non-statutory consultation on updated proposals in 2024, and a consultation in 2026 described by the Company as the final engagement before it submits its plans for a Development Consent Order. That in itself has a statutory consultation process also.

What exactly are we waiting for?

The frustrating thing is that there are clear and obvious benefits to East West Rail becoming a reality. Benefits so obvious that it taking so long is both comical and downright negligent.

Today, travelling between Oxford and Cambridge by public transport is a joke. Two of the most famous university cities in the world, separated by around eighty miles, are barely connected by public transport. Catching the train between them involves going via London on a trip that is nearly two and three-quarter hours long. If you don’t fancy changing in London, you can always travel by bus, changing at Bedford Bus Station, which is a delightful experience. That is at least two and a half hours. Meanwhile, if the drive sounds tempting, that is two hours on a good day, which is unlikely as the A421 through Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire is the most direct route, and is a heavily-trafficked single carriageway road.

With East West Rail, that journey time drops to ninety minutes. Direct. It’s not only Oxford and Cambridge that benefit either, as Milton Keynes and Bedford will also see rapidly sped up journeys and all the towns along the way. East West Rail will be a 100mph long distance version of the Elizabeth Line, linking all the towns across the arc.

This means a researcher in Cambridge can collaborate with a lab in Oxford without losing a day to the journey. Milton Keynes and Bedford are then positioned at the heart of this growth corridor, rather than just being bypassed. The railway brings several hundred thousand more people within commuting distance of both Oxford and Cambridge. Places like Bicester, Winslow, Tempsford and Cambourne go from being off the map to being on it.

Then there is the economics. The Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor already generates around £143 billion in gross value added every year, across a population of roughly three and a half million people. Nearly a third of the jobs in the area are in knowledge-intensive sectors, close to triple the British average. It is one of the most productive parts of the United Kingdom, and one of the few places in Europe that can credibly be spoken of in the same breath as Silicon Valley. This is precisely why successive governments have reached for that comparison, and East West Rail will be a catalytic new cluster for dynamic economic growth.

The problem is that the region’s transport has never matched its ambition, and East West Rail is the piece designed to fix that. By 2050, the Government’s own figures expect the railway to boost the regional economy by around £6.7 billion every single year. It is expected to support up to 100,000 new homes, connecting new and established communities to jobs, training, and education.

This is not just jobs or houses either. To the south of Bedford, the new Universal Studios is being constructed just to the South East of the existing Marston Vale Line. Currently under construction, it is forecast to general millions of visitor trips to the region each year. And the station at Stewartby – repositioned just to take advantage of this new theme park – is critical to its plans to prevent gridlock on the region’s roads.

Then you get onto the freight. Freight trains are already using the section of line that has been opened, and when the Central Section comes online, its role in moving freight will be supercharged. It could replace millions of lorry journeys a year and cut carbon emissions from moving goods by up to three quarters. That means fewer lorries on the A14, A421, and A428.

The strange spectacle of fighting your own good fortune

Yet despite all of these benefits, as sure as night follows day, there are a substantial number of people across the line of the route who have demanded this once-in-a-generation opportunity not be delayed, but be stopped in its tracks. The present be preserved at the expense of the future.

Let’s start in Bedford. A place that will have a substantially improved station and will see four trains an hour heading off to the likes of Cambridge and Oxford. Yet local opposition is forming to stop this. BFARe, which stands for Bedford For a Re-consultation, argues that the 2019 consultation was flawed and that the chosen route through the heart of the town is the wrong one. Alongside it, the Protect Poets campaign says it speaks for residents of Bedford’s Poets area, where a number of homes stand in the path of the alignment and face demolition.

Their lobbying is now holding sway. Bedford Borough Council, who for a long time unequivocally backed East West Rail, has now started to harden its position. At an extraordinary full council meeting on 27 May 2026, members unanimously approved a more robust response to the 2026 consultation. The environment portfolio holder, Cllr Nicola Gribble (Independent), characterised the proposals as fundamentally flawed and ill-fitting, memorably calling the scheme a square peg in a round hole and questioning how Bedford would function during construction. The Conservative group leader, Cllr Graeme Coombes, pushed successfully to make the response more robust, stating his group could not support anything requiring home demolitions and arguing the Council should consider withdrawing support altogether if concerns over demolitions, noise, and disruption were not addressed.

Travel to the Cambridge end and the pattern repeats. In South Cambridgeshire, the group Cambridge Approaches has become the standard-bearer for opposition to the southern approach into the city. They argue it is poor value for money, and warn that the railway is a Trojan Horse for yet more housebuilding in the area.

These two campaigns have delivered a joint Declaration of Opposition to the rail minister in person, signed by members of parliament, parliamentary candidates, the chairman of Cambridgeshire County Council, the mayor of Bedford, and councillors at county, district, borough and parish level. They have run petitions, and dominated the local debate on the project.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, obviously. We live in a democratic society, and people should have the right to have their objections heard. But scrutiny and obstruction are not the same thing.

While declarations, petitions, and protest are loud, support is often silent. The four regional chambers of commerce along the route (Thames Valley, Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire) support the scheme. So do many local MPs such as Chris Carter (Milton Keynes North) and Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge). It has been backed by six Prime Ministers. While local councils may argue about minor changes to the scheme, all are broadly supportive of it. The Universities support it, as do local sustainable travel groups. Finally, the East West Rail Company itself estimates that around seventy percent of local residents along the route support the scheme.

Which makes the fact that the project is still being delayed, and that the opposition is so vocal, all the more frustrating. If it’s this hard to build something that commands such support, imagine what it would be like if it was universally opposed.

NO MORE NONSENSE. JUST BUILD IT.

The Looking for Growth Milton Keynes, Cambridge, and Oxford Chapters are working together to ensure that support for the scheme remains in the public consciousness. Our message is simple: this scheme needs to be approved, constructed, and opened without delay.

Too much work has been undertaken for too long to delay any further. We do not say this because the concerns of residents do not matter. We say it because this scheme has been subject to extensive democratic debate and has overwhelming support.

The Development Consent Order process is built to weigh environmental impact, to require mitigation, to compensate those whose property is affected fairly and properly, and to test the scheme in public. All remaining matters affecting the delivery of the railway are matters of delivery, and not reasons to abandon it. Every one of them can be managed by a project that is allowed to get on with it. None of them is improved by another decade of paralysis, or yet another consultation.

Subscribe now

Any further delay has a cost to it: in economic growth forgone; in cars on congested roads whose drivers could take the train instead; in homes not built or jobs not created; in lorries on the road when that cargo could be being hauled behind a freight locomotive; and in the fact that two of the finest knowledge centres in the world do not have a direct train service between them.

The frustrating thing is that, in a way, this scheme is not an improvement. It is fixing a historical mistake. A railway that Dr Beeching himself, a man whose name is synonymous with closing railways, explicitly did not think should be lost, was closed anyway, in an act of short-term accountancy that the region has regretted ever since. It took British Railways three years to decide to shut it. It has now taken the best part of thirty to decide to open it again. And still we wait.

It’s time to end the delays and build the railway. The case has been made, the money has been committed, the benefits are enormous, and the mistake it corrects is nearly sixty years old. It cannot be held up any longer. Our future prosperity depends on the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – AI, computer tech, and biotechnology – in which places like Oxford and Cambridge excel. We cannot afford to lose out.

We spent three years deciding to close this line and thirty deciding whether to reopen it. If he were alive today, Dr Beeching would probably be confused about it all. It is time to finish the job.

James Gleave is the Founder and Director of Mobility Lab UK. He writes regularly on his Substack, Mobility Matters.

Yet another miserable chapter has now been added to Leeds’ attempts to get a tram. A report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) was leaked and appears to show how tragically short the memory of central Government is. If accepted, it will constitute a serious delay for the prospects of a ‘West Yorkshire Mass Transit’ system (WYMT) that the newest plans detail.

Disappointing as it was for West Yorkshire to be denied a solution this side of 2030, NISTA’s secret report suggests that were the Government to follow its recommendations, they might not build a tram at all. Whilst NISTA accepted that “it may well be the case that trams are the best modal choice”, it was by no means convinced that they were. Calling for a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, it noted that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) would have a significantly lower cost than a tram, whilst delivering a much better Benefit-to-Cost Ratio (BCR).

With this, one déjà vu seemed nested within another, with worrying parallels from the past. Just like with NISTA, a BCR comparison between a tram (the Supertram) and its alternatives had in fact previously been conducted, back in 2007, finding in favour of the BRT. However, when the time came to build, the BRT system was not granted planning consent (which even the Supertram achieved!) – the assumptions which showed the BRT so apparently favourable did not pass the test of reality according to the Planning Inspectorate.

The High Quality Bus Study

In 2004, the local authorities responsible for transport in Leeds were advised to explore alternatives to the Supertram scheme (a proposal for a tram network in Leeds with three lines) which had faced great cost overruns. One year later, the ‘Study of High Quality Buses in Leeds’ sought to find “whether a high quality bus initiative can deliver a viable alternative to light rail” and compared a BRT system against the original Supertram along a portion of the latter’s original route, under varying sets of assumptions.

It will be unhappily familiar to read that the BRT was compared to the Supertram and obtained a much better BCR, of 3.6 to 2.4. This, however, hinged on a critical set of assumptions, to the combined effect that a BRT system would be functionally indistinguishable from that of a tram. Firstly, that a BRT “[was] assessed economically as a new travel choice, in the same way that a tram is”, being seen by its users as sufficiently distinct to be meaningfully differentiated from a conventional bus. Or, simply put, it was seen by paying customers as more tram than bus. Secondly, given that each BRT bus was acknowledged to have around half of the capacity as a tram, it was assumed that it would be straightforward to run twice as many buses as the tram alternative, so that total system capacities were equivalent.

With these assumptions, the BRT achieved 93% of the benefits of a tram, but with significantly lower costs. However, the study acknowledged that there was uncertainty in assuming that the BRT was ‘more tram than bus’ in users’ eyes, since there had been no evidence or experience of a comparable BRT scheme in Britain. If perceived by users as essentially another kind of bus, it may still have been cheaper than a tram, but it would only have achieved around half of the benefits. Its BCR, therefore, would not have been much greater. Only the tram would have been able to deliver its scale of benefits. They actually quantified these benefits – half a billion pounds in additional ‘present value benefits’. Eventually, the test of the underlying assumptions would be made in 2016, and it revealed clear results.

The NGT Public Inquiry and the Planning Inspectorate’s Report

The High Quality Bus Study produced the successor scheme to the Supertram – the New Generation Transport (NGT) trolleybus proposal. It proposed a route along a truncated portion of the original Supertram network, following a north-south route from Holt Park via Headingley to Stourton. When the time came to act and build, however, the critical assumption of tram-parity discussed above failed. As part of a public inquiry, the Planning Inspectorate roundly rejected it, recommending the consent be refused for the entire scheme, and the Department for Transport agreed, finally killing off the scheme completely.

There were many criticisms. Its route over the same corridor would be less segregated and need a greater land take than the Supertram’s equivalent. Its interior, configured for a high intensity use with relatively few seats compared to the amount of standing room, might be a “deterrent to use and safety risk”. Journey times were calculated to be too optimistic, and worst, at the end of it, it was not found to be considered meaningfully different from regular buses.

From a customer perspective, a Stated Preference (SP) study referred to in the Inquiry found not only that trolleybuses were not found to be particularly preferred to regular buses, but that the specific type of bus to be used by NGT, a single-decker segmented articulated bus (a ‘bendy’ bus), was less preferred to modern double decker buses. Even some of the supporters of the NGT scheme said that a tram would have been preferable.

Arguably more critical, however, was that the proposed capacity revealed that the assumption of parity with the tram on this front did not hold. Even if the BRT were received by customers as a similar proposition to a tram, the system as a whole still would not have been able to have the same impact as a tram, because it would only have had half the capacity at most. BRT buses, with approximately half the capacity of a tram, would need to run buses twice as frequently to provide the same overall capacity. The NGT scheme, however, proposed to run ten buses per hour, or a bus every six minutes. Whilst a positive intervention, it would only have been equivalent in capacity to five trams an hour, or a tram every twelve minutes - hardly earth-shaking when Manchester tram services provide a combined frequency of ten trams per hour, but with much more capacity than what a BRT system could offer.

And whilst real BRT perhaps has never been tried, BRT ‘Lite’ might well be said to have been, over the very Leeds-Bradford route in question. The ‘Hyperlink’ scheme, whereby BRT-style articulated buses were deployed for the 72 bus route between Leeds and Bradford, operated buses at lower frequencies than proposed by NGT, with eight buses per hour. Eventually, its buses were retired and the route is now run by double-decker buses again, at half the frequency, hardly impacting connectivity in the region at all. It remains to be seen how a bus-based system could be devised in an already well built-up West Yorkshire which would probably need to deliver fifteen to twenty buses per hour to match a realistic tram timetable.

NGT’s BRT system could not deliver adequate benefits, considering its costs. There was “little evidence to show how the objective of maximising the Leeds economy would have been achieved” and therefore “there [was] not a compelling case in the public interest for making it, as any public benefit from public transport improvements and economic development would fail to outweigh the harm.” The Secretary of State for Transport demurred, refusing the NGT in its entirety.

WYMT vs. Supertram – a much bigger scope for trams

In retrospect it can be argued that had WYMT, rather than the Supertram, been used as the basis of comparison in the High Quality Bus Study, with the far broader WYMT in mind rather than the solely Leeds-focused Supertram, then tram-based system could have performed better against any BRT.

And it’s possible to improve plans for the tram still further.

Greater capacity can be achieved simply by using longer trams. Manchester does this by coupling its trams together, and other cities in Europe are starting to run ever longer continuous formations. The BCR comparison assumed trams were twice as spacious as BRT buses, but with longer trams, of around 50 metres in length, this could be increased to three-to-one, and the BCR recalculations very likely to be in the tram’s favour. With this sort of ratio, a tram running every fifteen minutes would need twelve BRT buses to provide the same passenger capacity; increasing this to every 6 minutes, thirty BRT buses per hour would be needed - an unfathomable proposition. Manchester’s Metrolink has also shown it is possible to run these longer formations on roads shared with other traffic, with the routes to Ashton and Eccles.

Higher speed can also be achieved using rail infrastructure, or land around rail infrastructure, to provide a more intensive service along an existing or disused corridor at relatively low marginal cost, whilst also being able to run at street-level within city centres. This has been put into practice not only in Manchester along former railway lines, but with Sheffield’s Supertram of its own, sharing track with heavy rail trains to run to and from Rotherham.

The WYMT scheme presents possibilities of using tram-trains to serve Leeds Bradford Airport via Horsforth, a sorely desired route, and also to the ‘Five Towns.’ Indeed some of the proposed routes to Bradford would use rail infrastructure corridors, an option outright impossible for a BRT, and maximising ‘tram-train’ possibilities could deliver unprecedented connectivity along this corridor, with a frequent, reliable, and fast service. High enough speeds along the Leeds-Bradford corridor could have strategic economic effects, in potentially allowing any western Bradford tram routes to be connected to this core corridor and significantly expand the one-hour Leeds economic catchment area, or ‘isochrone’.

Only Trams Will Do

This all seems awfully familiar: if this leaked NISTA report says what we think it does, then history is repeating itself in a comically tragic way. Leeds has been offered and then denied a tram before. It seems Whitehall is engaging in the same cost-benefit debacle as before, and once again, Leeds is going to end up with nothing.

Moreover, the scope is much bigger this time. It is not just the tram for Leeds at stake, but a ‘mass transit’ system for the entire of West Yorkshire. If BRT could not cater to a smaller portion of a three-leg tram network, it is laughable to suggest it might meet the needs of a county-wide mass rapid transit system. On the other hand, a more capacious, and potentially much faster, tram is perfectly suited to meet the transport challenge in this area, including future scalability.

With West Yorkshire’s new integrated ‘Weaver’ network incoming, bringing public transport all together under one name, it has to be said that all modes of transport ultimately must be cohesive. This includes both heavy rail, which needs significant work unlocking capacity at the Leeds City Station bottleneck, and indeed the traditional bus system which will always have a significant role. It is critically important that we break out of thinking in silos and create an effective multi-modal mix to deliver the greatest economic benefit.

Within this mix, the specific role of the tram can be identified as a sweet spot of medium distance, high intensity and higher quality corridors, where some segregated running is possible. This can be achieved through either central reservations as with sections of the Supertram, or ‘tram-train’ style solutions as seen in Sheffield. A greater magnitude of benefit is achieved than a bus-based solution could practicably achieve, yet the very high costs of a fully ‘grade-separated’ heavy rail or light rail solution can be avoided. Benefitting West Yorkshire rather than just Leeds in isolation demands something which can deliver benefits on a great enough scale.

With respect to taking a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, those who advocate for the tram by default, possibly with the view that “the term WYMT is synonymous with tram”, may do so because they tacitly grasp its inherent features, even when not explicitly articulated or advanced from first principles. Seen as a ‘street-train’, because the tram literally runs on rails, it solves the problems of steering a very long coupled set of vehicles through often tight city streets, and also of steering them at higher speeds. This enables the stability, ride quality, and interior spaciousness that leads people to subjectively judge them as being of better quality than buses, and perhaps to conclude after all that “anything less than” a tram would be “second-class”.

A generation has passed since the Supertram Act of 1993 and a generation of growth has happened, both in population and in the built environment. But there has been no growth in transport infrastructure to match this. We cannot allow this to happen again. A generation of delays has already seen costs spiralling; Leeds and West Yorkshire should not have to wait any longer.

Edmond Daramy-Williams is the Chair of LFG Leeds.

Mainstream ideas and parties have failed the British people. Their indecision and incompetence has led to the lives of millions getting worse every day.

Growth is illegal. Living standards are falling. Wages are stagnant. Large swathes of crime have become legal.

We have a plan to kickstart economic growth.

Today we’re releasing our first three policies:

1. Back British Creators. The Government is attempting to force social media companies to “privilege” content from big established companies like the BBC over those produced by independent content creators. Effective censorship like this stops jobs, money, and personal growth. To support new, growing creators, the Government must immediately abandon all attempts.

2. Quangos aren’t forever. Unelected bodies are blocking growth. They must have an expiry date and be renewed every 5 years by the Government. Those that deliver government policy should be folded back into the department; independent regulators would need reconfirmation by parliament; and other state bodies like the NAO could stay independent in perpetuity. To achieve this, the Government must pass primary legislation that explicitly places an expiry date on arms-length bodies in the UK.

3. Axe the tax trap on working parents. Parents are being punished simply for having children. A tax trap between £60,000-£80,000 means parents are facing an effective tax rate of over 50%. To give parents their pay rise back, the Government must change the High Income Child Benefit Charge so that 1% is clawed back every £400, not £200. This should be done through a Finance Bill amendment to Chapter 8 of Part 10 of Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003.

Every week for the next three months, we’ll be releasing policies that can deliver the economic growth the British people so desperately needs.

To support our plan, go to lookingforgrowth.uk/kickstartbritain

Subscribe now

In other words, if you’re ‘looking for growth’ as a startup, defence is not a great place to start. There is ultimately one customer, which is both indecisive and extremely demanding, both willing to commit large investments without knowing where it’ll find the money, and both willing to simultaneously add ‘gold plate’ requirements to what it’s buying while remaining obsessed with ‘value for money’. I’m not sure where I heard it first, but our procurement system can sometimes be best described as ‘doing a bad job of buying broken equipment that we don’t really need’. The list of controversies is long; the ongoing Ajax calamity, Type 45 destroyers struggling in warm waters, and the Watchkeeper drone programme, which will take 15 years and £2 billion to become fully operational, only to become functionally obsolete within 2 years and officially so within 5.

A lot of blame often gets left with ‘primes’ – large companies that directly own a contract with the MOD. However, more than anything, they are just optimised for dealing with long, uncertain procurement cycles, with a focus on maintaining traditional capabilities over newer technologies. Combined with a political obsession with SMEs, this has incentivised an ecosystem dominated by these large players, with specialist companies fitting into their supply chain as mandated. There is little room for disruption, rapid iteration, and deployment of new technologies. As a result, young companies are few and far between, leaving us unprepared to deal with the rapid proliferation of ‘software defined, hardware enabled’ technologies, even if the urgency itself is acknowledged. In Watchkeeper’s case, this meant that the ecosystem was unable to keep pace with advances in drone technology – expensive to build, operate and iterate on where the advantage is now in quick manufacturing, ease of use and modularity.

So what is to be done? Where LFG has seen success in pushing government to behave better, its greater strength is in building a network, and channeling talented, highly motivated people towards multi-decadal national challenges. New infrastructure, abundant energy, reviving British manufacturing, and cutting edge defence capabilities won’t just require better government, but also a new generation of companies willing to stick out a harsh and unpredictable business environment in the national interest. This is how I met my co-founders at Blackmoor Defence, born out of a desire to show that it is possible to start and succeed as a young company despite an inhospitable ecosystem.

Despite this, we’ve found in our first 6 months that potential competitors, Civil Servants, MOD and Armed Forces personnel have been overwhelmingly supportive. Introductions have been made, feedback on our deck and product development, and advice more generally has all been offered. Most seem genuinely excited, and maybe even slightly surprised that there are new people, with new ideas about new problems getting involved. This also means that most events even if billed for early stage companies actually end up with more SMEs present than young companies, simply because they are so rare. I am particularly grateful for the LFG x Valarian event earlier this year, which was an exception to this experience!

Universities have also been incredibly helpful, offering partnership opportunities, access to lab testing environments, demo facilities, and expertise. Sometimes, however, this can be held up by the politicisation of defence and national security on many university campuses, with projects stalled or cancelled as part of managing a difficult relationship with student unions.

Unfortunately, for all the good will, great people are held back by systemic dysfunction; opportunities will go cold due to shifting priorities, clearances will put up barriers, and people will be rotated out of their positions too fast to make any structural changes. Too often, potential partner organisations will keep a company in limbo because they don’t know what kind of commitments can be made. Having a potential customer or government partner tell us our idea is bad might hurt, but it would at least give a signal to start building something else.

Our most successful approach for getting around this has been to build solutions that we think are effective and exciting. Perhaps for all the complexity of defence as dominated by large suppliers and a monopsony buyer, the market approach of making something that solves a visible problem still works best. ‘Sea Sentinel’, our maritime asset monitoring software suite, originally came into existence because my co-founder wanted to learn about shadow fleet activity from open source intelligence.

Although starting a company is almost always fraught with uncertainty, the first 6 months of Blackmoor have made one thing very clear: defence needs more startups and young companies. There are huge gaps in the ecosystem’s ability to keep up in AI+ML, in autonomy and now counter-autonomy, in sensors, and in coordinating across all these areas and many more. There might not be VCs chomping at the bit to throw money at you, there might be a regulatory hinterland to march through, and even then, your primary customer might not even know what they want to buy from you, but if you’ve got ideas about how to solve problems for defence, I guarantee you that you’ll find people willing to do everything they can to help you succeed.

Notes:

I’ve been deliberately vague about what we’re working on at Blackmoor. If you’re interested, send me an email at john@blackmoordefence.com!

The relationship between the defence industry and growth is back in the spotlight. The Government’s predominant view is that defence should be treated as a ‘growth engine’, that investing in defence leads to good jobs all over the country, or what Andy Burnham has been calling ‘good growth’. The defence industry can certainly support this, and hope that Blackmoor can play its part in Leicester (where we’re currently based), but government investment in defence should have only one priority: increasing our ability to protect our country. Otherwise, there is a risk of creeping ‘everythingism’ at the expense of the efficacy of our Armed Forces.

John Macdonald is the co-founder of Blackmoor Defence, a new defence tech startup.

Looking for Growth do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this article. Opinions are the authors only.

The honest answer is that the record is mixed at best. The transformative projects meant to reshape the national economy have been slow, expensive, and frequently truncated. The planning system has added years to delivery timelines, often for projects that were eventually approved or abandoned anyway. And where projects have been built, the economic benefits forecast in the business case have not reliably materialised. If transport policy is genuinely going to drive growth, it needs a clearer view of what works – and what doesn't.

We struggle to deliver the transformative projects that growth depends on

The UK’s inability to deliver major projects is well documented, and one transport project is the poster child of this: High Speed 2 (HS2). Conceived in 2009, HS2 was sold not just as a solution to capacity constraints on an at-capacity West Coast Mainline between London and Birmingham, but as the spine of a more productive national economy. At its maximum extent, it would connect many of the country’s largest cities and free up capacity on the wider rail network. The economic case rested heavily on the full Y-shaped network reaching beyond Birmingham to Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, and Leeds, because that configuration was what maximised the agglomeration benefits of bringing major cities closer together. The economic case of HS2 published in 2012 estimated economic benefits of £28.1 billion on the section between London and Birmingham, and £71 billion across the entire network

What happened instead is a case study in how not to deliver. Costs rose from an original estimate of around £32 billion to a range that the government now puts at roughly £88 billion to £103 billion. The eastern leg from Birmingham to Leeds was cancelled in the 2021 Integrated Rail Plan. The Birmingham to Manchester leg was cancelled in 2023, though Prime Minister in waiting Andy Burnham is seeking to revive this section. The first trains between London and Birmingham are now not expected until the late 2030s, with the full remaining scheme stretching into the 2040s. The benefit-cost ratio tells the same story in miniature. It was estimated at £2.40 of benefit per pound spent in early appraisals, was revised down to £1.80 by 2013, and the 2020 full business case put the overall programme at £1.50, with phase one alone graded as low value for money at £1.20.

Every delay makes the position worse for growth. As the Railway Industry Association and others have repeatedly noted, each element of cost rises every time the project slips, and constant uncertainty in government breeds uncertainty in industry, who in turn cannot plan their own investments. The benefits are pushed further into the future, while the costs keep climbing in the present.

The result is that a scheme originally justified as a growth project has shifted from a growth-first vision to a value-for-money rescue exercise. The cancelled northern legs to Manchester and Leeds were precisely the parts of the network expected to do the most to rebalance the economy, and their loss removed the strongest part of the original case.

HS2 is the obvious example, but it is not an isolated one. Leeds offers an even longer-running illustration. It remains the largest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system, and not for want of trying. A Supertram network was planned through the 1990s, approved in 2001, and then cancelled in 2005 by the then transport secretary after around £40 million had already been spent and the cost estimate had roughly doubled to around £1 billion. A replacement trolleybus scheme, New Generation Transport, was itself cancelled in 2016 after a further sum, reported at around £27 million, had been spent.

When the eastern leg of HS2 was cancelled in 2021, West Yorkshire was promised funding for mass transit as a consolation, and around £2.5 billion was later pledged. Yet the latest position by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority in late 2025 and early 2026 is that delivery has been reset again, with trams now unlikely before the late 2030s. A senior local councillor described the latest delay as déjà vu, drawing a direct line back to the cancellation of Supertram almost twenty years earlier. For a city whose economy and population have grown throughout this period, the cost of repeatedly starting and stopping is real.

The value of the growth forgone through these delays can be quantified. The think tank Centre for Cities has estimated that poor public transport connectivity in the five largest northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Newcastle – costs the economy more than £16 billion a year in lost productivity, because more than four million people cannot reach their city centre within thirty minutes by public transport. Separately, the Government’s own framing of Northern Powerhouse Rail notes that lifting productivity in the major northern cities to the national average could add up to £40 billion a year to the UK economy. These figures describe an ongoing annual loss, not a one-off. Every year that transformative capacity is delayed is a year that this output is not recovered.

Planning and judicial review add years before a spade goes in the ground

The second problem sits upstream of delivery, in the consenting process itself. The canonical example is Heathrow Terminal 5. The planning application for the new terminal was submitted in February 1993. The public inquiry that followed ran from May 1995 to March 1999, sitting for 525 days, and remains the longest planning inquiry in British history. The decision to approve was not made until November 2001, and the terminal did not open until March 2008. From application to opening took around fifteen years, and from first conception in the 1980s the timeline stretches towards two decades. At the time, even supportive MPs described the four-year inquiry, and the years of delay around it, as something that should never be allowed to happen again.

The lesson was supposedly learned, and the Planning Act 2008 created a dedicated regime for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) intended to speed things up. Yet legal challenge has become a recurring source of delay. The A303 Stonehenge scheme is a notable recent illustration. Development consent for the tunnel and dual carriageway was first granted in November 2020, against the recommendation of the Planning Inspectorate. That decision was quashed by the High Court in July 2021 on grounds relating to the consideration of alternatives and the adequacy of information before ministers. The scheme was redetermined and approved again in July 2023. It was challenged again, the challenge was dismissed in the High Court in early 2024, campaigners were then granted permission to appeal, and in July 2024 the Government announced it would not proceed with the scheme at all. The net result of more than three years of legal process was a project that was approved twice, litigated repeatedly, and ultimately abandoned.

The aggregate picture is striking. In a written statement in January 2025, the Government reported that 58% of decisions on NSIPs had been subject to legal challenge in recent years. Of 30 challenges brought against major infrastructure projects, only four had resulted in a decision being overturned. On average each legal challenge took 1.4 years to conclude, the courts had spent more than 10,000 working days handling these cases, and major road projects had paid up to £121 million per scheme as a consequence of delays in legal proceedings. In other words, the overwhelming majority of challenges did not succeed, but they imposed substantial cost and delay regardless.

It is right that the public can test the lawfulness of government decisions, and judicial review is an important safeguard. The problem is not that challenges exist but that the process has allowed meritless or repetitive claims to delay projects of national importance with little ultimate effect on the outcome. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 has begun to address this, reducing the number of attempts a claimant can make to bring a legal challenge, and the Government has set out target timescales for these cases in the High Court and Court of Appeal. These are sensible reforms. But they also confirm the diagnosis. For years, a process intended to ensure good decisions has functioned as a brake on delivery, and a growth-oriented policy cannot tolerate timelines measured in decades.

We cannot be confident the forecast economic benefits will actually appear

The third problem is the least visible but arguably the most important. Even when projects are delivered, the economic benefits set out in their appraisal often fail to materialise as forecast. This matters because the entire system of prioritisation rests on those forecasts. The Department for Transport’s appraisal framework, Transport Analysis Guidance, produces benefit-cost ratios that determine which schemes are judged good value and therefore which get funded. If the forecasts are systematically optimistic, the whole basis for allocating capital to growth is compromised.

The evidence that this happens is reasonably consistent. National Highways runs a structured programme of Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE), comparing the actual impact of major road schemes one year and five years after opening against what was forecast. The meta-analysis of these evaluations found that observed traffic flows were generally lower than predicted. Individual scheme evaluations tell the same story. The widening of the M27 between junctions three and four, for example, delivered lower than expected journey time savings as a result of lower than forecast traffic volumes, and its outturn benefit-cost ratio came in below the figure used to justify the scheme.

This is not a peculiarly British phenomenon. The academic literature on transport appraisal, most prominently the work associated with Bent Flyvbjerg, has documented a persistent pattern in which costs come in higher and benefits come in lower than predicted at the appraisal stage. One ex-post study of road projects in Denmark found that actual traffic volumes were on average around 7% lower than forecast, a bias that is statistically significant and matters a great deal for congested networks, where benefits are highly sensitive to traffic levels. HS2 is again instructive. Its falling benefit-cost ratio over time, as costs rose and the network shrank, shows how much the headline appraisal figure can move between the decision to build and the reality of delivery.

The point is not that appraisal is worthless or that every forecast is wrong. It is that a policy genuinely oriented towards growth should treat appraisal forecasts with appropriate caution, invest far more in measuring what schemes actually deliver, and feed that evidence back into future decisions. At present, the gap between forecast and realised benefits is large enough that confident claims about the growth impact of any individual scheme should be read sceptically.

If the record is as patchy as the evidence suggests, the obvious question is what a genuinely pro-growth transport policy would look like instead. The answer is that it should be organised around mobility. The economic value of transport comes overwhelmingly from connecting people to opportunities, jobs, customers, suppliers, education, and from connecting businesses to one another and to a larger pool of workers. This is the mechanism behind agglomeration – that better-connected labour markets are more productive. The number of opportunities a person can reach in a reasonable time is therefore the right lens because it is the thing that actually drives growth, rather than speed or capacity for their own sake.

Several priorities follow from putting this at the centre.

Fast and frequent inter-urban travel matters, but the need varies by region

Connecting cities to one another quickly and reliably expands the effective labour market and allows firms in different places to trade ideas and services. But the case for investment is not uniform across the country. The British network is comparatively good at north-south journeys to and from London and comparatively poor at the east-west journeys between cities in the North and the Midlands. For example, travelling between Birmingham and Nottingham by rail takes around one hour and fifteen minutes to cover a distance of just over fifty miles. Meanwhile, from Birmingham to London, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, takes just one hour and nineteen minutes by rail.

The North is the clearest example of where the gap is most damaging. While four fast trains an hour run between Leeds and Manchester, two of the largest economies in the country, this hides some serious structural deficiencies. These services are often overcrowded, with trains often running with fewer carriages than timetables, and trains taking three-quarters of an hour to cover thirty six miles. Compare that to services running between London and Peterborough, which take around the same time to cover seventy-four miles.

The Northern Powerhouse Rail Partnership has estimated that a line linking just Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford could add around £22 billion in gross value added to the northern economy and raise productivity in those cities by up to 6%. The contrast with Scotland’s Central Belt, where better connections between Edinburgh and Glasgow have helped pool the labour market and support productivity growth, shows what is possible when dense urban areas are properly linked. Investing in fast, frequent inter-urban connections is therefore a real growth lever, but the priority should be the corridors where the current offer is weakest and the agglomeration potential is greatest, which means east-west connectivity in the North above almost anything else.

High-quality urban public transport is essential, and trams and metros should be its backbone

The most consistent finding in the evidence concerns travel within cities rather than between them. Centre for Cities has shown that, on average, only around 40% of people in Britain’s big cities can reach the city centre within thirty minutes by public transport, compared with roughly 67% in comparable European cities, such as Copenhagen and Munich. The comparison between similarly sized cities is stark. In Leeds, fewer than four in ten people can reach the centre in thirty minutes, while in Marseille it’s close to nine in ten. British cities are consequently economically much smaller than their populations suggest, because a large share of their potential workforce simply cannot reach the centre quickly. This is why poor urban connectivity, rather than poor inter-city links alone, sits at the heart of the productivity gap.

Trams, light rail, and metro systems should form the backbone of urban networks, because they offer the capacity, reliability, and attractiveness that high-frequency travel into dense centres requires. The successes already exist and are instructive. Manchester’s Metrolink, the Tyne and Wear Metro, the Nottingham Express Tram, and the West Midlands Metro have all demonstrably reshaped how people move and where they can work. The problem, as the Leeds story shows, is that Britain has been chronically bad at delivering these systems, and it builds them at far higher cost than comparable European cities.

This is precisely the gap the Government’s new Mass Transit Taskforce, launched in 2026 and chaired by Bridget Rosewell, is meant to close. Bringing together expertise from transport, planning, finance, industry, and academia, it has been asked to identify the barriers in planning, financing, and land acquisition that slow these schemes down and to recommend practical reforms, with initial recommendations expected within months. It sits alongside the £15.6 billion committed to Transport for City Regions in the 2025 Spending Review. The right ambition is not simply to fund these networks but to accelerate their delivery, so that cities stop spending decades planning systems that are then cancelled. Building the routes is necessary but not sufficient. The evidence also shows that the low-rise built form of British cities means fewer people live close to transport, so denser housing around stops and stations is part of the same agenda.

Roads matter, but economic gains often come through unexpected routes

Investment in roads remains important, particularly for freight, for areas poorly served by rail, and for journeys that public transport cannot realistically replace. But a pro-growth policy should be clear-eyed about where the economic returns from transport investment actually come from, because the intuitive answers are often wrong.

The clearest example is the relationship between car access, free parking, and the health of high streets. Retailers consistently believe that most of their customers arrive by car and that free or convenient parking is essential to footfall and sales. The evidence does not support this. A widely cited study of two shopping streets in Berlin found that only around 7% of shoppers had arrived by car, against the roughly 22% that traders estimated, and that more than 90% of takings came from people who walked, cycled, or used public transport. A review of commercial centres in Greater London reached a similar conclusion, finding that retailers vastly overestimate the role that free parking plays in their success.

The positive case is set out in the Pedestrian Pound research published by the charity Living Streets, most recently updated in 2024. It finds that people who walk to the high street tend to spend more over a week or a month than those who drive, that streets where the pedestrian experience has been improved have seen footfall rise by around 20-35%, and that well-designed schemes can lift retail sales by 30% or more. The implication for policy is important. Some of the most cost-effective ways to support local economic activity are not large road schemes at all, but relatively cheap improvements to walking, public realm, and the quality of place. A growth strategy that defaults to road capacity and free parking as the way to help town centres is likely to be spending money in the wrong place.

Define and measure

Finally, a policy needs metrics that measure success and failure. Too often, transport investment is judged by inputs and outputs that are easy to count, miles of road, billions of pounds committed, or by forecast benefit-cost ratios that, as set out above, are not reliably borne out.

Two metrics deserve to sit at the centre instead. The first is the number of people who can reach key economic hubs, principally city centres and major employment sites, within thirty minutes. This directly captures the size of the effective labour market and therefore the agglomeration benefits that drive productivity. It is also actionable. Centre for Cities has estimated that better integration of existing networks in England’s next six largest cities, through aligned timetables, integrated ticketing, and faster, more frequent buses, could connect around 1.2 million more people to their city centres within thirty minutes and boost national output by an estimated £17.4 billion a year. That is a larger and more certain return than many headline capital schemes, and it flows from improving mobility rather than simply adding infrastructure.

The second metric is reliability. A service that is fast on paper but frequently late or cancelled does not expand the effective labour market, because people cannot depend on it to get to work on time. Reliability is consistently undervalued in appraisal and underweighted in public debate, yet it is central to whether a network actually delivers what it promises. The unreliability of TransPennine Express services are a standing example of how poor performance shrinks the practical reach of a network well below its theoretical reach.

Rhetoric not reality

So British transport policy has called itself pro-growth for years. But its record suggests the label has run ahead of reality. The transformative projects meant to reshape the economy have been slow, costly, and cut back. The consenting process has added years and, in some cases, has delivered nothing for the delay. And the benefits forecast in business cases have too often failed to appear once schemes are built.

A genuinely pro-growth policy would start from a different place. It would treat the number of people and opportunities that can be reached in a reasonable time as the organising objective. That means prioritising fast and frequent inter-urban links where the current offer is weakest, especially across North England. It means building high-quality, reliable, and attractive urban networks with trams and metros at their core, and delivering them far faster than we have managed to date. It means recognising that some of the best economic returns come from cheap improvements to the public realm rather than from road capacity. And it means measuring success by how many people can reach economic hubs quickly and reliably, rather than by how much has been spent. Growth has been the stated goal for a long time. This is how a transport policy would actually achieve it.

James Gleave is the Founder and Director of Mobility Lab UK. He writes regularly on his Substack, Mobility Matters.

Looking for Growth do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this article. Opinions are the authors only.

Transcript:

Financially and environmentally, this is a no-brainer, for everyone except one person.

***

It’s not your imagination: Britain really does have some of the highest energy prices in the world, and it’s a huge problem.

Hi, I’m Will Hodson. I ran a business that reduced people’s energy bills automatically. We actually went on Dragons’ Den — very cheesy, I know — but we managed to negotiate what was the best deal in the history of the show. We helped people switch to the cheapest provider. But nowadays, every provider is expensive, and that’s because our system is broken. We need to fix it, and it’s really not that complicated.

But the first question is: how did we get here?

Let’s start at the beginning – the beginning of the last industrial age.

Then, as now, manual processes gave way to machine-powered automation, all enabled by cheap, abundant energy. Don’t forget that when Britain was an industrial superpower, we were an energy superpower too. In fact, by the middle of the 19th century, Britain produced two-thirds of the world’s coal. It was cheap, it was reliable, it was secure. Coal was all we needed.

The problem only became clear about 100 years later: we were too reliant on one fuel. In 1947, a shortage of coal forced the Attlee-led Government to shut down industry and impose blackouts. At the same time, coal-mining unions were becoming more powerful. This meant coal was less cheap and less reliable.

By the 1950s, another drawback was becoming clear. We didn’t know about climate change yet, but we knew coal was dirty — a pollutant — and the Great Smog of 1952 killed upwards of 10,000 Londoners. The Government acted, and in 1956, it passed the Clean Air Act. It was a sign of the times that London’s new power station, Bankside — which you and I know as Tate Modern — was quietly repurposed from burning coal to burning oil.

But our new reliance on Middle Eastern oil came at a price. A shortage of supplies in 1956, after the Suez Canal crisis, saw the Government impose rationing from Christmas of 1956 all the way to May of 1957. The country was in such a desperate state [that] the Prime Minister resigned.

Something more positive was happening in 1956, however: Britain opened the world’s first civil nuclear power plant. There were hopes that we were at the dawn of a new nuclear age, with limitless, almost free energy. By 1970, nuclear accounted for about 10% of our electricity generation. Fundamentally, however, we remained reliant on coal and overseas oil – and we were made to pay.

In 1973, the Yom Kippur War led to an explosion in the price of oil. This hit Britain hard: a three-day week, runaway inflation, and rolling blackouts. We needed coal, and the coal-mining unions knew it. With grievance and a golden opportunity to negotiate, they went to war with Ted Heath. Once again, due to an energy disaster, the Prime Minister of this country went down in flames.

But something was happening in the background that would change everything: we were discovering our own oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. By the time of the next oil crisis in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution, Britain was on the verge of becoming a net oil exporter. Oil revenue was what funded the entire political project of the 1980s, from tax cuts to welfare spending.

But we weren’t the only country that discovered North Sea oil. Norway did too, and they took a slightly different approach with their oil revenue. Norway used the tax receipts to create what is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth over two trillion dollars. That fund supports essential Norwegian services, which means that every single Norwegian benefits from Norwegian oil – which is something for us to bear in mind.

By 1990, Britain was looking past oil for various reasons. We needed to fund different technologies – mostly nuclear, but also renewables. The question was: how?

And the answer is a historic aberration that we are still living with.

The Energy Secretary at the time, a man called John Wakeham, didn’t want an argument with the Chancellor, so he put a tax on everyone’s energy bill and he called it a levy. Economists hated it, saying the tax made us uncompetitive and would drive industry abroad. Voices in Labour said it was regressive, because it was a tax on an essential that everyone used alike. They were both right – but 36 years later, the hack lives on.

And it gets worse with age. Because levies now fundamentally contradict one of our great renewable objectives: electrification. Levies are heaped overwhelmingly on electricity rather than gas. So levies make it more expensive to switch to electric vehicles instead of petrol cars, or to electric heat pumps instead of gas boilers –when all of our other policies try to make it cheaper. Everyone knows it’s bonkers.

But there is one beneficiary which refuses to let levies go: the Energy Department. Levies have made them a Second Treasury, able to raise and spend billions of pounds with precious little scrutiny. All in all, levies have bloated our bills by hundreds of pounds – and cutting levies remains the only way to cut people’s bills overnight.

In fact, it happened in the mid-90s. We sold off nuclear power that we’d subsidised, so taxes came down and bills dropped by 8% immediately. But no government wanted to give up this easy access to raising taxes.

In 2002, the Government used the energy levy to fund the Renewables Obligation. And this is the start of the modern energy era. Climate change was looming large; we’d just ratified the Kyoto Protocol pledging action. And so we entered a brave new world, where we would contract with big business to build out renewable energy in Britain.

Now, something needs to be said at the outset here: renewable energy corporations are not charities. They negotiate with our government for as much money as they can possibly get. The big question has always been: how well would our government negotiate on our behalf?

As a basic principle of negotiation, if you can walk away from the table – if you have lots of other options – you’re in a good place to negotiate. But in negotiations with the renewables industry, we’ve had the opposite, because we’ve written into our law our commitment to get a certain amount of energy from renewable sources each year.

That’s why, in 2013, renewable companies extracted a strike price for offshore wind that was three times the prevailing wholesale price, because they knew we were desperate to get the industry going. And that’s why, in 2023, when the Government tried to drive a hard bargain, for once, the renewable industry just walked away. They knew we’d come crawling back to hit our targets, and when we did, we coughed up a 66% price increase.

So why would you tie your hands with targets? Because energy policy has become climate policy, and climate issues engender moral absolutes.

Now, I’ll put my hands up here. When I was 26, I had just seen An Inconvenient Truth, I had shadowed a former Green Party MEP in Brussels, so I fully supported the Climate Change Act. Given the urgency of climate change, I have to say, I didn’t have much time for people who opposed it either.

But my support wasn’t just born of youthful zeal – it also reflected the outlook of my country. Britain had enjoyed 20 years of economic growth over two and a half per cent.

I thought that would continue, and I was wrong.

Since 2008, our growth rate has collapsed to less than 1% a year. It’s also the case that our bills have risen steadily.

Britain today is a very different country, with very different challenges and a very different mindset. But we have the same Energy Secretary – and I’m not sure his mindset has changed at all.

Ed Miliband first became Energy Secretary in 2008, and as leader of the opposition, then Shadow Energy Secretary, for 20 years, his agenda has dominated UK politics. This is Ed Miliband’s energy policy. The rest of us just live in it.

What’s become clear is that Miliband’s moral mission has presented a huge payday for giant renewable companies who cannot believe their luck. There are signs that the UK energy system has been captured by the renewables industry.

For example, we have paid them to build out far more offshore wind than we can actually use. So when the wind blows, we often get to a point where our cables cannot handle any more load – and under the contracts that our government has entered into, we pay those wind turbines to turn off. That’s called curtailment. Last year, curtailment cost us £1.5 billion. And they’re still handing out contracts. By 2030, this same system could cost us £8 billion – £8 billion to throw energy away.

This isn’t about policy anymore. We’re talking here about scandal, and it needs investigation.

The thing is, I’ve always believed in renewable energy. I bought into the idea that it was cheap, because when the wind blows and the turbines turn, the marginal energy costs nothing. But I also bought into the idea that renewable energy was cheap because I really, really wanted to believe it was true. So I didn’t count the high costs of the advance contracts that made the marginal costs irrelevant. I didn’t count the costs of curtailment, or of connecting remote renewables to the national grid – all of which are paid by us, the billpayer.

When you add that all up, some estimates say that renewable energy costs us more than twice as much as the price agreed in contracts. The government is not revealing the full cost of renewables, because it will be embarrassing. This has to change.

But calculating the true cost of renewables is not designed as an exercise in humiliation. It serves a hugely important purpose for negotiations: if we can calculate the true cost of renewables, we can challenge renewable generators to bring their prices closer to alternative energy sources.

In the near term at least, there will need to be alternative energy sources, because the wind won’t always blow and the sun won’t always shine. Anyone who says different is telling you a fairy tale and treating you like a child. The UK needs baseload energy for those situations, which historically has come from coal, nuclear, or gas. Coal is too dirty; nuclear is not yet ready; so that leaves gas. And even Ed Miliband’s own Energy Department acknowledges that we need gas well into the next decade.

So let’s work out where we get that gas from. The first question is: do you want gas, or Liquefied Natural Gas?

Liquefied Natural Gas is the same product as gas, but highly processed so it can be transported around the world. The processing is highly carbon-intensive and expensive. It comes largely from the Middle East, and much of it was backed up in the Strait of Hormuz for weeks. Higher cost, higher carbon footprint, higher risk – Liquefied Natural Gas is not ideal. Not when you have gas in the North Sea.

So the second question is: do we want Norwegian gas, or British gas? Well, if we use our own gas, we can use our own pipelines, support our own industry, and generate tax revenue for our own country – and this can support people who are crying out for help. Remember, that’s exactly what Norway do.

Financially and environmentally, this is a no-brainer, for everyone except one person. And he just happens to be our Energy Secretary.

Ed Miliband will go to his grave insisting that he’s right. The question is whether he takes this country with him.

Energy policy is that important. When people get it wrong – like in the 1950s, like in the 1970s – heads should roll. But at crucial moments, this country has managed to get things right.

One hundred years ago, the Electricity Supply Act saw a country that was on its knees rise up and create the world’s first central electricity grid. Britain — apparently fading, apparently in decline — showed the world the way. At that time, Britons lived at the mercy of ragtag energy companies, electrifying only the streets that could pay. But with one almighty effort, against the darkness of the Great Depression, that all changed. People who hadn’t had work for years showed themselves to be heroes, planting 4,000 miles of cable across this land. And that one Act brought communities, from Cornwall to Caithness, into the light. We saw clearly what needed to be done, and we did it.

So, with all the problems that Britain faces in its energy system today, 100 years on, I still believe that we can turn things around, with a single Act of Parliament. Because we’ve done it before. We can do it again.

LFG will fix it

Today we’re launching LFG’s Emergency Energy Bill: a ready-made Bill that the Government could pass tomorrow. Here’s how it will bring your bills down.

First, scrap all levies from energy bills. Whatever your politics, they should never have been there in the first place.

Second, lift the ban on new licences in the North Sea. Whether we like it or not, we need gas – so let’s get it at the lowest cost, with the lowest carbon emissions, by using our own reserves. What’s more, we demand that the tax revenue from North Sea oil goes directly towards reducing our bills. The Government has this power to help every household in the land.

But that’s not all.

We’ll demand an investigation into the curtailment scandal that’s costing billpayers billions. By 2030, we’re on course to pay offshore wind giants £8 billion to turn off their turbines. Sometimes we pay the same company to curtail wind in Scotland, and then fire up gas to replace it in England. Something is seriously wrong.

We believe Ed Miliband’s system has been captured by the giant companies behind renewables. There should be no more offshore wind contracts until the government accounts for its full cost, including curtailment, and including the costs of connecting them to the grid. These are costs that energy companies should pay, because the British billpayer cannot afford to pay anymore.

In fact, we’ll challenge energy companies to bid to move up the queue to be connected to the grid. The revenue that generates will go direct to reducing your bills.

The Bill will also scrap the Clean Power 2030 targets. Those targets have pushed civil servants to procure wind at any cost, rather than focus on electrification.

Finally, we will simplify the statutory duties of the energy regulators, NESO and Ofgem. They’ll no longer have discretion to balance Net Zero, energy security, and efficiency. Instead, they’ll be focused simply on minimising costs in Britain, subject to security of supply.

We are not giving up on climate change. But we can’t solve it all on our own anyway. At best, Britain can be an example to other countries — and we are, at present, an example of how not to do it.

I’ll level with you: there’s no time to waste. So I’ll finish where I started. Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world. Our Emergency Energy Bill will provide immediate relief for our industries, and for the millions of households who are struggling to afford the basics.

To support our Bill, go to lookingforgrowth.uk/saveus. Please share this video far and wide, because the British people deserve to hear the truth.

Thank you.

It should not take a movement, or a series of national and local campaigns, to force governments to tackle the cost of living, and to promote rising living standards. It shouldn’t but it does.

This is the movement for personal, social, economic, and national growth.

today’s launch

Today we’re launching Radical Honesty – LFG’s all new Substack about what has gone wrong, and what is needed to put it right.

We want your thoughts, and your ideas.

We will be running articles and essays written by founders, entrepreneurs, officials, campaigners, researchers, people that have just tried to build something – big or small. We want historical reflections, policy proposals, political and policy analysis, and personal accounts of people who have been helping to reverse decline. We want to examine what has gone wrong, highlight efforts to rebuild and renew, and explore serious ideas for how we can turn our nation around – and more. We want radical ideas – that means we will publish things we don’t necessarily agree with. We want to stoke a debate that will challenge the status quo.

In short, we will be publishing interesting work on areas concerned with personal, social, national, and economic growth.

If you want to contribute, please get in touch by emailing press@lookingforgrowth.uk