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Does HS2's £100m bat shed reveal how broken the UK's planning system really is?

Chris Stokel-Walker

An artist's impression of the HS2 'bat shed' (Credit: HS2)
An artist's impression of the HS2 'bat shed' (Credit: HS2)

The on-again, off-again saga of the UK’s High Speed 2 (HS2) rail system has never been far from the headlines. But one of the project’s most ignominious moments cropped up recently, when Sir Jon Thompson, who is overseeing the HS2 project, revealed at the Rail Industry Association conference earlier this month that the project will have to spend more than £100m on a 0.6-mile shed in Buckinghamshire to allow bats to fly over the planned rail route safely.

The requirement to build the shed was a precondition of more than 8,200 consents the organisation had to get from public bodies to build the first phase of the railway. “People say you've gone over the budget, but did people think about the bats?” he asked the conference.

Paying such exorbitant sums to build a small cover over a short part of the railway line has been lampooned by the media and the general public, and hints at the struggles big engineering projects face in getting off the ground in the UK.

“This is a genuine problem as to why we can’t build infrastructure in this country,” Thompson said. Transport secretary Louise Haigh has called the bat shed’s cost a “shocking example” of a problem that “epitomises the complete lack of efficiency we have uncovered on HS2.”

But is that assessment correct – or is it the frustration of someone brought in to try and shepherd a project to completion, when it is already blowing past initial budgets and has become a byword for poor organisation?

“The reported £100m ‘bat shed’ illustrates a core issue at the heart of the existing planning system, which is that there are a considerable number of competing priorities that need to be evaluated and balanced by planning officers,” says Ben Standing, a partner specialising in planning and environmental law at law firm Browne Jacobson. “The ‘bat shed’ is an example of the requirements in the planning system to protect biodiversity, and in this situation a specific protected species.”

One of the issues that HS2’s Thompson flagged in his speech was that the bat shed was a requirement from Natural England, which was consulted about the plans to build the railway line through a wood that contained the Bechstein’s bat, a protected species. Notably, Thompson pointed out, that species of bat is not protected under European law, but is in the UK – a hint that he thought it was perhaps unnecessary to take such dramatic action to protect it.

The implication within Thompson’s speech was that the planning system is being nobbled by draconian legislation that places undue burden on engineers and the companies they work for to follow environmental and planning rules – all of which add time and expense to projects. The transport secretary also seemed to suggest the balance had gone too far in favour of blocking engineering projects. “While I fully recognise the importance of meeting legal obligations, we must strike a sensible balance, and I will not stand by and allow costs to spiral in this way,” she said.

However, experts are far from agreed that the HS2 bat shed is a failure of planning regulation. “National planning policy could be changed by government to set priorities that reduce the overall cost of delivering infrastructure once applications are approved,” says Standing. “Any updated policy may have the advantage of minimising costs but may also reduce other protections deemed important by existing guidelines.”

It’s a conclusion agreed with by others. “Abandoning all such environmental standards would of course make it far simpler to plan for UK projects,” says Ben Garbett, planning consultant solicitor at Keystone Law, “but arguably most people would consider that mitigation measures aimed at protecting our precious wildlife and ecology is a price worth paying.”

Garbett says that such evidence-led analyses of how projects comply with environmental law standards may be seen as a bugbear and additional cost, but they are necessary. How much they affect a project like HS2 will be different – and potentially less significant, in the grand scheme of things – than smaller infrastructure projects, he adds.

“This will invariably count as a bottom-line project cost, which can harm the viability of many smaller schemes – but with a major infrastructure scheme like HS2 there is both a greater potential for widespread impacts to occur, and for those costs to be safely absorbed within the overall financing arrangements.”

The HS2 debacle has highlighted some of the key issues with planning and project approval in the country – but finding a solution that works both for industry and for the general public is a challenge that will take more than considering this single project in isolation. The challenge is whether the government will do so.

Haigh said she has “reinstated direct ministerial oversight of the project, and will be looking at what other systemic reforms we can put in place to ensure public money is put to good use and not wasted.” Whether that will extend beyond HS2 is yet to be seen.


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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

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