The case for ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness’

I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on to a busy road – when a thought struck me. ‘There’s no chance anyone would get planning permission for a shop here today.’ Either someone from the council would declare there was no safe vehicular access, or else neighbours would complain about the noise. Failing that, someone else would find that the marshland behind the site was the breeding ground for some rare but disgusting toad, or complain that a sweet shop could not open within a parsec of a primary school.

You know something has gone wrong when Crawley has a Facebook group called ‘Justice for Taco Bell’

Then it occurred to me that the same would also apply to the row of Victorian houses opposite. And to the road itself.

I would like to conduct a simple theoretical exercise to explain Britain’s complete lack of economic growth. All you need do is to take the sum of its built infrastructure and to ask what percentage of existing houses, roads, railways, airports, pubs, cafés, restaurants, castles or cathedrals would receive planning permission if they did not exist already. My guess is it’s about 5 to 10 per cent. Which means this country is running on infrastructure which only exists because it is ‘grandfathered in’. It isn’t land that’s scarce, it’s planning permission.

Peter Thiel said: ‘We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.’ He is not alone in pointing out that progress in the world of bits has raced ahead, whereas progress in the physical world is mostly static.